Dagger on Political Participation

The chapter on political participation was very disappointing to me. Dagger is a political scientist, and the problems that he discusses in the chapter are those that others in his discipline have studied without ceasing for decades. In particular, there are a wide variety of studies on the causes of political participation from which Dagger could have drawn to support and to vet his argument. In particular, his critique of voter efficacy (the idea that people are reluctant to vote because the doubt that their vote matters) simply pushed the issue aside when it has been a major area of contention in the field for a while.
Even more frustrating was his continual conflation of topics. Two were particularly frustrating to me. First, he asserted that direct democracy would (in theory) be good because it would treat every voter equally (I know he eventually rejects the entire direct democracy argument, but I find it frustrating that he is appealing to an incorrect characterization of the American political system to make his argument). Our system of government was specifically founded upon the idea that not every voter is to be treated equally. Our government is founded upon a dual system of equality: one house of Congress treats citizens as equals and the other house treats states as equals. The point of the American political system was never to treat every citizen as an equal (indeed, that is part of the reason why senators were not initially popularly elected). Dagger’s idea of direct democracy, then, would do more than change the mechanism of voting; it would change the fundamental fabric of our political system. Second, he completely underestimates the complexity of the legislative process. He provides a vague description of an “Agenda committee” that would, theoretically, choose which proposals are available to the public. It is hard to imagine how individuals would acquire the necessary expertise to properly draft legislation to govern one of the strongest countries in the world without education and training; if Dagger’s solution is to rely on some type of congressional staffers (which is what we do now), then he is removing power from the popularly elected individuals on the Agenda committee and placing power in the hands of these unelected staffers because the Agenda committee (without knowledge of the intricate process of legislation) would more than likely defer to the expertise of the staffer.
Dagger’s preferred solutions to the participation dilemma are compulsory voting and compulsory registration. To support his argument in favor of compulsory voting, he cites statistics from other countries. However, I find it hard to believe that such statistics would be necessarily applicable in the United States; every country is composed of a delicate balance of factors (size, level of political involvement other than voting, number of elections, etc.) that determine a nation’s political culture, and it seems unlikely just because something will work in the United States simply because it was successful in another country under vastly different circumstances. Second, Dagger seems to completely overestimate the barriers to voter registration. While I’m not familiar with voter registration processes nationwide, I know that the nationwide trend is toward the acceptance of same-day voter registration. It seems that, in a few years, voter registration will become obsolete as a separate process; individuals who had not previously registered will simply fill out a short form when the go to the polls. Also, this trend is seemingly being publicized. Think back to the publicity surrounding the Iowa caucuses (which, because of their closed-party status, are more “elite” institutions than general elections). The candidates from both parties went to great lengths to inform the public about same-day registration. As such, I find Dagger’s claim that compulsory registration would increase voter turnout to be largely unconvincing.