Political Participation Analysis
My project centered specifically on acts of political efficacy, in which I attempted to increase political participation by facilitating registration and informing voters on the details of a piece of legislation for an upcoming election. This central theme was the core focus in all of my actions throughout the project. These acts of efficacy conducted by both myself and the rest of the Politicos club through which they were performed would have farther-reaching results than most of us had originally suspected; the final tally for the district override we were encouraging voters to support came down to only a little over 250 votes- a small margin for such a measure. Throughout the month and a half before the election, as a club we attended every varsity football game, meet the teacher night, and a few other lower division football games. We spoke to multiple hundreds of people in that time in an attempt to garner support for the override. Considering the small amount by which the measure passed, the final majority can quite possibly be attributed to our club and our attempts to increase the political participation of our community. More than any of our other actions, this helped prove to us the gravity of political participation, in that our “campaigning” for a piece of legislation may have been the final weight that tipped the scales in its favor, showing that even a small group of individuals can have a large effect in the American government system.
Our results gave credibility to all such acts of political participation. Though it was most obvious because it was on a local scale, the point can still be made that every vote counts, and so every individual’s personal strive for efficacy is essential.
Similar acts of attempting to increase political participation are prevalent throughout society today- voter drives are often conducted, be it by schools, local organizations, or at some points even state legislatures. More national examples of this include the Motor Voter Law, which, through allowing people to register when they got their driver’s license, attempted to make registration less of a hassle. As the need for political participation is commonly understood, there are always acts in practice whenever an election nears to attempt to increase it- though there are many methods to do so, in the case of my project specifically, I sought to do this by helping to facilitate further political efficacy in the individuals with which I spoke. If the override election is anything to go by, I believe I can be said to have been at least marginally successful.
Increasing political participation- so long as it is not to fraudulent levels, such as the “vote early, vote often” trend of previous periods- can only serve to help society, as it makes legislation better representative of the beliefs of the public at large, not just a small pool of voters. Similarly, increasing political efficacy can only have positive results by keeping the public informed and allowing them to act appropriately on the political system so that their opinion has some effect. In this way, not only were my attempts to increase political participation successful and arguably expansive, they served to benefit the society of those with which I spoke, making their democracy more worthy of the “Voice of the People” title to which individuals so often would wish to laud it.
