COLUMN ONE : Do Voter Numbers Matter? : Turnout keeps falling, and commentators keep worrying about it. But election results would not vary much even if everyone eligible cast a ballot.

On Election Day only a little over one-third of the 186 million Americans eligible to vote bothered to do so.

That ringing declaration of indifference has sounded the bell for another round of national self-criticism. From coast to coast, despondent commentators are again lamenting the sparse turnout that equaled the weakest showing of the past 50 years, and reaffirmed the United States’ dubious position near the bottom of the list for electoral participation among democracies.

Not to quibble with this solemn chorus of despair, but so what?

Does low turnout distort election results, perhaps symbolizing deeper problems of disengagement and alienation? Or is it possible that low turnout means only that the most knowledgeable and interested citizens are voting, which may improve political decisions?

These may seem to be the sort of abstractions that keep only political scientists amused. But in a political era defined by voter indifference, such questions have concrete implications for the type of officeholders who get elected, and the kind of government they provide.

Extensive research by political scientists suggests that low turnout may be a cause for some concern, but perhaps not all the hand-wringing it usually generates.

For example, many liberals worry about low turnout because it may result in political leaders downplaying the concerns of low-income people, who vote even less often than other Americans. But most research suggests that election results would not look very different even if every eligible American went to the polls.

And though many critics believe that low participation insidiously erodes the legitimacy of government decisions, others say electoral turnout is not a foolproof gauge of a nation’s political vitality.

“I don’t think it is a measure of the health of the Republic,” said UC Berkeley political scientist Raymond E. Wolfinger, an expert on electoral participation. “Switzerland is one of the best governed countries in the world and they have a lower turnout rate than we do.”

Still, questions about turnout’s impact on the quality of democracy are easier to formulate than definitively resolve.

If the electorate was an accurate snapshot of society, theoretically low turnout would not be much of a concern, because the group that voted would function like the sample in a poll: a smaller number representing in miniature the larger mass.

But in the United States, the electorate does not precisely mirror the overall society. Upper-income people turn out more heavily than lower-income people; those with college educations turn out more heavily than those with less; and older people vote much more heavily than younger people. (Interestingly, the gap between black and white turnout is no longer that great.)

No one disputes this general portrait. But political scientists disagree about whether the decline in turnout over the past 30 years has tilted the balance even more toward the well-heeled.

Some observers maintain that the electorate has shifted further upscale in the past few decades because lower-income and blue-collar voters have turned away from the ballot box more rapidly than the affluent. The electorate’s class-bias “has been growing worse as turnout has been going down,” says Richard Cloward, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, and the co-author of “Why Americans Don’t Vote.”

For example, in 1968, the top 10% of Americans as measured by income voted at a rate 31 percentage points greater than the poorest 11%; by 1988, the gap between the top 12% and the bottom 12% had widened to nearly 37 percentage points.

Given that fact, it might be reasonable to expect that adding voters to the rolls would generally benefit Democrats.

With their (generally) anti-tax, and tough-on-crime positions, Republicans have organized their appeal around the reality that middle- and upper-income voters responsive to those concerns vote more heavily than low-income people, said Cornell University political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg, co-author of the recent book “Politics by Other Means: The Declining Importance of Elections.”

If everyone voted, “those issues wouldn’t play as well,” he says. And in a larger electoral audience, traditional Democratic notes of economic fairness might find a more receptive ear, Ginsberg and other analysts maintain.

That analysis sounds logical--but polls and other attempts to measure the impact of greater turnout have not supported it. “In terms of philosophical outlook voters and non-voters aren’t very different,” says Everett C. Ladd, director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.

In 1988, for example, a New York Times/CBS survey of non-voters found they actually preferred President Bush over Democrat Michael S. Dukakis by a larger margin than voters. And calculations by analyst Ruy A. Teixeira, author of another book called “Why Americans Don’t Vote,” showed that while Dukakis would have gained ground if the poor had voted as heavily as the most affluent, he still would have lost.

In fact, the demographic differences between voters and non-voters are actually narrowing because voters in all economic groups have dropped out over the past 30 years, several experts believe. “The non-electorate is still bottom-heavy but marginally less so,” says Curtis B. Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.

Teixeira contends that non-voters today are not as homogenous as they were 30 years ago. In 1960, fully 60% of non-voters qualified as poor; by Teixeira’s calculations, only 44% of non-voters in 1980 were poor.

“An increased class gap is not the real story in American politics,” Teixeira says. “The real story is that people from all walks of life are less and less connected to politics.”

That doesn’t mean partisan registration and get-out-the-vote drives have no effect, particularly in local elections.

Increases in black registration inspired by the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign helped Democrats defeat four Southern Republican senators in 1986. The Southwest Voter Registration Education Project’s success at registering thousands of Texas Latinos has keyed the dramatic rise of Latino officeholders in the state over the past 15 years. And a sophisticated program encouraging GOP partisans to cast absentee ballots was a crucial element of Republican Sen. Pete Wilson’s victory in this year’s California gubernatorial race.

Persistently meager turnout may increase the importance of such programs to motivate supporters in state and local races, because even a relatively small number of additional voters can decide elections where the overall vote total is low.

Berkeley political scientist Wolfinger argues that the GOP has resisted legislation to ease registration procedures precisely because it has generally proven more skilled than Democrats at getting its voters to the polls under the current rules. The House of Representatives passed legislation to simplify voter registration last February, but a Republican filibuster killed it in the Senate.

In national campaigns, though, turnout drives have not had much influence. That’s because the pool of non-voters is so large that either party can easily match attempts by the other to improve its prospects by expanding the electorate.

In 1984, for example, Democrats launched an ambitious program to oust Ronald Reagan by registering and turning out millions of new low-income and minority voters disaffected from his policies. But Republicans trumped their plans with voter registration drives aimed at evangelical Christians and other conservative groups. In the end, Reagan won about 61% of the new voters--almost exactly matching his overall total against Democrat Walter F. Mondale.

“Do I believe in expanding the electorate (for civic reasons)? Yes,” said Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, who advised Mondale. “But as an electoral strategy, I don’t think so.”

In trying to determine who votes, many analysts conclude that education, age, and even the length of time people have lived at their current address are more important factors than class.

Voting clearly tracks education: The voting gap between high school and college graduates doubled in the past two decades. And studies show people in their current home for less than two years vote less than those with roots in their neighborhoods. Nearly half of the Californians who turned out in last June’s primary have lived in the same house for 10 years or more, a Times poll showed.

But even these factors may be less important than age. Young people vote far less often than those older. And, in fact, according to research by Charles D. Elder, a political scientist at Wayne State University in Detroit, the voting gap between highly and less-educated people diminishes as they grow older. So does the difference between the affluent and the poor.

The reason, Elder believes, is that older people develop a greater sense of “community attachment” and with more “at stake” in the society pay closer attention to government decisions.

“With increasing age there is increasing civic competence: knowledge and experience on which to base discriminating judgments,” Elder says. “There is evidence that people are more likely to read as they grow older, and reading correlates very highly with these civic attributes. . . . The effects of these life cycle changes tend to offset the difference in socioeconomic status.”

That research--reinforced by surveys that reveal non-voters tune out news about politics and government even more than voters--suggests the electorate may be a club less defined by income than by interest. “It is the information-poor that are the dropouts (over the past 30 years),” says Warren Miller, a political scientist at Arizona State University.

This analysis can place low turnout in an entirely different light: Is it appropriate that the people most interested in the business of government select the people who carry it out?

As on all issues in this contentious field, opinions on this are scattered. Elder maintains that “too much sometimes is made of the decline in voter turnout. . . . One of the factors that contributes to low turnout is a lack of feeling of competence. . . . People who don’t vote feel they are not capable of making discerning judgments.”

Gans notes that the general decline in voting amplifies the voice of those most agitated about single issues, which makes it more difficult for politicians to appeal to the general interest.

And as the single-issue voices gain more influence, voters in turn may grow more discouraged. Some analysts detect growing conviction among voters that changing officeholders will not change the policies produced by the special-interest dominated system in Washington.

“The decline in voting . . . signifies a growing disconnectedness of millions and millions of people who are no longer citizens in any meaningful sense of the word,” said Sanford Horwitt, director of the Citizen Participation Projection at People for the American Way, a liberal lobbying group. “People are much more isolated than they were a generation and a half ago and don’t feel connected with their neighbors.”

“It’s not that people are apathetic or withdrawn,” said Harry C. Boyte, a senior fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. “It’s just that . . . there is a very strong feeling that there are no ways to hold politicians accountable. There is a loss of sense of having a voice in decisions.”

In such an environment--where public consensus is neither sought nor granted through vigorous campaigns--government will find it increasingly difficult to demand sacrifice, Cornell political scientist Ginsberg and others maintain.

That was evident in the difficulty of winning agreement for any deal to cut the budget deficit, says Walter Dean Burnham, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin. “That’s what you will see again in the Persian Gulf if we go to war,” he says.

“On the whole the problem is chronic rather than acute most of the time,” Burnham says, “but there is a real crisis of legitimacy built into these turnout figures.”