Eluding nonvoters
Political science continues to have tremendous trouble to capture the phenomenon of nonvoting – both Prof Roth and Dr de Nève stated and described this phenomenon clearly.
Nonvoters keep eluding political science | Photo by piccadillywilson on Flickr
Much of this dilemma is related to the tools of the trade: instruments of political polling work with samples of self-reported voters and nonvoters.
Political science has no tools to research nonvoting in depth.
A fact that is hard to admit…
Based on the discrepancies between predicted and real turnout it is generally assumed that—possibly bowing to societal pressure—some voters and nonvoters may not respond truthfully to all polling questions.
But much of the problem already begins before that – political science is not capable of reaching out to nonvoters. Mind you, they are not alone with this problem; but in any case it becomes very clear that whatever knowledge science possesses about nonvoters is based on very limited data, if any at all.
It is no surprise then when Dr de Nève states that “political science has failed to explain why and when people choose not to vote.”