By Invitation Only (review)

Abstract

Why has electoral turnout declined in the United States? What, if anything, can be done to increase voting participation? In this book Steven Schier advances a theory to account for change over time in who is politically active. He argues that for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mass mobilization by the political parties generated high levels of turnout among those eligible to vote, which of course for most of that period included only white males. In place of mass mobilization by political parties, what now occurs is narrowly targeted political activation. It is this shift from mass mobilization to political activation that he blames for low levels of turnout. Having developed this argument in the first chapter, he then turns to examine why the change occurred and what might be done to generate higher levels of voter turnout in the United States.