Political Community = Social Community?

When reading the Schattshneider chapter, one thought kept coming back to me: that the author's attributions of correlation between the "political community" and the "social and economic community" don't seem to carry the same weight today as they did 50 years ago.

The author uses the number of nonvoters in 1956 (close to 40 million) and ties it to similar numbers that seem to show a larger disconnect between nonvoters and voters. According to his assertions, the proportion of Americans that didn't vote in 1956 was the same as the proportion of Americans that were unemployed, didn't have radios, didn't have newspaper subscriptions, didn't own a car, etc. His implication was that nonvoters are substantially cut off from voters in more ways than we realize; the cleft between voters and nonvoters extends past the political realm and covers the social and economic realms, as well. Schattschneider seems to imply that if we could somehow include the nonvoters into the social and economic communities, they would also join the political community.

In the 50 years since this book was published, however, the social and economic communities in the United States have expanded substantially. The political community as defined by Schattschneider, however, has not experienced the same expansion. Voter turnout reached a peak in 1960 at 63%, but has remained between 48-57% for Presidential elections since. These numbers are fairly identical to (if not worse than) the 60-40 split put forward by Schattschneider. During the same time period, however, the reach of mass media, one of the author's main supposed correlations with voter turnout, has steadily increased. Schattschneider's inference that the "scope of the political system is about the same as that of the mass communications audience" doesn't seem to square with the experience of the past 50 years of an expanded mass communications audience.

One interesting question this modern experience raises is whether the mass media of Schattschneider's day was simply more effective at convincing its audience to participate in the political arena. The expansion of media past the three main networks, the marketization of news, and the 24-hour news cycle are all developments that reshaped the media environment since Schattschneider wrote the reading. Is a centralized, economically-insulated news media better at fostering political participation than a highly decentralized, market-based news media like the one we have today?