What if Nobody Came to the Election?
"What if Nobody Came to the Election?"Discuss this statement with reference to the political systems of the UK and the USA.Although the notion of a turn out of zero per cent may seem fancifal, it must be noted that trends on both sides of the Atlantic are suggesting the shadow of apathy hangs more prominently with each passing election. Apathy once a term associated more singularly with the American political culture is now a problem for Western democracies as a whole. Apathy was perhaps most noteable in the recent General Election and Presidential Election results. In 2000 George Bush was elected by a reasonably credible 49.8% of the voters. Yet this mandate was provided by only 25% of those entitled to vote; as only 93 million out of the 196.5 million eligable to vote choose to do so. This figure is as poor as that of the 1924 election of Calvin Coolridge, which was clouded by the fact that African- Americans were not to gain full suffrage for another fifty years, the newly enfranchised women were in many cases unsure of how to utilitze their newly as yet unused vote. The following year in Britain Tony Blair was swept into power, by another "historic" Labour landslide, but was it really a landslide of popular support? In 1
The 2000 presidential election, could hardly be deemed a foregone conclsion, infact it was one of the closest in America's history. Newspaper headlines and speeches are being cut to soundbites. It is perhaps not a culture of apathy that is prevailing but one of antipathy. While their benefactors are exactly the types of pressure groups, tobacco companies and the like who should not be allowed to influence a democratic system at all, let alone so profoundly. Many people have chosen to blame the system itself for the trend of declining turnout that prevails on both sides of the Atlantic. As we tread a path towards the media circus style politics that is so abhorred by the American citizen, a stage managed politics in which opinion and dissent is unheard of, a politics that citizens do not and can not believe in. Are the media to blame for degrading our elections? In America the media has had a more profound effect in politics for longer than in the United Kingdom. The Party Conventions are spectacles specifically designed to impress a television audience. Since 1997 talks of privatisation in the NHS, combined with cuts to the disability allowance and single parent benefits, have compounded their alienation. An election fundamentally flawed by the fact that one hundred seats were simply not contested and 1. Yet the turnout was approximately twenty per cent higher on both of these occassions than in 2001. Primaries serve now merely to elongate the political process. Elections before this date, were simply "undemocractic", however, the previous lowest turnout in less exceptional circumstance occurred in 1885 when Lord Sailsbury was brought to office, an election where all women and some men were still denied the vote.
Common topics in this essay:
Tony Blair,
Queen's Speech,
United Kingdom,
Labour Party,
Jeremy Paxman,
House Representatives,
Mandelson June,
Party Conventions,
Paddy Ashdown,
Lutz Republican,
united kingdom,
negative campaigning,
opinion polls,
president clinton,
potential voters lay,
type person,
australian system,
five cent,
paddy ashdown,
voters lay dead,
closeness contest,
party conventions,
medicare social security,
party political broadcasts,
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Acceptance Essays
