•  
  •  
 

St. Thomas Law Review

Jason Marisam

First Page

190

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Political scientists have generally concluded that state efforts to increase voter turnout will continue to flounder so long as those efforts remain focused on lowering the already low cost of voting. Accordingly, this Article argues that future efforts to achieve consistently higher and widespread voter turnout among all demographics must consider other determinants of voter behavior. The primary goal of this Article is to craft a framework based on a thorough understanding of voter motivation and behavior that helps conceptualize and analyze public efforts to increase voter turnout. The framework fills a gap in the literature by drawing from a range of fields-including election law, social psychology, sociology, and political science-that have not been previously synthesized and applied to voter turnout law and policy. This Article identifies and analyzes four core voter motivations: self-interest, social identity, altruistic cooperation, and community norms. A more complete understanding of the motivations that emerge in this Article leads to new insights into the promise and limits of specific efforts to increase voter turnout. Moreover, in a section that introduces a new concept called community vote drives, this Article ties together the analysis of the four motivations and demonstrates how they can inform future state efforts to improve voting rates. The first and second generation reforms to increase voter turnout focused on lowering the cost of voting. The first generation removed discriminatory barriers to voting, successfully erasing turnout differences between African Americans in the South and those living in the rest of the country. The second generation reforms were designed to reduce structural and administrative costs of voting, primarily by reforming voter registration laws and expanding vote-by-mail options. However, these second generation reforms have not led to significant changes in turnout. In the U.S., turnout remains low-by historical standards and in comparison to other countries-and lower voting rates for minority and socio-economically disadvantaged groups persist. Political scientists attribute the lack of success of these more recent reforms to the fact that the cost of voting-the time to register and show up at the polls-is already so low that further reductions in cost will effect little change in voting behavior. Indeed, the consensus among political scientists is now that structural reforms that make voting easier will yield little improvement in turnout rates. Accordingly, future efforts to achieve consistently higher and widespread turnout among all demographics must consider other determinants of voters' behavior. As a point of clarification, when this Article discusses voter behavior and voter motivation, it refers to decisions about whether to vote, not decisions about which political party to vote for. This Article proceeds as follows: Part II states the case for affirmative state action to increase turnout, beyond removing state-imposed barriers to voting; Part III(A) and (B) describe the first and second generations of reforms aimed to increase voter turnout, and conclude with the claim that these reforms focused on lowering the cost of voting, a strategy that will no longer produce higher turnout; Part IV is the central focus of the paper because it devotes a subpart to each of the four core voter motivations that describe the theoretical and empirical support for the existence of the motivation, and then analyzes how schemes to increase turnout based on that motivation have worked or could work in practice; Part V ties the discussion of the four motivations together by introducing and discussing the concept of community vote drives; and Part VI concludes.

Download

Included in

Law Commons

Share

COinS