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Rating: 
Summary: An honest but inadequate effort
Review: Dr. Patterson's book is, as far as I'm aware, the only serious analysis of non-voting in America that makes any effort to address the usual (and false) idea that our high rate of non-participation is somehow harmful, divisive, detrimental to democracy, etc. He presents another point of view, but devotes less than 4 pages to it; in the rest of the book he shows the same bias as other writers. Still, credit where credit is due; the book would be worth reading for this fact alone.
Rating:
Summary: Want to know more about voter turnout?
Review: In response to the reviewer who wants to know more about voter turnout, especially the impact of the Motor Voter Act and election day registration, I recommend the recent book by Martin Wattenberg -- Where Have All the Voters Gone?
Rating: 
Summary: What is new here?
Review: This book is a real disappointment. Patterson seems to think that footnotes compensate for real thought. There are almost 700 footnotes for a book that is substantively less than 200 pages. He seems to substitute polemic liberal nostrums for substantive debate about an important issue for our representative form of government. If that is what passes for scholarly treatment of an issue - then scholarship has declined.There are some interesting and challenging issues about why voters seemingly do not wish to participate. A primary analysis would be to understand whether the almost compulsive registration efforts like Motor Voter - are efficacious policies. California voters recently rejected a measure for same day registration even though the pro side out spent the anti side by several fold. It would have been interesting and useful to go through the expected benefits of making registration as easily available as shopping coupons. But this book does not do that. It would also have been helpful to think a bit about the decline in party registrations - as participation rates have seemingly declined so have party affiliations. What is the relationship of those two things? The role of campaign consultants is also glossed over. We have created a generation of consultants who believe driving down turnout is a good idea. I would have liked to know more about substantive ways to control those problems. The book concludes with a section of proposed reforms. Here I rest with the Tammany Senator Conklin who had a tremendous disrespect for "reformers" especially ones that relfect little about the complexity of our society at the present time. Each of the solutions might be a good idea but there is little substantive argumentation to defend the solution. For example, there are plenty of good arguments against the Electoral College - although there are also some very good arguments for its retention - but Patterson just trots out the one alternative without ever putting the solution in context. One would hope that someone would take another bite at getting these kinds of issues on the table for a serious discussion.
Rating:
Summary: What is new here?
Review: This book is a real disappointment. Patterson seems to think that footnotes compensate for real thought. There are almost 700 footnotes for a book that is substantively less than 200 pages. He seems to substitute polemic liberal nostrums for substantive debate about an important issue for our representative form of government. If that is what passes for scholarly treatment of an issue - then scholarship has declined. There are some interesting and challenging issues about why voters seemingly do not wish to participate. A primary analysis would be to understand whether the almost compulsive registration efforts like Motor Voter - are efficacious policies. California voters recently rejected a measure for same day registration even though the pro side out spent the anti side by several fold. It would have been interesting and useful to go through the expected benefits of making registration as easily available as shopping coupons. But this book does not do that. It would also have been helpful to think a bit about the decline in party registrations - as participation rates have seemingly declined so have party affiliations. What is the relationship of those two things? The role of campaign consultants is also glossed over. We have created a generation of consultants who believe driving down turnout is a good idea. I would have liked to know more about substantive ways to control those problems. The book concludes with a section of proposed reforms. Here I rest with the Tammany Senator Conklin who had a tremendous disrespect for "reformers" especially ones that relfect little about the complexity of our society at the present time. Each of the solutions might be a good idea but there is little substantive argumentation to defend the solution. For example, there are plenty of good arguments against the Electoral College - although there are also some very good arguments for its retention - but Patterson just trots out the one alternative without ever putting the solution in context. One would hope that someone would take another bite at getting these kinds of issues on the table for a serious discussion.
Rating: 
Summary: Invisible Men?
Review: This is a good book to read on its own terms, and after _The Right to Vote_ by A. Keyssar. The disastrous slippage of voter participations, after so much struggle to achieve political power, needs the point by point of social analysis given here, and also the context of its overall history. The author explores many factors in the problem, media bias, primaries, the excessive length of campaign process, along with negative tactics by candidates. A southpaw cynic will surely be suspicious there is always some invisible factor of, yes, 'class struggle' in such an outcome, although it is not quite clear how the dynamics operate in this instance. Part of the problem is impotence, hence indifference to the impotence of statistical gestures. Another is the passivity with respect to 'net information' available to the statistical citizen: how many citizesn even know how their system functions? And how many educational systems really convey to citizens this 'how'?
Still, the question reamins up in the air, and is in part a function of a greater history. The great experiment in representative democracy is barely two centuries old, and systematically tried for the first time in that regard. Therefore, our stance should be one of studying an outcome in the experiment of democracy rather than its instant creation by a constitution. We may only be in the first stages of this evolution. This work is eloquent on all the issues, and a manual of operations, or at least worry, with respect to a looming crisis of human political freedom.
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