Qualified voters may boycott the polls because they have no faith in the integrity of the polling or election system. Alternatively, they may not vote for reasons of apathy, lack of communication or lack of education. Refusal to vote indicates a certain political instability and the possibility of unrest. It may also lead to dictatorship and extremism, or control by an elite.
115 million eligible voters (almost two out of three) did not vote in the 2001 US elections. Since the 1960s, national voter participation had fallen more than 25 percent, the largest and longest slide in the country's history. Twenty-five million Americans who used to vote chose not to. Young people, together with poor people, have shown the lowest turnout and the steepest decline in participation. Only 20 percent of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four voted in the 1998 elections. Voter turnout among the young had shrunk from 50 percent in 1972 to 32 percent in 1996, when. fewer than half of the eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds had even registered to vote.
Events appear to be managed behind the scenes by unnamed powers. The citizen feels that he does not know for certain what is going on, who is doing it, or where he is being carried by the process. Listening to speeches, uttering opinions and voting do not enable him to govern his environment better. Lack of variety, lack of choice of doctrine and lack of progress in politics leads to political stagnation, which is manifested in apathy, alienation, cynicism, scepticism, materialism, conformism and political lag. It maintains a state of inequality and injustice and leads to violence, conflict, disintegration, revolution or dictatorship.
The semblance of division between democratically elected political parties masks a broad consensus. Disagreements are marginal to the reality of the social order in a capitalist society run for the benefit of the middle class majority that no political leader would propose to change. Promises of a new world order are deceiving alibis for shared impotence. The reality of economic decline makes most differences between political parties trivial. What the voters see is not the arguments regarding such differences but their futility, not the public servant solving problems but the party hack whose importance is entirely self-invented. The politician as hero is an extinct species.