Polarized politics and voter.

Does low voter turnout affect politics and policy? This paper examines how turnout fluctuations bring systematic changes to the composition of the electorate which in turn affects the political orientations of representatives being elected. More specifically, this paper looks at midterm House contests as a prototype of low-turnout elections and test whether members first elected in midterm years are more ideological or partisan in their orientations. If they are, voter turnout has serious implications to the partisan and ideological polarization of Congress. There is one highly consistent and recurring pattern of turnout fluctuation in the United States. Candidates run for the U.S. House of Representatives every two years. Within each redistricting decade, they run in exact same district (for the most part) election after election. However, they run in markedly different electoral environments every other election cycle. From 1960 to 2000, the national average turnout ( percent of VAP) for elections which included a presidential race was 55.1 percent . It was 40.6 percent for midterm (off-year) elections. The difference is highly statistically significant and this pattern of ups and downs has been remarkably consistent. The electorate is qualitatively as well as quantitatively different between presidential and midterm elections. One of the most significant and relevant characteristics of the midterm electorate is its composition in terms of partisan and ideological orientation. In low-turnout midterm elections, the active electorate becomes more partisan. The distributions of Democratic and Republican voters are expected to get respectively more skewed toward partisan extremes as strong partisans remain active at the polls but independents and leaners abstain. As a consequence, more extreme Democratic electorate is expected to produce more extreme Democratic candidates. The same is true for Republicans. To empirically test these propositions, first I examine whether the two median voters--one voting for Republican and the other for Democrat-- diverge to partisan extremes in midterm years. And secondly, if they do, partisan and ideological orientations of members who won their first term in midterm years are compared to that of members who first won in presidential years I focus on the 1990s U.S. House of Representatives and test the potential “midterm effects” on the partisan and ideological polarization of the members of Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]