How the States Shaped the Nation: American Electoral Institutions and Voter Turnout, 1920-2000 by Melanie Jean Springer

Author:Melanie Jean Springer [Springer, Melanie Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Campaigns & Elections, Political Science, Political Process, American Government, State, General
ISBN: 9780226114354
Google: ZegeAwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 23615384
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

SIX

Where Are the High Turnout States?

The American federal system infuses geographical boundaries with political substance. The division between state and national politics, broadly, and among independent actors within the states more specifically, has political consequences. Federalism allows the states to foster local interests by adopting policies that suit the preferences of their citizens. As Key observed,

The creation of a federal system implies the existence of territorial differences among people of the nation. To some degree these geographical political cleavages solve themselves by the division of powers between the national and state governments. So long as a sphere of action remains solely in the hands of the states, the people of New York cannot, through the national government, impose their views about a matter within that sphere upon the people of Texas or vice versa. (1956, 21)

Among other things, the states have the power to create a variety of electoral environments. As I have demonstrated throughout this book, the way the states have managed their electoral processes during the twentieth century has often been independent from other states and, in many cases, from the federal government. Federalism has allowed the states to create fifty unique electoral processes tailor-made to fit their publics.

Given the importance of elections in the American political system and the impressive power the states historically have had in structuring voting processes, one would expect varying institutional structures to generate political consequences. As I demonstrated in chapter 5, the nature of state electoral institutions—how expansive or restrictive they are—can alter voter participation to varying degrees. And regional differences in both the quality of electoral institutions and their effects have emerged throughout the twentieth century. Most apparent are the distinct differences between voter turnout and electoral institutions in the nonsouthern states and the southern states. More generally, as Onuf noted in his discussion of regionalism, “The most powerful explanation for sectional difference was to be found in the divergent development of Northerners and Southerners” (1996, 11). Over and over, it appears that voting rates are consistently high, or at least significantly above the national average, in many midwestern and western and even some northeastern states, while voter turnout in the southern states is routinely low. My aim in this book has been to link these state turnout patterns with the adoption or removal of varying restrictive or expansive electoral laws.

This chapter presents in-depth state investigations of the nonsouthern states that have routinely had high voting rates during the twentieth century. I selected the sample based on norms pertaining to case study analysis as established in the literature on qualitative and quantitative methods (e.g., Eckstein 1975; Geering 2004, 2007; George and Bennett 2004; King, Keohane, and Verba 1994, 1995; Lazarsfeld and Barton 1951; Mahoney and Goertz 2006; Munck 1998; Pierson 2004). The rationale for focusing on these states is that if the high turnout states in the Midwest, West, and Northeast have similarly expansive voting laws or exhibit similar patterns in adopting particular laws, that may add substance and specificity to the claim that electoral institutions have influenced participation.

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