ABSTRACT
Elections and parties are the key mechanisms of democracy, but without stable parties, elections are weak reeds, as the post-Soviet Russian experience illustrates. Democracy requires institutionalized competition. Elections are particularly important for social science analysis because they are repetitive events that have gone on for a long time, for two centuries in the United States. Although the church-state issue, which affected continental politics, did not exist in its clerical-anticlerical form in the United States, election history, as noted, demonstrates the importance of religious diversity as a source of political difference. The United States currently has the lowest rate of voting among the world's stable democracies—50 percent for president, 35 percent for Congress, and around 20 percent in primary nomination elections. The evidence clearly indicates that reducing registration requirements in different states increases the percentage who votes, though it is still far less than in other democracies.
