There is enormous focus these days on economic inequality, and for good reason. The gap between the top 1% and other Americans is growing, the middle class that built the country and ensured social stability is shrinking, and the likely consequences of those phenomena aren’t pretty.
In the United States, our Constitution guarantees us only equality before the law. Critics may quote Anatole France for the proposition that “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread,” but there is much to be said for a system that protects individual liberties against encroachments by the state. In such system, however, efforts to ameliorate material deprivations are statutory, not constitutional, and as we continue to be reminded, statutory entitlements are vulnerable to efforts to punish poor people for their misfortune.
Most public discourse around “equality” tends to focus on these issues of legal and economic equality and the relationship—or conflict—between the two. We rarely focus on a third kind of equality—democratic equality—despite the fact that it has a major influence on whether the country achieves the others.
Democratic equality simply means the equal right of each citizen to participate in the democratic process. It probably won’t come as a surprise to find that we aren’t doing terribly well on that front, either.
The influence of money in politics has grown exponentially since the Supreme Court’s ill-considered decision in Citizens United. (Actually, the problem started earlier, with the case of Buckley v. Valeo, when the Court first conflated money with speech) The result has been that those with money are able to “speak” much more loudly and effectively than the rest of us. When democracy becomes “pay to play,” there is no equality of participation.
It isn’t just money. In Indiana—which is unfortunately not an outlier— the legislature has used its power to make it more difficult to vote.
We have one of the strictest Voter ID laws in the nation—in order to cast a ballot, you must not only have a government-issued picture ID, that ID must have an expiration date. (This conveniently excludes the picture IDs issued by state universities.) Middle-class folks assume that it’s simple enough to obtain such identification, but for poorer people—particularly older black citizens who were born at home and lack a birth certificate—getting the necessary documentation can be both onerous and costly. (Despite pious rhetoric about deterring “voter fraud,” fraudulent in-person voting is virtually nonexistent.)
The Indiana legislature has also declined to enact other measures that encourage or facilitate voting by working-class Americans: keeping the polls open past six, establishing convenient voting centers, expanding early and absentee voting.
It’s bad enough that lawmakers see fit to erect barriers to voting rather than making it easier. But as I have previously posted, the most serious denial of democratic equality comes through partisan gerrymandering that produces an abundance of “safe” seats and eliminates voter choice.
Increasingly, especially at the state level, our legislators choose their voters—the voters don’t choose their representatives. So even when disadvantaged folks make it past the obstacles and manage to cast their ballots, they often find they are given no meaningful choice. A growing number of elections are uncontested.
As a result of democratic inequality, the people who would benefit most from the election of candidates willing to work for legal and/or economic equality have less access, less influence and less voice than their more privileged neighbors.
Today, I’m participating in an event on partisan redistricting hosted by the League of Women Voters and Common Cause. Following are the remarks I will share:
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Indiana had the lowest turnout rate in the nation in the last midterm elections. There are a number of reasons for that depressing statistic.
First of all, although Hoosiers are rarely in the vanguard of anything, we do remain on the cutting edge when it comes to voter suppression tactics—to begin with, we were among the very first states to pass a so-called “voter ID” law, and ours remains one of the nation’s strictest. For example, it isn’t enough to have a government issued picture ID; it must also have an expiration date.(Unlike, for example, student IDs.)
The legal challenge to that law was unsuccessful largely because its actual operation was speculative at that point; since the Seventh Circuit rejected that challenge, it has become clear even to Judge Posner, who voted to uphold the law, that its sole purpose was to discourage voting by poor and minority voters who might be expected to vote for Democrats. Voter ID laws were a “remedy” for a non-existent problem—in-person voter fraud.
But the lawmakers in what Harrison Ullmann used to call the World’s Worst Legislature haven’t rested on their laurels: this last session, lawmakers voted down an effort to keep the polls open until 8:00—Indiana’s polls close at 6:00, much earlier than most states. This makes it much more difficult for non-professional working people to vote. Lawmakers have also left in place the ability of a single member of a county election board to prevent the establishment of a voting center. Here in Marion County, the Republican member of the election board has persistently blocked efforts to do so. Wouldn’t want to make voting more convenient!
Laws making voting more onerous are only one reason among many for low voter turnout and disappointing citizen engagement. I am going to suggest three others that combine to depress interest in government and the electoral process: gerrrymandering, widespread distrust of government, and low levels of civic literacy. Today, our focus is on gerrymandering.
Every ten years, the Indiana General Assembly engages in what individual legislators will call redistricting, and what the rest of us will call gerrymandering, after former Vice-President Elbridge Gerry. It will be an intensely partisan endeavor—and that’s true no matter which party is in charge—and it will be viewed by most Hoosiers as highly technical and profoundly boring.
That redistricting, however, will have a much greater effect on how Indiana is governed for the ensuing decade than most, if not all, of the votes cast in the elections that will follow. Whichever party wins a majority in the November elections preceding redistricting wins the privilege of drawing the new maps—and those maps will have an outsized influence over the political agenda for the state.
The goal, of course, is to draw as many “safe” seats as possible–more for the party in charge, of course, but also for the minority party, because in order to retain control, the winners need to cram as many of the losers into as few districts as possible, which makes those districts safe as well. While we have engaged in this effort since Vice-President Gerry’s time (and he signed the Declaration of Independence!), the advent of computers has made the process far, far more efficient—and arguably, far more damaging.
Neighborhoods, cities, towns, townships–even precincts–are evaluated solely on the basis of their voting history, and then broken up to meet the political needs of mapmakers. Numbers are what drive the results–not compactness of districts, not communities of interest, and certainly not democratic competitiveness.
Let’s tick off some of the more obvious results of this process:
1) The interests of cities, neighborhoods, etc., are less likely to be represented.
2) Safe districts enable sloppy legislation and dubious ethics: if you are guaranteed victory every election, it is hard to be motivated and interested, easy to become lazy and arrogant. (Eric Turner was a recent example. There are many others.)
3) Party preoccupation with gerrymandering consumes an enormous amount of money and energy that could arguably be better directed.
4) Safe seats allow politicians to scuttle popular measures without fear of retribution: at the federal level, campaign finance reform is just one example.
5) Lack of competitiveness also makes it impossible to trace campaign donations, since unopposed candidates send their unneeded money to those running in competitive districts. So when the folks with “Family Friendly Libraries” send a check to Rep. Censor, who is unopposed, he then sends it to Sen. MeToo, who is in a hot race; but Sen. MeToo’s campaign report shows only a contribution from Rep. Censor.
These are just a few of the more obvious effects of gerrymandering; there are plenty of others. Two of those other consequences that may be less obvious deserve special attention and concern.
First, the lack of competitiveness breeds voter apathy and reduced political participation. Why get involved when the result is foreordained. Why donate to a sure loser? For that matter, unless you are trying to buy political influence for some reason, why donate to a sure winner? Why volunteer or vote, when those efforts are pointless? Not only do voters lack incentives for participation: it becomes increasingly difficult to recruit credible candidates to run on the ticket of the “sure loser” party. The result is that in many of these races, voters are left with a choice between the anointed and the annoying–marginal candidates who offer no new ideas, no energy, and no genuine challenge of any sort. Such contests simply exacerbate voter apathy.
You may think I am exaggerating–after all, how many “safe” districts can there be? Well, let me tell you–our legislators may not be the swiftest when it comes to a lot of issues, but they have self-perpetuation down to a science. In 2014, there were 25 state Senate districts up for election. In 11 of them, there was only one major party candidate running. A total of 2 Democrats and 9 Republicans were guaranteed election barring unforeseen circumstances.
Two major party candidates faced off in the general election in only 14 of the 25 districts up for election that year. And that’s not an anomaly.
As a friend of mine has aptly put it, “Almost half of our representatives and senators did not have to conduct a pesky campaign that required a defense of past service or a dialogue over local issues.”
We hear a lot about voter apathy, as if it were a moral deficiency of the voters. Allow me to suggest that it may be a highly rational response to noncompetitive politics. Watch those same “apathetic” folks at the local zoning hearing when a liquor store is applying for permission to locate down the street! I would suggest that people save their efforts for places where those efforts count, and thanks to the increasing lack of competitiveness, those places may NOT include the voting booth.
Second, gerrymandering has contributed to the polarization of politics, and the gridlock it causes. How? Because when a safe district effectively disenfranchises voters in one party, the only way to oppose an incumbent is in the primary–and that generally means that the challenge will come from the “flank” or extreme. In competitive districts, nominees know that they have to run to the middle in order to win a general election. When the primary is, in effect, the general election, the battle takes place among the base voters, the party faithful– who also tend to be the most ideological. So Republican incumbents will be challenged from the Right and Democratic incumbents will be attacked from the Left. Even where those challenges fail, they leave a powerful incentive for the incumbent to toe the line– to placate the most rigid and ideological elements of each party. Instead of the system working as intended, with both parties nominating folks they think will be most likely to win among the broader constituency, we get nominees who represent the most extreme voters on each side of the philosophical divide. Then we wonder why the winners can’t compromise and get the people’s business accomplished!
There are significant policy implications of a victory for the Republicans or Democrats: to the extent that the parties represent different philosophies—and these days, they unquestionably do– a victory in November means getting the “edge” for ten years in imposing one of those philosophies on Indiana government, and effectively disenfranchising not only those who vote for the other party, but also the more moderate voters in their own ranks.
Perhaps the worst consequence of all this is that reduced participation in the political process, and the well-founded belief that large numbers of citizens have been rendered voiceless and politically impotent, has significant implications for the legitimacy of government.
Is a Representative truly representative when he/she is elected by 10% or 20% of the eligible voters in the district?
Of course, there are reasons other than partisan redistricting for the growth of safe seats. In “The Big Sort,” Bill Bishop detailed the increasing tendency of Americans to live in areas where others share their values. We can’t eliminate such residential “self-sorting,” a phenomenon that has given us bright blue cities in very red states, but we can and should eliminate the intentional gerrymandering that exacerbates it. If we don’t, it really won’t matter who wins election, because the winner will encounter the intransigence and gridlock that is such a vivid consequence of the current system, especially at the federal level. That gridlock just adds to the pervasive cynicism about government, a cynicism that further reduces participation.
It is really time for the citizens of Indiana to rise up and demand changes to this system. The other speakers at this forum are far more expert than I am in the politics and laws governing redistricting, but I would suggest a few obvious elements that a fairer system should include:
1) areas of common economic interest and existing government boundaries should be respected to the greatest possible extent;
2) districts should be compact and rational in shape;
3) oddly-shaped districts clearly drawn for partisan advantage should be subject to the same standards courts now apply to districts that have been intentionally drawn to dilute the votes of racial minorities.
If political operatives can draw maps to create political advantage, they can also draw maps that are consistent with the premises of democracy.
The Washington Post recently ran an article documenting what virtually every sentient American knows: thanks to gerrymandering and residential “sorting,” elections at every level are increasingly uncompetitive–when they are contested at all.
Here’s the lede
Fewer state legislative elections were hotly contested between Democrats and Republicans in 2014 than at any time in the last 40 years, according to a new study that offered more evidence of a historically polarized electorate.
The analysis of election results from last year found less than 5 percent of the U.S. population lives in a state House or state Senate district where the two leading candidates finished within 5 percentage points of each other.
At the same time, the number of races that don’t even draw competition is on the rise. Nearly a third of voters lived in state Senate districts in which only one candidate ran, while more than 40 percent lived in state House districts with only one option. Those numbers are far higher than four decades ago, when less than a quarter of residents lived in one-candidate districts.
The question, of course, is: what do we do about it?
There are no “good guys” here–both parties aggressively seek advantage, and when in a position to call the shots, both can be counted on to draw a map as favorable as computing power can devise.
It’s common–even fashionable–to berate citizens who don’t vote. But let’s be fair: why take time out of your day to visit a polling place if there are no contests?
It won’t solve the whole problem, but the first step to re-engaging voters must be to remove redistricting from the partisan political process. Here in Indiana, Common Cause and the League of Women Voters are devoting themselves to getting that done. (They are holding a forum at the Indiana Historical Society on June 6th, devoted to the issue.)
It’s an uphill battle, but it’s one we all need to join.
I was supposed to keynote the League of Women Voters’ state meeting yesterday, but the event was cancelled due to the weather. I do hate to waste a good rant, so here–for those willing to wade through a longer-than-usual post–are the (slightly edited) observations I’d planned to share.
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The news—you will be unsurprised to learn—is not good. At the end of March, the Center for Civic Literacy, which I direct, will join the Indiana Bar Foundation and IU Northwest to release data from the latest Civic Health Index. I don’t intend to step on that release, but I will tell you that Indiana’s civic health is not good. If Indiana was a person, she’d be on life support.
Indiana had one of the lowest turnout rates in the last midterm elections. And although Hoosiers are rarely in the vanguard of anything, we do remain on the cutting edge when it comes to voter suppression tactics—to begin with, we were among the very first states to pass a so-called “voter ID” law. The legal challenge to that law was unsuccessful largely because its actual operation was speculative at that point; since the Seventh Circuit rejected that challenge, it has become clear even to the Judges who voted to uphold the law that its sole purpose was to discourage voting by poor and minority voters who might be expected to vote for Democrats. Voter ID laws were a “remedy” for a non-existent problem—in-person voter fraud.
But the World’s Worst Legislature certainly isn’t resting on its laurels: this session, lawmakers have voted down efforts to change the time the polls close to 8:00—Indiana’s polls close at 6:00, much earlier than most states. This makes it much more difficult for non-professional working people to vote. Lawmakers have also left in place the ability of a single member of a county election board to prevent the establishment of a voting center. Wouldn’t want to make voting more convenient!
Laws making voting more onerous are only one reason among many for low voter turnout and disappointing citizen engagement. I am going to suggest three others that combine to depress interest in government and the electoral process: gerrrymandering, widespread and growing distrust of government, and low levels of civic literacy.
Let’s start with gerrymandering.
The goal of partisan redistricting is to draw as many “safe” seats as possible—more for the party in charge, of course, but also for the minority party, because in order to retain control, the winners need to cram as many of the losers into as few districts as possible, and those districts are safer still. While we have engaged in this effort since Vice-President Gerry’s time (and he signed the Declaration of Independence!), the advent of computers has made the process far, far more efficient.
Neighborhoods, cities, towns, townships—even precincts—are evaluated solely on the basis of voting history, and then broken up to meet the political needs of mapmakers. Numbers are what drive the results—not compactness of districts, not communities of interest, and certainly not democratic competitiveness. There are several consequences of this effort to retain the political edge, none pretty but some worse than others:
1) The interests of cities, neighborhoods, etc., are less likely to be represented.
2) Safe districts create sloppy legislation: if you are guaranteed victory every election, it is hard to be motivated and interested, easy to become lazy and arrogant.
3) Party preoccupation with gerrymandering consumes an enormous amount of money and energy that could arguably be better directed (although given the Indiana legislature’s fixation on disabling environmental regulations, enabling religious discrimination and privatizing education, maybe not.)
4) Safe seats allow politicians to scuttle popular measures—or sponsor unpopular ones—without fear of retribution: if you doubt me, just take a look at the current General Assembly! The avalanche of truly awful bills has kept me supplied with blogging fodder, but I’d happily find other things to blog about.
5) Lack of competitiveness makes it impossible to trace campaign donations, since unopposed candidates send their unneeded money to those running in the dwindling number of competitive districts. When the folks with “Family Friendly Libraries” send a check to Rep. Censor, who is unopposed, he then sends it to Sen. MeToo, who is in one of the few hot races; but Sen. MeToo’s campaign report shows only a contribution from Rep. Censor.
More important than all of these negative consequences, however, is the fact that lack of competitiveness breeds voter apathy and reduced political participation. Why vote when the result is foreordained? Why donate to a sure loser? For that matter, unless you are trying to buy political influence for some reason, why donate to a sure winner? Why volunteer or put up a yard sign, or attend a political event when those efforts are clearly irrelevant?
It isn’t only voters who lack incentives for participation: it becomes increasingly difficult to recruit credible candidates to run on the ticket of the “sure loser” party. The result is that in many of these races, there is either no candidate running from the minority party, or a token, where voters are left with a choice between the anointed and the annoying—marginal candidates who offer no new ideas, no energy, and no challenge of any sort.
We hear a lot about voter apathy, as if it were a moral deficiency of the voters. Allow me to suggest that it may be a highly rational response to noncompetitive politics. Watch those same “apathetic” folks at the local zoning hearing when a liquor store is trying to locate down the block! I would suggest that people save their efforts for places where those efforts might actually count, and thanks to the increasing lack of competitiveness, those places may NOT include the voting booth.
Gerrymandering has also contributed mightily to the polarization of politics, and the gridlock and disaffection such polarization causes. When a safe district disenfranchizes one party, the only way to oppose an incumbent is in the primary—and that generally means that the challenge will come from the “flank” or extreme. In competitive districts, nominees know that they have to run to the middle in order to win a general election. When the primary is, in effect, the general election, the battle takes place among the party faithful, who also tend to be the most ideological voters. So Republican incumbents will be challenged from the Right and Democratic incumbents will be attacked from the Left. Even where those challenges fail, they are a powerful incentive for the incumbent to toe the line–to placate the most rigid elements of each party. Instead of the system working as intended, with both parties nominating folks they think will be most likely to appeal to the broad middle, we get nominees who play to the base— the most extreme voters on each side of the philosophical divide—because those are the voters who show up at the polls.
In “The Big Sort,” Bill Bishop detailed the increasing tendency of Americans to live in areas where others share their values. We can’t eliminate such residential “self-sorting,” a phenomenon that has given us bright blue cities in very red states, but we can and should eliminate the intentional gerrymandering that exacerbates it. If we don’t, it really won’t matter who wins election, because the winner will encounter the intransigence and gridlock that is such a vivid consequence of the current system. That gridlock adds to the pervasive cynicism about government, which further reduces participation.
These truly nefarious effects of partisan redistricting are a major reason we have seen so much erosion of trust in government, but they are hardly the only reason.
So let’s talk about trust—or more accurately, the lack thereof.
Ever since Ronald Reagan said that government was the problem, not the solution, pundits and politicians have been beating on government. The people who want services but don’t want to pay taxes to pay for those services have crippled government’s ability to do many things we want and expect government to do. That disdain for the collective mechanism we call government is a big part of the problem—but there are other reasons as well for our current cynicism and distrust.
The problem is, that distrust infects other aspects of our communal lives.
Political scientists have accumulated a significant amount of data suggesting that over the past decades, Americans have become less trusting of each other. They warn that this erosion of interpersonal social trust—sometimes called social capital—has very negative implications for our ability to govern ourselves.
In 2009, I wrote a book titled Distrust, American Style, in which I argued that the “generalized social trust” our society requires depends upon our ability to trust our social and governing institutions.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but fish rot from the head. When we no longer trust the integrity of our social and governing institutions, that distrust infects everything else.
Many people get it backwards: they blame America’s growing diversity for the erosion of social trust. I disagree. The cure for what ails us doesn’t lie in building a wall between the United States and Mexico, discriminating against Muslims or LGBT folks, or recasting America as a “Christian Nation.” The remedy is to make our governmental, religious and civic institutions trustworthyagain. And we can’t do that without recognizing the pre-eminent role of government, which is an essential “umpire,” enforcing the rules of fair play and setting the standard for our other institutions, both private and nonprofit.
If I am correct, and government has an important role in building trust and social capital, we have a problem. There is a widespread perception right now that our governing institutions are not trustworthy—and there is plenty of evidence that American elected officials—even the non-crazy ones—have pursued policies or behaviors that are actually destructive of social trust. I would include in those policies the “privatization” and “reinventing government” ideology that has grown over the past thirty plus years, which has had the unintended consequence of “hollowing out” not just government, but a substantial segment of the nonprofit and voluntary sector. If healthy and functioning government agencies, and a robust civil society are necessary to the maintenance of trustworthy institutions, such “hollowing out” makes their task infinitely more difficult.
Since Distrust, American Style was written, it has gotten worse. We have had Citizens United and its progeny, we have had a Great Recession brought about by inadequate regulation of venal and greedy financial institutions, and we have seen daily reports of government corruption and incompetence—some true, some not. Which brings me to today’s media environment.
It is always tempting to assert that we live in times that are radically unlike past eras—that somehow, the challenges we face are not only fundamentally different than the problems that confronted our forebears, but worse; to worry that children growing up today are subject to more pernicious influences than children of prior generations. (In Stephanie Coontz’ felicitous phrase, there is a great deal of nostalgia for “the way we never were.”) I grew up in the 1950s, and can personally attest to the fact that all of our contemporary, misty-eyed evocations of that time are revisionist nonsense. The widespread belief that 50s-era Americans all lived like the characters from shows like “Father Knows Best” or “Leave it to Beaver” is highly inaccurate, to put it mildly. (Ask the African-Americans who were still relegated to separate restrooms and drinking fountains in much of the American South, or the women who couldn’t get equal pay for equal work or a credit rating separate from their husbands.)
Nevertheless—even conceding our human tendency to overstate the effects of social change for good or ill—it is impossible to understand the current cynicism about government without recognizing the profound social changes that have been wrought by communication technologies, most prominently the Internet.
We live today in an incessant babble of information. Some of that information is transmitted through hundreds of cable and broadcast television stations, increasing numbers of which are devoted to news and commentary twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But it’s the Web that has had the greatest impact on the way we live our daily lives. We read news and commentary from all over the world on line, we shop for goods and services, we communicate with our friends and families, and we consult web-based sources for everything from medical advice to housekeeping hints to comedy routines. When we don’t know something, we Google it. The web is rapidly becoming a repository of all human knowledge—not to mention human rumors, hatreds, gossip, trivia and paranoid fantasies. Picking our way through this landscape requires new skills, new ways of accessing, sorting and evaluating the credibility and value of what we see and hear—and most of us have yet to develop those skills.
Today, anyone with access to the internet can hire a few reporters or “content providers” and create her own media outlet. One result is that the previously hierarchical nature of public knowledge is rapidly diminishing. The time-honored “gatekeeper” function of the press—when journalists decided what constituted news and verified information before publishing it—will soon be a thing of the past, if it isn’t already.
The Web allows like-minded people to connect with each other and form communities that span traditional geographical and political boundaries. It has encouraged—and enabled—a wide array of political and civic activism, and that’s great, but it has also created and facilitated what Eli Pariser calls “the filter bubble”–the ability to live within our preferred “realities” with others who share our biases.
The information revolution is particularly pertinent to the issue of trust in our civic and governing institutions. At no time in human history have citizens been as aware of every failure of competence, every allegation of corruption or malfeasance. At no time have we been as swamped with propaganda and partisan spin. Politicians like to talk about “low-information” voters, but even the most detached American citizen cannot escape hearing about institutional failures on a daily basis, whether those failures are true or not. It may be the case that corruption and ineptitude are no worse than they ever were, but it is certainly the case that information and misinformation about public wrongdoing or incompetence is infinitely more widespread in today’s wired and connected world.
When people do not respect the enterprise that is government, when they suspect their lawmakers have been bought and paid for, is it any wonder they remain detached from it?
Finally, there’s our astonishing lack of civic literacy. Research confirms a correlation between civic knowledge and civic participation, and Americans overall are civically illiterate.
Only 36 percent of Americans can correctly name the three branches of government. Fewer than half of 12th grade students can describe the meaning of federalism. Only 35% of teenagers can correctly identify “We the People” as the first three words of the Constitution. This isn’t a new phenomenon: in a 1998 survey, nearly 94% of teenagers could name the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, but only 2.2 percent could name the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Most Americans (58%) are unable to identify even a single department in the United States Cabinet. The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) 2006 report on civics competencies found that barely a quarter of the nation’s 4th, 8th and 12th graders are proficient in civics, with only five percent of seniors able to identify and explain checks on presidential power. Only 43% of high school seniors could name the two major political parties; only 11% knew the length of a Senator’s term; and only 23% could name the first President of the United States. One scholar has reacted to the 2010 NAEP results by worrying that the amount of civic knowledge in this country may be “too low to sustain democratic governance.”
Here’s the bottom line: when citizens do not understand the most basic structure and purpose of their governing institutions, we shouldn’t be surprised if they fail to recognize the multiple ways that structure affects them, as well as their obligations to their fellow citizens.
When you don’t know that there are three branches of government, and you have a zoning problem or a social security issue—you don’t know where to start, where to go to resolve the issue. You find the system unresponsive and intimidating—and you opt out.
If we are going to encourage more people to participate, to vote, to become involved in electing and monitoring our government at all levels, we have to do at least three things: we have to work for laws that will enable rather than discourage voting, beginning with nonpartisan redistricting; we have to start talking about the things that government does well, while working to make it more ethical and accountable; and we have to raise the level of civic knowledge, so people will know how to do those things and why they matter.
On Tuesday, I attended the “Pancakes and Politics” breakfast hosted by the Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce. It was a lively and informative panel. One exchange that really struck me was a brief discussion of redistricting.
Everyone on the panel–Republican, Democrat and Statehouse reporter Ed Feigenbaum (who was officially neither)–agreed that noncompetitive elections are bad for democracy, that they pull parties to the extremes, encourage lazy legislators and reduce electoral participation.
The question was, what can be done about it?
The Democrat on the panel endorsed nonpartisan redistricting; the Republican on the panel (I should be better about names!) disagreed. He pointed out that Americans have been “sorting” ourselves into Red and Blue enclaves–voting with our feet to live in places where our neighbors agree with us about values and priorities. True enough–anyone who’s read Bill Bishop’s book The Big Sortwould recognize the accuracy of his observation.
His second argument against nonpartisan redistricting was less persuasive. Basically, he pooh-poohed the notion that we can really take partisan politics out of the process. The success of nonpartisan processes in Iowa and elsewhere suggest otherwise.
The truth–as is so often the case–is likely somewhere in the middle: eliminating partisan gamesmanship and gerrymandering will not solve the problem of underrepresentation of people living in overwhelmingly blue cities in red and purple states. But it would be measurably fairer than the current system, in which representatives choose their voters rather than the other way around, and that fairness would ameliorate at least some of the cynicism and apathy that depresses voter turnout. And it would increase the numbers of competitive districts–perhaps not as much as advocates hope, but certainly more than the panelist conceded.
Common Cause, which has made redistricting reform a high priority, has announced a contest that highlights one of the reasons that challenges to highly gerrymandered districts have failed: the Supreme Court has consistently declined to get involved unless the districts can be shown to have been drawn to disenfranchise minorities. The Court has said that partisan districts (districts drawn to unfairly benefit a political party) are “justiciable”–that is, that such challenges will be heard by the courts–but they have routinely declined to overturn political decision-making unless racially discriminatory motives can be demonstrated.
