This engaging video series critiques common features of the electoral system, starting with the “first-past-the post” system.
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A Representation of Opinion
Voting for one candidate is seen as endorsing the policies of that candidate and rejecting the policies of the other(s), particularly in the context of presidential elections. If you vote for a candidate because you agree with the majority of their positions, your vote and the votes of others like you sends a message that comes out the other side of Election Day as: Everyone who voted for this candidate gave them a mandate to carry out all of the goals stated by the candidate.
At best, most of the people who voted for the candidate agreed with a majority of that candidate’s policies, but likely not every single policy or opinion; at worst, they just hated the opposition candidate(s) more and disagreed with all of them. So how is voting representative of what the voters actually think?
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On Activism and Voting
One of the perils of voting-focused civic involvement is that all other forms of civic involvement get short shrift in comparison. If you are involved in political issues beyond voting, others may view you as an “activist.” This is a term of separation, as an article by Jonathan Matthew Smucker at AlterNet points out:
It is as if activism has morphed into a specific identity that centers on a hobby—like being a skier or a theater person—rather than a civic responsibility that necessarily traverses groups and interests. In a way, the very label activist—its individualizing, identifying affects—excuses everyone else from civic responsibility. I may or may not have an opinion about a given issue, but I can’t be expected to do anything about it because, well, “I’m not an activist,” or “I’m not political.”
Smucker argues that as people’s basic needs in industrialized countries have been fulfilled, they are more able to focus on self-expression and self-realization. People who focus on self-expression like to be around people who are like them. As a result, people with particular interests and engagement in social, economic, or political issues tend to spend time with people like them (“activists”), and identify with other activists. Other people then come to view activists as separate from them, and the concerns of activists as different from their own.
However, this dynamic of separation and difference makes it very difficult to make big changes in society, because sizeable movements of people create those big changes:
A fledgling movement that attempts to attract only individuals as individuals, one at a time, will never grow fast enough to affect big systemic change. Throughout history, the big progressive changes worth a damn have been achieved when whole swaths of already-organized people (i.e. existing institutions and social networks) are set in motion.
The ramifications for voting are clear: as long as we focus on individuals voting at the expense of organizing social movements, we are not going to achieve any major changes. Even voting-focused movements of any political leaning will need to engage people beyond an individual level and build a community.
This also means that activists need to start bringing their causes into their other social circles. As Smucker writes, “when we do not contest the cultures, beliefs, symbols, narratives, etc. of the existing institutions and social networks that we are part of, we also walk away from the resources and power embedded within them.”
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Tagged activism, communal action, community, individualism, voting
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The Psychology of Voting
A 2008 article in the American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology gives a rundown of studies addressing voting behavior.
These studies assert that people vote for various reasons, including altruism (“voting is a good thing to do”), habit (“I always vote”), egocentrism (“I am voting this way and people like me will also vote this way”), peer pressure (“other people vote and I want to fit in”), and self-expression (“I am sharing my opinion(s)”).
For example: A study by Richard Jankowski, the chair of the political science department at State University of New York – Fredonia, found that respondents who agreed with altruistic statements in a survey were more likely to have voted in the 1994 elections (Rationality and Society, Vol. 19, No. 1).
A study by Donald Green (American Political Science Review, Vol. 102, No. 1) indicated that people who received a mailing reminding them that voting records are public and sharing whether they and their neighbors voted were 8.1 percent more likely to vote in an election, versus people whose mailings only reminded them of their civic duty, who were told their turnout was being studied, or who were given a list of their own voting turnouts in the prior two elections.
Melissa Acevedo of Westchester Community College, and Joachim Krueger of Brown University published a study in Political Psychology (Vol. 25, No. 1) that indicated that people vote because they believe their vote makes a difference:
To test their ideas, Krueger and Acevedo asked participants to imagine they were supporters of the “Peace Party” in a fictional country where they faced a close election with the “War Party.” They were asked to assume that they intended to vote, but that half the time circumstances prevented them from getting to the polls, and that they learned the results on the late-night news. They were then given four different scenarios: that their party had won and they voted (or abstained) and their party had lost and they had voted (or abstained).
For each scenario, participants rated how much regret they’d feel to having voted or abstained. The results showed low regret and high satisfaction for when they voted and their party won. When they voted and lost, or abstained and won, participants showed a greater expectancy of regret, less satisfaction and reduced confidence in voting again.
Acevedo and Krueger believe that this can help explain why people sometimes vote strategically for their less desired candidate. In other words, people like to vote for a winner, even if that winner is not their top choice.
In addition, people feel lower satisfaction if they don’t vote and the candidate they supported wins anyway – which may explain some non-voters’ attitudes as well.
Posted in Anti-Voting, Pro-Voting, Third Parties
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A Post-Election Call to Action: “We have to find the zeal to serve our communities in the same way that we turn out for presidential elections.”
If Obama’s re-election makes you want to sit back and relax, realize that we have so much more to do:
Though I’m sure that BO is a sincerely good person, as a politician, his policies have failed to impact my communities, and I, like many of you, don’t expect that to change in the future. The government will continue to steer clear of policies that provide lasting and meaningful change for the people in the communities I care about most. So while Obama’s re-election should be celebrated as a victory in that it quelled the tidal wave of irrational fanaticism that is the Republican Party, we have to move on quickly.
Read the rest of this short article here.
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Democratizr for Third Party Voting Power
One way that you can vote while bringing new ideas and potential for change into the political realm is voting for a third party – not the Democrats, not the Republicans, but one of dozens of alternative parties such as Green or Libertarian (as of 2012, these two examples are the third parties with the highest number of presidential election votes). A new project called Democratizr aims to bring people together to vote strategically for third parties:
[Democratizr is] A website where voters can pledge to vote for third parties if a certain number of other people do too. When that threshold is met, Democratizr notifies you that it’s safe to vote for the candidate you chose.
As of November 2012, they are just getting started. They could use your ideas and support in areas like fundraising, outreach, organizational development, and building the site. If you are interested in third party voting, check out their more detailed explanation of the process and click on the options at the end to get connected with the growing Democratizr team.
Historical Criticisms of Voting: W.E.B. DuBois, Why I Won’t Vote
W.E.B. DuBois wrote an essay for The Nation in October 1956 explaining why he was not voting. A large number of DuBois’s arguments are very close to those given by politically aware non-voters today, but they are shaped by the specific political, social, and historical contexts of his time.
The opening comments:
Since I was twenty-one in 1889, I have in theory followed the voting plan strongly advocated by Sidney Lens in The Nation of August 4, i.e., voting for a third party even when its chances were hopeless, if the main parties were unsatisfactory; or, in absence of a third choice, voting for the lesser of two evils. My action, however, had to be limited by the candidates’ attitude toward Negroes. Of my adult life, I have spent twenty-three years living and teaching in the South, where my voting choice was not asked. I was disfranchised by law or administration.
After describing his voting history starting in 1912, DuBois explains why he has decided to stop voting:
In 1956, I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no “two evils” exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say. There is no third party. On the Presidential ballot in a few states (seventeen in 1952), a “Socialist” Party will appear. Few will hear its appeal because it will have almost no opportunity to take part in the campaign and explain its platform. If a voter organizes or advocates a real third-party movement, he may be accused of seeking to overthrow this government by “force and violence.” Anything he advocates by way of significant reform will be called “Communist” and will of necessity be Communist in the sense that it must advocate such things as government ownership of the means of production; government in business; the limitation of private profit; social medicine, government housing and federal aid to education; the total abolition of race bias; and the welfare state. These things are on every Communist program; these things are the aim of socialism. Any American who advocates them today, no matter how sincerely, stands in danger of losing his job, surrendering his social status and perhaps landing in jail.
While socialist and communist beliefs may be less likely to land you directly in jail since the end of McCarthyism, the rest of that paragraph also accurately describes the position of the two major parties and the third parties today. DuBois goes on to critique the warmongering and ignorance/avoidance of poverty issues from both Republicans and Democrats.
Reading DuBois’s essay, though I believe we would have some differences of opinion on politics, I am struck by how little has really changed. Can voting for these two parties enact any more change than has occurred in the last 56 years?
