Paul at Not Little England has a new post up about voter apathy.

He begins with a story about 'Fairtrade Fortnight', something I knew nothing about until I read his post, and something he knew nothing about until he saw it advertised in Sainsbury's. He draws a parallel between this and democracy, in that both things are things that we 'should' participate in and yet, often, we don't. For the sake of brevity, I'll leave alone the assumption that Fairtrade is a good thing, as it's a pretty reasonable one.

I agree with the broad thrust of his argument - that greater involvement in politics is a good thing and that efforts undertaken by the likes of They Work For You to open the political process up are wholly admirable. However, I do partly dispute the notion that turnout is a measure of the strength of a democracy.

I should begin by saying that I don't like the FPTP (First Past The Post) system and think that it should be replaced with something more proportional. I also believe that a side-effect of a proportional system would be to increase turnout, since individual votes would - in most seats - increase in importance. But I don't believe that increasing turnout is an end desirable for its own sake.

Karl Popper is mostly remembered for his philosophy of science, in particular his belief in 'conjectures and refutations', the idea being that science puts forward likely hypotheses and attempts to falsify them. We can never be 100% certain that a hypothesis is true, but we can accumulate evidence that it is not false. He applied a similar principle in his view of democracy: that political manifestos are hypthetical answers to problems, which can be falsified by evidence. Once falsified, people generally vote them out. A democratic governing majority, therefore, exists until the majority of the electorate no longer believe in it.

Various political parties put their hypotheses forward and, as an electorate, we choose which hypothesis we want to test. Only when it has been refuted will a majority of people choose to vote that party out of power. Until that point, it is likely that turnout will fall. The low turnout at the last election probably reflects the fact that people simply don't know whether the present government has failed or not. Some people believe it has, but not enough to unseat it from power yet.

Under this view, the 'don't knows' - the apathetic, the 'floating voters' - are crucial. Only when they are persuaded one way or another will they come out to vote. It is, of course, the goal of opposition parties to persuade these people that there is a case for voting the government out. Partisans on all sides have, largely, already made their minds up. It could even be argued that they are no longer objective observers. The floating voters are important because they have no real preference for any of the parties, but judge governments based on empirical observations - the 'pound in their pocket', perceived crime rates, how long they waited for NHS operations and so on. This infuriates the partisans who generally have a rationally-constructed case for voting the way they do, but in the end it may be that the floating voters apply the necessary common sense that prevents political agendas being carried too far.

Paul concluded with this:

The issue, I suppose, it getting people interested in and educated about politics, and not in some cheesy politix for kidz crap either. Perhaps the internet is a good way to do this, maybe blogs and so on really do give access to 'the common man' in a way that previous media hasn't. I guess we have a few more years to the next election to find out. Here's hoping.

I have to say that I entirely agree with him here. Where voters can scrutinise the political process and come to their own conclusions, democracy is strengthened. But if they still choose to reserve judgement and withhold their vote, we should not begrudge the fact that they choose to do so.