The Vanishing Voter: Public Involvement in an Age of Uncertainty

By Thomas E. Patterson

Book Overview

From the award-winning author of Out of Order --named the best political science book of the last decade by the American Political Science Association--comes this landmark book about why Americans don't vote. Based on more than 80,000 interviews, The Vanishing Voter investigates why--despite a better educated citizenry, the end of racial barriers to voting, and simplified voter registration procedures--the percentage of voters has steadily decreased to the point that the United States now has nearly the lowest voting rate in the world. Patterson cites the blurring of differences between the political parties, the news media's negative bias, and flaws in the election system to explain this disturbing trend while suggesting specific reforms intended to bring Americans back to the polls. Astute, far-reaching, and impeccably researched, The Vanishing Voter engages the very meaning of our relationship to our government.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375713794
• ISBN13: 9780375713798
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Invisible Men?

This is a good book to read on its own terms, and after _The Right to Vote_ by A. Keyssar. The disastrous slippage of voter participations, after so much struggle to achieve political power, needs the point by point of social analysis given here, and also the context of its overall history. The author explores many factors in the problem, media bias, primaries, the excessive length of campaign process, along with negative tactics by candidates. A southpaw cynic will surely be suspicious there is always some invisible factor of, yes, 'class struggle' in such an outcome, although it is not quite clear how the dynamics operate in this instance. Part of the problem is impotence, hence indifference to the impotence of statistical gestures. Another is the passivity with respect to 'net information' available to the statistical citizen: how many citizesn even know how their system functions? And how many educational systems really convey to citizens this 'how'?Still, the question reamins up in the air, and is in part a function of a greater history. The great experiment in representative democracy is barely two centuries old, and systematically tried for the first time in that regard. Therefore, our stance should be one of studying an outcome in the experiment of democracy rather than its instant creation by a constitution. We may only be in the first stages of this evolution. This work is eloquent on all the issues, and a manual of operations, or at least worry, with respect to a looming crisis of human political freedom.