Voter Turnout Analysis

In this essay, I will analyze the very relevant issue of voter turnout. In fact, in the last few years, there have been a very small number of people involved in politics and citizens have behaved in an increasingly passive and apathetic way toward political matters. This demonstrates the weakness in the working process of modern democracies. If we look at the history, for example going back in the Athenian democracy, where all citizens, included the lower classes, participated actively in the politics, or if we think about the fight for universal suffrage, it is very shocking to realize that people of our century seem not really to use their right to vote. Hence, this clearly makes us question the causes of this apathy. In the first part,

“It assumes that individual behavior is motivated by self-interest, utility maximization, or, more simply put, goal fulfillment.”(Petracca, 1991) According to this approach to politics, actors know what they want and they organize themselves to reach their objectives they and by ordering them in a transitive way. People have to evaluate what means to use to achieve their aims and this isn’t always an easy decision, but they do their best to chose the right instruments. The difficulty lies in the fact that the actions of one actor and his outcomes are correlated with the action of the others. So people must establish an equilibrium between their wills and the individual will select the best equilibrium actually available, keeping in mind others’ choices. (Riker, 1995)

The paradox of voter turnout lies in the fact that, people, as rational actors, shouldn’t go to the polls, because the possibilities that their vote could be influential and decisive are nearly zero and the benefits do not help the individual but society as a whole. So they theoretically should decide to stay home during the elections, because the costs and the energy they spend in voting overcome the benefits they could have from doing it. (Myatt,

The first one is the voter registration. Most of the countries right now, to prevent frauds, require that voters be registered for taking part in the elections. Even if they register virtually all their potential voters, not all of them use the same system to do it. The most common ways are self-initiated systems and state-initiated systems. In America there is the first one. This implies that the process isn’t automatic as it is in the second system, which is more broad in Europe, but it requires efforts. This could influence the decreasing of political participation because some people could not know how to register or just they don’t want to waste time in doing it. Anyway the tricky registration process, which is more lax lately, can’t be the only explanation for this