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It’s The Rules, Stupid

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To add on to what Markos says about Evan Thomas’s silly version of the “American politics went to hell when the pro-apartheid faction left the Democratic Party” narrative, for further debunking one can look outside the United States. First of all, if polarization depresses turnout, it’s rather hard to explain why countries with PR systems and hence much more polarized parties than the U.S. have much higher election turnouts. Even more importantly, the much greater turnout elsewhere makes it overwhelmingly likely that the unusually low voter turnout in the U.S. has nothing to do with some sort of inherent apathy among the electorate and much more to do with the fact that rule make it much harder to vote in the U.S. If you want to increase turnout, make the state responsible for ensuring that people register, give people time off work, make lines at polling places low, etc. How blurring distinctions between the parties is supposed to increase turnout, conversely, I can’t tell you.

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