[quote=@The Nexerus]
[@Dinh AaronMk] This message you relayed is about someone who is in a political minority ranting that the majority of society doesn't agree with them. It is not the case that everyone in Britain in 1992 wanted Neil Kinnock to win and Major pulled through only from system inertia. The policies of John Major, as disdainfully stale as a young socialist of the time might have found them, were the ideas favoured by the British electorate over any other ideas expressed.

The elite did not kill socialism because they feared it. The people killed socialism because they were against it. All genuine socialists of today, at least in the West, are necessarily in the vein of Blanqui, wanting to enforce the workers' liberation upon them whether they'd like it or not. It is true that democracy cannot be relied upon to produce socialism: not because of the irrevocability of the existing system, but because there is no democratic will for socialism.
[/quote]

Yet looking at the table political involvement did drop very significantly after his election. Which isn't so much a "the socialists lost, boo-hoo". They had already lost when Margret Thatcher was elected. That was the point in the Election Cycle when the strength and solidarity of British Labor had faded away because of generational distance between the generation that had grown up during the Depression and London Blitz and the generation that was voting then. The power structure that had given the UK the NHS and clobbered Churchill's government after the war.

From the greater conversation I pulled it from, that election would have been the point the post-Soviet, neo-liberal dream was still high. But then produced apathy.

[quote=@Nytem4re]
[@Dinh AaronMk]

Isn't the Australian statistic skewed because there is a penalty for NOT voting there? It's better to merely vote anything than have " a fine and potentially a day in court." I'm sure we could higher the voting population in the US if we said you have a fine/jail time if you don't vote. 
[/quote]

It's one of the interesting metrics to be sure, but given that every other country I listed still has a higher turnout rate on some level additionally suggests that with or without a threat of going to court a majority of the population is still going to the polls, either because the candidates up for grabs feel they matter more and their view is more represented, or because it's easier than going in on a Tuesday afternoon.

Hell, to add more to the list, [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_federal_election,_2013]German rate of participation was at 71% in 2013[/url], [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_presidential_election,_2016]Austria was at 74%[/url], [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_general_election,_2012]Dutch turnout for 2012 was much the same rate[/url] and was [url=http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/03/dutch-election-high-turnout-key-national-vote-170315170755942.html]last election as high as 80%[/url].

We have an involvement issue, plain and simple.