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Persistent racial/ethnic gaps in voter turnout produce elections that are increasingly unrepresentative of the wishes of all Americans.
In The Turnout Gap, Bernard L. Fraga offers the most comprehensive analysis to date of the causes and consequences of racial and ethnic disparities in voter turnout. Examining voting for Whites, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans from the 1800s to the present, Fraga documents persistent gaps in turnout and shows that elections are increasingly unrepresentative of the wishes of all Americans. These gaps persist not because of socioeconomics or voter suppression, but because minority voters have limited influence in shaping election outcomes. As Fraga demonstrates, voters turn out at higher rates when their votes matter; despite demographic change, in most elections and most places, minorities are less electorally relevant than Whites. The Turnout Gap shows that when politicians engage the minority electorate, the power of the vote can win. However, demography is not destiny. It is up to politicians, parties, and citizens themselves to mobilize the potential of all Americans.
Anger is a powerful mobilizing force in American politics on both sides of the political aisle, but does it motivate all groups equally? This book offers a new conceptualization of anger as a political resource that mobilizes black and white Americans differentially to exacerbate political inequality. Drawing on survey data from the last forty years, experiments, and rhetoric analysis, Phoenix finds that - from Reagan to Trump - black Americans register significantly less anger than their white counterparts and that anger (in contrast to pride) has a weaker mobilizing effect on their political participation. The book examines both the causes of this and the consequences. Pointing to black Americans' tempered expectations of politics and the stigmas associated with black anger, it shows how race and lived experience moderate the emergence of emotions and their impact on behavior. The book makes multiple theoretical contributions and offers important practical insights for political strategy.
The solution to youth voter turnout requires focus on helping young people follow through on their political interests and intentions.
Who Votes Now? compares the demographic characteristics and political views of voters and nonvoters in American presidential elections since 1972 and examines how electoral reforms and the choices offered by candidates influence voter turnout. Drawing on a wealth of data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey and the American National Election Studies, Jan Leighley and Jonathan Nagler demonstrate that the rich have consistently voted more than the poor for the past four decades, and that voters are substantially more conservative in their economic views than nonvoters. They find that women are now more likely to vote than men, that the gap in voting rates between blacks and whites has largely disappeared, and that older Americans continue to vote more than younger Americans. Leighley and Nagler also show how electoral reforms such as Election Day voter registration and absentee voting have boosted voter turnout, and how turnout would also rise if parties offered more distinct choices. Providing the most systematic analysis available of modern voter turnout, Who Votes Now? reveals that persistent class bias in turnout has enduring political consequences, and that it really does matter who votes and who doesn't.
The dilemma of democracy arises from two contrasting trends. More people in the established democracies are participating in civil society activity, contacting government officials, protesting, and using online activism and other creative forms of participation. At the same time, the importance of social status as an influence on political activity is increasing. The democratic principle of the equality of voice is eroding. The politically rich are getting richer-and the politically needy have less voice. This book assembles an unprecedented set of international public opinion surveys to identify the individual, institutional, and political factors that produce these trends. New forms of activity place greater demands on participants, raising the importance of social status skills and resources. Civil society activity further widens the participation gap. New norms of citizenship shift how people participate. And generational change and new online forms of activism accentuate this process. Effective and representative government requires a participatory citizenry and equal voice, and participation trends are undermining these outcomes. The Participation Gap both documents the growing participation gap in contemporary democracies and suggests ways that we can better achieve their theoretical ideal of a participatory citizenry and equal voice.
Examines how and why American women voted since the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920.
"To understand public opinion and political behavior, researchers typically sort people by self-identified groupings such as party identification, race, gender, education and income. This book advances gun owners as a new classification. It demonstrates a "gun gap", which captures the differences between gun owners and non-gun owners, and shows how this gap improves conventional models of political behavior. The gun gap in fact represents an important explanation for voter choice, voter turnout, perceptions of personal and public safety, preferences for gun control policies, and support for the death penalty. Moreover, the gun gap is growing. During the 1970s and 1980s, the gap was small. However, legislative battles over guns in the early 1990s marked a significant growth in the gun gap that continues to this day. The 2016 presidential election witnessed the largest recorded gun gap in history. The gun gap in voter choice was nearly three times larger in 2016 than the gender gap, and exceeded age and education gaps by notable margins. This book also focuses on variation among gun owners. Gun owners are not a monolith but exhibit attitudinal and behavioral differences that can be as large as the gap between gun and non-gun owners. The gun gap thus affords a new and compelling vantage point to evaluate modern mass politics"--
This book develops and empirically tests a social theory of political participation. It overturns prior understandings of why some people (such as college-degree holders, churchgoers and citizens in national rather than local elections) vote more often than others. The book shows that the standard demographic variables are not proxies for variation in the individual costs and benefits of participation, but for systematic variation in the patterns of social ties between potential voters. Potential voters who move in larger social circles, particularly those including politicians and other mobilizing actors, have more access to the flurry of electoral activity prodding citizens to vote and increasing political discussion. Treating voting as a socially defined practice instead of as an individual choice over personal payoffs, a social theory of participation is derived from a mathematical model with behavioral foundations that is empirically calibrated and tested using multiple methods and data sources.
What does it take for women to win political office? This book uncovers a gendered qualifications gap, showing that women need to be significantly more qualified than men to win elections. Applying insights from psychology and political science and drawing on experiments, public opinion data, and content analysis, Nichole M. Bauer presents new evidence of how voter biases and informational asymmetries combine to disadvantage female candidates. The book shows that voters conflate masculinity and political leadership, receive less information about the political experiences of female candidates, and hold female candidates to a higher qualifications standard. This higher standard is especially problematic for Republican female candidates. The demand for masculinity in political leaders means these women must “look like men” but also be better than men to win elections.