At Least “The Aughts” Saw Higher Turnout

by John Sides on January 2, 2010 · 2 comments

in Campaigns and elections

Erik asks for positive trends from the past decade. Here is one: voter turnout in presidential elections (from this old post).

turnout.png

More data on turnout is at Michael McDonald’s page.

2 comments

{ 2 comments }

Paul gronke January 3, 2010 at 3:35 am

John

today’s times business page asks why we expect economic change to be measured in decade increments. Putting that aside, it’s easy to find trends of improvement. I suppose we should limit ourselves to social and political measures, but by my estimation the pace of many technological, medical, and scientific innovations continued upward in the last decade.

But here are three:
1) the quality of election administration in the US improved dramatically since 2000
2) the educational and income attainments of
women vs. men
3) the number of world series won by the red sox

TGGP January 3, 2010 at 5:09 pm

Bryan Caplan argues that high turnout is a bad thing. When turnout is lower, only the most motivated (and presumably most informed) are voting. Since Bush was re-elected in this great decade, I think he may have a point!

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