Abstract
One of the newest methods of mobilizing citizens to the polls appears to be “vote shaming.” An example is from the former editor of an online newsletter for election scholars and election administrators across the country. “In his mailbox was an official-looking document detailing his voting history and comparing his voting history to his neighbors’.” The election guru was rather indignant about this piece of campaign mail because his voting “grade” was not as high as his neighbors’ grades because he had recently moved. He was quoted as saying:
I got one out of four bars, when, honestly, I’m [a] super voter. I vote in regional, local, national, any election you hold, I’ll vote in it. Because I moved in 2011, my federal election records indicate that, in [my new home], I voted in the November 2012 election and that’s it. But that’s completely wrong. I voted in every federal election since 1990.1
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Notes
Knoke, David. 1990. Political Networks: The Structural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leighley, Jan E. and Jonathan Nagler. 2014. Who Votes Now? Demographics, Issues, Inequality, and Turnout in the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Some more recent work conceptualizes identity not necessarily about just demographic or social groups to which one belongs, but also “lifestyle” groups. See Bennett, W. Lance. 2012. “The Personalization of Politics: Political Identity, Social Media, and Changing Patterns of Participation.” The Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Science 644(1): 20–39.
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The reader who is dissatisfied with the lack of explanation about how norms developed in the United States (listed in Chapter 2) may find some comfort in the idea that racial discrimination and stereotyping may, in part, have their genesis in the idea of social identity theory (see for example, Virtanen, Simo V. and Leonie Huddy. 1998. “Old Fashioned Racism and New Forms of Racial Prejudice.” Journal of Politics 60(2): 311–332
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and Green, Donald P. , and Shachar, Ron. (2000). “Habit Formation and Political Behaviour: Evidence of Consuetude in Voter Turnout.” British Journal of Political Science, 30: 561–573.
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See Portes, Alejandro. 2014. “Downsides of Social Capital.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 111(52): 18407–18408.
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For a comprehensive discussion of the use of network analysis, see Stephen P. Borgatti, Ajay Mehra, Daniel J. Brass, and Giuseppe Labianca. 2009. “Network Analysis in the Social Sciences.” Science 323(5916) (Feb. 13): 892–895.
Granovetter, Mark S. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78(6): 1360–1380.
Leighley, Jan E. 2001. Strength in Numbers: The Political Mobilization of Racial and Ethnic Minorities. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Uhlaner, Carole. 1989. “Rational Turnout: The Neglected Role of Groups.” American Journal of Political Science 33(2): 390–422.
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Kropf, M.E. (2016). Exercising the Right to Vote. In: Institutions and the Right to Vote in America. Elections, Voting, Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-30171-0_6
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