Electorate Quotes - page 3
We have given in to the politics of anger - the belief that riling up the base can make up for failed attempts to broaden the electorate. These are the spasms of a dying party. Anger and resentment and blaming groups of people for our problems might work politically in the short term, but it's a dangerous impulse in a pluralistic society, and we know from history that it's an impulse that, once acted upon, never ends well.
Jeff Flake
By any honest assessment of where we are as a party, without a major course correction, we are simply on the way out. The demographic picture of America is rapidly changing, and we have to change with it. George W. Bush got 56 percent of the white vote, and won. Mitt Romney got 59 percent of the white vote, and lost. Every four years in this country, the electorate gets about two percentage points less white; as an increasingly old and increasingly white party, we are skidding with each passing election toward irrelevance in terms of appealing to a broad electorate. We hold out our hand, expecting our share of nonwhite votes, and yet we give these Americans too few reasons to come our way. Instead, we demonize them, marginalize them, and blame them for our country's problems. We all knew of this before the last election, but we quickly set it aside for the sugar high of populism, nativism, and demagoguery. The crash from this sugar high will be particularly unpleasant.
Jeff Flake
We have to include a wider array of institutions-to distinguish democracy from authoritarian governments, and even there we need a scale to do so. But it means not just elections, indeed free and fair elections; I think it's come in the twentieth century to mean a universal electorate, male and female, moving the age down a bit, that's now just standard. Political parties and political competition and free and fair elections, and something that I've tried to add on, without, I suppose, a great deal of success in the real world or elsewhere: the ultimate popular control over the agenda.
Robert A. Dahl
We live in a world in which individuals and businessmen... they want to do so unencumbered by national boundaries. At the same time, modern democracies, at least as much as other forms of government, long for autonomy; they want to control their own destinies in ways responsive to the needs of an electorate often concerned less with national than with local or sectorial interests. Yet, theory and experience indicate we can't have it both ways, full integration and full autonomy.
Paul Volcker
Historically ... it is traditional and habitual for us to be inadequately prepared. This is the combined result of a number factors, the character of which is only indicated: democracy, which tends to make everyone believe that he knows it all; the preponderance (inherent in democracy) of people whose real interest is in their own welfare as individuals; the glorification of our own victories in war and the corresponding ignorance of our defeats (and disgraces) and of their basic causes; the inability of the average individual (the man in the street) to understand the cause and effect not only in foreign but domestic affairs, as well as his lack of interest in such matters. Added to these elements is the manner in which our representative (republican) form of government has developed as to put a premium on mediocrity and to emphasise the defects of the electorate already mentioned.
Ernest King
Women are unquestionably destined to exercise more and more influence upon practical politics in Australia...In the educating of the electorate in liberal ideas they have for many years been an effective force. Now we have an organisation in which all distinctions have gone, and with men and women working equally for the one body ...
Robert Menzies
Unsurprisingly, the poll-takers don't talk a lot in public about the ignorance of the electorate on political and public policy matters. And the politicians are not going to disclose the, let's say, limited body of knowledge in their constituencies. You don't get elected calling your voters airheads.
Jack Germond
Twenty-six days after 9/11, Americans were in Afghanistan; 40 hours after a similar al Qaeda attack, the Spanish electorate voted in Socialists on the promise that they would get out of Iraq pronto. Our population may seem soft and flabby on university campuses and think tanks, but the sort of Americans I see out here in rural central California like to fight, work to exhaustion and, for the most part, worry more about what we are going to do to our enemies in the Middle East, rather than they to us.
Victor Davis Hanson
While the outward face of democracy may be a multiparty system and regular elections, some observers contend that there is a substantial difference between the right to vote and the right to choose policies. If the choice of candidates for election does not correspond to the desires of the people, then a pro forma election among candidates who have been put up by political machines does not further the credibility or legitimacy of such democracies. This is not democracy but "partitocracy”. If the only choices are between candidates A and B, whose programmes are often very similar, the electorate does not have a real voice and the election does not satisfy the essence of what democratic government must be. In such cases, the two-party system shows itself to be twice as democratic as the oneparty system. True democracy requires real choices as well as transparent and accountable governance and administration in all sectors of society.
Alfred de Zayas