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Voting is the central act of democracy, the method by which citizens influence the policy of the state by holding the leaders who represent them accountable for their decisions. It is also the means by which elected leaders make decisions in legislatures, and it is used outside government in businesses, civic organizations, social groups, and families in every modern society. This entry focuses on voting for elected offices because that type of voting defines democracy.

Why Do People Vote?

Does voting make a difference? Almost all political scientists agree that political leaders in democracies respond to voters in a way that leaders in undemocratic, or “authoritarian,” countries do not. Because representatives in democracies are accountable to voters, they are much more likely to do things that benefit large sectors of society (rather than their friends and families)—for example, providing public goods such as infrastructure, public safety, and education and adhering to the rule of law rather than relying on arbitrary decisions about who should have access to government resources.

Political leaders in authoritarian countries are not entirely unaccountable to ordinary citizens. They must provide at least minimal government services or they eventually will face revolt or at the very least citizens who express their displeasure by cheating the system, refusing to do what they are told when no one is watching, and engaging in other subtle forms of resistance. When politicians must compete against one another for votes, the degree of accountability to ordinary citizens is much higher, much as merchants in a competitive marketplace offer better prices and higher quality than does a seller with a monopoly.

Though voting is clearly important for society as a whole, the question of why individuals vote is more problematic: One vote among thousands seems to matter very little. This is a classic example of a collective action problem in which many people working together can produce something that benefits them all but any individual’s contribution adds little to the whole and its absence will not be missed; as a result any particular person has little incentive to contribute. For the individual, then, voting appears to be irrational because one vote would not change the outcome but voters and nonvoters alike share the results.

In some political systems politicians solve this problem by trading money or favors to the citizens who are willing to vote for them, a practice known as patronage. Although this strategy motivates people to vote, most scholars believe it compromises the nature of democracy. Another strategy is to instill civic pride and responsibility in voters so that they see voting as an important part of their role in the community. This strategy also can work for dedicated groups within a larger society, such as labor unions, which often expend a great deal of effort encouraging their members to vote. Some societies even adopt compulsory voting, forcing citizens who do not vote to pay fines. Also, whatever people perceive the benefits of voting to be, they are more likely to vote if casting a vote is easy to do.

In part because politicians, parties, and governments in different countries have adopted different strategies to encourage citizens to vote and in part because of differences in political cultures among countries, levels of voter turnout vary dramatically from one country to the next and often change over time. The United States, for example, had lower voter turnout rates throughout the twentieth century than those of most other rich democracies, and that pattern continued into the twenty-first century; however, turnout rates in most Western European countries declined after the 1970s, whereas U.S. rates remained stable over that period among eligible voters (though the presence of increasing numbers of noncitizens and disenfranchised convicts in the population created the appearance of a decline in U.S. turnouts). Especially low turnouts can call the legitimacy of elections into question because actual voters may not be representative of society as whole. Because poorer and less educated voters are less likely to turn out than are their fellow citizens, low turnouts harm parties that draw more support from those voters.

The History Of Voting

Voting dates at least from ancient times, with well-known examples including the Greek city-state of Athens, the republic of Rome, and the direct ancestors of modern legislatures: the assemblies, or parliaments, of medieval Europe. In all those cases the only people allowed to vote were males who held important social positions (members of the nobility or clergy) or owned a certain amount of property; the vast majority of adults, including women, could not vote.

The fight to create democratic government in Europe was therefore as much a fight over who got to vote as it was a fight over whether the king or the parliament would be supreme. Disenfranchised groups placed the right to vote at the forefront of their fights for equality both for its symbolic importance as the mark of full citizenship and because it gave them the political power to pursue other goals. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries pressure from the lower classes, often organized by labor unions, resulted in the lowering of property qualifications until finally universal male suffrage became the norm throughout Europe and the Americas. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, those countries witnessed a push to give women the right to vote, and by the late twentieth century nearly every country in the world had adopted universal suffrage.

As a result the right to vote ceased to be the true measure of democracy because authoritarians found ways to give people the right to vote without turning over real political power. One example was the American South, where the United States freed black slaves and gave them the right to vote after the Civil War ended in 1865. Strict requirements such as literacy tests and poll taxes (requirements usually waived for poor, uneducated whites) prevented blacks from voting until those measures were overturned by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the first decade of the twenty-first century laws in many U.S. states that prevented convicts and even ex-convicts from voting continued to affect blacks disproportionately.

A far more popular strategy has been to ban all political parties other than the ruling party or to make it difficult for other parties to organize and campaign. A more subtle method to reduce the power of the vote is the practice of patronage, or “machine” politics, in which politicians trade money or favors for votes; this practice was easier to implement before the secret ballot was adopted in most countries in the late nineteenth century, but politicians have devised numerous ways to reward loyalty and punish disloyalty even when votes are secret. Those politicians are accountable to voters, but there is little political competition; the politicians are political monopolists and are less responsive to voters than are politicians in a competitive system.

In a society with deep ethnic, racial, or national divisions, the members of each ethnic group typically vote only for politicians and parties of their own group. Some scholars consider ethnic solidarity in voting a reasonable exercise in self-determination, especially when minority groups attempt to oppose an oppressive majority. However, other scholars argue that not only does this situation produce a monopolistic relationship between leaders and voters that encourages patronage, but when the majority as well as the minority votes along ethnic lines, the majority wins every election and the minority has little reason to participate in the political system, a situation that leads to conflict that may turn violent.

In some countries legislators represent districts with unequal numbers of constituents, giving voters in smaller districts more power. This normally happens for historical reasons (for example, when people move from rural districts to urban ones), but parties with strong support in the smaller districts typically oppose any changes. In addition, officeholders sometimes “gerrymander” district boundaries, drawing them so that even if districts are equal in size, they tend to favor the election of one party or of incumbents in general.

Even when everyone has an equal right to vote and elections are competitive, casting votes may be difficult. In the United States citizens must register to vote before an election, and this requires extra time and effort. By contrast, in many countries all adult citizens are automatically eligible to vote. The actual act of voting may be problematic as well, especially when elections are held on working days or transportation to the polls is difficult to obtain. Low levels of education also may pose a barrier because people who cannot read or understand complex political concepts may have little ability to choose candidates wisely and little interest in doing so. Negative campaign ads and bad weather discourage many voters, strengthening the role of the most dedicated (and typically most extreme). Some scholars have argued that voters can grow apathetic as a result of “election fatigue” resulting from multiple elections within a specific period or multiple races at each election. The United States, with its many state and local as well as national elections, provides a clear example of this problem. Because many barriers to voting disproportionately affect the poor and less educated, efforts to raise or lower those barriers often become the objects of political dispute, with parties that draw more votes from the affected groups arguing for lower barriers.

At the other end of the spectrum the ability to provide campaign contributions or mobilize voters may give rich individuals and well-organized groups a more powerful voice in elections. Though all countries have restrictions on these sorts of activities, it seems unlikely that those advantages can be eliminated completely, and some scholars argue that private funding of political causes is necessary to provide true opposition to the government in power.

Electoral Systems

Except in a few small communities where citizens vote directly on every issue, voters elect representatives to a legislature and, in some countries, executive offices such as the presidency. The first traditional method of electing legislatures is single-member districts (SMDs), in which the candidate who receives the most votes is elected; in countries with presidential systems presidents usually are elected this way. SMDs tend to produce two-party systems because parties with similar ideologies are more likely to win in each district by uniting. This system encourages direct accountability of representatives to a set of constituents, and this can make individual politicians more important than parties; however, the presence of only two parties gives voters a clear choice.

The other traditional form of voting is proportional representation (PR), in which each district elects many representatives and people vote for parties rather than individual candidates, with each party receiving a share of seats in the legislature proportional to its vote (in a rare variant known as the single transferable vote system [STV] voters actually vote for individual candidates, listing them in order of preference, but the system nonetheless produces proportional representation of parties). PR produces multiparty systems, requiring parties to form coalitions to rule. Because people vote for parties in PR systems, parties are usually strong and have clear platforms. In addition, voters never fear that their votes will be wasted as a result of their living in districts where their parties are always in the minority.

Because of this, it is thought that PR systems favor minorities whose members are spread evenly across geographical districts: In an SMD system a minority that is a minority in every district will win no seats, whereas in a PR system it will win a percentage equal to its share of the population. In practice, however, a minority that would lose every seat in an SMD system would end up with a minority in a PR system and thus, despite having symbolically important seats in the legislature, would be unable to pass legislation unless it could take part in a coalition (and a coalition would work equally well to gain a majority in SMDs), though in most legislatures a sizable minority may be able to block certain legislation or at least prevent constitutional amendments.

This concern applies most clearly when an electoral minority is a permanent one, as is the case in an ethnically divided country. In a competitive democracy, whether SMD or PR, the greatest barrier to “tyranny of the majority” is that no majority is permanent and therefore the members of the current majority have incentives both to treat potential future allies in the current minority well and to institutionalize respect for the minority because they themselves will be in the minority eventually.

Some countries have adopted other systems in an attempt to combine the best features of SMDs and PR. An open-list PR system allows voters to choose specific candidates within each party. An SMD system with a primary election allows voters to choose among competing candidates with similar ideologies in the primary. This narrows the choice in the general election to a clear one between two (or at most a few) candidates; holding a runoff if no candidate wins a majority in an election works in much the same way. Multiple voting allows each voter to vote for several different candidates in one district; each voter receives a number of votes equal to the number of offices to be filled, with all candidates competing against one another. An SMD system with alternative voting lets voters rank candidates in order of preference, allowing someone to support a first-choice party without hurting the chances of a second-choice party to win out over parties the voter dislikes; like STV, this is a rare variant. A few countries have adopted a mixed system in which some representatives are chosen in SMDs and others are elected by PR.

Older democracies tend to use one system or another for historical reasons. Newer democracies and those that have undergone major constitutional reforms are more likely to use systems like those of neighboring countries or their former colonial rulers (SMDs in the Americas and PR in Europe, for example) or to use one of the new systems.

In addition to electing representatives and executive officers such as presidents, voters sometimes vote directly on important issues, especially constitutions or constitutional amendments. This practice, called a referendum, was pioneered by Switzerland and has become increasingly common throughout the world.

Electoral Systems In Legislatures And Outside Government

Voting is also important within legislatures: Governments and laws must be approved by a majority of representatives. Secret ballots are uncommon in legislatures because they make it difficult for constituents to hold legislators accountable. In addition, when parties are strong, legislators almost always vote as their party leaders direct. The result is that a government in a system with strong parties wins nearly every vote, especially in the typical parliamentary system, where a government must have a majority of the seats in the legislature to take power in the first place.

The electoral systems used outside government often mimic governmental systems. For example, the members of a large club usually elect a board of directors and a president and other executive officers. However, there may be important differences. For example, many organizations use open voting rather than a secret ballot, and in corporations the shareholders have as many votes as they own shares rather than one vote each.

How Do People Decide Whom To Vote For?

Many factors enter into citizens’ decisions about how to vote, and with the exception of ethnicity in an ethnically divided country no single factor overshadows the rest. Profession and economic class, religion, gender, region, the values instilled by parents, and longtime identification with a party can all play a role, as can events during the lifetime of a voter, such as the Great Depression and the 9/11 attacks. This complexity is probably for the best because having voters pulled in many different directions by cross-pressures tends to moderate conflicts and forces politicians to compete for votes.

Researchers generally agree, however, that except in patronage systems, voters rarely vote on the basis of narrow self-interest; they are more likely to vote on the basis of the interests of a large social group or the country as a whole. Citizens also tend to vote retrospectively, rewarding or punishing incumbents for the results of previous years, especially economic results, rather than guessing how candidates may perform in the future.

Bibliography:

Campbell, Angus, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes. 1960. The American Voter. New York: Wiley.
Lawson, Steven F. 2003. Civil Rights Crossroads: Nation, Community, and the Black Freedom Struggle. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
LeDuc, Lawrence, Richard G. Niemi, and Pippa Norris, eds. 2002. Comparing Democracies 2: New Challenges in the Study of Elections and Voting. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Niemi, Richard G., and Herbert F. Weisberg, eds. 2001. Controversies in Voting Behavior. 4th ed. Washington, DC: CQ Press.
Popkin, Samuel L. 1994. The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rae, Douglas W. 1967. The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Weatherford, Doris. 1998. A History of the American Suffragist Movement. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.