As Spain enters a potentially transcendent election cycle and the United States is slowly gearing up for its presidential primary season, I feel compelled to make a comment about what has been called the silent majority.
The good news is that many countries around the world enjoy representative government with regularly scheduled elections. The bad news is that in many places elections are far from free or fair and in too many places they are either directly manipulated or held in a climate of fear in which opposition candidates are harassed or imprisoned and in which the sate uses its power to shape the election.
This is the case in countries all over the world including Russia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and many others.
American Polarization
In other countries with a longer democratic tradition, a very different problem is relatively high absenteeism rates which range from 25 – 30% in Spain to as much as 40% in the United States.
What happens when many people don’t turn out to vote is that elections become more about mobilising a particular base of voters than actually engaging in positive discourse about the future of a particular country or region.
As Al Gore discussed in a remarkable and overlooked book, The Assault on Reason, political discourse has become increasingly polarised in recent years. Donald Trump’s campaign for the Republican nomination is all about mobilising the slice of the Republican Party that agrees with his controversial views. On the other side, Bernie Sanders connects with the Democratic party’s core constituency.
In the end what will ultimately decide the U.S. election, which is still a long 14 months away, will be the level of turnout and which side gets the voters to the polls.
Not only in the U.S.
Spain, and Catalunya are also suffering, in my view, from the same problem. Proponents of very different visions of the country and the region are leaving very little room for compromise and increasingly defending their own points of view with potentially dangerous rhetoric.
Like in the United States, the election is increasingly about mobilising each parties base and looking for ways to ridicule or dismiss the other side’s arguments or the individuals involved.
While voter turnout is higher in Spain than in the U.S., I believe that both the Catalan and national elections will be decided by people who are not particular active in politics and often do not go to Vote.
My analysis of the 2004 national elections in Spain, for example. was that about 2.4 million more spanish citizens came out to vote due to their anger over the war in Iraq and the government’s handling of the terrorist attacks in Madrid. In other words, non voters dropped from 31.3% to 24.3 % between the 2000 and 2004 elections and that is how José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero won the election.
What is critical is if these same people will come to feel that the elections coming up are equally important and if they will come out on one side or another. The problem is that the increasingly strident tone by most politicians will most likely get such people to tune out and stay home.
