The nature of American politics 37Christians, particularly in the South, where 73 per cent of white evangelicals
voted for him. But Bush also targeted Catholics, a majority of whom voted
for him. In fact, since 1996, as Everett Carl Ladd has shown, it is ‘religios-
ity’, the extent of regular church attendance, rather than religious affiliation
which is important in affecting voting behaviour. Voters who were not ac-
tive church attenders voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, whilst a majority of
regular church attenders voted for the Republican candidate, Bob Dole. In
2000 white Protestants who identified themselves as very highly committed
to religion voted 87 per cent for Bush as opposed to 13 per cent for Al Gore,
the Democratic candidate.
The role of individualism and personality
The patterns of sectional, class, ethnic and religious politics that we have
looked at so far would seem to leave little room for the emergence of truly
individualistic behaviour on the part of the electors or their representatives.
Yet if we look at the trends of political behaviour in America we find that
individualism in politics became increasingly important in the twentieth
century. At the end of the nineteenth century, American political attitudes
were strongly party-oriented; that is to say, voters identified themselves very
strongly with a particular political party. It was in the nature of politics at
that time that party identification was founded largely upon historical and
regional loyalties rather than upon class but, as the twentieth century pro-
gressed and class voting increased in importance, the ties between the voter
and his party progressively declined. That these two things happened at the
same time was a reflection both of the extreme nature of the sectional align-
ment of 1896 and of the fact that, as the century progressed, much of the
electorate became increasingly alienated from political life. Walter D. Burn-
ham has pointed out that an increasingly large proportion of the electorate
are peripheral voters, who are not closely tied to one party or another, and
who participate in elections only when they feel strongly moved to do so by
the impact of a personality or an issue sufficiently strong to make them re-
enter the political universe. The following figures of voting turnout (Table
2.3) illustrate this decline in political activity in the electorate.
Voter turnout declined during the 1970s, and in 1976 only 54.4 per cent
of the potential electorate turned out to vote in the contest between Ford
and Carter; in 1980 the Reagan–Carter battle tempted only 53.9 per cent of
the electorate into the polling booths. In 1996 a low point was reached when
only 49 per cent of the electorate turned out to vote for the presidential can-
didates, Clinton, Dole and Perot. In 2004, however, turnout rose to 60.7 per
cent, largely as a result of the public interest roused by the circumstances of
the attack upon the World Trade Center and the war in Iraq.
Turnout for congressional elections in years when a president is not be-
ing elected is even lower, and voting for state and local elections is lower
still. However, we should not be too hasty in our judgement of the American