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Saturday, November 01, 2014

'The Vital Role of the Occasional Voter'

Sendhil Mullainathan:

The Vital Role of the Occasional Voter, NY Times: Low voter turnout is a bad thing. Let’s get that out of the way immediately.
The midterm elections take place on Tuesday, but it’s highly likely that relatively few Americans will actually go to the polls. In 2010, in the last midterm election, only 37 percent of the voting-age population voted.
What’s more, voter turnout isn’t evenly dispersed... And even if low turnout were uniformly spread among economic and racial groups, it would still be disheartening. ...
But one type of nonvoter provides a silver lining in this otherwise gloomy state of affairs. These people, whom I call sporadic voters, don’t apathetically sit out all elections. They fail to go to the polls sometimes but do go at other times, presumably when they perceive the stakes to be high. And unlike apathetic nonvoters who undermine democracy, sporadic voters may actually bolster it. In fact, recent behavioral research suggests that this group may provide a reservoir of neutrality that can help keep democracy from going astray. ...

    Posted by on Saturday, November 1, 2014 at 12:36 PM in Economics | Permalink  Comments (22)


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