ABSTRACT
Opportunities for political participation in Texas are extensive. In real politics, candidates often are intelligent, but they do not always, or even usually, conduct informative campaigns. The most common forms of political participation include talking and reading about politics and voting. Many states, including Texas with its traditionalistic political culture and dominant Anglo elite, used this authority to exclude most poor and minority citizens from politics. Modern scholarship contends that today's voter turnout reflects historical patterns of discrimination as well as socio-demographic characteristics of the population such as racial and ethnic diversity, income, and education. Texas had no voter registration law until 1891 and 1891 law applied only to cities of over 10,000. Early twentieth-century Texas was a largely rural society in which exchanges of labor and barter of goods meant many poor families saw little real money over the course of a year. In 1902, Texas adopted poll tax of $1.50, later raised to $1.75, to register to vote.
