One of the most disturbing trends in the American political system is the rapid ascent of the far right. As FiveThirtyEight editor Nate Silver recently noted, “The most conservative Republicans in the House 25 or 30 years ago would be among the most liberal members now.” In “Why Voting Matters,” my latest report for Demos, a progressive public-policy organization, I make the case that higher turnout would dramatically change policy in the United States by moderating the power of the far right. I consulted the American National Election Studies 2012 data, focusing on differences in opinion between voters and nonvoters who identified as Republican. I began by examining the three areas of federal spending that most closely relate to the government’s role in the social safety net: Social Security, child care and subsidies for the poor. Each question asks respondents whether they want to increase, decrease or keep the same funding for each. I examine net support, which means subtracting the share of those who want to decrease spending from those who want to increase it. As the chart below shows, nonvoters were significantly more likely to support the social safety net than voters.

I also examined the rate of turnout by partisan affiliation. As the chart below shows, individuals with the strongest partisan identification were most likely to turn out to vote. In 2012, 88 percent of strong Democrats and 92 percent of strong Republicans voted, compared with 76 percent of independent Democrats and 77 percent of independent Republicans.

Finally, I explored the ideology of Republican voters and nonvoters. Among self-identified Republicans, individuals who identify as extremely conservative were most likely to vote, while those who are middle of the road were less likely. Liberal Republicans were the least likely to vote.

The data suggest that Republicans who don’t vote are far more moderate than Republicans who do and that higher turnout would lead to a more moderate Republican Party. There is a strong theoretical reason to believe that higher turnout would lead to less polarization, because marginal voters are less polarized than regular voters. In a recent study, researchers Ryan Enos, Anthony Fowler and Lynn Vavreck found that a propensity to vote strongly correlates with strong party identification and extreme ideology. Two scholars of political polarization, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, argue that boosting turnout would push politicians to woo voters in the center, pointing to the example of Australia’s compulsory voting. As they wrote, “Australian politicians of all stripes say that knowing their party’s base will all be there, as will the base of the other side, requires them to focus on those persuadable voters in the middle.” Similarly, in a 2012 paper, researcher Justin Valasek found that “measures to increase turnout decrease political polarization.” In an earlier working version of the paper, he points to the implementation of voting by mail in Oregon, noting that, “between 1982 and 1994 the Oregon delegation was more polarized than the national average, and in all subsequent elections, where all citizens were allowed to vote by mail, it was less polarized.” Though there is not enough data to conclusively show that voting by mail was responsible (thus it was cut from the final paper), it is certainly suggestive. The greater influence of political donors compared with other voters can also affect polarization. A recent paper by economist Razvan Vlaicu argued that the increasing power of political donors has led candidates to pursue partisan policy goals rather than ones that have more popular support. Because donors are more polarized, if politicians are courting donors rather than other voters (or constituents), they will pursue more extreme policies. In a recent study, political scientists Seth Hill and Chris Tausanovitch found that “with respect to the policy questions in our data and the broader ideologies they represent, Americans tend to be no more distant from one another today than they were in the 1950s. The public has not ‘moved apart’ on these questions of government policy.” That is, what political polarization has occurred can’t really be attributed to the views of the general public, which have remained remarkably constant over time. For that reason, higher turnout, by wresting control of policy from a polarized donor class, could lead to more moderate governance.

Policies such as automatic voter registration could reduce polarization and make our politics more representative of the popular will.