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Nonvoters
America's No-Shows
- Jack C. Doppelt - Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
- Ellen Shearer - Medill News Service, Washington D.C.
Other Titles in:
Political Communications
Political Communications
264 pages | SAGE Publications, Inc
This book addresses the issue of why 51.2% of the population of the USA failed to vote in the November 1996 presidential election. Through polls and studies conducted in the spring and summer of 1996, the contributors set out to answer the following questions: what were the 51.2 percent doing that day? Who are they? Why didn't they vote?
The results are summarized into five types of nonvoters: doers, unplugged, irritable, don't knows and alienated.
Introduction
The Conventional Wisdom about Nonvoters
Profiling America's Nonvoters
Doers
Unpluggeds
Irritables
Don't Knows
Alienateds
Can't Shows
Conclusion
"Meet your nonvoting neighbors. Some of them are thoughtful, caring, and involved in community life. More are poor and young, stressed and strapped. Many have expectations of politics so absurdly high that they write off any politician who is not a saint or understanding of parties and political institutions so drastically low that they cannot follow even the basics of a political campaign. Doppelt and Shearer offer an honest, humane, and disturbing account of how the other half thinks and feel sabout the right to vote, and then lays it aside."
Author of The Good Citizen: A History of American Civil Life