| |
| Join Our Newsletter |
 Please Select sub-criteria |  |
|
|
|
|
| |
| Apathy Wins by a Landslide |
04 |
|
|
| |
| |
| |
Further assessment of the causes of voluntary disenfranchisement needs to be undertaken, as the implications are too severe to ignore. Solutions to the problem of voter commitment have so-far been confined, sadly, to enhancing the ease of voting such as the recent postal voting pilots in the May local elections. SMS and internet voting as well as weekend and supermarket voting have also been suggested as ways of increasing voter participation. These propositions may well assist in procuring additional voter turnout, but these attempts will be cosmetic in nature at-best and do not fundamentally address the underlying causes of voter apathy. Indeed, if these changes were successful they may reveal the uncomfortable truth about people’s current priorities and level of political commitment. There is an irony, surely not lost on anyone, about going to war in Iraq—supposedly to bring elected governments to the Middle East—while one’s own citizens consider a visit to the polling booth every four years to be more burdensome than a daily visit to the pub. Many people still see the solution to apathy as an urgent and renewed focus on voting, citizenship and participation but it is doubtful that those who have become truly apathetic will return to the fold merely because they can vote while buying a carton of milk. A strategy that merely focuses on more participation in the system, which may itself be contributing to electoral fragmentation in the first place, will inevitably generate the wrong conclusions. Do some more questions need to be asked?
Firstly, does the emphasis on the concepts of individualism, utilitarianism (with a wholly individualistic slant—naturally), and self-absorption within western societies have an adverse effect on increasing political discourse and communal activism? Claire Andre and Manuel Velasquez writing in response to the book ‘Good Society’ believe there is a link between individualism and apathy:
“A ruthless individualism, expressed primarily through a market mentality, has invaded every sphere of our lives, undermining those institutions, such as the family or the university, that have traditionally functioned as foci of collective purposes, history, and culture. This lack of common purpose and concern for the common good bodes ill for a people claiming to be a democracy. Caught up in our private pursuits, we allow the workings of our major institutions—the economy and government—to go on ‘over our heads’.”
| |
| |
| |
| |
« First < 2 3 4 5 6 >
Page 4 of 6 pages
| |
|
|
