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Thu, 1 May 2003 09:58:39 -0400 |
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It is no surprise that the US wins another Gold Medal, this time in the
non-voting Olympics. We have the best democracy that money can buy, and
since not that many people have the money, they don't vote. This
tabulation exists in many different sources, but is analyzed in a
forthcoming book available at:
http://shakti.trincoll.edu/~mfrankli/Synopsis%26outline.html
USA 55.8
Switzerland 56.6
Japan 71.3
Ireland 73.2
Canada 74.6
Finland 75.9
UK 76.4
France 76.7
Israel 80.4
Norway 80.6
Denmark 85.6
Germany 85.6
Sweden 86.1
Netherlands 87.6
Malta 88.2
New Zealand 88.6
Iceland 89.5
Luxembourg 89.8
Italy 90.6
Austria 92.1
Belgium 92.6
Australia 94.6
These figures are the mean turnout 1945-99 percentages.
In a previous book chapter the author reasons why the US has such a
stellar showing:
Franklin, M. N. (1996). Electoral Participation. Comparing democracies :
elections and voting in global perspectives. L. LeDuc, R. G. Niemi and P.
Norris. Thousand Oaks, Sage: 216-235.
There on page 232 in the last paragraph: The fact that voters are not
fools is also suggested by the extent to which they bypass electoral
routes where those routes prove unreponsive. The United States suffers
much from the unresponsive nature of its institutional character 28
Footnote 28: To say it "suffers" from its institutions is to look at
things purely from the perspective of electoral turnout. The founding
fathers, of course, designed a system that would be unresponsive to the
popular will and their system works pretty much as intended. Our finding
suggest that low turnout is an inevitable concomitant.
Your Olympic Scorekeeper, Stephen Bezruchka
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