The Importance Of Political Participation

In the United States political participation such as voting, protesting and staying informed are highly praised and thought to be the most patriotic and sometimes even sacred thing a citizen can do. After all, the government is meant to be ran by the people so it is best to stay involved. If this is the popular belief in American society, why is it that not as many people participate in the government anymore and why are even those number declining? The fact is that a good portion of the country’s eligible voters have taken an apathetic view when it comes to their government and do not find it worth the effort, time and sometimes even money are just not worth the seemingly small benefits that are up for grabs any more. This means a decrease in voting, petition signing, letter writing, organization participation and even the keeping up with government activity is down. In the end, the biggest contributing factor to this apathy is the fact that participating in government activities as citizens just does not appeal to people’s self interest. They way benefits and costs work when it comes to political participation is that anyone who …show more content…
Despite classes on how the government works being pushed more in schools, people today are no better educated than those in the 1940s. There is no real desire to go and look up the information needed to be an informed citizen because there is generally no incentive to do so, not if someone is not currently being affected by the government’s actions or have already decided not to vote, because in those cases there is no real point to being informed. Another trend is that with each generation, those people become less interested in politics and the overall amount of people interested in politics is also dropping as older generations with more interests die out (Putnam,