Voting alone

With the British general election vote dipping below 60 percent last week, the American abyss—turnout hovering around 50 percent—would seem to yawn not far below. The dropout voter was one of the big stories of the just finished campaign. Is this notorious voter uncommitted, or anti-committed, or voting with his or her feet (or arse)?

Granted, there’s a long way down before the British numbers sink to the American level. The British turnout has just dipped below the 1964 turnout in the American North (higher than the whole country because historical suppression of the black vote didn’t apply). On the other hand, as the late political scientist Everett Ladd pointed out, the notorious American slump may well be exaggerated, since the turnout figures—the numerator—usually don’t count absentee ballots, which are rising in number, and the denominator usually overstates the eligible population by failing to exclude the ineligible, a huge 8.5 percent, mainly felons.

Still and all, the error in American tabulation is cold comfort for those who believe that democratic participation is a virtue unto itself regardless of the outcome—and for the left in particular, which wants more equality, but can hardly expect to see it if the people who suffer most from the present unequal dispensation don’t vote. Voting seems to be on the decline in most of the prosperous countries. The British turnout decline is precipitous, but note also the Israeli election in February, whose consequences were considerable, with a turnout of 62 percent. And in the Irish referendum on the Nice treaty, only 35% of the electorate bothered to vote.

Politics ain’t fun

The usual explanations for turnout decline are these:

1. that the major parties don’t differ enough to rouse the electorate (the preferred theory of the left, which assumes a radical public that has been cheated of potential representation);
3. that in the era inevitably called “globalisation,” governments have lost the power to make the big decisions, and voters know it;
6. that a huge margin in the polls (viz., Tony Blair’s) takes the suspense and fun out of voting, especially given a first-past-the-post system, giving the disaffected the opportunity for a costless, none-of-the-above, vote;
9. that the decline of voting is but one sign of a general decline in “social capital”—civic participation of all sorts, including membership in political parties, unions, movement associations, and so forth.

I offer a variant of the fourth, not incompatible with the others but possibly more disturbing because there would not seem to be much that politicians or political parties can do about it.

Politics isn’t much fun, and if you ain’t got fun to offer, whatta ya got?

What Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites more than a half-century ago identified as a specifically American “fun-morality”—Thou Must Have Fun—has spread throughout the prosperous lands and become normal. Never mind that Americans are still gripped by Protestant self-obstruction and are probably not any happier than when they were less prosperous. (A popular bumper sticker asks “Are we having fun yet?” and the question wouldn’t need to be asked if the answer were a resounding yes.) In parts of the world fortunate enough to avoid recent genocides, the right to pleasure of the individual’s own choosing has become, de facto, the main human right that rallies mass enthusiasm.

Individualism is not the only belief but it is the main belief—or rather, it is the platform on which all other beliefs are built. If the main question before politics is how to secure benefits for individuals, then political activity will be assessed, gravitated toward, or avoided the same way all other life activity is. Namely, on the principle: How enjoyable is it?

No time to lose

And here is where the problem of competition looms—competition for people’s time. Look at the torrent of alternative pursuits. If on any given evening political activity for party A or B is assessed not against political activity for party C or D but against the evening’s offerings of movies, sitcoms, radio, CDs, video or DVD rentals (or on-line magazines, God help us), then the trouble with politics—and not just with socialism, in the saying often attributed to Oscar Wilde—is that it takes too many evenings.

The American political scientist Robert Putnam, whose book Bowling Alone popularised, has parsed, computed, and otherwise inspected the sparse political landscape and argued his way methodically to the stark conclusion that television viewing alone accounts for some 25 percent of the decline in American civic participation over the last half-century.

Much of this decline, note, came during the period of mass broadcasting over a number of channels, in most countries, smaller than the number of fingers on one hand.

Now consider the present situation. All the prosperous countries are in the process of wiring, cabling, satelliting, dishing, and otherwise hooking up their populations to a torrent of media unprecedented in human history, a non-stop 24/7 sense-surround, saturated with images and soundtracks beyond number, the better to tailor entertainment to consumer preferences. Media conglomerates not only run mass broadcasts but also increasingly spawn demographically fragmented channels for niche markets. Masses are out, niches are in. This process is farthest along in the U. S. but would seem to be on its way elsewhere.

If people expect the entertainment that absorbs much of their lives to please them, to match their moods, they may well be thinking about political activity according to the same standard: Is it fun? Can civic duty hold a Roman candle to such expectations?

A question mark seems like a good place to leave this. I have no solution to offer. But I think it’s worth starting at the problem.