Introduction

This chapter describes stimulated scholars to explain why American turnout was declining. In the 1960 presidential election, voter turnout was 62.77 percent. In actuality, turnout decline has not been limited to the United States. Most industrialized democracies have experienced declines in the post– World War II era. Among twenty-two industrialized democracies, Franklin found that the mean turnout trend since 1945 was a 5.5 percentage point decline. Franklin identifies the lowering of the voting age in many democracies to eighteen during the late 1960s and early 1970s as key to continuing turnout decline. He argues that the new eighteen-year-old potential voters were more susceptible to the electoral environment than their twenty-one-year-old counterparts. Although turnout may rise and fall for a variety of reasons, it is consistently lower in the United States because of institutional reasons. The chapter also provides an outline of this book.