To vote or not to vote? from Demokratie & Dialog on Vimeo.

Thomas Kleinhenz—in his book “Reasons for the decline of turnout”—offers one of the most detailed typologies of nonvoters, taking into account their socio-economic status, political interests, party identifications, values and participation behaviours.

Seven types of nonvoters, but no young people | Photo by Darwin Bell on Flickr

Kleinhenz distinguishes seven types of nonvoters, each labelled with a self-explanatory name. While these do not represent homogeneous groups, you may be able to identify one or more of these fictitious characters among your neighbours and acquaintances…

• Active post-materialists
• Upper-class conservatives
• Isolated disadvantaged persons
• Passive uninterested persons
• Saturated middle-class people
• Individualist yuppies
• Disappointed workers

The decisive motives of these different types of nonvoters for their abstention are related to ineffectiveness, individualism, alienation, disinterest, satisfaction, self-centredness or dissatisfaction – all of which can—on their own or in any given combination—be valid and comprehensible reasons for different participation behaviours.

Typologies of nonvoters largely ignore young people.
New research is needed.

And yet, like most other typologies, Kleinhenz’ model does not relate strongly enough to young people—in particular those young people aged 16 to 25—representing an increasingly large proportion of nonvoters.

His typology—and, in fairness to Thomas Kleinhenz, all others that currently exist—does not apply to today’s young generation.

We need new research engaging with the characteristics and motivations of young nonvoters!

Had I ever thought about non-voters before? Probably not. Why? Because why in the world should I focus on people, who consider (or don’t) voting important? Does anybody really care about them? No way – I thought before. But now I know that before I didn’t know what I had been talking about.

Of course there are a lot of people who care about ‘choiceless’. The great example may be this famous project in Berlin, which has recently taken place. However, the point is that before this event I didn’t know a lot about non- voters. NOW, when I can talk about them through the whole day…I am even more confused. WHY? Because there are so many reasons (why there are non-voters), so many examples (who are the non–voters), so many consequences (of non–voting) that I just do not know… how to discover various aspects of choiceless&voiceless. If I could, I would use X-ray examination to explore them, but I think it wouldn’t make any sense. In my opinion even the best scientist hasn’t got a clue about WWW – Why, Who, Where.

Is it complicated?
…maybe…
a little bit…

So I can give one illustration which presents why the problem of Choiceless & Voiceless is not so easy to understand. But firstly, I must warn every person who is already reading my article: after seeing this column, you will still not understand C&V. But you’ll understand me, at least.

Formally we have two groups of non-voters: the first part is the people who don’t consider voting important, and the second group consists of people who use non-voting to express their protest against the government. But if you think that’s all about them, you will be surprised. Why? Because many non-voters seem to be more mysterious. For instance, they neither protest against the government nor consider voting unimportant. They may have no information about politicians, they may loose the letters with candidates, the may forget that elections are on Sunday, not on Monday, they may be under 18, they may be in another country. What is worse – it often isn’t their fault. But who is responsible for such a situation then? We talk about diminishing turnout, we walk streets to encourage people to take part in the elections and immediately we hear that somebody is under 18!!! Dear parents, please – try to give birth earlier, that when we finally ask someone ‘did you vote in the last elections’, he or she could find a better reason for non-voting than ‘I am under 18’.

I’ve just shown the first example, why examining non-voters may be such difficult work. The second example may be appropriate to change people’s mind on the streets. Actually I was trying to find out, how many people met in public places consider voting unimportant. Well, I asked: “Did you vote in the last elections?” And what is amazing – almost everybody answered: “Yeah, of course, it’s very important”. And after some time, I decided to tell people that we are doing a project about non-voting, so we are looking for non-voters and, even more amazingly, I heard from most of people: “I didn’t vote…”

Good accident? Maybe.

Or maybe people just lie all the time to make me feel even more confused.

And finally, the third example why non- voters cannot be understood is me. Yeah – I didn’t vote in the last elections, because…yhm…I was in another town, so I didn’t know a lot about my local candidates…(as if I weren’t able to type into Google ‘local candidates from district…’.

Yeah, I must admit – I was just lazy and that means that I cannot be considered as a part of any group presented by me. Maybe there are more people like ‘me before’.

Because NOW – I can proudly say – I am a voter! I want to express my opinion, I wonna change something in my country and on my continent. And I can quote one man met on the street in Berlin:

“You should go and vote, because, as you live in the European Union, you have to know that the European Union’s Parliament takes decisions which affect all of us living in the European Union.”

Is it complicated?
…maybe…
a little bit…

I can’t explain this – now – it is your vote, your voice, your choice.

* * *

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.”

But no more… – graphics and explanation follow below.

The first graph illustrates a typical age distribution of voter turnout:

Source: Prof. Dieter Roth | 2009 at the Choiceless Seminar

Interestingly—some people might be tempted to say alarmingly—this distribution is changing drastically. The percentage of young people not voting at early age is increasing remarkably throughout Europe, and the argument is not too farfetched that this tendency will later grow through the age pyramid less weakened. In other words: the higher percentage of early nonvoters suggests that less people will become dutiful voters later on in their lifes.

The second graph illustrates the blatant discrepancy between nonvoters across age-groups:

Source: PD Dr. Dorothée de Nève | 2009 at the Choiceless Seminar

One tremendous problem is the disregard of blank votes—also known as white votes, a form of protest against the available selection of choices or candidates—which most countries do not count as valid and therefore turn into void votes, much rather than to accept them as a legitimate expression of disagreement with and disapproval of the presented options.

Another major issue relates to the unbelievably high numbers of citizens and residents that are systematically excluded and denied the right to vote – in many European countries between a quarter and a third of the population.

Photo by tiffa130 | flickr

Take the case of the recent elections to the Parliament of the European Union, often referred to as the European election. Of the roughly 500 million people living in the European Union, approximately 375 million were eligible to vote – around 75 % of the Union’s population had the right to vote, and the remaining quarter was excluded from the start.

Of these 375 million eligible voters, less than half actually went to the polls – only 43 % voted.

All in all, 338 million people living in the European Union did not—or could not—make their voice heard in these elections. That’s a whopping per­centage of 67.6 % – more than two thirds of the people living in the EU.

In other words: less than a third of the people living in the Union have determined the power constellations in which the political parties and their personell are now allowed to continue taking decisions that effect all the 500 million Europeans.

And yet: nonvoting is not a problem of democracy at large; it is a problem of political parties. Fiddling with the numbers, on the other hand—as currently practised by those very same political parties—that is a problem of democracy.