Political apathy and disengagement in the United States has been a topic of popular and academic concern for nearly half a century. Beginning in the 1970s, rates of voter participation and other forms of formal political engagement fell into decline. Sociologists and political scientists trained their attention on this issue and sought to understand “Why Americans don’t vote.” These scholars pointed to changes in the media, the political parties, and electoral campaigns, as well government scandals and the absence of social capital (e.g., the American propensity to go “bowling alone”). In the last decade, a wave of historians responded to this literature arguing that although formal electoral participation decreased after 1970, Americans continued engaging in “front porch politics.” As Americans expressed diminished faith in the government, they organized to solve their problems outside of elections and other formal political processes. Most recently, a third literature has emerged with historians arguing that this sort of do-it-yourself, volunteer-based political activity had the unintended consequence of growing neoliberalism “from the ground up.” In particular, the neighborhood-based activism of the 1970s and 80s tilled the soil for privatized and market-based governance during the 1990s. All three of these literatures are valuable, and our panel’s papers contribute to each of these discussions. But the existing scholarship has approached the decline in formal political participation as either an effect of some larger political or socioeconomic problem or a prelude to a new style of politicking and governance. The existing scholarship has seldom considered how the issue of civic participation itself shaped American politics.

This panel moves the politics of civic disengagement to the center of the frame and spotlights the many post-1970 political actors who were animated by the issue of nonvoting. Julilly Kohler-Hausmann’s paper argues that the 1965 Voting Rights Act sparked a decades-long clash at the federal legislative and national party levels as progressives pushed for a multiracial majoritarian democracy and liberals and conservatives fought to place new conditions on voting rights. Marisa Chappell’s paper examines that battle at the ground-level and charts the rise of ACORN in working-class communities. ACORN attempted to build a grassroots movement to overcome the barriers preventing working-class people from voting and running for office. Christopher Agee’s paper considers how liberal neighborhood activists and liberal downtown elites both hoped to transcend race and class divides and motivate a new active civic participation through neighborhood anti-crime organizing.

This panel will explore the range of questions political actors faced as they grappled with voter “apathy” in the post-1970 period. What was the role of the state, the existing electoral infrastructure, and the citizenry in widening or limiting civic participation? Would broadened civic participation be achieved through conflict or cooperation? What sorts of differences existed between a democracy rooted in “active citizenship” and a democracy built upon “conditional citizenship”? Ultimately, this panel will consider how and why the efforts aimed at expanding civic engagement succeeded, failed, or reinforced the very barriers that activists sought to overcome.