Understanding why people continue to vote: a path toward overcoming resigned abstention and rebuilding forms of power from the ground up
As we find ourselves between the two rounds of municipal elections, one question persists—all the more poignantly since it has been raised in recent discussions: why do so many people continue to vote while deeply doubting the usefulness of voting?
If so many people continue to vote despite these doubts, it is undoubtedly not merely an individual matter of “belief.” We must look at the structures that produce this behavior and make it seem almost natural.
First, there is a social construction of the duty to vote. From school, the family environment, institutions, and political and media discourse, one equation is relentlessly hammered home: voting = democracy. It eventually becomes an internalized moral imperative. In this context, not voting is no longer simply a different political choice, but a fault, a form of civic desertion. The guilt felt by many is not spontaneous: it is produced, maintained, and normalized.
Added to this is an equally powerful injunction: “we fought to win this right”. It is constantly invoked, particularly in reference to historical struggles—universal suffrage, women’s suffrage, civil rights for racialized communities. The implicit reasoning is simple: since this right was hard-won, failing to exercise it would amount to betraying those struggles.
But this shift is far from neutral. It rests on a fundamental confusion: the fact that a right has been won does not imply that its exercise is relevant, effective, or emancipatory. A right implies neither utility, nor justice, nor freedom in and of itself. Both history and the present are filled with rights that have been proclaimed but circumvented, stripped of their substance, or openly flouted. Constitutions, international law, and fundamental charters are replete with formal guarantees that nonetheless coexist with massive inequalities, structural violence, and persistent domination—even mass crimes. In other words, the existence of a right guarantees nothing regarding the reality of power or those who actually exercise it.
In this context, the injunction to vote in the name of past struggles functions as a critical neutralization: it prevents us from questioning the real content of this right and its current role. It transforms a political question—does this mechanism truly allow us to act upon the world?—into a moral obligation—you must vote because others have fought. It shifts the problem.
This mechanism is part of the state’s—that “supernatural runt of society” (in Marx’s words)—permanent effort to regularly grant itself a semblance of legitimacy, however artificial. Voting plays a central role here: even when decisions largely elude citizens, regular participation in elections helps maintain the idea that “the people decide.” Voting thus becomes a rite of validation and legitimization, which generates consent and perpetuates the established order far more than it distributes power.
The left-right alternation fits into this system as a mechanism for stabilization. It gives the illusion of choice, channels discontent, and sustains the hope for change—while leaving the fundamental structures, particularly economic ones, largely intact. It functions as a controlled breathing mechanism for the system, absorbing tensions without causing genuine ruptures.
Capitalism is closely intertwined with this system. Voting channels social tensions toward periodic elections and restricted choices, rather than toward forms of autonomous organization or direct conflict. It transforms relations of domination into individual preferences to be expressed in the voting booth, thereby helping to stabilize the social order by giving the impression that everyone participates freely.
Added to this is constant media pressure. The public sphere is continuously saturated by electoral logic: polls, strategies, scenarios, duels, “decisive moments.” Everything converges on the election as an insurmountable horizon. Even criticism is reintegrated into this framework—“voting against,” “forming a barrier,” “expressing one’s anger at the polls”—reinforcing the idea that there is no alternative to voting. How, incidentally, should we interpret the fact that media outlets largely owned by the ultra-wealthy tirelessly remind us of the importance of voting—no doubt a pure coincidence, devoid of any structural interest…
At the same time, certain parties maintain a form of permanent campaigning, based on a limited but intensive form of activism, often highly structured. A minority of trained cadres concentrates on strategic planning, while dedicated activists ensure its execution, sometimes to the point of exhaustion, within a logic of continuous renewal. This hierarchical operation reproduces, on its own scale, a division between those who define and those who apply—a form of political “aristocracy,” in the sense of a minority presumed to know.
Another central element lies in a widely perpetuated confusion between politics and The Political. Politics is here reduced to its institutional form: elections, parties, representation, and the conquest of state power. The Political, in the deeper sense, however, refers to the entirety of social relations, forms of collective organization, modes of decision-making, and practices of mutual aid or conflict. By reducing “the political” to institutional politics alone, we foster the idea that there are no legitimate means of transformation other than voting and the alternation of power. Individuals are thus conditioned to conceive of change within a narrow framework, where initiative remains delegated. Other practices—self-organization, direct democracy, collective action—are rendered invisible or dismissed.
This conditioning is accompanied by another, even more insidious dimension:a form of socially produced political laziness. Through constant delegation, institutions and political professionals have instilled the idea that governing public affairs is too complex to be handled collectively. “Let us handle it; we know better; it’s our job.” This logic creates dependency: it disempowers while offering reassurance.
In this context, voting appears as a simple, accessible, almost effortless solution—a way to “do one’s part” without truly getting involved. It becomes a minimal gesture that gives the illusion of participating in change without having to confront the complexity of reality. A form of political consumption, where one periodically chooses between competing options, just as one would choose a product.
This representation perpetuates a powerful fantasy: that of change being possible without real commitment, of social transformation achieved without praxis, without conflict, without collective construction. A form of deliverance without subsistence, where politics is outsourced, handled by others.
Nothing could be further from reality. On the contrary, any profound transformation requires a living, conflict-ridden, continuous process, involving forms of organization, experimentation, and sustained commitment. Radical change is not decreed at the ballot box: it is built through practice.
At the same time, the steady rise in voter abstention introduces a major tension. It often reflects a sense of powerlessness, a loss of meaning, a form of withdrawal. But as long as it remains a sum of individual disengagements, it stays politically harmless. Very high abstention rates—sometimes exceeding 40%—in no way prevent institutions from proclaiming themselves legitimate and continuing to govern “in the name of all.” Absence remains silent, and therefore absorbable.
Under these conditions, voters’ behavior becomes more understandable. Many are not fooled, but they are caught up in a set of norms, narratives, and mechanisms that make voting morally obligatory, socially expected, and symbolically unavoidable. Not voting is not merely abstaining: it is exposing oneself to guilt, to judgment, to the idea of breaking with a framework presented as the only legitimate one—and sometimes to the impression that no credible alternative exists.
Voting thus appears less as a simple democratic tool than as a mechanism for reproducing the established order. It transforms a potentially critical population into a periodically mobilized electorate, reinforces the idea that the system works because everyone participates in it, and shifts the central question: not “do we have the right to vote?”, but “do we actually have power?”
Consequently, a strategic challenge emerges: breaking free from the sterile choice between resigned participation and powerless abstention. This requires transforming forced abstention into conscious, deliberate, and politicized abstention—not as a mere withdrawal, but as a starting point for other forms of organization and decision-making. Not merely acting against, but rebuilding forms of power from below, reclaiming political agency where it has been confiscated.
It is only under this condition that a different horizon can open up: that of a society that no longer delegates its power, but establishes itself.
Rebound: