From: harelb@math.cornell.edu
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc
Date: 12 Nov 92 03:00 PST
Subject: POPULAR PARTICIPATION: Was Nicaragu
Nf-ID: #N:9211121100.AA01949@tba.msi.corne:1225874757:000:2956
Nf-From: math.cornell.edu!harelb    Nov 12 03:00:00 1992


Subject: POPULAR PARTICIPATION: Was Nicaragua More Democratic than the U.S.?
From: harelb@math.cornell.edu (misc.activism.progressive co-moderator)

POPULAR PARTICIPATION: Was Nicaragua More Democratic than the U.S.?

[From:
       ========================================================
       I s   N i c a r a g u a   M o r e   D e m o c r a t i c
       ========================================================
            T h a n   t h e   U n i t e d   S t a t e s ?
       ========================================================
                        By Michael Parenti (*)

[From: Covert Action Information Bulletin, Number 26, Summer 1986]]


=====================
Popular Participation
=====================

One crucial measure of an open political system is the degree of
popular participation. Most voting studies in the United
States and elsewhere find that nonvoters show a high degree of
alienation from the political process; they believe voting is not a
means of effecting changes, and they often fail to see a meaningful
choice in the candidates presented to them. (This is the view also of
a surprisingly large number of persons who vote in the United States.)
Therefore a comparison of the respective rates of turnouts in the
Nicaraguan and U.S. election might be worth pondering for a moment.

The turnout in the United States in the 1984 election was little less
than 53 percent of the eligible voters, one of the lowest of any

	[A decades-record high of some 55% in this 1992 election --HB]

western nation. Yet the press took little note of this and instead
treated Reagan's reelection as a landslide victory and democratic
mandate. In contrast, voter turnout was nearly 82 percent in Managua
and 75.4 percent in Nicaragua as a whole.  Yet this turnout was
described in the U.S. press as "disappointing" because the Sandinistas
had hoped for an 80 percent national turnout. (Left unmentioned was
the fact that in Nicaragua the voting was voluntary, unlike most Latin
American countries. [including the U.S. backed terror-state
"democracies" where the government which runs the "death squads" makes
it known, loud and clear, that *not* voting makes one highly suspect of
"subversive"/"terrorist" activities -- which have extremely well-known
consequences in these countries --HB]

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