On November 4, 2008, probably 140 million Americans cast votes in the election for President of the United States. Nearly as many citizens, although eligible, chose not to vote, whether out of inertia, disgust, or apathy.
References
1.
DanielleS. Allen.Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education (University of Chicago Press, 2004). Discusses how Americans imagine voting and citizenship in the political culture the civil rights movement helped develop.
2.
BenedictAnderson.Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (Verso, 1991). This classic work shows how people use everyday experience and the news media to imagine themselves as part of groups whose members they've never seen and will never meet.
3.
MichaelS. Lewis-BeckWilliamG. JacobyHelmutNorpothHerbertF. Weisberg.The American Voter Revisited (University of Michigan Press, 2008). In this ambitious book, the original The American Voter is carefully reconstructed using data from 2000 to evaluate how voting has stayed the same and changed since the 1950s.
4.
MichaelSchudson.The Good Citizen (Harvard University Press, 1999). This historical study details how the ideas and assumptions behind American citizenship have changed since the writing of the Constitution.
