More Elections = Fewer Voters

Vote as if your life depended on it...because it may.

I just saw an interesting study on voter turnout the other day. All over the world, at least in the countries that are democracies, voter turnout has been going down. Fewer and fewer people are voting…which is a very bad thing, since it means that elections are then likely to be won by the most motivated. And, all too often, the most motivated are the people you least want to see in power. (Can you say “Trump” boys and girls?)

Now, a new study by Filip Kostelka, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Government, University of Essex, and André Blais, Full Professor, Department of Political Science, Université de Montréal, has looked at the problem and come up with some tentative explanations and solutions. In particular, they note, people get tired of voting and of election hysteria. They simply begin to tune out if every time they turn on the TV or cruise the web, they are barraged by campaign advertising and political news.

Worse, in the last few years, we have entered an age when there are more elections to get turned off by. In Western Europe, for instance, as more and more power has been transferred to local institutions, local elections have grown both in number and in importance. The result has been that a kind of election fatigue has set in.

Even more important, the authors suggest, is that the current generation of young voters tend to be less impressed by existing political institutions and therefore don’t see as much value in participating in the political process. After all, if billionaires and vast corporations actually run things, and there is always good evidence that they do, why bother voting? The person in the White House or the Congress is, after all, pretty much just a hireling. 

Still, there is hope. Younger voters, say the authors, can become very active if they feel the stakes are high enough. Thus, in the United States, Trump’s presence in the White House motivated young and first time voters to go to the polls in record numbers to cast their ballots against the GOP.

Let’s hope that last part is a growing trend.

~mjt

Source: “Global voter turnout has been in decline since the 1960s – we wanted to find out why,”  by Filip Kostelk and André Blais, The Conversation, Sep 22, 2021, https://theconversation.com/global-voter-turnout-has-been-in-decline-since-the-1960s-we-wanted-to-find-out-why-167775