About

Dr. J. Edwin Benton discusses voting and elections in an article for The Conversation

SIGS Professor, Dr. J. Edwin Benton, discusses "When Americans go to the polls, they look to the past – not the future" in an article for The Conversation. In this article, Dr. Benton examines how voters vote in our county’s elections. He then compares the Americans perspective on voting (“retrospective” perspective) to the European’s perspective on voting (“prospective” perspective). Going further into the retrospective perspective, Dr. Benton covers the general issues most American’s look for when deciding on election candidates since Americans have their stance on issues that they would like to see addressed by the electoral candidates. These issues were represented by graphs that compared what Americans in each party, Republican and Democrat, deemed most important and the issues were also compared to what was important in 2011 to what is important in 2019. All of this shows the top issue that most Americans are weighing on for the upcoming 2020 presidential election. You’ll notice this article is along the journalistic style more than a traditional scholarly style. This is because The Conversation requires the journalistic style as a prerequisite.