REGISTRATION AND VOTING: PUTTING FIRST THINGS SECOND.

The article focuses on issues related to voter registration and voting in the U.S. Of the decisions the potential voter must make, one may indeed be whether to participate in the presidential election. More often, however, the potential voter must decide whether to vote in mayoral, city council, or other local elections. Though these latter races are far more common than the selection of a president, the great bulk of electoral research has used presidential elections as the focal point. And this overemphasis is substantially magnified in voting behavior texts, which consistently disregard elections below the national level. This lack of attention to local elections would not constitute a serious problem if it could be convincingly demonstrated that one can generalize from the national to the local level. There are strong reason to believe that the findings of national studies are often inapplicable to local voting behavior. This paper focuses on one area of significant difference between national and municipal voting, the influence of registration on turnout.