P 0 L I T I C S

With the next presidential election less than a year away, we asked Bill Ballenger, CMU's new Griffin Endowed Chair, to help make sense of some of the recent political trends, and we asked him what's ahead for our country in 2004.

What is responsible for the overall decline in political participation over the last few decades? 

There are two things that are contradictory. On the one hand, I think people have been made cynical over the past 30 or 40 years--first by Vietnam, secondly by Watergate, and several events subsequent to that--which has drained people's confidence and trust in government at all levels. But on the other hand, there have been enough things that have happened in government that are fairly optimistic, positive, and laudatory in nature that people don't feel immediately threatened by what is going to happen to them if candidate X is governor as opposed to candidate Y. 

These countries in Africa and Southeast Asia that have just gotten democracy for the first time, you always hear about these first elections they have with people lined up in the baking sun and 95 percent voting. It's just unbelievable when you hear this and you think, 'My God, why do these people have all this enthusiasm and we don't?' When you stop and think about it, the problem is that people start to take for granted their own success and the success of their government. 

You always hear the comment 'Oh, they're all alike. All those politicians are alike.' But of course they're not all alike, and people who are really involved in the process know what the huge differences are and how important they are. But to the rank and file citizenry, people have a very trusting attitude that the system is somehow going to produce a government in which they can be fairly confident, even though they've been made cynical. It's an odd situation. 

Student-age voters are particularly susceptible to apathy with regard to elections and current events. Why do you think this is, and how will you address this at CMU? 

I was in the Michigan Legislature when we amended the federal constitution to allow the 18-year-old to vote. Voting age was 21 when I was first elected. That was the height of the Vietnam War, and there was all this feeling that if you could die for your country you ought to be able to vote for your country. 

Ironically, you give 18-year-olds the vote, and they don't show up. One of the reasons that the percentage of people voting has dropped is that we now have this class of 18 to 21-year-olds who don't vote and drag down the whole average. Studies have been done, if you take them out of the equation, all of a sudden we're back to where we were 20 years ago overall. You would think that they ought to get involved and take more interest sooner. I'm hoping to at least get the people who take my seminar fired up to the point where they get involved. I'll do everything I can, but I've only got 20 students at a time. 

Our country came away from the presidential election in 2000 with a mixture of reactions to our electoral system. What have we learned from that election, and how will the 2004 election be different? 

One of the key things of 2000 was the integrity of the voting process itself. And one of the results has been this pell-mell rush to optiscan, optical voting. Now all of a sudden, not only are good old-fashioned pencil ballots and punch-card ballots and machine ballots passé, now it's got to be optiscan or nothing. Everybody is thinking that if you don't have that, the whole system is screwed up. I think that's very questionable. But when you ask what is the result of 2000, clearly that's it. And it's costing a lot of money.