The Vanishing Male Voter

Take death. Men are, simply, more likely to be dead come Election Day. Compared to woman, men die young (in car crashes, in combat) and have a shorter life expectancy: 75 years on average for American men, compared to 80 for women. That has long given women an edge in the sheer number of eligible voters, which has helped them surge past men in total votes. In 1964, for instance, 1.7 million more woman than men voted. By 2004, that margin had spread to nearly 9 million. Mortality rates also give female voters a boost over men proportionally, since elderly Americans are the most active voting bloc—and the majority are women.

Another factor: men tend to be loners. They are less likely than women to attend church, consume news, trust authority and believe that people are generally good, according to the University of Michigan's General Social Survey, a semiannual tracking of attitudes and behaviors.

Another factor: education and employment. Graduating from college is one of the top predictors of voting, and increasingly men are falling behind their female counterparts. Over the last half century, male enrollment has dropped below that of women at the undergraduate level, falling from two thirds of the national student body in 1958 to less than half—43 percent—today. Even if men do have the same education as women, they aren't necessarily as likely to hit the polls. Consumed by economic anxiety and longer work hours (the top fifth of male earners have seen their work days grow a staggering 80 percent since 1980, according to a study by the economists Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano) today's Company Men may not make voting a priority. "The added work hours may have sapped time and energy for civic participation," says New York University sociologist Dalton Conley, author of the forthcoming book "Elsewhere, USA," which unpacks the social and economic roots of our preoccupation with work.

Other men may have more time on their hands than they want. Of the roughly 5.3 million convicted felons barred from voting in this country, more than 80 percent are men, says Erica Wood, deputy director of NYU's Brennan Center for Justice. That number has steadily swelled since the 1980s, adds University of California, San Diego, political scientist and statistician Samuel Popkin, who explains the male voting problem simply: "Men go to jail."

The remaining 12 million men—the nonfelons—who still aren't voting at the rate their fathers did might just be stubborn. "Men tend to view voting as a choice," says Lyn Ragsdale, a political scientist at Rice University who is working on a book about nonvoters. Fortunately there is hope for the nonvoting male: women. In recent years, women have upended the conventional wisdom that they follow their husbands on Election Day—an idea once so entrenched that in the 1930s poll-master George Gallup didn't even bother canvassing women on their political choices. (He once remarked: "How will women vote on Election Day? Just as exactly as they were told the night before.") Today, married men are not only more likely to vote than their single counterparts, but, according to sociologist Michael Kimmel, they are likely to be swayed by their wife's choice at the voting booth. Smart move.

© 2008