Why is abstention depopulated?
Italics by Battista Falconi
In the comments of the press at the latest electoral rounds, the element of abstention regularly recurs, which was particularly high in Iran, where the so-called ultra-conservative candidate won, and in the French regional elections, where the expected breakthrough by Marine Le Pen it did not happen. On the other hand, there was a greater than expected participation in the vote in Rome and Bologna for the primary of the Democratic Party, which had suffered a heavy flop in Turin.
Beyond the individual cases, of relative interest, the attention paid to abstention, which is now the main enemy of all parties and candidates, is indicative. There are two potential reasons for this disaffection from voting, one of a general nature and the other of a technical nature.
The first is the overt crisis of parliamentary party democracy, now largely deprived of the functions it has assumed, particularly since the middle of the last century, in redeeming large masses of the population hitherto excluded from the processes of political representation due to the rules that we could define of an elitist nature, and which ranged from the substantial prohibition of electoral competition by the most authoritarian regimes to the strong limitation of the right to vote and passive present even in universally considered democracies: just think of the date of introduction of female voting in Switzerland.
This function, as is well known, no longer makes sense to exist: the participation of the masses in decision-making processes is anything but effective and generalized (moreover, it probably could not even be) but the exclusions today concern other areas. The most relevant rights from which many citizens are excluded are for example that of access to digital services, or employment opportunities.
Towards the vote, however, there is a further more specific element that makes this moment obsolete in some ways, considered in the past the keystone of a democracy: the observation that the steps and mechanisms by which the representative elites are determined are others. The only frequency with which, at least in Italy, governments rely on people who have never requested popular consent is a striking index of this process. But, in the opposite sense, the masses today can express their opinion and also try to condition political processes, sometimes with success, through that expression of consensus and dissent that passes through multimedia, new technologies, high tech. .
Basically, perhaps trivializing a little, for social media and web 2.0 and for those methods of communication that allow you to express your agreement or disagreement with relative ease.
This sort of permanent vote in real time makes periodic and official voting less and less interesting. We certainly cannot think of replacing the booth and the ballot box with likes or followers, but we cannot even think of continuing to concentrate decisions in single moments with a multi-year periodicity. Perhaps by starting – as is happening more and more often now, and this is another process which it will be good to take measures – an exhausting post-electoral quarrel about the legitimacy of the results obtained from the vote.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/elezioni-astensione-cosa-significa/ on Mon, 21 Jun 2021 08:37:38 +0000.