Some of what Pew’s research tells us is unsurprising: political participation is highest at the “poles”–both ideological liberals and ideological conservatives participate more than their less ideological fellow-citizens. The category they call “consistent conservative” is heavily dominated by rural folks. When it comes to raising children, conservatives prioritize responsibility, faith and hard work, with faith identified as particularly important; while responsibility led among all five of Pew’s ideological categories, religious faith was chosen by significantly more consistent conservatives than all other groups.
These findings tend to confirm what most observers would have expected. The surprise–at least, to me–came from the conclusion that “Consistent conservatives participate in politics at higher rates than most other ideological groups.”
Half of consistent conservatives, for example, said they had contacted an elected official within the past two years – the highest level of any of our five groups. (The corresponding figure for all Americans, by the way, was 28%.) Consistent conservatives also ranked high on other measurements of political engagement, such as donating money (26%), attending campaign events (24%) and volunteering on a campaign (12%).
Those of us who wonder who elects the scientifically illiterate, the religiously intolerant “Christian Nation” folks, and the other assorted crazies have our answer.
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.
Vox and several other sources recently reported on the composition of the incoming Congress, noting that “winning” can no longer be defined as “getting the most votes.”
On Tuesday, 33 US senators elected in November will be sworn in by Vice President Joe Biden — including 12 who are new to the chamber. The class includes 22 Republicans and 11 Democrats, a big reason why the GOP has a 54-46 majority in the Senate overall.
But here’s a crazy fact: those 46 Democrats got more votes than the 54 Republicans across the 2010, 2012, and 2014 elections. According to Nathan Nicholson, a researcher at the voting reform advocacy group FairVote, “the 46 Democratic caucus members in the 114th Congress received a total of 67.8 million votes in winning their seats, while the 54 Republican caucus members received 47.1 million votes.”
The writer used these numbers to make the point that the Senate–a body to which all states, large or small, send two senators–is undemocratic.
I want to make a different point, and one that I find much more troubling. The Senate, after all, was intended to be less representative than the House. We may disagree with those initial choices, but in the case of the Senate, the system is working as designed.
When it comes to Congress and the nation’s statehouses, however, “one person, one vote” is no longer an accurate description of American elections. We have disenfranchised urban voters, and given control of the country’s policymaking to rural America.
In the 2012 Congressional elections, Democratic candidates for the House received over a million more votes than Republicans, yet the GOP easily retained control. In state after state, rural voters have a disproportionate voice–drowning out the political preferences of urban inhabitants–partially as a result of gerrymandering and partially as a result of residential “sorting.”
The first Constitution counted African-Americans as 2/3 of a citizen [update: my bad. Slaves were 3/5ths, not 2/3ds]. Today, we count people in cities (where, I’m sure coincidentally, most minorities still live) as 2/3ds of a voter.
I don’t know what you call that, but it isn’t democracy.
One of the (multiple) controversies of the last election cycle concerned efforts in several states to make voting more difficult. Republicans in those states–perhaps most notably Florida–cut back early voting times, required government-issued IDs, “purged” voter rolls of thousands of eligible, properly registered voters, and took other measures designed to limit voting by poor and minority citizens, on the not-unreasonable assumption that most of those votes would go to Democrats.
Here in Indianapolis, the lone Republican member of the Marion County Election Board repeatedly blocked the efforts of Beth White, the County Clerk, to open satellite voting locations. The sites had been extremely popular in earlier elections; they made early voting much more convenient for people who work long hours or have difficulty getting downtown to cast a vote at the Clerk’s office. There was no legitimate reason to block satellite voting; the extra money had been raised from private sources.
Now, with a super-majority in the Indiana General Assembly and fewer impediments to wholly partisan measures, we are seeing additional efforts to limit voting. Two amendments are pending in the Indiana House today to SB 388. That bill was heard in committee last week. These amendments, sponsored by Rep. Thompson, would reduce in-person absentee voting at the clerk’s office from the current legal requirement of 29 days.
Amendment 1 reduces early voting down to ONLY 15 DAYS. Amendment 2 reduces early voting down to ONLY 10 DAYS.
Tellingly, neither amendment has been heard in committee or has been reviewed by election officials–at least publicly. Passage of either amendment would greatly increase the numbers who turn out on Election Day; we could see long lines of the sort that discouraged an estimated 200,000+ voters in Florida last November. It would also make voting much more difficult for those who need to vote absentee in-person.
There is no policy justification for this proposal. Had there been, it would have been offered in committee and subjected to public discussion and debate. This is simply an effort to tilt the playing field, an effort to sneak in under the radar with a change in the rules that is intended to suppress Democratic votes.
This sort of behavior simply adds to the growing public disgust with government at all levels.
I don’t know how, but We the People need to figure out a way to send a message to our legislators, both here in Indiana and in Washington: we didn’t elect you to play partisan power games. We didn’t elect you to obstruct the operation of government, to refuse to confirm qualified nominees because the other guys nominated them, or to place the interests of your donors above the common good. We didn’t elect you so that you can rig the system to improve your chances of holding on to your job.
Evidently, Sen. Thompson and his cohorts would prefer we dispense with this democratic nonsense and not really elect our legislators at all–they’d undoubtedly prefer the system used in autocratic countries, where 99% of the “vote” turns out to ratify the election of a single nominee.
We had an interesting exchange in my Media and Policy class this past Thursday night. I team-teach that class with John Mutz, who–among his numerous other distinctions–served as Indiana’s Lt. Governor. Former Indiana Supreme Court Justice Ted Boehm and Common Cause policy director Julia Vaughn were guest speakers. So the discussion (about the impact of money in politics) was informed–and informative.
Julia noted that Indiana ranked next to last among the states in voter turnout, according to the recent Civic Health Index, and John challenged her statement that we should be embarrassed by that low level of participation, saying it didn’t bother him.
Should it bother us? This is one of those questions where the correct response is “it depends.”
If the folks who are blowing off the political process are low-information, low-interest voters, then I agree with John that it isn’t a problem. Why should the votes of the uninformed dilute the votes of those of us who take the process seriously? If you don’t know who you support and why, then you should stay home and let more thoughtful people participate.
On the other hand, if low turnout is due to one or more of the following reasons, we have a different problem and we need to do something about it.
We should be embarrassed if
We’ve made voting too difficult. If we’ve restricted the number of polling places, and/or limited the hours those polls are open so that voting is inconvenient for people with jobs and family obligations and actual lives, shame on us. Ditto if we’re requiring all sorts of documentation that older, poorer folks are unlikely to have.
We’ve made politics too nasty. If all voters hear are 30-second attacks on the integrity, brains and general humanity of those running for office, research suggests those voters tend to turn it all off and stay home on election day. (Some candidates will actually engage in nasty campaigning in order to evoke the “pox on both your houses” response and thus suppress turnout, if they think a larger turnout would benefit their opponent.)
We’ve made the ballot too daunting and complicated. Remind me again why we are voting for coroner, treasurer, recorder and dog-catcher? Who beside the candidates really cares who serves on township advisory boards?
We’ve failed to “connect the dots” between government policies and the reality of our daily lives, allowing voters to believe that candidates are all fungible. (Hurricane Sandy is just one example of why policies matter: if disaster relief had been turned back to state and local governments, does anyone really believe the result would have been the same for those who desperately needed help? Instead of throwing mud at each other, candidates need to make the case that their preferred policies matter, and how.)
We’ve constructed a system in which many votes really don’t matter. This is the most depressing reason of all, because it’s true. Yes, my vote for state and local offices still matters, more or less, but increasingly–thanks to gerrymandering and winner-take-all allocation of Electoral College votes–my votes for President and many other offices really don’t. (In this year’s Presidential election, those Hoosiers who vote for Obama might just as well flush those votes down the nearest toilet; Romney will win the state and take all of Indiana’s electoral college votes–even if the win is only by a point or two. A couple of states allocate their electoral votes to reflect the breakdown of the state’s popular vote–the constitution permits that–but Indiana and most others don’t.)
So–should we be embarrassed by our low turnout? Yes. If we institute changes that make voting more convenient, the ballot less daunting, the process less negative and/or fruitless and turnout is still low, then we can shrug it off and accuse the nonvoters among us of of poor citizenship. But not before.
