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Since January 1995, when the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) went into effect, people have been registering or updating their voting addresses at the rate of nearly one million per month in 42 states. Based on early figures, we expect that the rolls will rise by 20 million before the 1996 election and 20 million more by the 1998 midterm election when the full four-year drivers' license renewal cycle will be completed. The resulting increase would be far and away the largest among already eligible voters (as contrasted with the enfranchising of new groups, such as women and 18-year-olds) since the personal voter registration system was introduced in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.The NVRA requires that states offer to register people to vote when they get or renew drivers' licenses (called "motor voter"), or when they apply for AFDC, Food Stamps, Medicaid, WIC, and disability services (called "agency-based" voter registration). Roughly eight million enrolled or updated their voting addresses in the first nine months—four million of them in drivers' license agencies, one million in public assistance agencies, and three million by mail.

Effects of the Jan. 1995 law allowing voter registration when individuals renew drivers' licenses or apply for public assistance, allowing mail-in registration, and forbidding striking people from the rolls if they did not vote during some specified period; US. Effects include elimination of disparities in registration by race, income, and age and the boost it may give to the Democratic party.

Suggests that social movements play a large, often determining, role in the periodic electoral de- & realignments of political history, drawing on brief reviews of realignments in the 1930s & the 1960s. The conventional literature suggests that periodic electoral shifts signal volatile changes in the economy or social life. However, it is suggested that, because minority parties always hold at least some institutional power in a two-party system, they are ill-equipped to channel the discontent produced by social & political changes. Instead, social movements do what party leaders & contenders for office in a two-party system will not: raise deeply divisive issues. By mobilizing constituencies around divisive issues, social movements pressure politicians to make changes they otherwise would not. The dissensual politics provoked by the interaction of movements & coalition builders of the two-party system is demonstrated in brief dicussions of the emergence of the New Deal alignment in 1932, the conservative realignment of 1980, & the potential for a new realignment in the 1990s. D. M. Smith

Explanations of collective protest offered by resource mobilization (RM) theory, emphasizing the continuities between the institutions of conventional social life & those of collective protest, are favorably compared to rival explanations by the malintegration approach. A danger faced by RM, however, is that important differences between convention & protest will be inexplicable. In consequence, lower-stratum protests -- which, by virtue of, eg, their often violent nature, are not confined to conventional institutions -- are classed as mere failed attempts at RM. 51 References. A. Levine

When turnout fell to a near-historic low in 1988, the two sources of government statistics suggested opposite reasons. One is that fewer and fewer people are registered to vote, and the other that registered voters are going to the polls less and less.According to the figures supplied by state election officials who tally up county registration totals and record election returns, voting by registered voters is down 15 percentage points since 1960: 85.4% voted that year, but only 70.5% in 1988. By contrast, the U.S. Census reported that 86.2% of registered voters cast ballots in 1988, down only 4.8 percentage points since 1968 (when the Census postelection sample surveys of both registration and voting were first undertaken) (U.S. Bureau of Census, 1989). The 1988 result confirmed the earlier Census summary conclusion for the presidential elections between 1968-80 that registered voters "overwhelmingly go to the polls" (U.S. Bureau of Census, 1984a).The Census surveys show that falling registration is the more important cause of declining turnout: the level slipped from 74.3% in 1968 to 66.6% in 1988, or 7.7 percentage points. Adjusting that result downward by about 10% to correct for the tendency by some respondents to tell the Census interviewers they are registered when they are not, the 1988 level of registration was 59%. State data, by contrast, show a much higher registration level: 70.9% in 1988, off only 4.5 percentage points since 1960.

Congress is once again considering the possibility of enacting national voter registration reform. The Universal Voter Registration Act—introduced by Alan Cranston (D-CA) in the Senate and by John Conyers (D-MI) in the House—would require the states to establish both day-of-election registration and mail-in registration, and it would also require "all Federal agencies and all State, county, and municipal agencies receiving grant-in-aid monies" to offer voter registration to the public. Jesse Jackson has since taken up support of the bill, and Governor Dukakis, no champion of registration reform in his own state, acceded to Jackson's demand that it be endorsed by the Democratic party platform. And then there is a second bill being shaped by Representative Al Swift (D-WA) which would require states to make voter registration an automatic part of processing people for drivers' licenses and identification cards in motor vehicle offices. This bill may also be expanded to include other federally-assisted state agencies, such as unemployment and welfare.Certainly something should be done. Just a shade more than half of Americans will go to the polls in November 1988, compared with turnout levels between 75% and 95% in other western democracies. High turnout is made easy elsewhere because citizens are placed on registration lists automatically when they come of age, or they are registered periodically by government-sponsored door-to-door canvasses. In the United States, by contrast, only 63% of those eligible are registered; more than 65 million are not, and two out of three of them are below the median income.