ABSTRACT
Lester Milbrath and Madan L. Goel argue that a person votes more out of a sense of civic duty than the belief that his or her vote will make a difference—voting may be a means for voters to define themselves as good members of the community. In the pluralist framework, voting and free elections are key ingredients of the democratic state. Voting is a key strategy of political action that enables one to influence government decisions, and thus, it demonstrates that the public has power. Casting a ballot is seen as a major mechanism, perhaps the single most important one, for individuals to express their political preferences. The elite-managerial framework interprets voting and elections quite differently from pluralists. The heart of the issue is that elections are pictured as “a fiction, a legitimation of elite control, sometimes a recipe for political disorder”.
