Why did Turnout crater at the beginning of the 20th Century?

[Tetro Kornbluth]

It is not a particularly good article and I can't vouch for its accuracy but I do think it is interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_elections

I have to say it is full of interesting information. Notice how turnout figures in the nineteenth century often seem to correspond with turning point elections and it is interesting to consider that 1876 still records as the highest turnout in American history. I wonder to what effect various disenfranchisements had on those figures; Blacks it seems not a lot, Women (which is o/c easier to record) a lot more at least initially.

But what really caught my eye was this stretch from about 1896 to 1924:
1896         79.3%
1900         73.2%
1904         65.2%
1908         65.4%
1912         58.8%
1916         61.6%
1920         49.2%
1924         48.9%

In the Nineteenth Century turnouts into the 70s were the norm, the lowest turnout of any election between 1840 and 1900 was 71.3% in 1872 - a non-contest where one of the two major parties effectively refused to run a candidate. 1896's was relatively high for the era but that was a decisive and highly polarized election and then you see this rather steep decline. What is notable about is doesn't seem to correlate very well with 'major' elections or ones where there was a high degree of polarization and a wide range of choices (ie. Third party candidates). 1912's is well down on 1908's despite being a more of a contest in every single possible way. I suspect the incredibly low numbers for the 1920s can be explained by a combination of the implosion of the Democratic 'Ethnic' vote due to Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy, the effects of female suffrage (passed in time for 1920, many women may have been initially reluctant to vote? I'm speculating here) and the recognition that those elections were going to be massive Republican landslides. But earlier? I can't explain that plunge. I'm not an expert at all in this period of American history, so any ideas?

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Anyone?

[Mehmentum]

Sorry, no clue, I'm very interested to hear the answer though.

[Benj]

I don't have any terribly useful insights, but I would guess it was in large part due to immigration. New immigrants didn't (and don't) vote much, and by the 1920s a very large portion of the country were first generation immigrants (while this was very much not true in the 1870s to 1890s). Also, most were immigrating from countries without serious democracy, unlike today, when most immigrants come from countries that are at least nominally democratic and hold regular elections (China being the only notable exception).

[minionofmidas]

The 1912 collapse is very strange. Republicans staying home due to GOTV efforts suspended due to splits in local party machines?

Also, according to this turnout in 2008 was lower than 1968, despite most Southern Blacks not yet voting that year? Oh right, it's VAP, not CVAP. The 1960s being of course the decade in the country's existence when the foreign-born were the smallest share of the population.

[WillK]

My theory is that because of the big influx of immigration in the 1900-1920 period the size of the Voting Age Population increased faster than number of actual registered voters.

From 1920 on, the VAP doubled, since it was no longer gender constrained, but the turnout did not double since women were less likely to get out and vote at the time.


 

It is not a particularly good article and I can't vouch for its accuracy but I do think it is interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_States_presidential_elections

I have to say it is full of interesting information. Notice how turnout figures in the nineteenth century often seem to correspond with turning point elections and it is interesting to consider that 1876 still records as the highest turnout in American history. I wonder to what effect various disenfranchisements had on those figures; Blacks it seems not a lot, Women (which is o/c easier to record) a lot more at least initially.

But what really caught my eye was this stretch from about 1896 to 1924:
1896         79.3%
1900         73.2%
1904         65.2%
1908         65.4%
1912         58.8%
1916         61.6%
1920         49.2%
1924         48.9%

In the Nineteenth Century turnouts into the 70s were the norm, the lowest turnout of any election between 1840 and 1900 was 71.3% in 1872 - a non-contest where one of the two major parties effectively refused to run a candidate. 1896's was relatively high for the era but that was a decisive and highly polarized election and then you see this rather steep decline. What is notable about is doesn't seem to correlate very well with 'major' elections or ones where there was a high degree of polarization and a wide range of choices (ie. Third party candidates). 1912's is well down on 1908's despite being a more of a contest in every single possible way. I suspect the incredibly low numbers for the 1920s can be explained by a combination of the implosion of the Democratic 'Ethnic' vote due to Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy, the effects of female suffrage (passed in time for 1920, many women may have been initially reluctant to vote? I'm speculating here) and the recognition that those elections were going to be massive Republican landslides. But earlier? I can't explain that plunge. I'm not an expert at all in this period of American history, so any ideas?

[jaichind]

I think it has to do with the introduction of Australian ballot which took place in 1892.  Local machine politics, before Australian ballot came into play, used all sort of incentives to get people to the polls and then give them a ballot where the person votes straight ticket for one party of another and then the person puts that ballot into the ballot box.  So all a political machine for party Y has to know is that person X is a for party Y, get him to the polls with promise of liquor, and give him their ticket and know that is a vote for the local politicans of party Y.  With Australian ballot, the person might very well vote for President for party Y but not vote for the local politicans of party Y that is paying for this.  Over time the local political machine lost the incentive of mass mobilization since they would not know it really represented a vote for themselves and instead focused on a narrow mobilization of known supportors of the said local political machine.

[Forsyth]

In the 1890s the Southern states started changing their voting laws to disenfranchise black voters, although they also ended up disenfranchising a lot of white voters as well.  Poll taxes and literacy tests were common, although threats of violence and intimidation kept many blacks from even trying to register.  When my parents registered to vote in Charleston, South Carolina in 1960 they had to read part of the state constitution and my mother still remembers it since it was filled with words she never heard of.  In some states, people could bypass the literacy test if they met property requirements or if their grandfather had been eligible to vote before the civil war (the Grandfather Clause).  Wikipedia has more information on the subject under Disfranchisement_after_the_Civil_War.  The Grandfather Clause was found unconstitutional in 1915.

[ottermax]

My understanding is similar to jaichind's.

Bribery was acceptable and especially with immigrants in the cities before WWI. I'm not sure why it stopped though.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

In the 1890s the Southern states started changing their voting laws to disenfranchise black voters, although they also ended up disenfranchising a lot of white voters as well.  Poll taxes and literacy tests were common, although threats of violence and intimidation kept many blacks from even trying to register.  When my parents registered to vote in Charleston, South Carolina in 1960 they had to read part of the state constitution and my mother still remembers it since it was filled with words she never heard of.  In some states, people could bypass the literacy test if they met property requirements or if their grandfather had been eligible to vote before the civil war (the Grandfather Clause).  Wikipedia has more information on the subject under Disfranchisement_after_the_Civil_War.  The Grandfather Clause was found unconstitutional in 1915.

Yes, but I would assume these wouldn't counted in the overall figures.

Jaichind and Ottermax, thanks... This would mean though that political mobilization in the US has more or less always excluded 40% of the population (assuming we can hold the figures of the 1910s to be the mean which is a bold assumption although it does come closest to all Post-Great Depression figures). So why is that? In most western countries turnout has cratered quite badly recently mostly thanks, I think, to Friedman's golden straight-jacket but yet turnout in the US is going up (but only because it was so low post-1968 and Watergate).

[mianfei]

Essentially, as is noted by Alexander Keyssar in The Right To Vote The Contested History Of Democracy In The United States and in part of Dietrich Rüschemeyer’s Capitalist Development and Democracy, the period between 1896 and 1920 saw the ruling classes introducing a number of features designed to prevent the possibility of the working classes (and Negroes) uniting to destroy capitalism by voting themselves the capitalists’ wealth:

• poll taxes
• literacy tests
• residency requirements
• malapportionment against urban electorates

If we follow from Rüschemeyer and Robert Mickey’s more recent Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944–1972, it seems probable that these changes were driven by a combination of the Bourbon southern landed elite and an increasingly powerful mining elite in the West. In fact, if we follow from a quote on page 10 of Mickey’s book:

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it seems logical to me that capital-dependent mining elites would be even more likely to fear democracy than labor-dependent landed elites. The assets mining elites hold is even more fixed than is land, and thus even easier for a politically agitated lower class to tax.

Thus, the settlement of the West produced a new class likely to have been very hostile to mass democracy at a time when belief in world socialist revolution and radically egalitarian democracy was establishing itself as the basic belief of Europe’s developing working classes and was increasingly feared in North America. In no other country globally did such a class develop at this same time – though neither Keyssar nor Rüschemeyer nor Mickey discusses this point.

[Maverick J-Mac]

Has anyone else notices how disgusting politics is?  I can't blame people for not wanting to vote.