The $64 Question

Schattschneider remarked, “Anyone who finds out how to involve the forty million [non-voters] in American politics will run the country for a generation” (101). Schattschneider was convinced that non-voters would only enter the system if the discourse addressed new and different issues involving the concerns of non-voters. Schattschneider's analysis of the causes of non-voting was more nuanced than much current research, and was particularly astute about the psychological pressures on the under-represented. He argued that:

At the same time, Schattschneider was dismissive of mass media efforts to get out the vote and of the efficacy of removing legal barriers to the ballot box (ch. 6). In the 40-odd years since Schattschneider wrote about non-voting, political scientists have generally not shared his psychological emphasis.

Instead, a great deal of scholarly attention has been given to the removal of institutional obstacles to voting in the U.S., especially by facilitating registration, establishing Election Day holidays, and increasing voter convenience. A recent study by Frances Piven and Richard Cloward (2000) puts a great deal of faith in the leverage of the Motor Voter Act. Studies of electoral reform show, however, that measures such as Motor Voter, mail balloting, and other easements of the voting process do not change the demography of voting (Traugott, in Crigler et al. 2003, 181–182). Changes in the rules can increase the number of usual voters who participate in a given election; but making the ballot box more accessible will not change the make-up of the electorate in terms of class or ethnicity. Of course, simply expanding the size of the electorate is a perfectly worthy goal, as a large majority of participants enhances the apparent legitimacy of democratic elections. But the class bias of the current system goes to the heart of the principle of equality that is essential to the democratic process.

Not long ago, analysts believed that, even if the preferences of non-voters were added to those of voters, the outcome of American elections would not change (Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde 2000). Beginning with the 1994 off-year election, in which the Republican Party obtained a majority of seats in the House of Representatives, the comforting notion that universal participation would not change election outcomes had to be discarded. Non-voters are both demographically and preferentially different from voters, and if they did vote, elections would have different outcomes.

Without higher levels of participation by disadvantaged groups, the system will continue to derogate and ignore their needs. The fate of non-participants is dependent on battles between those who do not wish to meet their needs and the largesse of well-intentioned others. The outcome is inevitably and disappointingly off the mark. A look at policy outcomes in the area of welfare “reform” or healthcare show just how much the policy debate can detour around the needs and preferences of Americans who do not participate in the political process.

Political scientists have identified the characteristics associated with participation, but not how to motivate participation. Studies by sociologists have shown that people's concerns form a circumplex from the personal and family to the neighborhood and then on to the nation (Levy and Guttman 1975). Family health, safety, and economic welfare are the inner tier of concern. For many American families, the circumstances in those life areas are so marginal that they find it impossible to proceed beyond that intimate circle to the more distant social and political world. Further research is needed to unlock the mystery of the mobilization of underrepresented groups. We have to understand how politics fits into the lives of ordinary people. It is a necessary step in conveying the consequences of elections to non-college young people, new immigrants, members of minority groups, and the poor.¹

Convincing people who are not involved in the political process that there is a real pay-off from participation is not a simple matter. As Anthony Downs (1957) argued, the democratic paradox is that the information costs of voting and the imperceptible impact of any single vote do not warrant participation by rational actors. As Downs claimed and others have demonstrated, information costs are greater for those with fewer resources of education or social standing. The more people need information, the more costly the information and the less likely they are to get it. As Pippa Norris argues, political knowledge is a “virtuous circle; people with higher cognitive skills and greater political interest are most likely to pay attention to the news media” (2000, 227). Although Norris sees attention to news media as a stimulus and not a hindrance to political participation, she acknowledges that “the disengaged are less likely to regard political news as credible, because trust in the news media and government go hand in hand” (317).

W. Russell Neuman describes “a pattern of stratification by which the more sophisticated citizens attend to the more political media and are better able to recall and interpret abstract political communications” (1986, 156). In this “spiral” less sophisticated citizens may actually reject political information. Mere civic preaching is not going to change the perception that politics does not matter in people's lives or change the sense that less advantaged people cannot succeed against wealthy interests.

Excellent studies by Sidney Verba, Kaye Schlozman, and Henry Brady (1995) show that many poor people prefer to invest their dollars and time in organizations such as local churches that produce more tangible rewards than politics (198). Even though people who receive welfare benefits have just as great a stake in election outcomes as people who oppose the capital gains tax, there is a substantial difference in political participation between the two groups. Citizens with more resources—education, income, and efficacy—are more likely to participate on every level.

No doubt, political participation has suffered because of the transformation of American political parties from face-to-face voter recruitment to television evangelizing. As field experiments by Alan Gerber and Donald Green (2000) have shown, in-person contact is the most effective way to prod voters to the polls. In a demonstration that practicing politicians actually read political science research, both parties committed themselves to face-to-face contact for the 2004 election. The liberal organization Americans Coming Together and Republicans' “Friendly Congregations” are examples of personal contact programs. Even face-to-face efforts fail if non-voters believe that politics makes no difference in their lives. In fact, the cynical belief that it does not matter which party is in power can impede voting even for people well-positioned in terms of resources. Yet, when voting is discussed in the press and in the classroom, the policy consequences of elections are rarely invoked.

What Do Campaigns and Elections Courses Cover?

A non-scientific sampling was made of 52 syllabi that were available on the Internet in the summer of 2003 and that covered some aspect of American campaigns, elections, or political behavior.²

These syllabi varied in their titles, goals, and level.³ The more similar the goals, the more similar the content. Syllabi for American campaigns and elections generally take as given—that is, they do not discuss alternatives to—the two-party system, the institution of the Electoral College for presidential elections, and the first-past-the-post single-member-district-system for congressional elections. Campaigns and elections courses are dominated by the presidential election process (26) and its unique form of party nominations (22) and lengthy general election campaign (26). Common topics are voting behavior (28), American political parties (19) as well as the temporal, social, and political context of the most recent presidential election (16), campaign finance (21), and news media coverage (24). Courses about campaigning spend a week or more on strategy, campaign consultants, political advertising, and public opinion polling. Because many courses are not taught in presidential election years, many campaigns and elections courses discuss non-presidential elections, but usually only for the House of Representative and/or the Senate (26, including 2 courses focusing exclusively on congressional elections). Courses with political parties in the title (14) devote the most time to political parties and the impact of elections (an average of one week is typically spent on “the party in government”). Only 11 courses (generally not those on political parties) discuss turnout and participation, with the majority spending less than a fraction of a week on these essential topics.

Clearly, campaigns and elections courses cover a lot of ground. It is a sobering thought, however, that by emphasizing the political process, courses reflect the much abhorred media fixation on the “horserace”—about which many critical tomes in the field of political communication have been written. Very few courses about elections focus on the substance that is so often missing from media reports, for example, by asking students to compare the policy positions of competing candidates (2) or how previous elections influenced the course of policy (3 courses). Only 9 courses discussed “why voting matters;” 5 courses included the topic of “reform;” 3 courses specifically put the U.S. system in a comparative context; and 3 discussed direct democracy.

A Theme of Equality

Organizing courses around the theme of democratic equality would lead instructors to bring to the fore the issues of “representative distortion” (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady's term), which in turn would raise a number of useful topics such as the policy consequences of elections, comparisons with other systems, the central role of political parties in mobilization and governance, and efforts to reform the American system to make elections more democratic. Making room for these topics could have a salutary civic effect not found in the details of candidate strategy.

Graduate Courses

The issues and suggestions raised here primarily concern the importance of adding new material to already stuffed undergraduate courses. Graduate courses, even more stuffed, are likely to include topics on democratic theory, political parties, the historical impact of U.S. elections, comparative politics, and mobilization. Part of the problem in addressing these topics in undergraduate courses is that they are either perceived as “dry” (that would be political parties) or too sophisticated for undergraduate students (psychology of voting, political economy, etc.).

In addition, the undergraduate study of campaigns and elections shares a problem with economics, math, and the natural sciences. The research literature is often inaccessible to students because it employs highly sophisticated methodology. In fact, political scientists have long complained that the statistical complexity of articles on American elections and voting in the discipline's leading journals are indecipherable to outsiders. Even graduate courses are not immune to this problem.

In a symposium on methodological pluralism published in PS (July 2003), Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Andrew Bennett's study of seven leading journals in political science showed that from 1975 to 2000, 80 to 90% of articles on American politics employed statistical methods compared to 30 to 48% of international relations and 50 to 68% of comparative politics articles (391). Research in American politics was also more likely than research in other fields to employ formal modeling or a combination of formal modeling and statistical methods (388). Commentators agree, however, that these methods are often opaque to graduate students who are not highly trained in their use. For example, James Morrow, whose research involves game theory and statistics, doubts that a general graduate course on methodologies “can teach the ability to read papers critically using those methodologies” (391). And Bear Braumoeller asks: “if a method must be understood at an operational level before research that uses it can be competently evaluated, isn't the distinction between a ‘reading competency’ and a ‘working competency’ a chimera?” (388) The current debate over graduate teaching of research methods reflects some of these issues.

Why Shift Emphasis?.

Voter inequality and mobilization are so central to the working of democracy that it is worth the effort to include these topics in both graduate and undergraduate courses on campaigns and elections. It is sobering to realize that more that 40 years ago Schattschneider predicted a crisis in American politics resulting from the absence of a large minority of participants from the electorate. He wrote: “Whatever the cause, the present boycott of the political system has brought the political system very near to something like the limit of tolerance of passive abstention (emphasis in original, [1960] 1975, 107). In spite of his foreboding, turnout continued to decline in subsequent elections. Schattschneider was worried in particular because he thought that simple consent would not be enough for democracies in a world of conflict. Democratic government would require “support,” by which he meant an even greater level of legitimacy to allow citizens to face the risks of a dangerous world.

Surely the situation of the U.S. in the world today is no less precarious than in Schattschneider's day. Government needs support to make the dramatic changes that will be necessary to accommodate the aging of the population, its increasing diversity, the adjustment to the global economy, and the threat of terrorism. The legitimacy that comes from an ample majority of participants will strengthen American democracy. It makes sense for courses on campaigns and elections to face the problem of electoral abstention head on. At least American students will better appreciate the obstacles in establishing democracies abroad if they understand the challenges at home.

We can take a cue from Schattschneider's tentative recommendations for solving the problem of democratic distortion. He wrote:

Surely political scientists and teachers of campaigns and elections are among those whose particular interests revolve around the questions of participation. If we think of our students as the significant “newcomers” to whom Schattschneider alludes, then our classrooms are the places to begin making American elections more effectively democratic.

Comparative Courses That Include Campaigns and Elections

Date Accessed: July 24, 2003