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A Theme of Equality in Campaigns and Elections

Elections are the chief mechanisms of popular consent and political accountability in democracy. As recent history attests: “elections in the democratic context can have significant implications for the makeup of a nation's ruling circle and the character of its policies” (Ginsberg 1982, viii). While American elections are undeniably consequential, they fail on the democratic standard of equality. The American electorate is class biased—and more so than in other advanced democracies. Research for more than 50 years has shown that large numbers of Americans don't vote and that voters and nonvoters are drawn from different income and educational strata (Leighley and Nagler 1992). The burning issue of American elections is how to make the electorate more representative of the population as a whole. Courses on American elections, however, devote little time to turn-out and still less on how to mobilize non-voters. Instead, the lion's share of the typical syllabus is devoted to the presidential campaign process. The emphasis on “hoopla” (Patterson 1980) cannot help but feed student conceptualization of politics as a game, rather than an essential social enterprise. If our goal as teachers of political science is to bring students into the world of constructive democratic citizenship, then we must discuss with our students what is at stake in American elections.