Non-Voting and Non-Voters: A Typology

The studies of non-voting made in the United States and Europe have firmly established that failure to vote is associated with conflicting political preferences, with lack of interest in politics, with low position on the social stratification scale, with a feeling of political powerlessness and, to a lesser extent, with sex (women voting usually less than men) and with age (the very young and the very old voting less than the average). But while identifying the causes of non-voting these studies have been unable to determine with any precision the true level of voluntary non-voting and the relative size of the various groups of non-voters. The reason for this failure is in the non-coincidence of four types of electoral universes used and often confused during the research and the analysis: ( a ) the universe of the cases studied; ( b ) the universe of the sample (when the research is done by sampling, as is normally the case); ( c ) the electors registered on the rolls and thus able to vote; and ( d ) the potential electors. Unless there is a close coincidence between these four universes, determining the true level of electoral participation and the relative importance of the various types of non-voters becomes an open confrontation between hard data and guess work.