Turnout smackdown.

• Author: Kendall, Brent
• Position: Book Review

THE VANISHING VOTER: Public Involvement in the Age of Uncertainty by Thomas Patterson Knopf, $25.00

ONE MONTH BEFORE THE 2000 New Hampshire primary, Al Gore and Bill Bradley attempted to differentiate themselves on health care, gun control, and leadership in front of a national cable audience. At the same time, the World Wrestling Federation presented its latest installment of "WWF Smackdown!," which attracted four times as many viewers. This anecdote, recounted in Thomas Patterson's The Vanishing Voter, sums up the author's frustration at the level of civic interest in the United States.

Perhaps nothing better symbolizes American culture's secondary emphasis on community more than the public political apathy and anemic voter-participation levels of the past quarter century. Though presidential and congressional midterm election turnout among eligible voters has declined only slightly since 1972, Patterson, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, says that the confounding (and depressing) truth is that turnout hasn't increased, in spite of all the reasons participation should have grown. The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race enjoyed a 63 percent turnout rate, while Bush-Gore limped in at 51 percent.

Political scientists have theorized that a better-educated citizenry should be a more involved one. Yet in 1960, half of the adult population hadn't finished high school, and fewer than 10 percent held a college degree, while today, one in four adults holds a degree, and another quarter have attended college in some fashion. In addition, less than one third of Southern blacks were registered for the 1960 election, and turnout among women lagged 10 percent behind that of men. Today, blacks vote at the same rate as whites, women the same as men. Throw in the 10 million registrants added to the rolls by the 1993 Motor Voter Act, and you ought to have a recipe for civic participation.

That it hasn't happened says much about our age, and it's not all bad. Only in a stable society with relative peace and prosperity do citizens have the luxury to choose civil disengagement without suffering heavy consequences. That said, Patterson argues that the process is wanting, and faults candidates, journalists, and the political parties for a civic environment that is far from citizen-friendly. "[O]rdinary Americans share some of the blame for their lapse in participation," he writes. "But most of the fault lies elsewhere, and citizens cannot be expected to...