Why America Stopped Voting: The Decline of Participatory Democracy and the Emergence of Modern American Politics

Examines how giving up the vote became a fundamental aspect of modern American life

Public involvement in the electoral process has all but disappeared. Not since World War I has even half the electorate cast ballots in an off-year election. Even at the presidential level, voting has plummeted dismally. Nonvoting has, over the past century, become ingrained at the heart of American politics.

It was not always this way. With the integration of America’s mass electorate into the electoral system in the 1830s, eligible voters were intensely participatory and remained highly mobilized throughout the nineteenth century. The turning point in American politics came during the early twentieth century when, from unmatched heights in the 1890s, voter turnouts fell repeatedly election after election.

Examining mass political behavior in twenty successive national elections, Why America Stopped Voting combines political analysis with social analysis to place voter participation within the larger context of American culture and society. A milestone in the evolution of our understanding of electoral politics, Why America Stopped Voting shows that the enduring decline of voter participation has been gradual and not the direct result of particular political events. Rather, Kornbluh shows that fundamental social changes that restructured virtually every aspect of American life at the turn of the century were at the heart of the decline in voter participation that still plagues our electoral process today.