The Voter as Onlooker: "Electabilitism" in American Presidential Elections

Considerations of electability is, due to the makeup and functioning of the American electoral system, always an issue in presidential elections. For a majority of voters in the 2020 primary elections, however, considerations of electability has been more important than anything else.This makes electability worthy of discussion as a phenomenon and as a potential problem. In this article, I attempt both. In light of a conceptual discussion of the term electability and its historical evolution, I consider electability in relation to political-scientific theories of voting. I distinguish between sincere, sophisticated, and distanced voting, where electability plays, respectively, no part, a limited part, and a big part. Based on Hans Skjerveim's typology, I argue that a voter attitude that fixates on electability - what I call electabilitism - turns the voter into a spectator rather than a participant. This creates problems of legitimacy, representation, participation, and citizenship. Thus, electabilitism, I argue, ultimately poses a democratic problem.