Voting and Non-voting Behavior in the Election of 2004

One of the controversial issues about presidential elections in the U.S. that has attracted a lot of attention and discussion is the fact that sometimes president is elected while he doesn’t receive the majority of the popular vote but receives the majority in the Electoral College. This is the case that happened in the election of 2000.
Another issue that has arisen a hot debate among political scientists is the fact that the number of people who vote is decreasing since 1960. Both of these issues are of great importance since they can lead to questioning democracy in the U.S.

There are two controversial questions to answer:
1) Why do people vote in the way they do? To answer this question there are many theories among political scientists. However, there are two major theories: the “party identification” model and the “issue voting” model.
2) Why in a democratic country do so many people fail to exercise their democratic right to cast ballot at presidential elections? To answer this question we can go through two series of explanations: institutional explanations and socio-economic explanations.

As it is clear the first question examines the voting behavior and the second question examines the non-voting behavior of an election. In this article I am going to examine these issues in the election of 2004.

Voting Behavior:
1)The case for the party identification model: this model suggests that most Americans develop an affiliation to one party as they grow up and the attachment tends to determine the way they vote for the rest of their lives. It seems that they are mostly stable and resistant to change. However, usually about one-third of the electorate is likely to change their mind.
Here is a report on election results that can show what percentage of voters have voted for the same party they had voted before.

PRESIDENTIAL VOTE IN 2000 - BUSH , KERRY , NADER
Did Not Vote (17%) - 45% , 54% , 1%
Gore (37%) - 10% , 90% , 0%
Bush (43%) - 91% , 9% , 0%
Other (3%) - 21% , 71% , 3%

http://edition.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/result/index.html

As it is shown in this report more than two-thirds of the voters have voted for the same party. So this model is applicable in this election.
Russell J. Dalton and Steven Weldon in their article, “Is the Party Over? Spreading Antipathy Toward Political Parties” state that in recent decades, a marked weakening of partisan ties across Western democracies is seen. This process of partisan "dealignment" first became apparent in the United States. American partisanship was extremely stable from the 1950s to the early 1960s, with party identifiers constituting 70-75 percent of the electorate. But loyalties began to weaken after the 1964 election. By the 1980s, more than a third of the electorates were nonpartisans, and in the 1990s, Ross Perot's third-party candidacy in the two presidential elections pushed the percentage of partisans down still further. The percentage of partisans hit a new low in the 2000 American National Election Study (59 percent), and this pattern continued into the 2004 election (60 percent), despite the highly politicized and partisan nature of the Bush/Kerry campaign.

2)The case for the issue voting model: the theorists of this model argue that in recent years there has been a process of dealignment, a process by which voters gradually lose their attachment to parties in general and become independent instead. These voters who vote according to the issue essentially vote in two votes, prospective and retrospective. Voting prospectively the voter considers each candidates opinion and future program on each separate issue but voting retrospectively the voter considers the previous achievements or failures of a special voter.

COMPARED TO FOUR YEARS AGO, U.S. IS …. - BUSH ,KERRY, NADER
Safer From Terrorism (54%) - 79%, 20% , 0%
Less Safe (41%) - 14%, 85% , 0%

HOW BUSH IS HANDELING HIS JOB - BUSH , KERRY, NADER
Approve (53%) - 90% , 9% , 0%
Disapprove (46%) - 6% , 93% , 0%

http://edition.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/result/index.html

It is shown that most of the voters who have been satisfied with Bush’s job in his previous term of presidency have voted for him again and according to these results more than half of the voters vote retrospectively.

Non-voting Behavior:
1) Institutional explanations: in this area some political scientists believe the decrease in the turnout can be because of the political system itself within the political institutions.
Robert Longley in his article, “Survey Answers, Why Don't More Americans Vote?” explains that according to the results released by the California Voter Foundation (CVF), 28 percent of infrequent voters and 23 percent of those unregistered said they do not vote or do not register to vote because they are too busy. Also a feeling that candidates don’t really speak to them was cited as the second leading reason why infrequent voters and nonvoters do not vote.
2)Socio-political explanations: in this model some factors like education and age are contributed to non-voting behavior.
According to Robert H. Binstock, “the percentage of older persons voting for George Bush was slightly more than the national average, suggesting that old-age policy issues are not the predominant factors affecting older voters.”
In another article, “Turnout of Under-25 Voters Rose Sharply in 2004”, Robert Longley points out that data released by the Pew Charitable Trust shows that the turnout rate of 18-24 year old voters in the 2004 presidential election rose by 5.8 percent, as 1.8 million more people in this age group voted than in 2000. On Nov. 2, 2004, 10.5 million under-25 voters went to the polls, compared to 8.7 million in 2000, raising the turnout rate to 42.3 percent from 36.5 percent.

References:
1. http://cnn.com/
2. http://www.about.com/
3. http://www.publicopinionpros.com/