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Voting Turnout in American Cities*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Robert R. Alford  and
Eugene C. Lee
Robert R. Alford
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin
Eugene C. Lee
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Extract

Writing about local elections in 1968, Charles R. Adrian and Charles Press report that, “It is not known whether … state and national voting-population characteristics fit municipal voting, too.” Although a number of important studies of politics and elections in individual communities have emerged in recent years, the data are far from sufficient to permit more than the most speculative generalizations about the nature of the local electorate. This study draws back the curtain, albeit only a bit, on one aspect of local political participation—voting turnout. The data presented constitute, so far as we know, the first attempt at a comprehensive comparison among American cities with respect to turnout. As will be suggested and become obvious, the breadth of the data is not matched by their depth; data were received from only 80 percent of the 729 cities above 25,000 population in 1962, and we were able to utilize comparative turnout figures from only 282 of these. While relationships are suggested between turnout, political and governmental structure, and characteristics of the population, these relationships must be regarded more as leads to future research, than as clear and unambiguous findings.

Previous work by the present authors has pointed to the importance of the political and social variables included in this analysis of American cities. Lee suggested in a study of nonpartisan elections and politics in California cities that nonpartisanship might tend to reduce voter participation. In a study of American cities, this hypothesis was confirmed in a preliminary analysis of the same data used in this article.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 62 , Issue 3 , September 1968 , pp. 796 - 813
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1968

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References

1 Adrian, Charles R. and Press, Charles, Governing Urban America, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1968), p. 95 Google Scholar.

2 Alvin Boskoff and Harmon Ziegler's study, Voting Patterns in a Local Election, provides a brief review of the state of the literature: (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1964)Google Scholar, Chapter 1. See also Milbrath, Lester W., Political Participation (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965)Google Scholar; but note that references to city elections are infrequent.

3 Lee, Eugene C., The Politics of Nonpartisanship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960)Google Scholar, Chapters 9 and 11.

4 Lee, Eugene C., “City Elections: A Statistical Profile,” in Municipal Year Book (Chicago: International City Managers' Association, 1963), 74–84 Google Scholar.

5 Alford, Robert R. and Scoble, Harry M., “Political and Socioeconomic Characteristics of American Cities,” in Municipal Year Book (Chicago: International City Managers' Association, 1965), p. 95 Google Scholar. See also Schnore, Leo F. and Alford, Robert R., “Forms of Government and Socioeconomic Characteristics of Suburbs,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 8 (06, 1963), 1–17 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and John Kessel, “Governmental Structure and Political Environment: A Statistical Note about American Cities,” this Review, 66 (September, 1962), 615–620. Robert L. Lineberry and Edmund P. Fowler present data at some variance with the above and suggest that there are not significant class differences between reformed and unreformed cities, although there is “some support for the argument that reformed cities are more homogeneous.” However, as they suggest, varying samples may produce varying conclusions. In any event, the differences between these studies are not central to this analysis of voting participation. See their “Reformism and Public Policies in American Cities,” this Review, 61 (September, 1967), p. 706.

6 Dixon, Ruth B., “Predicting Voter Turnout in City Elections,” unpublished M.A. thesis in Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, 1966 Google Scholar; Dixon, Ruth B., “The Reform Movement in American City Government: Has Democracy Been Sacrificed to Efficiency?”, unpublished paper, Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, 1965 Google Scholar.

7 Pinard, Maurice, “Structural Attachments and Political Support in Urban Politics: The Case of Fluoridation Referendums,” American Journal of Sociology, 68 (03, 1963), p. 518 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A similar study reported that in cities with high levels of citizen participation, associated with a welleducated population, the local government was frequently immobilized from making decisions on such issues as bond referenda and fluoridation controversies. Crain, Robert L. and Rosenthal, Donald B., “Community Status as a Dimension of Local Decision-Making,” American Sociological Review, 32 (12, 1967), 970–984 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

8 See Alford, Robert R., “The Comparative Study of Urban Politics,” in Schnore, Leo F. and Fagin, Henry (eds.), Urban Research and Policy Planning (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1967), 263–302 Google Scholar, for an analytic scheme which distinguishes “situational” from “cultural” and “structural” factors in explaining decisions, policies and roles of government in urban politics. Situational factors themselves have causes and may be patterned, of course, but, by definition, are not predictable from structural or cultural factors. Voting turnout figures for four Wisconsin cities in April and November elections from 1950 to 1964 ranged from 14 percent to 91 percent, which is partly explainable by situational factors. See Robert R. Alford, with the collaboration of Scoble, Harry M., Bureaucracy and Participation: Political Cultures in Four Wisconsin Cities (Chicago: Rand McNally, forthcoming), Chapter VIIGoogle Scholar.

9 Key, V. O. Jr., “The Politically Relevant in Surveys,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 24 (1960), 54–61 Google Scholar; and Ranney, Austin, “The Utility and Limitations of Aggregate Data in the Study of Electoral Behavior,” in Ranney, (ed.), Essays in the Behavioral Study of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), p. 99 Google Scholar.

10 Crain and Rosenthal, op. cit., p. 984.

11 The following table compares characteristics of American cities above 25,000 population in 1960 and the cities used in this study.

12 Lee, “City Elections …,” op. cit., p. 81.

13 Gilbert, Charles E. and Clague, Christopher, “Electoral Competition and Electoral Systems in Large Cities,” The Journal of Politics, 24 (05, 1962), p. 330 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 We use “mayor-council” and “nonmanager” interchangeably, although the category includes some 30 commission cities, 10.6 percent of the total of nonmanager communities with nonconcurrent elections.

15 Lineberry and Fowler, op. cit., p. 715. This article provides a succinct summary of these hypotheses.

16 Lee, “City Elections …,” op. cit, 74–84. Ecological data from Des Moines, Iowa, show a similar pattern; see Robert H. Salisbury and Gordon Blake, “Class and Party in Partisan and Non-Partisan Elections: The Case of Des Moines,” this Review, 57 (September, 1963), 589–590.

17 Michael Parenti, “Ethnic Politics and the Persistence of Ethnic Identification,” this Review, 61 (September, 1967), p. 717. An earlier statement of this thesis is found in Wolfinger, Raymond E., “Some Consequences of Ethnic Politics,” in Jennings, M. Kent and Ziegler, Harmon (eds.), The Electoral Process (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966)Google Scholar. See also Raymond E. Wolfinger, “The Development and Persistence of Ethnic Voting,” this Review, 59 (December, 1965), 896–908. Robert Lane has suggested that “the seat of ethnic politics is the local community, not the national capitol.” See his Political Life (New York: The Free Press, 1959), p. 239 Google Scholar.

18 See, for example, Lane, op. cit., p. 222; Boskoff and Ziegler, op. cit., p. 16: Milbrath, op. cit., p. 122.

19 Lineberry and Fowler, op. cit., p. 707.

20 For an example of the use of “political culture” as a variable in categorizing American states, see Elazar, Daniel J., American Federalism: A View from the States (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1966)Google Scholar.

21 We are indebted to Raymond Wolfinger for bringing this point to our attention.

22 Rogers, David, “Community Political Systems: A Framework and Hypothesis for Comparative Studies,” in Swanson, Bert E. (ed.), Current Trends in Comparative Community Studies (Kansas City, Mo.: Community Studies, Inc., 1962), p. 39 Google Scholar.

23 Stanley Kelley, Jr., Richard E. Ayres and William G. Bowen, “Registration and Voting: Putting First Things First,” this Review, 61 (June, 1967), 359–379.

24 Dixon, “The Reform Movement …,” op. cit.

25 Kessel, op. cit., p. 617.

26 It should be noted that while these correlations are based upon measures of education as a continuous variable, the measure itself is not continuous for a given city, but rather a single proportion of persons who have achieved a given level of education. See Robert R. Alford and Harry M. Scoble, “Sources of Local Political Involvement,” this Review (forthcoming) for an analysis of the relative importance of a variety of factors, including education, for political involvement.

27 Dixon, “Predicting Voter Turnout …,” op. cit., 50–52.

28 Lineberry and Fowler, op. cit., p. 716.

29 Letter to one of the authors dated January 29, 1964.

30 Lee, The Politics of Nonpartisanship, op. cit., Chapter 11.

31 Grain and Rosenthal, op. cit., 970–984.

32 Ibid.

33 James Q. Wilson and Edward C. Banfield, “Public-Regardingness as a Value Premise in Voting Behavior,” this Review, 58 (December, 1964), 876–887.

34 Raymond E. Wolfinger and John Osgood Field, “Political Ethos and the Structure of City Government,” this Review, 60 (June, 1966), p. 326. While we take full note of the Wolfinger-Field vs. Banfield-Wilson controversy as to the use and abuse of “ethos,” we make no attempt here to enter into their discussion as to what the latter pair said or implied in City Politics. The issue is discussed in letters to the editor of each pair in the December, 1966, issue of this Review. See “Communications,” 998–1000.

35 Patterson, Samuel C., “The Political Cultures of the American States,” The Journal of Politics, 30 (02, 1968), 204–207 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alford, with the collaboration of Harry M. Scoble, op. cit., and Williams, Oliver P. and Adrian, Charles R., Four Cities (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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