A case of elective compulsive disorder

[struggle4progress]

Posted on Sunday, 11.02.08
A case of elective compulsive disorder
BY PATT MORRISON
[email protected]

... Nothing's too minor to obsess over. You learn that Nebraska and Maine allot electoral votes by congressional district instead of winner-take-all, and off you go on a Google-quest for voter registration stats in Omaha and Bangor. You sign up for alerts about Election-Day weather forecasts in Ohio. You don't give a hang about who wins the World Series, except that they're both swing-state teams and how would that affect voters' moods? ...

Lynn Vavreck ... teaches political science at the University of California, Los Angeles and, with her research partner at Stanford University, has questioned 20,000 registered voters nationwide many times in the past year.

At last check, 61 percent of those people had gone Internet cruising for political info in the previous week, and 50 percent had swapped political e-mails with someone. Within the previous 24 hours, 53 percent of the 20,000 had talked to someone about a candidate. And in the same time, 6 percent of Vavreck's 20,000 voters had pinned on a candidate's button ...

Brian Rathbun teaches and studies political psychology at the University of Southern California, and he thinks he has an explanation. He's found that people don't, as it's assumed, vote their pocketbooks, they vote ''socio-tropically'' -- for the collective good, what they think is best for the country. ``We see that on steroids in this election -- the feeling that the nation's future is really at stake'' ...

http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/inbox/story/750652.html