2
V. O. Key (1949, 527) once asserted that “the blunt truth is that politicians and officials
are under no compulsion to pay much heed to classes and groups of citizens that do not vote.”
Walter Dean Burnham
(1987, 99)
put the blunt truth even more bluntly, “if you don’t vote, you
don’t count.” This contention raises serious issues for American politics because different
groups in American society vote at different rates (e.g., Verba and Nie 1972; Wolfinger and
Rosenstone 1980; Rosenstone and Hansen 1993; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995). If elected
officials represent voters more than the nonvoters, governmental activity may be biased, a
violation of “the equal consideration of the preferences and interests of all citizens,” which is
“one of the bedrock principles in a democracy” (Verba 2003, 663).
Although this line of reasoning is familiar and raises fundamental concerns, few political
scientists have tested Key’s blunt truth (Martin 2003). We tend to assume that the politically
active find their preferences better reflected in governmental action than do the inactive, but few
have examined whether this is so.
1
As Larry Bartels (1998, 45) put it, differences in turnout
among various groups, “are seldom explicitly related to any observed or potential impact they
may have upon the strategic decisions of candidates or the policy outcomes produced by the
electoral process.” Simply put, we are still learning about turnout’s political impacts.
One point upon which Key, along with many after him, was silent was the equality of
voting’s rewards. Those who don’t vote may not count, but do those who vote count equally?
Certainly, as a result of court decisions establishing the legal principle of “one person, one vote,”
votes have equal influence on electoral outcomes in a legal sense. However, Bartels (1998)
argues that political conditions may render votes politically unequal, meaning different groups
1
This assumption extends beyond academic circles. For example, columnist Bob Herbert laments that
“The inclination of many politicians to give short shrift to the interests of the young, the poor, the
working classes, the black and the brown, has been encouraged by the consistently poor voting records of
those groups” (qtd. in Highton and Wolfinger 2001, 189).
Convention