The vanishing voter : public involvement in an age of uncertainty

During the presidential election of 2000, Thomas E. Patterson, a political scientist and voter-turnout specialist who had recently moved from the University of Minnesota to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, set himself an ambitious task. He would use a rigorous pattern of regular telephone interviews with ordinary citizens around the country to gauge the shifting psychologies of the American electorate over the course of the campaign. Unlike most pollsters, Patterson wasn’t concerned with which candidates the voters found appealing or even with which issues mattered to them most. Patterson’s aim, instead, was to track how much voters knew about the candidates and issues at different moments during the campaign, to ask what made them pay more attention to the race and what made them pay less attention, and to use those responses to figure out why American voter turnout is so radically low when compared to other Western democracies — a discrepancy which only seems to be growing.