JHU Course Syllabus - Lobbying and Influence, Spring 2013

Class Schedule

Week 1: January 23             

Introduction and overview.

Week 2: January 30

In which we gain an initial understanding of the contours of representation in Washington, and how it fits with American democracy

-       Madison, Federalist #10

-       Kay Lehman Schlozman and John T. Tierney, Organized Interests and American Democracy, 1986, Chapter 2

-       Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry Brady, The Unheavenly Chorus, 2012, Chapter 11

-       “Who cares about the lobbying agenda?” Kimball et al, Interest Groups & Advocacy, May 2012

Week 3: February 6

In which we think about political conflict

-       E.E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People, 1960, Chapter 1

-       Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Two Faces of Power.” 1962, American Political Science Review, 947-952

-       Andrew S. McFarland, Neopluralism,  2004, Chapters 2-4 + pp. 124-132

Week 4: February 13

 In which we try to make some sense of the “political process” and the role of lobbyists in it

-       John Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, 1984, Chapters 1, 4, 8-9.

-       Steven Teles, “Kludgeocracy: The American Way of Policy,” New America Foundation, December 2012

-       Harold Meyerson, “Did the Founding Fathers Screw Up?” the American Prospect, September 26, 2011

Week 5: February 20

In which we examine how Congress works, and some reasons it might be susceptible to lobbyists

-       Douglas Arnold, The Logic of Congressional Action, 1990 Chapters 1-2,4

-       Morris Fiorina, Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment, 1989, Chapter 5

-       David A. Fahrenthold “Even in an era of budget cuts, these government programs won’t die,” Washington Post, April 20, 2011

Week 6: February 27           

In which we explore how political organizations form and maintain themselves

-       Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action, 1965, Chapters 1-2;

-       Jack Walker, “Mobilizing Interest Groups in America,” Chapters 3 & 10.

Week 7: March 6

In which we evaluate the old adage that “there are only two things that matter in politics: money, and I forget the other thing.”

-       Lawrence Lessig, Republic, Lost, 2011, Chapters 10 & 14

-       Stephen Ansolabehere, John de Figueiredo, and James M. Snyder, Jr., “Why Is There So Little Money in Politics,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2002

Week 8: March 13           

In which we investigate the role of policy and political information and framing.

-       Richard Hall and Alan Deardorff, “Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy,” American Political Science Review, 2006

-       Lorelei Kelly, “Congress’ Wicked Problem: Seeking Knowledge Inside the Information Tsunami,” New America Foundation, December 2012

-       Kent Weaver and Andrew Rich, “Advocates and Analysts: Think Tanks and the Politicization of Expertise,” in Allen J. Cigler and Burdett Loomis, eds., Interest Group Politics, 5th Edition, 1998

March 19: NO CLASS – SPRING BREAK

Week 9: March 27         

In which we take a trip through the revolving door

-       Revolving Door Working Group, “A Matter of Trust: How the Revolving Door undermines Public Confidence in Government – And What to Do About It,” 2005, pp. 1-47

-       Rogan Kersh, “State Autonomy and Civil Society: The Lobbyist Connection,” Critical Review, 2001

-       Barack Obama Executive Order on Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Personnel, 2009

-       OMBWatch, “Nonprofits and Obama’s Lobbying Rules,” 2009

Week 10: April 3

 In which we explore how lobbyists influence the second and third branches of the federal government and see how passage of a bill is merely the beginning of a new fight

-       Suzanne J. Piotrowksi and David H. Rosenbloom, “The Legal-Institutional Framework for Interest Group Participation in Federal Administrative Policymaking,” in Paul S. Hernson, Ronald G. Shaiko, and Clyde Wilcox, The Interest Group Connection, 2^nd Edition, 2005

-       Scott Furlong, “Exploring Interest Group Participation in Executive Policymaking”, in Paul S. Hernson, Ronald G. Shaiko, and Clyde Wilcox, The Interest Group Connection, 2^nd Edition, 2005

-       Karen O’Connor, “Lobbying the Justices or Lobbying for Justice?”  in Paul S. Hernson, Ronald G. Shaiko, and Clyde Wilcox, The Interest Group Connection, 2^nd Edition, 2005

-       Eric Patashnik, Reforms at Risk, 2009. Chapter 9

Week 11: April 10

In which we look into some lobbying organizations with more detail

-       Kelly D. Patterson and Matthew M. Singer, “Targeting Success: The Enduring Power of the NRA,” in Allen J. Cigler and Burdett Loomis, eds., Interest Group Politics, 7th Edition, 2007

-       Peter L. Francia, “Protecting America’s Workers in Hostile Territory: Unions and the Republican Congress,” in Paul S. Hernson, Ronald G. Shaiko, and Clyde Wilcox, The Interest Group Connection, 2^nd Edition, 2005

-       John C. Green and Mathan S. Bigelow: “The Christian Right Goes to Washington,” in Paul S. Hernson, Ronald G. Shaiko, and Clyde Wilcox, The Interest Group Connection, 2^nd Edition, 2005

-    

Week 12: April 17

In which we ask: Are we doomed?

-       Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, “Winner-Take-All Politics:  Public Policy, Political Organization, and the Precipitous Rise of Top Incomes in the United States,” Politics & Society, 2010

-       Jonathan Rauch, Government’s End: Why Washington Stopped Working, 1999, Chapter 4

-       David Boaz. “The Lobbyist Scandals,” Pittsburgh Tribune Review, January 15, 2006

Week 13: April 24          

…Or is there hope yet?

-       Nick Allard, “Lobbying is an Honorable Profession: The Right to Petition and the Competition to be Right.” Stanford Law and Policy Review, 2008.

-       Lee Drutman, “Evaluating Reforms of Lobbying and Money in Politics,” New Directions in Interest Groups, forthcoming

-       Lee Drutman, “A Better Way to Fix Lobbying,” Issues in Governance Studies, The Brookings Institution, 2011

We Should Care This Much About Earmarks? Really?

We Should Care This Much About Earmarks? Really?


If you've been following some of the recent coverage of the $410 billion federal appropriations bill, you might be forgiven for thinking that there is little more to the federal budget than a plague of roughly 9,000 "earmarks," all wasteful and deceitful. After all, both the mainstream press and congressional Republicans have been relentlessly focused on earmarks — and not generally in the kindest of terms.

But how concerned should the public really be about earmarks? Actually, not very, say political scientists who study earmarks and pork-barrel politics.

For one, earmarks (i.e. specific targeted requests for funding separate from the normal appropriations process) account for roughly 2 percent of all appropriations expenditures. (By contrast, the military budget accounts for more than half of all federal discretionary spending).

And while some projects might sound silly when taken out of context, most actually serve legitimate local needs that otherwise fall through the cracks of normal funding mechanisms (which, by the way, would disburse the same amount of money even without earmarks)

"I think people should take a deep breath and stop worrying, and look at other things we're spending money on as a society," said Scott A. Frisch, a professor at Cal State University, Channel Islands, who is working on a book called Why Earmarks are Good for Democracy and is also the author of The Politics of Pork. "I'm much more worried about entitlement reform, contracting reform, election reform, campaign finance. But earmarks are a convenient target to distract people."

"The thing I'm struck by is that everyone seems to be starting from the premise that all earmarks are bad," said Amy Steigerwalt, a professor of political science at Georgia State University who has also studied earmarks. "Like most things in the world, a simple black-and-white perception isn't true. There are certainly abuses ... but the reality is that earmarks are really the only mechanism that members can ensure that money goes to their districts in ways that are not part of larger bills."

One of the challenges of the modern legislative process, Steigerwalt notes, is that Congress no longer allocates funding for local projects by what used to be called private bills. Rather, these days, the only opportunity for individual House and Senate members to address the local concerns often is the earmarking process, in which members request funding for specific projects from the appropriation committee chairs.

After all, the House and the Senate are not about to vote separately on 9,000 stand-alone bills, each covering an intensely local project. Such a process would take forever. But bundling all the projects together in a single bill is not only much more efficient, said Diana Evans, a professor of political science at Trinity College, it also helps to get an appropriations bill passed. After all, if everybody has a local project in the bill, everybody also has a stake in the bill passing. (Evans makes this point in more detail in her recent book, Greasing the Wheels.)

"It's an inevitable part of the process," she said. "It's too useful. It helps members to get re-elected, and it helps leaders to put together support for their bills."

And it's a bipartisan part of the process. Both Republicans and Democrats are active earmarkers. And for good reason, notes Jeffrey Lazarus, a professor of political science at Georgia State: "Members who score more federal spending get higher vote shares, and tend to have an easier time winning re-election."

Then again, it might make a little sense for Republicans to be the ones complaining now, since, according to Evans, "the general rule that everyone agrees to is that the majority gets 60 percent of earmarks, so when the Republican party was in power, they got 60 percent of the earmarks, and now the Democrats are in power and they get 60 percent of the earmarks."

But, then again, it was under the period of a Republican majority Congress that the practice of earmarking really boomed. In 1994, the last year Democrats were in power, the watchdog group Citizens against Government Waste found 1,318 earmarks worth $7.8 billion. By 2006, the last year of Republican rule, that had ballooned to 9,963 earmarks worth $29 billion.

When Democrats returned to power in 2007, they instituted new rules making earmarks more transparent ("It used to be that, until the past Congress, you really had to go through the reports and dig through them," said Frisch.) Such rules, however, did little to slow the earmarks.

"Making earmarks public doesn't shame members," Evans said. "They want constituents to know about their awards. They talk about them in newsletters and press releases. I'd say most constituents like them pretty well if they're coming to their district."

Of course, the process still could be more open. "The way the process is done right now is not terribly transparent," said Steigerwalt. "And anything that seems untransparent can also be portrayed as sneaky, underhanded, and certainly unfair or only aiding those in power." (Obama has floated new rules to improve transparency even more.)

Moreover, earmarks have also gotten a bad name from a few high-profile cases with corrupt lobbyists, like those surrounding now-jailed Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-CA, or the lobbying firm PMA Group, which is under FBI investigation for improper campaign contributions.

But just because lobbyists are involved, doesn't mean that they are not representing legitimate local concerns. Lazarus has found in his own research that earmark requests are generally very responsive to the concerns of particular districts. "Members of Congress tend to seek out earmarks which comport with the finds of federal spending that their districts request," he said. "So it's not like it's as totally useless as it's made out to be. There is actually some effort to target spending to what a district wants and what it needs."

Sure, lobbyists often insert themselves into the process, helping local institutions navigate the confusing folkways of Washington, exacting what might be an unnecessary toll. But that shouldn't tarnish otherwise defensible projects, say scholars. "Sometimes, it's easy to pick out abusive earmarks," noted Steigerwalt. "But you get into trouble when you start critiquing volcano monitoring, which, to the people of Seattle, is extremely important since they're waiting for a volcano to explode."

And what of the supposed "eruption of spending" that these earmarks are producing?

"Earmarks are simply taking money we've decided to spend on community development or agriculture, and instead of allowing the bureaucracy or some type of static formula to decide it, it's allowing the elected representatives of the people to," said Frisch. In other words, earmarks do not represent new spending, but rather money that would have been allocated otherwise under bureaucratic formulas that can ignore sometimes idiosyncratic local concerns.

Ultimately, none of the political scientists think that earmarks are going away any time soon, even if Obama succeeds in adding further transparency to the process. "As long as voters are rewarding it," said Lazarus, "politicians will keep doing it, no matter how nationally unpopular. Unless something fundamental about the political landscape changes, you're never going to see the avenue for this kind of spending completely shut off."

So, we are left with yet another paradox of American democracy: opportunistic politicians railing against a process they willingly participate in and benefit from, knowing very well that there is actually very little they could do to change it even if they wanted to, and voters rewarding behavior — at the individual level — that they supposedly dislike at the national level. Pork-barrel politics are as old as the system of geographic representation enshrined in the Constitution, and it doesn't appear things are going to change anytime soon. But maybe, say scholars, that's just fine.


http://www.miller-mccune.com/politics/we-should-care-this-much-about-earmarks-really-1064.print

Can the private sector save the banks?

Lee Drutman: Can the private sector save the banks?

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

LEE DRUTMAN

WASHINGTON

THESE ARE HARD TIMES on Wall Street. All those big banks that once towered so high are now basically insolvent, and the only solution left seems to be for the U.S. government to inject a hefty sum of taxpayer money to prop up the banking system.

But . . . one small problem: Too much government ownership could be a gateway to “nationalization,” which, apparently, is un-American. You see, we in the good U.S. of A. believe in free enterprise, and we are not going to let a little thing like the massive failure of a sizeable chunk of private banking system fool us into letting the government start running our economy.

Ah yes. The private sector. And, speaking of which, shouldn’t that distinguished private sector be coming to the rescue of our once-grand banks any minute now, snapping up those “toxic” assets at market prices and getting our credit system humming again?

Okay, so the branding on these assets could be a little better, but come on! All you folks on Wall Street, who don’t like this whole nationalization thing: Don’t you want to show those crazy liberals in Washington that the private sector is not dead, that the free market still works, that government is not the solution?

After all, what would J.P. Morgan do? Well, back in 1907, Wall Street got caught up in a bit of a panic not entirely dissimilar to this one, and some large banks wound up insolvent. Morgan showed that the private sector was up to the task. He got a bunch of banker friends together and they pumped capital into the troubled banks alongside the U.S. Treasury, restoring solvency and confidence.

Unlike a century ago, of course, there are no strong banks left to help out the weak ones. But what we do have today are a lot of individual people who made an awful lot of money working on Wall Street. Surely, they could do their part for the free market?

Let’s do some brief accounting. The top 25 hedge-fund managers for 2007 each earned at least $360 million. And the top earner, John Paulson (no relation to Henry) earned $3.7 billion. Then you have the Wall Street CEOs. Merrill Lynch’s John Thain took home $83 million in 2007 (plus that fancy commode for his office). Goldman Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein took home $54 million. Then there’s Countrywide’s Tony Mozilo, who earned $410 million over several years by being at the center of the exploding mortgage business. But high-level compensation went pretty far down the organizational chart. And don’t forget about the bonuses: $18 billion even in 2008, $33.2 billion the year before. Wall Street made a lot of people millionaires.

And by the way: what, exactly, did they do in return for this money? As far as I can tell, Wall Street over the last 10 years consisted mostly of a sort of collective mania in which supposedly very smart people bought and traded insane amounts of complex financial products that they didn’t really understand, any more than they needed to understand the complex computer algorithms (designed by a bunch of even-smarter economics Ph.D.s) that told them they should be doing it.

Moreover, the more buying and selling they did, the more money they made. And as we all know, when you’re making millions in bonuses and compensation, you don’t ask silly questions like whether it is a good idea to leverage your assets 30- or 40-to-1 on the premise that home prices go up forever in excess of real income and people with no assets and no job can of course pay off a mortgage. Especially when it’s not even your own money you’re gambling with.

And so we are in a funny situation these days. We have a lot of people who got very rich on Wall Street during this disastrously delusional decade. And now, while the already deep-in-debt federal government struggles to clean up the sprawling mess the investors and bankers left behind, Wall Street still complains: Don’t nationalize!

Well, how about this for a solution: How about all those smart Wall Street bankers and investors who got so rich ruining the financial sector get together some of their own money and show us all how great the private sector is in correcting its own failures by setting up a fund to buy up the toxic assets and pump liquidity into the banks?

It’s good for taxpayers (less money for the bailout). It’s good for preserving private enterprise (no specter of socialism). And it might even be good for Wall Street (at the very least, Wall Street can improve its reputation by showing some spirit of civic responsibility; and who knows, maybe its denizens can even make some money buying up cheap assets).

For years now, conservatives have been talking up the importance of both personal responsibility and the power of private enterprise, while warning of wasting taxpayer dollars on big government. Well, if this isn’t a chance to put all those principles into practice, I don’t know what is. Come on, private sector! You can do it! Right?

Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is a research fellow at the Brookings Institution ( ldrutman@brookings.edu).

http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_drut3_03-03-09_RUDEEQT_v14.3e69832.html

The real problem with Washington lobbyists - Providence Journal

Lee Drutman: The real problem with Washington lobbyists

01:00 AM EST on Sunday, February 8, 2009

LEE DRUTMAN

WASHINGTON

BARELY IN OFFICE a day, President Obama was already on the case of the lobbyists, signing an executive order on Jan. 21 that banned lobbyists’ gifts to the executive branch, limited the lobbying-career options for departing executive-branch personnel and brought unprecedented transparency to White House deliberations. Though unable to quite deliver on his campaign promise that lobbyists “won’t find a job in my White House,” he did impose a two-year moratorium on their working on issues on which they had recently lobbied.

All of this is well and good and promising as a first step: It shows that Obama is concerned with the often distorting role of lobbyists in our policy process and is interested in transparency and good government. And yet at the same time, there is also something troubling about the approach, because these rules fail to acknowledge the murky complexities of lobbying, and in so doing, may ultimately undermine our ability to curtail the most troubling biases that lobbyists introduce into the system.

As Exhibit A in the complexities of “lobbying,” consider the case of would-have-been Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Daschle, who for the past four years worked as a “special policy adviser” at Alston & Bird, one of the largest lobbying law firms in Washington. Daschle did not register as a lobbyist. But let’s say he did, as he probably should have. Would his track record in the Senate and deep knowledge of the health-care system suddenly have been less valuable?

Who knows: Perhaps his experience working with Alston & Bird clients like Roche and the American Hospital Association and CVS Caremark gave Daschle a greater understanding of what is wrong with private health care and how to fix it, an understanding he can now turn to progressive ends. Why is it that we always assume that once somebody has spent time as a lobbyist, he or she is rendered incapable of shedding those particularized loyalties upon joining the government, but that once somebody leaves government, he or she will immediately shed any allegiance to the commonweal? Does Obama have so little faith in the people he has selected?

Consider also Daschle’s options upon leaving the Senate in 2005. Alston & Bird offered him the chance to get rich and to stay active in Washington. Sure, he could have taken a job at a think tank or a public-interest organization, but such jobs pay far less and are also harder to come by. Ultimately it was the perks in this world that got him into trouble — a cautionary tale more than anything else.

But Daschle’s decision followed a well-worn Washington career trajectory for elected officials and staffers alike: Spend some time in the federal government, build up some policy expertise and some political connections, and then “go downtown” and cash in by working for a lobbying firm or a well-paying corporation’s Washington office.

And so, every year more and more policy and political experience and knowledge migrate to those who can pay top dollar for it. By my calculations, corporations and business associations combined now have a 25-to-1 personnel advantage over public interests and unions combined in registered lobbyists. This, however, surely understates the advantage. Not only are corporations able to hire the most experienced and connected operatives, they also are able to support the ever-increasing number of ancillary lobbying activities that don’t get publicly disclosed — the issue advertising and research studies and private polling and “grassroots” mobilization and coalition building and other shadow lobbying that go into honing and relentlessly pressing arguments.

Which means that if Obama is truly interested in transparency, a great first step would be to require full disclosure of the whole range of lobbying activities, not just direct lobbying as required under current rules. Doing so would help us to see lobbyists more fully for what they actually are — producers and promoters of argument and information, some of which is quite valuable to the policy process. Indeed, lawmakers and their staffs frequently depend on lobbyists to do much of the legwork in researching, drafting, and ginning up support for various policy proposals.

But herein lies the challenge. Lobbyists are not an evil class apart, a flock of shady operatives whose sole trick is manipulating the social norms of reciprocity, and who therefore must be quarantined. For better or worse, lobbyists have become an integral part of the Washington policymaking process. The problem is that lobbyists represent only those who can afford to hire them, and this turns out primarily to be corporations and wealthy special interests.

One way to ameliorate this massive representation bias would be to set up an Office of Public Lobbying, which would seek ways to give more volume to the public interest voices that so often get drowned out by wealthy corporate interests. Another would be to do more to support policy expertise in government, both by expanding entities such as the Congressional Research Service and the Government Accountability Office and doing more to attract and maintain top talent. But most of all, let’s stop treating lobbying as a problem of corruption and ethics. The deeper, more fundamental problem is one of representation and voice.

Lee Drutman, an occasional contributor, is a research fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. He is working on a book about the growth of corporate lobbying in Washington, D.C.

http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_drut8_02-08-09_9UD6QNO_v8.4001ae1.html

A decade of financial creativity!

Lee Drutman: A decade of financial creativity!

01:00 AM EST on Wednesday, January 21, 2009

LEE DRUTMAN

WASHINGTON

THIS YEAR marks the tenth anniversary of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the landmark deregulatory law that breathlessly cast aside the antiquated notion that there should be protection against excessive risk-taking and conflict of interest in the financial-services industry. “In this era of economic prosperity,” Rep. Thomas J. Bliley Jr. (R.-Va.) said at the time, “we have decided that freedom is the answer.”) A mega-wave of Wall Street mergers promptly followed.

So, then, what better way to commemorate this historic moment than with the newly announced break-up of Citigroup, whose 1998 mega-merger had once upon a time forced Congress’s hand by brazenly violating the existing cross-ownership provisions in the old Glass-Steagall Act? Instead of trying to stop the merger, federal lawmakers decided to at last give in to more than two decades of lobbying by the industry and repeal Glass-Steagall. “The world changes, and we have to change with it,” said Sen. Phil Gramm (R.-Texas). “We have taken a step that will greatly increase the variety of financial services that will be available to people all over America.”

On Jan. 13, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit announced that conglomeration had officially failed as a business model. His company would be dumping several units, including its Smith Barney brokerage. The new company would look remarkably like the Citicorp of the 1990s — back before it merged with Travelers, and well before it discovered that somehow it was on the hook for $306 billion in “toxic assets” (enough to qualify for a $45 billion taxpayer bailout!).

It’s funny: When Gramm-Leach-Bliley initially passed, Sandy Weill and John Reed, Citigroup’s co-chairmen and co-chief executives, prophetically predicted that “this legislation will unleash the creativity of our industry.” How true: Never has a decade seen more fiscal creativity.

But their next prediction, that “all Americans — investors, savers and insureds — will be better served” has been a bit less prophetic. Unless by all Americans, Weill and Reed only meant people like them. Each earned about $26 million the year of the merger. Weill also pulled in a remarkable $785 million in compensation between 1995 and 2000.

But back to the creativity bit. The first acts of the post-deregulation Wall Street resourcefulness surrounded the relentless cheerleading behind the great Ponzi scheme commonly known as the tech bubble. The poster child for this was Jack Grubman, Citigroup’s visionary $20 million-a-year tech analyst, inventively telling everyone to Buy! Buy! Buy! WorldCom, Global Crossing and Qwest — all a steal at any price!

But why was Grubman so hot to trot on such rot? Probably because the investment-banking wing of Citigroup was getting rich underwriting the these companies’ stock offerings, but only so long as the brokerage wing of Citigroup could whip the stock-buying public into an appropriate frenzy. These same conflicts of interest were rampant across Wall Street.

Citigroup, along with many other Wall Street banks, also showed remarkable, newly unleashed ingenuity in developing and then helping to execute many of the funny-business transactions that Enron used to commit massive fraud. (Citigroup later paid $255 million in fines to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Other banks were also fined.)

The next wave of unleashed innovation on Wall Street, of course, was the massively creative and fabulously complex array of mortgage-backed securities. Remarkably, even though nobody now appears to have actually understood what they were buying, everybody on Wall Street somehow thought they could make money on these assets, or at least use them to win massive short-term personal bonuses, regardless of how the game of hot potato ultimately turned out.

Had this colossally stupid investment craze taken place in the pre-conglomerate world, things would still have turned out poorly when it finally become clear that housing prices do not, in fact, outpace real income growth forever and, yes, people with no assets and no job do, in fact, sometimes default on their loans. But things turned out even worse because these giant Wall Street conglomerates had far more money to play with than the investment banks of yore, and leveraged their assets on the order of 30 to 1 (with permission from the kind, gentle Securities and Exchange Commission). As a result, it seems that now almost the entire economy is on the hook. The analogy here is to the compulsive gambler who not only bets his savings, but also his house. And his kid’s college savings. And all on something very, very stupid.

So here’s to 10 years of the freedom, creativity and the wide variety of financial services we were promised. And how, amazingly, it all led us right back to where we started — and so much worse for the wear.

Lee Drutman, an occasional contributor, is a research fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, in Washington.

http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_drut21_01-21-09_SACVLPI_v15.42812c0.html

Does Old Glory Have a Dark Side? -- Miller-McCune

Does Old Glory Have a Dark Side?
Research suggests that seeing the flag doesn't make Americans feel more patriotic. But it does make them feel more nationalistic and more superior to non-Americans.

http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/Does-Old-Glory-Have-a-Dark-Side



Early in the presidential campaign that was, Barack Obama’s initial reluctance to wear a flag pin caused some opponents to question his patriotism. After all, some conservatives argued, the flag is the quintessential symbol of American patriotism, and by not wearing it on his lapel, well, one could only assume ...
But are the stars and stripes as much a symbol of patriotism as many make them out to be? Probably not, according to some new research on the effects of exposure to the American flag. Experiments conducted by Markus Kemmelmeier, a professor of social psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno, and colleagues show that gazing upon the red, white and blue actually does very little to stoke feelings of patriotism.

But it does make people more individualistic, more materialistic and — perhaps most troublingly — more nationalistic.

Researchers tend to define patriotism as love of one’s country; nationalism, on the other hand, tends to measure feelings of superiority. “Nationalism takes into consideration that there are others and that your own country is not just only loveable but also different and better than others,” Kemmelmeier explained.

Originally from Germany, Kemmelmeier said he was struck by the omnipresence of the American flag when he arrived in the United States in 1994. “Every plumber has one on his plumbing uniform; churches even have flags in them,” he said. “This is strange to people in other countries.”

Ten years ago, Kemmelmeier and colleagues at the University of Michigan (where he was then getting his Ph.D. in social psychology) were trying to prime feelings of patriotism by showing people the American flag, testing the conventional wisdom that the flag made people more patriotic. But try as they might, the only feelings they were able to elicit by showing people the flag were feelings of national superiority (i.e., nationalism).

The nationalism-eliciting findings are published in the October issue of Political Psychology in an article Kemmelmeier co-authored with David G. Winter, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. The study describes two specific experiments, one in which undergraduates responded to a survey with and without a large American flag in the room and one in which undergraduates responded to a questionnaire with and without three American flags printed on the paper.

In both cases, according to the article, “the flag not only prompted participants to think about their own country as superior to and dominant in the world, but also induced a mode of hierarchical thinking as evidence in elevated group-dominance scores.” In other words, according to Kemmelmeier, the flag makes people think that some people and some countries are better than others, a mode of thinking, he said, that makes people “feel more entitled to express prejudice.”

The paper also notes that “nationalism has been implicated in aggression, oppression, and warfare.”

Kemmelmeier is now in the process of writing up two other sets of studies on exposure to the American flag. In one group of experiments, he found that seeing the stars and stripes elicits stronger feelings of individualism and materialism and much less collectivist feeling. “It brings forth an idea of ‘I’m my own person; I am free here; I have the freedom to enjoy these inalienable rights,’” Kemmelmeier explained.

The other group of experiments (also in the process of being written up) is a lost letter study in which handwritten and stamped but undelivered letters were left on car windshield wipers, all with the same post office box. Half of the letters were addressed to a fictitious Muslim charity; half were addressed to a fictitious Christian charity. Among each group, half had an American flag on them, and half didn’t.

The return rate for the letters without a flag was consistently between 50 and 60 percent, regardless of whether the charity was Christian or Muslim. But when the American flag was on the envelope, a remarkable 90 percent of the letters addressed to the Christian charity consistently came back to the post office, while only between 30 and 40 percent of the Muslim charity letters were returned.

“As soon as there was a flag sticker, that changed the meaning completely,” Kemmelmeier explained. “Adding the flag shapes how you should interpret what religion somebody is.”

But while Kemmelmeier’s studies point to a somewhat unsettling take on what Americans take away from seeing the flag, another set of studies offers a more positive perspective, suggesting that the presence of Old Glory primes egalitarian concepts and also may make Americans less hostile to Arabs and Muslims.
David A. Butz (formerly a graduate student at Florida State University and now a postdoc at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst), E. Ashby Plant (a professor of psychology at FSU) and Celeste E. Doerr (a psychology graduate student at FSU) recently administered word identification tests to undergraduates to measure how long it took them to discriminate between real and nonsense words that came up on a computer screen.

Participants who saw a flag before the test more quickly identified words associated with egalitarianism than those who didn’t. Exposure to the flag also elicited more favorable attitudes toward Muslims and less nationalism in a survey. The findings were reported in 2007 in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

“What we show is that the flag is associated with egalitarian concepts,” Butz said. “This is true for both high- and low-nationalism people. It’s not moderated by political party. What it means is that through socialization experiences, we gain these egalitarian concepts with the flag.”

However, Butz speculated that “perhaps this is a surface meaning.” He was actually a little surprised by the egalitarianism-priming findings, given other research suggesting that exposure to the American flag increases nationalism and the hierarchical, anti-egalitarian feelings that come with that.

“The flag has a complex range of associations,” he said. “Symbols like the flag can be multireferential. They can mean different things to different people. It shows how tricky it is to study the symbols.”

In Israel, cognitive scientist Ran Hassin studied the association that subliminal flashes of the Israeli flag had on discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and found that “subliminal presentation of a national flag can bring about significant changes not only in a citizen's expressed political opinions within an experimental setting but also in their ‘real-life’ overt political behavior.” In his experiments, participants — all Israelis — who saw the flag flashes answered questions with a more “mainstream Zionist” tilt than those who didn’t.

Whether that meant the flag drew viewers to the political center, as Hassin theorized, or that symbols primed people based on their pre-existing associations was a question he left for future research — such as that of Kemmelmeier and Butz — to answer.

Butz got interested in studying the flag in light of a 2004 Florida law (the Carey Baker Freedom Flag Act) that mandates flags be placed in every public classroom — kindergarten to college — in the state. (A similar law also recently passed in Arizona.)

These laws worry Butz. “We don’t know a lot about the potential for symbols to influence behavior,” he said. “It’s scary to think that there are laws out there on the thinking that flags influence patriotism, and there’s no evidence for that.”

Another reason for concern comes from some research that Butz has done on student performance in the presence of the American flag. With a flag in the room, he found, white students perform about 10 percent better on math tests than they do otherwise. But non-white students perform at the same level.

“What we find in studies — and this is now being replicated — is that whites are getting a performance boost, and that’s disturbing,” Butz said. He speculated that it might have something to do with whites feeling more included in the presence of the flag.

Both Kemmelmeier and Butz stress that the psychology of the American flag is complicated. It can prime a wide range of emotions, depending on the person and the situation. There may also be regional differences. And while the flag is not necessarily the pure symbol of inspired patriotism that some might make it out to be, neither is it necessarily a pure symbol of nationalism and individualistic materialism. A lot depends on the context.

“It can have a negative impact, but nowadays there is a real opportunity to re-interpret what it means to be an American,” Kemmelmeier said. “The flag is always amorphous, and the meaning is always dependent on how it is used.”

Alaska: Land of Contradictions - Miller-McCune

Politics

Alaska: Land of Contradictions
The politics of the Last Frontier are a strange brew of libertarianism, moralism, privacy and a love of government handouts.


In many ways, the politics of Alaska are a study in contrasts.

On one hand, the state receives more federal money per capita than any other state in the union ($506.34, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense), and 1 in 3 jobs there is connected to the federal government. But a strong anti-government libertarian tradition resonates — in 1990, the state even elected a member of the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party, Walter Joseph Hickel, to be its governor.

On one hand, Alaska is a remarkably sparsely populated state, with just 0.22 percent of the U.S. population (670,000 people) living on a giant landmass that would simultaneously touch Southern California, Florida and Lake Superior if superimposed on the lower 48 (it is 570,380 square miles, just slightly smaller than all of Iran). But the majority of Alaskans (61 percent) lives in a single metropolitan area (Anchorage).

On one hand, Alaskans take their right to privacy seriously — Alaska is the only U.S. state in which possession of marijuana is legal (in small amounts). But the state is also home to an increasing number of evangelical Christians, who consider a broad range of supposedly private vices to be a public matter.

Peeing Off the Porch

One of those conservative Christians is Gov. Sarah Palin, who burst onto the national scene last month when John McCain tapped her to be his running mate, putting Alaska on the radar of the rest of the country.

To many Americans in the lower 48, Alaska is a strange and far-off place. The classic stereotype is a land of unforgiving climate and rugged individualism, the kind popularized by books like Going to Extremes by Joe McGinnis or shows like Northern Exposure.

This, however, is increasingly a myth, said Carl Shepro, a professor of political science at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

“There’s this idea that you can live in Alaska and be happy and nobody will be around, and you can go out and pee off your porch and nobody’s going to see it,” he said. “And that’s just not the reality in Anchorage or Juneau or Fairbanks.

“There are people who perceive themselves to be rugged individuals,” he added, “and there are some people who do live that way, but the real myth is the fact that we’re so independent and we distrust government and we don’t want anything to do with government, and the reality is: Look at Senator (Ted) Stevens. He was able to bring home earmarks. The state is right out there with their hands out. Sarah Palin was right out there with her hands out.”

Fifty years ago, the ethos of independence might have been closer to the reality. When Alaska joined the union in 1959, most of its residents had grown up in sparsely populated frontier colony that reinforced a sense of individualism. They even wrote an explicit right to privacy into the state constitution.

It is a right to privacy that Alaskans continue to take seriously. In 2003, for example, the Alaska state Legislature passed a resolution condemning the USA PATRIOT Act, instructing state police not to “initiate, participate in, or assist or cooperate with an inquiry, surveillance or detention” without “reasonable suspicion of criminal activity under Alaska State Law” — quite at odds with the stance of the national Republican Party.

It is also this right to privacy that guarantees Alaskans the freedom to possess small amounts of marijuana.

But starting in 1968, with the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay, and in 1977, with the completion of the Trans-Alaskan oil pipeline, an oil boom began attracting increasing numbers of transplants from oil-producing states like Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma; with them arrived conservative Christian values commonly seen in those states. Alaska has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, and almost all of its elected leaders since then have been Republicans.

And as more and more transplants arrive (the population of the state has grown steadily, from 226,167 in 1960 to 626,932 in 2000), the state Republican Party has become more religiously oriented.

“The popularity of the religious right has been growing, and probably the reason (Palin) got elected is because of the number of people who identify with the religious right,” Shepro said. “Palin is in the vanguard of the religious Christian right in Alaska.”

Gerald A. McBeath, a professor of political science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, described Alaska’s political culture as a hybrid of individualistic and moralistic cultures, drawing on Daniel Elazar’s typology of state political cultures. (Elazar breaks state political culture into three domains: moralistic, individualist and traditionalistic.)

“Individualism obviously fits into the frontier mystique, the self-reliance given very extreme climate circumstances,” said McBeath, author (with Thomas A. Morehouse) of Alaska Politics and Government. And moralism, he said, refers to the increasing religious dimension of politics.

America's Breakaway Republic?

And what about the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party, whose convention Sarah Palin attended and of which her husband Todd was once a member?

The party was founded in 1973 by a man named Joe Vogler, who objected to the federal government telling him how he could use his mining claims. In 1986, he ran for governor and won about 10,000 votes (5.5 percent of all votes), tapping into the strong individualist element in the population. Part of his platform was secession from the United States.

Though it looked like the party was finished after that, in 1990, Walter Joseph Hickel, who had been a Republican, successfully ran for governor as a member of the Alaskan Independence Party. But Shepro said that Hickel never really took the secessionist agenda seriously.

“The rhetoric was there, but for all practical applications, he was a Republican.”

McBeath, meanwhile, dismissed the Alaskan Independence Party as “a flash in the pan,” part of a larger “sagebrush rebellion of oppositional sentiment” that took place in many Western states in the 1970s and ’80s.

But the Alaskan Independence Party does fit into a larger populist tradition in Alaska. McBeath notes that the state has a relative openness to political upstarts and low statewide election filing fees ($100) to make it easy for newcomers to enter the fray.

“In most American states, Sarah Palin would never become governor,” McBeath said. “But Alaska provides the kinds of opportunities for ambitious people that are not available elsewhere. So she took her moralist approach and decided to enter, and it was easy for her to do so.”

Alaska also has strong tradition of statewide ballot initiatives. “We’re constantly wanting to throw stuff in front of people,” McBeath said.

Then there are the taxes — or, rather, the lack of taxes. In 1976, the state government set up something called the Alaska Permanent Fund, which manages the surplus in state oil revenues and gives every resident of Alaska an annual tax refund of about $2,000. Alaskans pay no taxes, except for a property tax.

Yet, Shepro said, “Alaskans feel they are overtaxed. We have the lowest tax burden in the U.S., but if you talk to the average person on the street, they say they are being taxed to death and want to elect Republicans. People say they hate socialism and government ought not to be doing all the things it does, but they’ll take a check from the government as a reward for living in Alaska.”

But perhaps in this contradiction, Alaskans are not so unique after all.

“People like road building and the money they get, and they don’t like government,” McBeath said. “Tell me something new. These contradictions are a fact of life everywhere.”

http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/730