Impact of public policies that increase or decrease voter participation

Impact of public policies that increase or decrease voter participation

The impact of public policies that increase or decrease voter participation. Personal Response to The effect of public policies that increase or decrease voter participation.

Impact of public policies that increase or decrease voter participation.

Personal Response to The impact of public policies that increase or decrease voter participation.

Why Non-Voters Matter

Firstly, A new study suggests that increasing turnout could have significant ramifications for policy.

In 2014, just 41.9 percent of the voting-age citizen population of the United States voted. But the people who voted are not only in the minority, they form an unrepresentative minority. Millions of Americans are too young to vote. Others are disenfranchise felons, unable to vote for health reasons, missed registration deadlines, and stuck at work, dissuaded by voter ID laws.

In many salient ways, voters are not like non-voters: voters are richer, whiter, and older than other Americans. And my new report, Why Voting Matters, shows how their votes produce a government that caters to their interests—and how boosting turnout would lead to a more representative democracy.

Political scientists once accepted the idea that voters were a “carbon copy” of the nonvoting population. In 1999, Benjamin Highton and Raymond E. Wolfinger summarized this consensus, writing that, “simply put, voters’ preferences differ minimally from those of all citizens; outcomes would not change if everyone voted.”

More recently, though, that view has come under attack. Jan Leighley and Jonathan Nagler, a pair of political scientists, argue that gaps between voters and non-voters are real and have widened, and that the divergence in their views is particularly acute on issues related to social class and the size of government. However, measures that examine a one dimensional left-right axis obscure these divides.