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.”
Monday, December 29, 2008
Thursday, October 02, 2008
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
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
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Are Polls Overstating Obama’s Support?
Are Polls Overstating Obama’s Support?
There is a long history of black Democratic candidates doing worse than pre-election polling would suggest. Two recent studies disagree on whether this problem is still with us.
By: Lee Drutman | September 30, 2008
California. 1982. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, a Democrat, is running to be the first black governor in his state's history. Days before the election, he is up by almost 10 points in the polls. But when the returns come in, Republican George Deukmejian is declared the winner.
Virginia. 1989. Lt. Gov. Douglas Wilder, a Democrat, is running to be the first black governor in his state's history. Days before the election, polls give him a nine-point lead. When the returns come in, Wilder is indeed the winner — but only by a few thousand votes.
Some call it the Bradley Effect; others call it the Wilder Effect — this idea that pre-election polling tends to overstate the support for black candidates, especially Democrats. This happens, it is alleged, because there are a significant number of voters who tell pollsters that they'll support their party's candidate. But then, because they are ultimately uncomfortable voting for a black candidate, they don't.
With polls suggesting America is on the verge of electing its first black president in just a few weeks, both campaigns have largely been quiet on the issue of race. Race is, of course, a factor: A widely cited poll by AP-Yahoo News in late September found Obama's race is costing him 6 percentage points in support before the general election.
But the question lingers: Should the Obama campaign be worried that polls are overstating his support? Is his narrow lead safe from private racist sentiments that white Democrats refuse to share with pollsters?
Two recent academic studies have come to different conclusions on this question by examining past senatorial, gubernatorial and mayoral races with black candidates.
Daniel J. Hopkins, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's department of government, is convinced that the Bradley/Wilder Effect is largely a thing of the past. His analysis suggests that, at least since 1996, pre-election polling on black candidates has been accurate. Racism may still exist, but it no longer skews polling.
But Christopher Stout and Reuben Kline, both Ph.D. candidates in political science at University of California, Irvine, think that the Bradley/Wilder Effect is still very much with us, and that, all else being equal, polling numbers will overstate support for black Democrats by about three percentage points.
Stout and Kline argue that in order to understand the Bradley/Wilder Effect, one should pay attention to how competitive the election is. They find that in close, high-turnout elections, the effect tends to be more pronounced.
The reason, they argue, is that in a close election, Democratic voters feel more social pressure to support the Democratic nominee, fearing that any stated deviation from their party would make them look racist, since what other justification could they have for voting Republican in such a close race?
"They don't want to look racist to the pollster, but then they end up not voting for the black candidate or just not voting at all," Kline said.
Controlling for closeness of election, turnout and a few other contextual factors, their model predicts that, on average, pre-election polls will overstate support for black candidates by 3.3 percentage points.
Though a simple plot of elections over time makes it look like the Bradley/Wilder Effect fades post-1996, Stout and Kline argue that this is actually an artifact of other trends. One, there haven't been that many close elections involving black candidates in recent years. And two, there are more black Republicans running, and Republican voters are more comfortable telling pollsters they will vote against a black candidate (hence, no Bradley effect).
"People say the Bradley Effect is going away, but they're looking at elections that are not competitive and more Republican black candidates," Stout said.
Hopkins, however, argues that the post-1996 disappearance of the effect is indeed real but easily missed because of a frequently overlooked aspect of polling bias — the tendency to for polls to overstate the frontrunner generally (his best guess is that there is a 2.5 percentage point bias in favor of a leading candidate). "I think the Wilder Effect can sometimes be confused with the frontrunner effect," Hopkins explained.
Taking the frontrunner effect into account, Hopkins finds that evidence for a Bradley/Wilder Effect of about 2.3 points but only until 1996. Then, he finds, it just drops off pretty suddenly.
"One thought is that this is a generational effect, and that there is a particular generation that harbors racial biases but an anti-racist norm, and the Wilder Effect is a factor of those two processes together," Hopkins said. "But if that were true, it should disappear gradually."
Rather, Hopkins thinks it has something to do with the way the political agenda changed around that time. "By 1997," he noted, "welfare was off the agenda, crime's prominence as an issue had declined; so two racial issues are less salient. And starting in the 1990s, Republican candidates have run fewer racialized campaigns."
Hopkins also points to the work of Zoltan Hajnal, whose recent book, Changing White Attitudes Toward Black Political Leadership, has shown that white voters who have concerns about black political leaders tend to lose those concerns once they actually experience black political leadership. So, Hopkins wonders: "Did Wilder himself help to eliminate the Wilder Effect by showing that there wasn't much to fear from an Afro-American executive?"
And what about the upcoming presidential election? What should we expect?
"It's a close election and a high-turnout race, and all this indicates there's going to be a decent Bradley Effect," Stout said.
Kline, meanwhile, noted that in swing states such as "Ohio, and probably Michigan, you have socially conservative Democrats, and that's probably a problem for Obama because it seems like those should be the voters most likely to falsify their preference (i.e., lie to pollsters). They should be voting Democratic, but they may be reticent to do so."
Indeed, a recent AP-Yahoo News poll found that 40 percent of white Americans and more than a third of white Democrats and independents maintain negative attitudes toward blacks. But this doesn't mean necessarily that Obama's support is overstated. In fact, it may be one reason why Obama is not doing better.
"The Wilder Effect is often misunderstood," Hopkins said. "People tend to think that if there is no Wilder Effect, then there's no racial bias, but the Wilder Effect is one form of racial bias, and race can in many ways influence voter choices without producing a Wilder Effect."
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/732
There is a long history of black Democratic candidates doing worse than pre-election polling would suggest. Two recent studies disagree on whether this problem is still with us.
By: Lee Drutman | September 30, 2008
California. 1982. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, a Democrat, is running to be the first black governor in his state's history. Days before the election, he is up by almost 10 points in the polls. But when the returns come in, Republican George Deukmejian is declared the winner.
Virginia. 1989. Lt. Gov. Douglas Wilder, a Democrat, is running to be the first black governor in his state's history. Days before the election, polls give him a nine-point lead. When the returns come in, Wilder is indeed the winner — but only by a few thousand votes.
Some call it the Bradley Effect; others call it the Wilder Effect — this idea that pre-election polling tends to overstate the support for black candidates, especially Democrats. This happens, it is alleged, because there are a significant number of voters who tell pollsters that they'll support their party's candidate. But then, because they are ultimately uncomfortable voting for a black candidate, they don't.
With polls suggesting America is on the verge of electing its first black president in just a few weeks, both campaigns have largely been quiet on the issue of race. Race is, of course, a factor: A widely cited poll by AP-Yahoo News in late September found Obama's race is costing him 6 percentage points in support before the general election.
But the question lingers: Should the Obama campaign be worried that polls are overstating his support? Is his narrow lead safe from private racist sentiments that white Democrats refuse to share with pollsters?
Two recent academic studies have come to different conclusions on this question by examining past senatorial, gubernatorial and mayoral races with black candidates.
Daniel J. Hopkins, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's department of government, is convinced that the Bradley/Wilder Effect is largely a thing of the past. His analysis suggests that, at least since 1996, pre-election polling on black candidates has been accurate. Racism may still exist, but it no longer skews polling.
But Christopher Stout and Reuben Kline, both Ph.D. candidates in political science at University of California, Irvine, think that the Bradley/Wilder Effect is still very much with us, and that, all else being equal, polling numbers will overstate support for black Democrats by about three percentage points.
Stout and Kline argue that in order to understand the Bradley/Wilder Effect, one should pay attention to how competitive the election is. They find that in close, high-turnout elections, the effect tends to be more pronounced.
The reason, they argue, is that in a close election, Democratic voters feel more social pressure to support the Democratic nominee, fearing that any stated deviation from their party would make them look racist, since what other justification could they have for voting Republican in such a close race?
"They don't want to look racist to the pollster, but then they end up not voting for the black candidate or just not voting at all," Kline said.
Controlling for closeness of election, turnout and a few other contextual factors, their model predicts that, on average, pre-election polls will overstate support for black candidates by 3.3 percentage points.
Though a simple plot of elections over time makes it look like the Bradley/Wilder Effect fades post-1996, Stout and Kline argue that this is actually an artifact of other trends. One, there haven't been that many close elections involving black candidates in recent years. And two, there are more black Republicans running, and Republican voters are more comfortable telling pollsters they will vote against a black candidate (hence, no Bradley effect).
"People say the Bradley Effect is going away, but they're looking at elections that are not competitive and more Republican black candidates," Stout said.
Hopkins, however, argues that the post-1996 disappearance of the effect is indeed real but easily missed because of a frequently overlooked aspect of polling bias — the tendency to for polls to overstate the frontrunner generally (his best guess is that there is a 2.5 percentage point bias in favor of a leading candidate). "I think the Wilder Effect can sometimes be confused with the frontrunner effect," Hopkins explained.
Taking the frontrunner effect into account, Hopkins finds that evidence for a Bradley/Wilder Effect of about 2.3 points but only until 1996. Then, he finds, it just drops off pretty suddenly.
"One thought is that this is a generational effect, and that there is a particular generation that harbors racial biases but an anti-racist norm, and the Wilder Effect is a factor of those two processes together," Hopkins said. "But if that were true, it should disappear gradually."
Rather, Hopkins thinks it has something to do with the way the political agenda changed around that time. "By 1997," he noted, "welfare was off the agenda, crime's prominence as an issue had declined; so two racial issues are less salient. And starting in the 1990s, Republican candidates have run fewer racialized campaigns."
Hopkins also points to the work of Zoltan Hajnal, whose recent book, Changing White Attitudes Toward Black Political Leadership, has shown that white voters who have concerns about black political leaders tend to lose those concerns once they actually experience black political leadership. So, Hopkins wonders: "Did Wilder himself help to eliminate the Wilder Effect by showing that there wasn't much to fear from an Afro-American executive?"
And what about the upcoming presidential election? What should we expect?
"It's a close election and a high-turnout race, and all this indicates there's going to be a decent Bradley Effect," Stout said.
Kline, meanwhile, noted that in swing states such as "Ohio, and probably Michigan, you have socially conservative Democrats, and that's probably a problem for Obama because it seems like those should be the voters most likely to falsify their preference (i.e., lie to pollsters). They should be voting Democratic, but they may be reticent to do so."
Indeed, a recent AP-Yahoo News poll found that 40 percent of white Americans and more than a third of white Democrats and independents maintain negative attitudes toward blacks. But this doesn't mean necessarily that Obama's support is overstated. In fact, it may be one reason why Obama is not doing better.
"The Wilder Effect is often misunderstood," Hopkins said. "People tend to think that if there is no Wilder Effect, then there's no racial bias, but the Wilder Effect is one form of racial bias, and race can in many ways influence voter choices without producing a Wilder Effect."
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/732
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
The Rise of the Political Donor Class - Miller-McCune
As congressional elections become more and more expensive, a handful of wealthy ZIP codes are increasingly picking up the tab.
By: Lee Drutman
As of this writing, the 2008 congressional candidates have already raised close to $1 billion for their campaigns (about $700 million in the House and $300 million in the Senate). By November's election, that total could top $2 billion.
It's a lot of money, and given the geographical distribution of wealth in America, an oddity emerges: many candidates who represent places in the United States without much disposable income raise the millions necessary to run for office these days.
Increasingly, they’re not bothering to ask the folks whom they are actually paid to represent for campaign cash. Instead, they are flocking to a handful of super-wealthy ZIP codes in places like Hollywood; the Upper East Side of Manhattan; Greenwich, Conn.; and suburban Washington, D.C. - the "political ATM's" of the campaign trial.
While one can find occasional media coverage of these kinds of high-dollar fundraisers, a recent study by three political scientists is the first to document the extent to which congressional candidates of both parties now depend on out-of-district donors to help them finance their campaigns.
According to an analysis by University of Maryland political science professors James G. Gimpel and Frances E. Lee and graduate student Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz, as of 2004, more than 2 out of 3 U.S. House campaign contributions (70.2 percent) came from somewhere outside the district. That’s a steady increase from 54.5 percent in 1996 and 63 percent in 2000.
Moreover, as of 2004, only 1 in 5 congressional districts provided the majority of contributions for the candidates seeking to represent that district. And in 18 percent of congressional districts, more than 90 percent of money now comes from out of district.
The professors write in their analysis that the new donor class is “disproportionately wealthy, urban, highly educated, and employed in elite occupations.”
“I think people in favor of an elitist interpretation of American political power would be very pleased with these results,” Gimpel said. “There is a concentration of wealth, elites are close together and that is across parties. They share a lot of the same values, not just culturally but even politically, and maybe one reason you don’t have any socialism in the U.S. is because there is a consensus among the donor class that is classically liberal.”
Gimpel and Lee are currently working on a paper exploring in more detail the political beliefs of this donor class.
Craig Holman, legislative representative for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, also notes that the donor class is a very small percentage of U.S. citizens. In 2004, for example, he says that less than 0.6 percent of voting-age Americans contributed more than $200 to a campaign. And 86 percent of those $200 or more campaign contributions came from households earning $100,000 per year or more.
The donor class is also extremely white. “Neighborhoods of African Americans and Latinos are particularly underrepresented when it comes to making campaign contributions,” Holman said. He points to the difference between ZIP code 10021 — Manhattan’s Upper East Side — which provided $4.2 million in contributions in 2004, and ZIP code 10035 — just a few miles north in Harlem — which provided just $3,750 in campaign contributions. Put another way, that’s a per-citizen contribution of $41.15 per Upper East Side resident versus a per-citizen contribution of 11 cents in Harlem.
Holman, like many in the campaign finance reform community, supports public financing of elections.
These findings come as spending on campaigns has exploded. In 1996, for example, the average U.S. House campaign cost $673,739. But in 2004, the average winning U.S. House campaign was $1,034,224, and by 2006 it was up to $1,253,031. At the same time, the percent of money coming from out of district has increased from 54 percent in 1996 to 70 percent in 2004.
That’s probably no coincidence. As costs continue to skyrocket, the importance of that small donor class keeps growing.
Gimpel notes that as the party committees and individual candidates build up and share their donor lists, they know that there are certain ZIP codes they can count on for contributions over and over again. In these ZIP codes, fundraisers are also increasingly social events that the politically conscious of the community feel like they can’t afford to miss. Often, they are held at the home of some celebrity, which is an event in itself.
“We think there is a lot of sociology involved,” Gimpel said. “These folks are status-seeking, and they want to be part of the donor base, to go to these events to see and be seen. I’ve been to some of these fundraisers, and what you observe is people coming together who know each other, and it is a major social event.”
Gimpel, Lee and Pearson-Merkowitz also found that the donor class is, not surprisingly, much more interested in funding competitive elections. They conclude from this that “inter-district funding flows are guided by partisan networks” — in other words, donors are contributing mostly because they want to see a particular party in power. Ideologically extreme candidates also seem to do better with out-of-district donors, suggesting that, as the scholars note, “nonresident contributors donate for expressive purposes.”
But while the coasts and a few major metropolitan areas in between are awash in campaign fundraising events, there are large swaths of land in the middle of the country that are generating virtually no political money.
“We were quite astonished to see that there are major sections of the country that give almost nothing,” Gimpel said. “There are a great many congressional districts where there just isn’t much wealth.”
So far, however, there has yet to be much of a backlash in what coastal elites tend to refer to as “flyover country.” While the professors do write that Alaska, Vermont and Oregon have all made attempts to restrict out-of-district funding, the issue has yet to gain wide attention.
As Gimpel noted, “I’m not quite sure it’s sunk in how extensive these flows are and where they come from.”
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/562
By: Lee Drutman
As of this writing, the 2008 congressional candidates have already raised close to $1 billion for their campaigns (about $700 million in the House and $300 million in the Senate). By November's election, that total could top $2 billion.
It's a lot of money, and given the geographical distribution of wealth in America, an oddity emerges: many candidates who represent places in the United States without much disposable income raise the millions necessary to run for office these days.
Increasingly, they’re not bothering to ask the folks whom they are actually paid to represent for campaign cash. Instead, they are flocking to a handful of super-wealthy ZIP codes in places like Hollywood; the Upper East Side of Manhattan; Greenwich, Conn.; and suburban Washington, D.C. - the "political ATM's" of the campaign trial.
While one can find occasional media coverage of these kinds of high-dollar fundraisers, a recent study by three political scientists is the first to document the extent to which congressional candidates of both parties now depend on out-of-district donors to help them finance their campaigns.
According to an analysis by University of Maryland political science professors James G. Gimpel and Frances E. Lee and graduate student Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz, as of 2004, more than 2 out of 3 U.S. House campaign contributions (70.2 percent) came from somewhere outside the district. That’s a steady increase from 54.5 percent in 1996 and 63 percent in 2000.
Moreover, as of 2004, only 1 in 5 congressional districts provided the majority of contributions for the candidates seeking to represent that district. And in 18 percent of congressional districts, more than 90 percent of money now comes from out of district.
The professors write in their analysis that the new donor class is “disproportionately wealthy, urban, highly educated, and employed in elite occupations.”
“I think people in favor of an elitist interpretation of American political power would be very pleased with these results,” Gimpel said. “There is a concentration of wealth, elites are close together and that is across parties. They share a lot of the same values, not just culturally but even politically, and maybe one reason you don’t have any socialism in the U.S. is because there is a consensus among the donor class that is classically liberal.”
Gimpel and Lee are currently working on a paper exploring in more detail the political beliefs of this donor class.
Craig Holman, legislative representative for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch, also notes that the donor class is a very small percentage of U.S. citizens. In 2004, for example, he says that less than 0.6 percent of voting-age Americans contributed more than $200 to a campaign. And 86 percent of those $200 or more campaign contributions came from households earning $100,000 per year or more.
The donor class is also extremely white. “Neighborhoods of African Americans and Latinos are particularly underrepresented when it comes to making campaign contributions,” Holman said. He points to the difference between ZIP code 10021 — Manhattan’s Upper East Side — which provided $4.2 million in contributions in 2004, and ZIP code 10035 — just a few miles north in Harlem — which provided just $3,750 in campaign contributions. Put another way, that’s a per-citizen contribution of $41.15 per Upper East Side resident versus a per-citizen contribution of 11 cents in Harlem.
Holman, like many in the campaign finance reform community, supports public financing of elections.
These findings come as spending on campaigns has exploded. In 1996, for example, the average U.S. House campaign cost $673,739. But in 2004, the average winning U.S. House campaign was $1,034,224, and by 2006 it was up to $1,253,031. At the same time, the percent of money coming from out of district has increased from 54 percent in 1996 to 70 percent in 2004.
That’s probably no coincidence. As costs continue to skyrocket, the importance of that small donor class keeps growing.
Gimpel notes that as the party committees and individual candidates build up and share their donor lists, they know that there are certain ZIP codes they can count on for contributions over and over again. In these ZIP codes, fundraisers are also increasingly social events that the politically conscious of the community feel like they can’t afford to miss. Often, they are held at the home of some celebrity, which is an event in itself.
“We think there is a lot of sociology involved,” Gimpel said. “These folks are status-seeking, and they want to be part of the donor base, to go to these events to see and be seen. I’ve been to some of these fundraisers, and what you observe is people coming together who know each other, and it is a major social event.”
Gimpel, Lee and Pearson-Merkowitz also found that the donor class is, not surprisingly, much more interested in funding competitive elections. They conclude from this that “inter-district funding flows are guided by partisan networks” — in other words, donors are contributing mostly because they want to see a particular party in power. Ideologically extreme candidates also seem to do better with out-of-district donors, suggesting that, as the scholars note, “nonresident contributors donate for expressive purposes.”
But while the coasts and a few major metropolitan areas in between are awash in campaign fundraising events, there are large swaths of land in the middle of the country that are generating virtually no political money.
“We were quite astonished to see that there are major sections of the country that give almost nothing,” Gimpel said. “There are a great many congressional districts where there just isn’t much wealth.”
So far, however, there has yet to be much of a backlash in what coastal elites tend to refer to as “flyover country.” While the professors do write that Alaska, Vermont and Oregon have all made attempts to restrict out-of-district funding, the issue has yet to gain wide attention.
As Gimpel noted, “I’m not quite sure it’s sunk in how extensive these flows are and where they come from.”
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/562
Monday, August 11, 2008
Grand New Party -- Los Angeles Times
BOOK REVIEW
'Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream' by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam
By Lee Drutman, Special to The Times
August 11, 2008
REPUBLICANS have been in a bit of a funk lately. Voters (especially the young ones) are increasingly identifying themselves as Democrats, and current projections give Obama the edge on Nov. 4 with the GOP losing seats in both the House and the Senate. Come Nov. 5, Republicans may be doing a lot of soul-searching.
Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam -- a pair of ambitious young editors at the Atlantic -- have a plan for them: If you want to build that elusive lasting majority you've been talking about for decades, you need a domestic policy program that deals with working-class anxieties. Really help the working class, they say, and you will win elections from here till eternity.
Part revisionist history, part wonky policy program, "Grand New Party" is brimming with ideas -- but of variable quality.
The book's best argument is that social issues "aren't just red herrings distracting the working class from economic struggles. . . . Rather they're at the root of working-class insecurity." Coastal elites can mock values voters all they want, the book argues, but for those who live in a world where drugs, divorce and out-of-wedlock births wreak havoc, the traditional family is not some antiquated hang-up, it's the crucible of economic stability.
But things get fuzzier when the two start arguing their working-class-as-linchpin-of-electoral-success story. Up through the mid-1960s, they contend, these voters were solid New Deal Democrats. But by the 1960s, rising crime, declining social mores and a drifting Democratic Party left them anxious and alienated.
Into this void stepped clever Richard Nixon, "the architect of a working-class conservatism that would shape American politics for the next quarter century." Douthat and Salam see Nixon as sincere in wanting to help the working class (he even proposed a guaranteed annual income) but thwarted by ideologues on both sides.
They also want to reclaim Reagan as a working-class ally, noting that his famous remark that "government is the problem" has been taken out of context -- Reagan actually qualified it with "in the present crisis." "It was conservatism that promised to fix the welfare state," Douthat and Salam write of Reagan, "rather than to abolish it."
Heck, they even give George W. Bush credit for "making the Republican Party responsive to the working class," because he pushed education initiatives and funding for job training and business start-ups.
And yet, for all the focus on sensitivity toward the working class as the key to Republican presidential wins over the last 40 years, the authors have a remarkably loose conception of, well, the working class: "the non-college educated voters who make up roughly half of the American electorate."
Somehow, Douthat and Salam claim insight into the singular collective desires of this half of the country (urban and rural, black and white, Protestant and Catholic, all apparently as one) -- but present virtually no polling data. The book is full of phrases like "the working class wants"; if they mean the white working class (as they often seem to), it's only fair to acknowledge this group as an ever-shrinking slice of the American electorate.
The other puzzling piece is why all this Republican populism never turned into much actual policy (and thus never solidified the elusive lasting majority). To their credit, Douthat and Salam seem genuinely frustrated by this. But their only scapegoat is political ineptitude. Well, here's another idea: Maybe the underlying political economy of the Republican Party is largely about keeping big business happy, and the aggressive free market philosophy that holds this alliance together is not particularly concerned with how the other half lives.
Still, Douthat and Salam, stubborn idealists that they are, refuse to give up on the party's supposed best intentions. Instead, they propose a wide-ranging policy program to finally do right by the working class. But their essentially post-partisan mélange of government interventions -- even with its family-centered, anti-handouts, pro-markets-and-innovation focus -- seems inconceivably far from where the largely anti-government Republican coalition is these days. Though maybe that is their point. Grand New Party, remember. Well, good luck.
Moreover, although their proposals are generally smart and intriguing, their larger claim that a lasting majority naturally follows from a detailed domestic agenda seems way too hopeful. This was the Democrats' approach for years -- and they kept running into the reality that very few Americans care for policy details, especially working-class voters who tend to be the least informed. Meanwhile, Republicans talked in sweeping, animating themes (Values! Patriotism! Freedom!), giving folks the simple emotional connections they craved from politics. Now that Obama seems to have finally figured this out, how ironic it would be if the Republicans started to go all wonky.
Lee Drutman is co-author of "The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy."
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-et-book11-2008aug11,0,3802200.story
'Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream' by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam
By Lee Drutman, Special to The Times
August 11, 2008
REPUBLICANS have been in a bit of a funk lately. Voters (especially the young ones) are increasingly identifying themselves as Democrats, and current projections give Obama the edge on Nov. 4 with the GOP losing seats in both the House and the Senate. Come Nov. 5, Republicans may be doing a lot of soul-searching.
Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam -- a pair of ambitious young editors at the Atlantic -- have a plan for them: If you want to build that elusive lasting majority you've been talking about for decades, you need a domestic policy program that deals with working-class anxieties. Really help the working class, they say, and you will win elections from here till eternity.
Part revisionist history, part wonky policy program, "Grand New Party" is brimming with ideas -- but of variable quality.
The book's best argument is that social issues "aren't just red herrings distracting the working class from economic struggles. . . . Rather they're at the root of working-class insecurity." Coastal elites can mock values voters all they want, the book argues, but for those who live in a world where drugs, divorce and out-of-wedlock births wreak havoc, the traditional family is not some antiquated hang-up, it's the crucible of economic stability.
But things get fuzzier when the two start arguing their working-class-as-linchpin-of-electoral-success story. Up through the mid-1960s, they contend, these voters were solid New Deal Democrats. But by the 1960s, rising crime, declining social mores and a drifting Democratic Party left them anxious and alienated.
Into this void stepped clever Richard Nixon, "the architect of a working-class conservatism that would shape American politics for the next quarter century." Douthat and Salam see Nixon as sincere in wanting to help the working class (he even proposed a guaranteed annual income) but thwarted by ideologues on both sides.
They also want to reclaim Reagan as a working-class ally, noting that his famous remark that "government is the problem" has been taken out of context -- Reagan actually qualified it with "in the present crisis." "It was conservatism that promised to fix the welfare state," Douthat and Salam write of Reagan, "rather than to abolish it."
Heck, they even give George W. Bush credit for "making the Republican Party responsive to the working class," because he pushed education initiatives and funding for job training and business start-ups.
And yet, for all the focus on sensitivity toward the working class as the key to Republican presidential wins over the last 40 years, the authors have a remarkably loose conception of, well, the working class: "the non-college educated voters who make up roughly half of the American electorate."
Somehow, Douthat and Salam claim insight into the singular collective desires of this half of the country (urban and rural, black and white, Protestant and Catholic, all apparently as one) -- but present virtually no polling data. The book is full of phrases like "the working class wants"; if they mean the white working class (as they often seem to), it's only fair to acknowledge this group as an ever-shrinking slice of the American electorate.
The other puzzling piece is why all this Republican populism never turned into much actual policy (and thus never solidified the elusive lasting majority). To their credit, Douthat and Salam seem genuinely frustrated by this. But their only scapegoat is political ineptitude. Well, here's another idea: Maybe the underlying political economy of the Republican Party is largely about keeping big business happy, and the aggressive free market philosophy that holds this alliance together is not particularly concerned with how the other half lives.
Still, Douthat and Salam, stubborn idealists that they are, refuse to give up on the party's supposed best intentions. Instead, they propose a wide-ranging policy program to finally do right by the working class. But their essentially post-partisan mélange of government interventions -- even with its family-centered, anti-handouts, pro-markets-and-innovation focus -- seems inconceivably far from where the largely anti-government Republican coalition is these days. Though maybe that is their point. Grand New Party, remember. Well, good luck.
Moreover, although their proposals are generally smart and intriguing, their larger claim that a lasting majority naturally follows from a detailed domestic agenda seems way too hopeful. This was the Democrats' approach for years -- and they kept running into the reality that very few Americans care for policy details, especially working-class voters who tend to be the least informed. Meanwhile, Republicans talked in sweeping, animating themes (Values! Patriotism! Freedom!), giving folks the simple emotional connections they craved from politics. Now that Obama seems to have finally figured this out, how ironic it would be if the Republicans started to go all wonky.
Lee Drutman is co-author of "The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy."
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-et-book11-2008aug11,0,3802200.story
Monday, July 28, 2008
The Wheel of Political Fortune Keeps Spinning
The Wheel of Political Fortune Keeps Spinning
Democrats may be ascendant now, but don’t expect permanence. One recent study gives them about 13 years in power.
By: Lee Drutman
It was not so long ago that GOP strategist Karl Rove talked boldly of creating a “permanent Republican majority.” As it turned out, it was an elusive dream.
Of course, had he paid attention to American political history, he should have known better. No party ever holds power forever. It’s just a matter of how long.
But how long has long been a matter of debate. Arthur Schlesinger Sr. once famously suggested that American politics oscillated between liberal and conservative poles in predictable 30-year cycles. One recent study of American electoral political history suggests Schlesinger may have been on to something.
In order to test his prediction, Samuel Merrill III (a professor of mathematics and computer science at Wilkes University), Bernard Grofman (a professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine) and Thomas L. Brunell (a professor of political science at the University of Texas, Dallas) analyzed the Democratic seats from every U.S. House and Senate election since 1854, as well as the Democratic vote share of every presidential election since 1854.
Clear up-and-down patterns emerge. And when subjected to something called a spectral analysis (a statistical technique designed to decompose a time series into cycles of different lengths, similar to what scientists use to decompose white light into colors), the professors found the data have a clear peak around 13 periods — meaning that the U.S. government completes a full Democrat-to-Republican-to-Democrat cycle roughly every 26 years.
“It’s interesting that what we came up with really fit the Schlesinger predictions very well,” Merrill said. “But a lot of it is just gradual change, change that follows more like a sine curve than something abrupt. You have a cycling where the two are out of phase, each one affecting the other. You get a cycling that continues for a long time, not an equilibrium.”
A finding of gradual change goes against the “critical elections” theory of American politics — that is, that there are occasional crucial “realigning” elections that dramatically rewrite the electoral map for a generation to come, sort of like periodic earthquakes. (This theory, once prominent among scholars of American politics, is increasingly out of fashion — but perhaps there are cycles for theories, too.)
Rather than plate tectonics, Merrill and colleagues see more of a pendulum, in which centripetal and centrifugal forces pull the country and its political institutions back and forth along the political spectrum.
In an academic article describing their findings, they explain this in terms of a “Voter-Party Interaction Model.” The basic argument is that public opinion is centrist. But once a party gets into power, its leaders tend to push it to political extremes because they have more extreme policy agendas than the centrist public (hence, the centrifugal force).
But as years of polling show, the public responds to this. Public opinion almost always tends to move against the party in power. “Voters just seem to react more when something negative happens than when something positive happens, and negative things can accumulate,” Merrill said. “They take their toll after a period of time.”
Or as another Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., once put it, “Disappointment (is) a basic spring of political change.”
This, then, creates an opportunity for the minority party. It can move to the center to pick up enough public support to win back majority status (hence, the centripetal force). And then the minority party becomes the majority party, and the cycle begins anew.
But while Merrill and colleagues see things following a roughly consistent pattern, others are not so sure.
“I don’t think there are well-defined cycles,” said Edward G. Carmines, a professor of political science at Indiana University who has written about party alignments. “There are rough approximations of what might be called cycles … but not in a strict kind of 30-year pattern. I don’t think they’re highly predictable.”
Carmines instead sees a largely random element in the changing fortunes of the parties — essentially, driven new issues that periodically arise and split the electorate in new ways. “The things that make a party successful in a given era and in a given set of circumstances tend to lessen and erode,” Carmines said. “And the other party, wanting to be competitive, finds ways, sometimes through new issue conflicts, of gaining the upper hand.”
In Carmines’ view, the current Republican decline largely reflects a shift from Republican-friendly issues, with the war especially working against the GOP. In the view of Merrill and colleagues, the Republican downfall was the inevitable result of a period of the kind of creeping extremism and accumulating scandals that always happens to parties in power (though shifting issues may play a role as well).
Either way, opinion polls clearly show that after a period of Republican dominance, public opinion is currently moving in a liberal direction. According to studies by James A. Stimson, professor of political science at the University of North Carolina, “liberal mood” peaked in 1990, hit a trough in 2001 and is currently on its way back up. That Democrats won control of the U.S. House in 2006 after 12 years of Republican control neatly conforms to the 13-year half-cycle predicted by Merrill and colleagues — then again, that was after 40 years of Democratic control of the House.
Merrill and colleagues are now beginning to investigate whether cycles also occur in Britain. Merrill said their preliminary analysis suggests that there also seems to be cycling back and forth between liberal and conservative poles on roughly 26 or 28 year cycles going back to 1830, though there is more work to be done on the question.
For all parties concerned, the apparently inexorable wheel of political fortune offers important lessons. For the party in power, “They’d better take advantage of it,” Merrill said. “Their time will come, and it probably won’t be that long.” In other words, no use getting arrogant and thinking that there has been a permanent reordering of the political map. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen. Better to take advantage of the fleeting power to get things done.
And for the party out of power: patience. It’s only a matter of time before the party in power overreaches and before a new issue comes up that can turn the tables.
For those who value stability, all of this suggests that American democracy may be in good health after all, oscillating back and forth as it does around Schlesinger’s vital center.
“In a way, I feel better about American politics having done this,” Merrill said, “that there’s not going to be one party that stays in power forever.”
Democrats may be ascendant now, but don’t expect permanence. One recent study gives them about 13 years in power.
By: Lee Drutman
It was not so long ago that GOP strategist Karl Rove talked boldly of creating a “permanent Republican majority.” As it turned out, it was an elusive dream.
Of course, had he paid attention to American political history, he should have known better. No party ever holds power forever. It’s just a matter of how long.
But how long has long been a matter of debate. Arthur Schlesinger Sr. once famously suggested that American politics oscillated between liberal and conservative poles in predictable 30-year cycles. One recent study of American electoral political history suggests Schlesinger may have been on to something.
In order to test his prediction, Samuel Merrill III (a professor of mathematics and computer science at Wilkes University), Bernard Grofman (a professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine) and Thomas L. Brunell (a professor of political science at the University of Texas, Dallas) analyzed the Democratic seats from every U.S. House and Senate election since 1854, as well as the Democratic vote share of every presidential election since 1854.
Clear up-and-down patterns emerge. And when subjected to something called a spectral analysis (a statistical technique designed to decompose a time series into cycles of different lengths, similar to what scientists use to decompose white light into colors), the professors found the data have a clear peak around 13 periods — meaning that the U.S. government completes a full Democrat-to-Republican-to-Democrat cycle roughly every 26 years.
“It’s interesting that what we came up with really fit the Schlesinger predictions very well,” Merrill said. “But a lot of it is just gradual change, change that follows more like a sine curve than something abrupt. You have a cycling where the two are out of phase, each one affecting the other. You get a cycling that continues for a long time, not an equilibrium.”
A finding of gradual change goes against the “critical elections” theory of American politics — that is, that there are occasional crucial “realigning” elections that dramatically rewrite the electoral map for a generation to come, sort of like periodic earthquakes. (This theory, once prominent among scholars of American politics, is increasingly out of fashion — but perhaps there are cycles for theories, too.)
Rather than plate tectonics, Merrill and colleagues see more of a pendulum, in which centripetal and centrifugal forces pull the country and its political institutions back and forth along the political spectrum.
In an academic article describing their findings, they explain this in terms of a “Voter-Party Interaction Model.” The basic argument is that public opinion is centrist. But once a party gets into power, its leaders tend to push it to political extremes because they have more extreme policy agendas than the centrist public (hence, the centrifugal force).
But as years of polling show, the public responds to this. Public opinion almost always tends to move against the party in power. “Voters just seem to react more when something negative happens than when something positive happens, and negative things can accumulate,” Merrill said. “They take their toll after a period of time.”
Or as another Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., once put it, “Disappointment (is) a basic spring of political change.”
This, then, creates an opportunity for the minority party. It can move to the center to pick up enough public support to win back majority status (hence, the centripetal force). And then the minority party becomes the majority party, and the cycle begins anew.
But while Merrill and colleagues see things following a roughly consistent pattern, others are not so sure.
“I don’t think there are well-defined cycles,” said Edward G. Carmines, a professor of political science at Indiana University who has written about party alignments. “There are rough approximations of what might be called cycles … but not in a strict kind of 30-year pattern. I don’t think they’re highly predictable.”
Carmines instead sees a largely random element in the changing fortunes of the parties — essentially, driven new issues that periodically arise and split the electorate in new ways. “The things that make a party successful in a given era and in a given set of circumstances tend to lessen and erode,” Carmines said. “And the other party, wanting to be competitive, finds ways, sometimes through new issue conflicts, of gaining the upper hand.”
In Carmines’ view, the current Republican decline largely reflects a shift from Republican-friendly issues, with the war especially working against the GOP. In the view of Merrill and colleagues, the Republican downfall was the inevitable result of a period of the kind of creeping extremism and accumulating scandals that always happens to parties in power (though shifting issues may play a role as well).
Either way, opinion polls clearly show that after a period of Republican dominance, public opinion is currently moving in a liberal direction. According to studies by James A. Stimson, professor of political science at the University of North Carolina, “liberal mood” peaked in 1990, hit a trough in 2001 and is currently on its way back up. That Democrats won control of the U.S. House in 2006 after 12 years of Republican control neatly conforms to the 13-year half-cycle predicted by Merrill and colleagues — then again, that was after 40 years of Democratic control of the House.
Merrill and colleagues are now beginning to investigate whether cycles also occur in Britain. Merrill said their preliminary analysis suggests that there also seems to be cycling back and forth between liberal and conservative poles on roughly 26 or 28 year cycles going back to 1830, though there is more work to be done on the question.
For all parties concerned, the apparently inexorable wheel of political fortune offers important lessons. For the party in power, “They’d better take advantage of it,” Merrill said. “Their time will come, and it probably won’t be that long.” In other words, no use getting arrogant and thinking that there has been a permanent reordering of the political map. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen. Better to take advantage of the fleeting power to get things done.
And for the party out of power: patience. It’s only a matter of time before the party in power overreaches and before a new issue comes up that can turn the tables.
For those who value stability, all of this suggests that American democracy may be in good health after all, oscillating back and forth as it does around Schlesinger’s vital center.
“In a way, I feel better about American politics having done this,” Merrill said, “that there’s not going to be one party that stays in power forever.”
Friday, July 11, 2008
E-mails to Congress Add Up, But to What? - Miller-McCune
E-mails to Congress Add Up, But to What?
The percentage of citizens contacting their members of Congress has more than doubled, but both groups view each other with "mutual skepticism." What should be done?
By: Lee Drutman | July 08, 2008 |
If you're like most Web-oriented people, chances are you've come across an invitation to "contact your member of Congress" about some issue or other. You click through, and before you know it, you've added your name and participated in the great democratic process. As if nothing could be easier.
Add it up, and Congress is now receiving far more input than ever before. According to a new report by the Congressional Management Foundation, almost half (44 percent) of Americans say they've contacted a U.S. senator or representative over the last five years - a remarkable number, considering that in 2004, the American National Election Studies found that only 18 percent of Americans had expressed their views.
"People are not tuning out, they are tuning in," said Beverly Bell, executive director of the CMF. "There is a lot more public participation in the democratic process."
The reason appears pretty simple. As the report and those involved with it are quick to note, the Internet has made everything easier, from learning about the issues to effortlessly registering opinions about them.
"There is a new medium with which we can communicate with our representatives," said Dino Christenson, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Ohio State University who consulted extensively with the CMF in producing the report. "And it is quite possibly the medium that requires the very least amount of work on our part."
"And this makes a lot of sense given what we know about political participation," Christenson added. "People would be fine giving their opinion, but they're unlikely to do so given the amount of work it takes and the belief that doing so won't result in a change. But if you get an online petition, and it's as simple as filling in your name and clicking submit, then you're off to go."
And, mostly, it is opinions (not complaints) that citizens are generously sharing. Of those surveyed, 91 percent said the reason they contacted their member was "to voice my opinion on an issue before Congress." Only 13 percent were interested the more traditional constituent service and said that they wanted "to get help with a problem."
So how many e-mails does this add up to? According an earlier CMF report, Congress received 200 million communications in 2004 (about 90 percent through the Internet), as compared with 50 million in 1995. That number is probably even higher today.
But is that too much? Congressional staffs, after all, are no bigger than they were three decades ago, even as the amount of incoming communication has grown exponentially. And the report does note that congressional offices are growing increasingly skeptical as to how much of the unsolicited advice actually represents heartfelt concern from constituents, given how cheaply it can be generated. In the last few years, a growing number of congressional offices have even taken steps to create extra hurdles to being contacted via the Internet.
But Bell is quick to highlight the finding that 91 percent of respondents say they contacted Congress because they "care deeply about an issue," a figure she hopes will dispel some of the concern about this just being an explosion of ersatz e-pinions, "These are not just sheep doing something because somebody sent them an e-mail," she said.
From the perspectives of the citizens, the alleged contempt with which congressional offices view constituent opinion appears to be no secret. More than 3 in 5 respondents (62 percent) who contacted Congress said they didn't think that their senators and representatives were interested in what they had to say.
Part of this may be because members of Congress are not doing a particularly attentive job of responding.
Only 63 percent of respondents who contacted their members said they could remember getting a reply. Of those, only 47 percent said they were satisfied with it. Overall, only 30 percent of respondents who contacted Congress received a satisfactory response. The top two reasons for being dissatisfied? "Did not address concerns" (64 percent) and "Too politically biased" (51 percent).
But amid what she calls "mutual skepticism," Bell sees an opportunity. Citizens who are contacting Congress are actually very eager to learn more about what is going on in Washington (74 percent said they want to know more about their members' views and activities). And congressional offices could tap into that interest with a little bit of effort — putting more information about members' positions online, making more creative use of e-mail as a way of keeping constituents informed and also engaging active citizens more directly.
Unfortunately, CMF's 2007 "Golden Mouse" report rated 42 percent of Congressional Web sites as either substandard (23 percent received a grade of "D") or outright failing (19 percent received a grade of "F"). This suggests that a lot of congressional offices are missing out on an easy way to fill what appears to be a real demand for information about Washington.
But Congress' slowness to modernize is no surprise to Thomas T. Holyoke, a professor of political science at California State University, Fresno who also consulted on the report. "Capitol Hill has always had a reluctance to make changes in the way things are done," Holyoke said. "You've got members who have been there a while, and they feel like they've hit on magical formula to ensure electoral success, Capitol Hill didn't even really computerize until the mid-90s."
Another key finding is the crucial role that interest groups are playing in facilitating this communication. According to the report, 82 percent of those who contacted Capitol Hill did so at the request of a third-party group.
"The American public is looking to third parties for information and also to be alerted," Bell said. "They want them to be a first line of defense to let them know when something's coming up. Advocacy groups have moved into a very important niche in the democratic process."
But this makes Holyoke a little uneasy. He worries that interest groups make it "almost too easy perhaps" to participate — but only for those citizens who happen to share the opinions of the most well-organized groups. "You're emphasizing only one part of a member's constituency," he said. "What a member hears is a distorted sense of opinion in the district."
Despite the concerns, Bell said that the increased participation is generally a good thing, and that "overall, it's a positive report, and there are positive messages to take away." But she added that both citizens and congressional offices need to stop being so skeptical about each other's intentions. "Each side needs to give each other the benefit of the doubt," she said "There needs to be a change of mind-set that no tool can overcome."
The percentage of citizens contacting their members of Congress has more than doubled, but both groups view each other with "mutual skepticism." What should be done?
By: Lee Drutman | July 08, 2008 |
If you're like most Web-oriented people, chances are you've come across an invitation to "contact your member of Congress" about some issue or other. You click through, and before you know it, you've added your name and participated in the great democratic process. As if nothing could be easier.
Add it up, and Congress is now receiving far more input than ever before. According to a new report by the Congressional Management Foundation, almost half (44 percent) of Americans say they've contacted a U.S. senator or representative over the last five years - a remarkable number, considering that in 2004, the American National Election Studies found that only 18 percent of Americans had expressed their views.
"People are not tuning out, they are tuning in," said Beverly Bell, executive director of the CMF. "There is a lot more public participation in the democratic process."
The reason appears pretty simple. As the report and those involved with it are quick to note, the Internet has made everything easier, from learning about the issues to effortlessly registering opinions about them.
"There is a new medium with which we can communicate with our representatives," said Dino Christenson, a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Ohio State University who consulted extensively with the CMF in producing the report. "And it is quite possibly the medium that requires the very least amount of work on our part."
"And this makes a lot of sense given what we know about political participation," Christenson added. "People would be fine giving their opinion, but they're unlikely to do so given the amount of work it takes and the belief that doing so won't result in a change. But if you get an online petition, and it's as simple as filling in your name and clicking submit, then you're off to go."
And, mostly, it is opinions (not complaints) that citizens are generously sharing. Of those surveyed, 91 percent said the reason they contacted their member was "to voice my opinion on an issue before Congress." Only 13 percent were interested the more traditional constituent service and said that they wanted "to get help with a problem."
So how many e-mails does this add up to? According an earlier CMF report, Congress received 200 million communications in 2004 (about 90 percent through the Internet), as compared with 50 million in 1995. That number is probably even higher today.
But is that too much? Congressional staffs, after all, are no bigger than they were three decades ago, even as the amount of incoming communication has grown exponentially. And the report does note that congressional offices are growing increasingly skeptical as to how much of the unsolicited advice actually represents heartfelt concern from constituents, given how cheaply it can be generated. In the last few years, a growing number of congressional offices have even taken steps to create extra hurdles to being contacted via the Internet.
But Bell is quick to highlight the finding that 91 percent of respondents say they contacted Congress because they "care deeply about an issue," a figure she hopes will dispel some of the concern about this just being an explosion of ersatz e-pinions, "These are not just sheep doing something because somebody sent them an e-mail," she said.
From the perspectives of the citizens, the alleged contempt with which congressional offices view constituent opinion appears to be no secret. More than 3 in 5 respondents (62 percent) who contacted Congress said they didn't think that their senators and representatives were interested in what they had to say.
Part of this may be because members of Congress are not doing a particularly attentive job of responding.
Only 63 percent of respondents who contacted their members said they could remember getting a reply. Of those, only 47 percent said they were satisfied with it. Overall, only 30 percent of respondents who contacted Congress received a satisfactory response. The top two reasons for being dissatisfied? "Did not address concerns" (64 percent) and "Too politically biased" (51 percent).
But amid what she calls "mutual skepticism," Bell sees an opportunity. Citizens who are contacting Congress are actually very eager to learn more about what is going on in Washington (74 percent said they want to know more about their members' views and activities). And congressional offices could tap into that interest with a little bit of effort — putting more information about members' positions online, making more creative use of e-mail as a way of keeping constituents informed and also engaging active citizens more directly.
Unfortunately, CMF's 2007 "Golden Mouse" report rated 42 percent of Congressional Web sites as either substandard (23 percent received a grade of "D") or outright failing (19 percent received a grade of "F"). This suggests that a lot of congressional offices are missing out on an easy way to fill what appears to be a real demand for information about Washington.
But Congress' slowness to modernize is no surprise to Thomas T. Holyoke, a professor of political science at California State University, Fresno who also consulted on the report. "Capitol Hill has always had a reluctance to make changes in the way things are done," Holyoke said. "You've got members who have been there a while, and they feel like they've hit on magical formula to ensure electoral success, Capitol Hill didn't even really computerize until the mid-90s."
Another key finding is the crucial role that interest groups are playing in facilitating this communication. According to the report, 82 percent of those who contacted Capitol Hill did so at the request of a third-party group.
"The American public is looking to third parties for information and also to be alerted," Bell said. "They want them to be a first line of defense to let them know when something's coming up. Advocacy groups have moved into a very important niche in the democratic process."
But this makes Holyoke a little uneasy. He worries that interest groups make it "almost too easy perhaps" to participate — but only for those citizens who happen to share the opinions of the most well-organized groups. "You're emphasizing only one part of a member's constituency," he said. "What a member hears is a distorted sense of opinion in the district."
Despite the concerns, Bell said that the increased participation is generally a good thing, and that "overall, it's a positive report, and there are positive messages to take away." But she added that both citizens and congressional offices need to stop being so skeptical about each other's intentions. "Each side needs to give each other the benefit of the doubt," she said "There needs to be a change of mind-set that no tool can overcome."
Sunday, July 06, 2008
The Dumbest Generation -- LA Times
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-book5-2008jul05,0,3980465.story
From the Los Angeles Times
BOOK REVIEW
'The Dumbest Generation' by Mark Bauerlein
How dumb are we? Thanks to the Internet, dumb and dumber, this author writes.
By Lee Drutman
Special to The Times
July 5, 2008
In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day. That is, if you even bother to finish. If you are perusing this on the Internet, the big block of text below probably seems daunting, maybe even boring. Who has the time? Besides, one of your Facebook friends might have just posted a status update!
Such is the kind of recklessly distracted impatience that makes Mark Bauerlein fear for his country. "As of 2008," the 49-year-old professor of English at Emory University writes in "The Dumbest Generation," "the intellectual future of the United States looks dim."
The way Bauerlein sees it, something new and disastrous has happened to America's youth with the arrival of the instant gratification go-go-go digital age. The result is, essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of "enduring ideas and conflicts." Survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that America's youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a "brazen disregard of books and reading."
Things were not supposed to be this way. After all, "never have the opportunities for education, learning, political action, and cultural activity been greater," writes Bauerlein, a former director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. But somehow, he contends, the much-ballyhooed advances of this brave new world have not only failed to materialize -- they've actually made us dumber.
The problem is that instead of using the Web to learn about the wide world, young people instead mostly use it to gossip about each other and follow pop culture, relentlessly keeping up with the ever-shifting lingua franca of being cool in school. The two most popular websites by far among students are Facebook and MySpace. "Social life is a powerful temptation," Bauerlein explains, "and most teenagers feel the pain of missing out."
This ceaseless pipeline of peer-to-peer activity is worrisome, he argues, not only because it crowds out the more serious stuff but also because it strengthens what he calls the "pull of immaturity." Instead of connecting them with parents, teachers and other adult figures, "[t]he web . . . encourages more horizontal modeling, more raillery and mimicry of people the same age." When Bauerlein tells an audience of college students, "You are six times more likely to know who the latest American Idol is than you are to know who the speaker of the U.S. House is," a voice in the crowd tells him: " 'American Idol' IS more important."
Bauerlein also frets about the nature of the Internet itself, where people "seek out what they already hope to find, and they want it fast and free, with a minimum of effort." In entering a world where nobody ever has to stick with anything that bores or challenges them, "going online habituates them to juvenile mental habits."
And all this feeds on itself. Increasingly disconnected from the "adult" world of tradition, culture, history, context and the ability to sit down for more than five minutes with a book, today's digital generation is becoming insulated in its own stultifying cocoon of bad spelling, civic illiteracy and endless postings that hopelessly confuse triviality with transcendence. Two-thirds of U.S. undergraduates now score above average on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, up 30% since 1982, he reports.
At fault is not just technology but also a newly indulgent attitude among parents, educators and other mentors, who, Bauerlein argues, lack the courage to risk "being labeled a curmudgeon and a reactionary."
But is he? The natural (and anticipated) response would indeed be to dismiss him as your archetypal cranky old professor who just can't understand why "kids these days" don't find Shakespeare as timeless as he always has. Such alarmism ignores the context and history he accuses the youth of lacking -- the fact that mass ignorance and apathy have always been widespread in anti-intellectual America, especially among the youth. Maybe something is different this time. But, of course. Something is different every time.
The book's ultimate doomsday scenario -- of a dull and self-absorbed new generation of citizens falling prey to demagoguery and brazen power grabs -- seems at once overblown (witness, for example, this election season's youth reengagement in politics) and also yesterday's news (haven't we always been perilously close to this, if not already suffering from it?). But amid the sometimes annoyingly frantic warning bells that ding throughout "The Dumbest Generation," there are also some keen insights into how the new digital world really is changing the way young people engage with information and the obstacles they face in integrating any of it meaningfully. These are insights that educators, parents and other adults ignore at their peril.
Lee Drutman is co-author of "The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy."
The Dumbest Generation
How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, or Don't Trust Anyone Under 30 Mark Bauerlein
Tarcher/Penguin: 272 pp., $24.95
From the Los Angeles Times
BOOK REVIEW
'The Dumbest Generation' by Mark Bauerlein
How dumb are we? Thanks to the Internet, dumb and dumber, this author writes.
By Lee Drutman
Special to The Times
July 5, 2008
In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day. That is, if you even bother to finish. If you are perusing this on the Internet, the big block of text below probably seems daunting, maybe even boring. Who has the time? Besides, one of your Facebook friends might have just posted a status update!
Such is the kind of recklessly distracted impatience that makes Mark Bauerlein fear for his country. "As of 2008," the 49-year-old professor of English at Emory University writes in "The Dumbest Generation," "the intellectual future of the United States looks dim."
The way Bauerlein sees it, something new and disastrous has happened to America's youth with the arrival of the instant gratification go-go-go digital age. The result is, essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of "enduring ideas and conflicts." Survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that America's youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a "brazen disregard of books and reading."
Things were not supposed to be this way. After all, "never have the opportunities for education, learning, political action, and cultural activity been greater," writes Bauerlein, a former director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. But somehow, he contends, the much-ballyhooed advances of this brave new world have not only failed to materialize -- they've actually made us dumber.
The problem is that instead of using the Web to learn about the wide world, young people instead mostly use it to gossip about each other and follow pop culture, relentlessly keeping up with the ever-shifting lingua franca of being cool in school. The two most popular websites by far among students are Facebook and MySpace. "Social life is a powerful temptation," Bauerlein explains, "and most teenagers feel the pain of missing out."
This ceaseless pipeline of peer-to-peer activity is worrisome, he argues, not only because it crowds out the more serious stuff but also because it strengthens what he calls the "pull of immaturity." Instead of connecting them with parents, teachers and other adult figures, "[t]he web . . . encourages more horizontal modeling, more raillery and mimicry of people the same age." When Bauerlein tells an audience of college students, "You are six times more likely to know who the latest American Idol is than you are to know who the speaker of the U.S. House is," a voice in the crowd tells him: " 'American Idol' IS more important."
Bauerlein also frets about the nature of the Internet itself, where people "seek out what they already hope to find, and they want it fast and free, with a minimum of effort." In entering a world where nobody ever has to stick with anything that bores or challenges them, "going online habituates them to juvenile mental habits."
And all this feeds on itself. Increasingly disconnected from the "adult" world of tradition, culture, history, context and the ability to sit down for more than five minutes with a book, today's digital generation is becoming insulated in its own stultifying cocoon of bad spelling, civic illiteracy and endless postings that hopelessly confuse triviality with transcendence. Two-thirds of U.S. undergraduates now score above average on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, up 30% since 1982, he reports.
At fault is not just technology but also a newly indulgent attitude among parents, educators and other mentors, who, Bauerlein argues, lack the courage to risk "being labeled a curmudgeon and a reactionary."
But is he? The natural (and anticipated) response would indeed be to dismiss him as your archetypal cranky old professor who just can't understand why "kids these days" don't find Shakespeare as timeless as he always has. Such alarmism ignores the context and history he accuses the youth of lacking -- the fact that mass ignorance and apathy have always been widespread in anti-intellectual America, especially among the youth. Maybe something is different this time. But, of course. Something is different every time.
The book's ultimate doomsday scenario -- of a dull and self-absorbed new generation of citizens falling prey to demagoguery and brazen power grabs -- seems at once overblown (witness, for example, this election season's youth reengagement in politics) and also yesterday's news (haven't we always been perilously close to this, if not already suffering from it?). But amid the sometimes annoyingly frantic warning bells that ding throughout "The Dumbest Generation," there are also some keen insights into how the new digital world really is changing the way young people engage with information and the obstacles they face in integrating any of it meaningfully. These are insights that educators, parents and other adults ignore at their peril.
Lee Drutman is co-author of "The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy."
The Dumbest Generation
How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, or Don't Trust Anyone Under 30 Mark Bauerlein
Tarcher/Penguin: 272 pp., $24.95
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Three Fixes For Our Lobbyist Problem
Three Fixes For Our Lobbyist Problem
Forget money, lobbyists' real power comes from information. Here's three ideas that would reduce their influence on Congress and strengthen our democracy.
LEE DRUTMAN | June 5, 2008 | web only
In recent weeks, John McCain and Barack Obama have sparred over the role of lobbyists in their campaigns. While both are eager to position themselves as the candidate of reform, neither has proposed a plan that tackles the real sources of lobbyists' power. Real lobbying reform must start by acknowledging that control of information is as central to lobbyists' power as control of money.
To be sure, the fact that lobbyists contribute to campaigns and even help run them is important in building valuable relationships and goodwill. But relationships and goodwill only go so far. They may lead to improved access, but access is hardly an exclusive quantity these days and far, far from a guarantee of victory.
Lobbyists are influential because, as the main providers of policy information and expertise to policymakers, they increasingly define the terms of political debate. Even if we funded all elections publicly and banned lobbyists from running campaigns, they would still play a major role in the legislative processes for a simple reason: They know a lot of stuff. Increasingly, it is even lobbyists who are drafting the laws. Lobbyists like to say that Washington couldn't function without them. They may be right.
Policymaking, after all, is complicated business these days. Understanding most issues, especially those affecting business, now requires a level of expertise that, as generalists by necessity, few members of Congress possess. Even their staffers typically cover far too much ground to develop substantive expertise on anything in particular and rarely stay in one position long enough to overcome this handicap.
Staffers are also generally paid poorly to work long hours. As a result, once a staffer has developed some real proficiency in an area, the lobbying firms who inevitably come calling can offer triple or quadruple his or her salary for fewer hours of work. It's a hard offer to resist, especially for staffers who are feeling a little burnt out and trying to start a family,
And so, everywhere you turn on Capitol Hill, there are now large smiling teams of industry lobbyists committed to making themselves as "helpful" as possible -- providing information and research to policymakers and staffers (often the lobbyists' former colleagues), making sure that key decision-makers know all about the potential "unintended consequences" of an unwelcome piece of legislation, and explaining how to draft "win-win" laws. To a young and inexperienced staffer (and there are many), facts and figures on demand are a godsend, especially when time is short (as it almost always is). And even better if the lobbyist used to work just down the hall.
But what if Congress began to pay staffers more, hired more of them, and made it possible for them to work better, more family-friendly hours? Surely, they would be more likely stick around longer, becoming savvier customers of information with each passing year. They would be less likely to turn to lobbyists to make sense of the complexities of policy-making and also less likely to turn into lobbyists themselves, thus taking their knowledge of those complexities with them. Higher salaries and better working conditions would also mean Congress would be able to draw on a larger and more diverse talent pool in filling positions.
Additionally, Congress could bolster its independence from lobbyists by increasing the funding for the Congressional Research Service and Government Accountability Office, which turn out reports and investigate a wide range of policy issues. Again, the more information and expertise there is readily available from neutral sources, the less need members of Congress and their staffers will have for relying on private lobbyists.
It is also important to recognize that the advantage that big business enjoys in is nothing new. It has existed for as long as there have been lobbyists (though the extent of it has varied over the years), and it will remain as long as businesses can raise far more money for their lobbying groups than their opponents.
Consider an example: If big energy companies want to get together to fight new pollution regulations, it's very easy for a couple of CEOs who have everything at stake to take a few million dollars each from their multi-billion dollar general budget and spend it on lobbying. It's much harder for an environmental group to raise a similar amount of money from the millions of people who might each be only very slightly affected by the fate of the pollution regulations, and each of whom also probably figures somebody else out there will contribute to the environmental cause -- so why should they?
Social scientists call this the "collective action problem," and it helps to explain why roughly half the organizations in Washington represent business, while less than five percent could be classified as public interest groups (regardless of ideology).
One way to counter this seemingly inevitable law of biased representation would be for the government to support a cadre of public-interest lobbyists. These lobbyists would be available to represent any group that represents a sizeable diffuse public interest that is not being adequately represented in a policy debate.
There are a number of ways this might work. Groups could petition an office of public lobbying and get support for their causes based on the number of signatures above a certain threshold. The government could also do periodic issue polling on legislation under consideration, and if it found, say 25 percent or more support for a side that is not being represented, that side would get a public lobbyist. Causes would also have to prove that they are being outspent by more than, say, a 2-to-1 margin. Government could allocate assistance in proportion to both the public support of the cause and the resources being allocated on the other side.
Understandably, Americans are frustrated with the expanded role that lobbyists play in Washington, and they have good reason to be. Lobbyists overwhelmingly represent the narrow interests of the largest and most powerful corporations, and the policy outcomes they help shape often reflect that. But lobbyists also exist to solve a real need for expertise on the Hill. That is the real scandal about lobbying.
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=three_fixes_for_our__lobbyist_problem
Forget money, lobbyists' real power comes from information. Here's three ideas that would reduce their influence on Congress and strengthen our democracy.
LEE DRUTMAN | June 5, 2008 | web only
In recent weeks, John McCain and Barack Obama have sparred over the role of lobbyists in their campaigns. While both are eager to position themselves as the candidate of reform, neither has proposed a plan that tackles the real sources of lobbyists' power. Real lobbying reform must start by acknowledging that control of information is as central to lobbyists' power as control of money.
To be sure, the fact that lobbyists contribute to campaigns and even help run them is important in building valuable relationships and goodwill. But relationships and goodwill only go so far. They may lead to improved access, but access is hardly an exclusive quantity these days and far, far from a guarantee of victory.
Lobbyists are influential because, as the main providers of policy information and expertise to policymakers, they increasingly define the terms of political debate. Even if we funded all elections publicly and banned lobbyists from running campaigns, they would still play a major role in the legislative processes for a simple reason: They know a lot of stuff. Increasingly, it is even lobbyists who are drafting the laws. Lobbyists like to say that Washington couldn't function without them. They may be right.
Policymaking, after all, is complicated business these days. Understanding most issues, especially those affecting business, now requires a level of expertise that, as generalists by necessity, few members of Congress possess. Even their staffers typically cover far too much ground to develop substantive expertise on anything in particular and rarely stay in one position long enough to overcome this handicap.
Staffers are also generally paid poorly to work long hours. As a result, once a staffer has developed some real proficiency in an area, the lobbying firms who inevitably come calling can offer triple or quadruple his or her salary for fewer hours of work. It's a hard offer to resist, especially for staffers who are feeling a little burnt out and trying to start a family,
And so, everywhere you turn on Capitol Hill, there are now large smiling teams of industry lobbyists committed to making themselves as "helpful" as possible -- providing information and research to policymakers and staffers (often the lobbyists' former colleagues), making sure that key decision-makers know all about the potential "unintended consequences" of an unwelcome piece of legislation, and explaining how to draft "win-win" laws. To a young and inexperienced staffer (and there are many), facts and figures on demand are a godsend, especially when time is short (as it almost always is). And even better if the lobbyist used to work just down the hall.
But what if Congress began to pay staffers more, hired more of them, and made it possible for them to work better, more family-friendly hours? Surely, they would be more likely stick around longer, becoming savvier customers of information with each passing year. They would be less likely to turn to lobbyists to make sense of the complexities of policy-making and also less likely to turn into lobbyists themselves, thus taking their knowledge of those complexities with them. Higher salaries and better working conditions would also mean Congress would be able to draw on a larger and more diverse talent pool in filling positions.
Additionally, Congress could bolster its independence from lobbyists by increasing the funding for the Congressional Research Service and Government Accountability Office, which turn out reports and investigate a wide range of policy issues. Again, the more information and expertise there is readily available from neutral sources, the less need members of Congress and their staffers will have for relying on private lobbyists.
It is also important to recognize that the advantage that big business enjoys in is nothing new. It has existed for as long as there have been lobbyists (though the extent of it has varied over the years), and it will remain as long as businesses can raise far more money for their lobbying groups than their opponents.
Consider an example: If big energy companies want to get together to fight new pollution regulations, it's very easy for a couple of CEOs who have everything at stake to take a few million dollars each from their multi-billion dollar general budget and spend it on lobbying. It's much harder for an environmental group to raise a similar amount of money from the millions of people who might each be only very slightly affected by the fate of the pollution regulations, and each of whom also probably figures somebody else out there will contribute to the environmental cause -- so why should they?
Social scientists call this the "collective action problem," and it helps to explain why roughly half the organizations in Washington represent business, while less than five percent could be classified as public interest groups (regardless of ideology).
One way to counter this seemingly inevitable law of biased representation would be for the government to support a cadre of public-interest lobbyists. These lobbyists would be available to represent any group that represents a sizeable diffuse public interest that is not being adequately represented in a policy debate.
There are a number of ways this might work. Groups could petition an office of public lobbying and get support for their causes based on the number of signatures above a certain threshold. The government could also do periodic issue polling on legislation under consideration, and if it found, say 25 percent or more support for a side that is not being represented, that side would get a public lobbyist. Causes would also have to prove that they are being outspent by more than, say, a 2-to-1 margin. Government could allocate assistance in proportion to both the public support of the cause and the resources being allocated on the other side.
Understandably, Americans are frustrated with the expanded role that lobbyists play in Washington, and they have good reason to be. Lobbyists overwhelmingly represent the narrow interests of the largest and most powerful corporations, and the policy outcomes they help shape often reflect that. But lobbyists also exist to solve a real need for expertise on the Hill. That is the real scandal about lobbying.
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=three_fixes_for_our__lobbyist_problem
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Is the House of Representatives Too Small? - Miller-McCune
For the first 13 decades of its history, the U.S. House of Representatives was an ever-expanding institution. From 65 members in its vintage 1789 configuration, the lower chamber grew steadily with each new census count, accommodating the growing population of the country.
But a bigger House also meant a more unwieldy House. And so in 1911, Congress somewhat arbitrarily decided that 435 was enough already and set the number down in a statute. The House had gotten as big as it was going to be.
And so it has been ever since, even as the country has more than tripled in size. The average U.S. congressional district now contains roughly 640,000 citizens, as opposed to about 200,000 in 1911.
With so many people to keep up with, do relationships between the representatives and their constituents inevitably begin to fray? And if so, does this mean that the so-called "people's house" isn't really living up to its name anymore?
Brian Frederick, a professor of political science at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, thinks that things are heading that way. His research shows that as districts get bigger in population, constituents are less likely to report that they had contact with their member of Congress, less likely to think their member would be helpful, and less likely to favorably evaluate their member of Congress (and more likely to see their member as out of touch with the district).
These findings confirm what most theory on representation already suggests: Members from larger districts should have a harder time connecting with and thus representing their constituents. But until Frederick combined National Election Survey data with district and member characteristics, there was no solid empirical evidence to back it up.
Based on such findings, Frederick said he is now convinced that increasing the size of the U.S. House would, on balance, be a good idea. "It would make it easier for members to serve fewer constituents and a more homogenous constituency," he said. "It would allow for smaller geographic areas. There is something to be said for that kind of connection between members and their constituents."
It would also likely lead to better minority representation in Congress, Frederick noted, because it would create more majority-minority districts. (The representation of minorities lags behind their percentage of the general population. The U.S. population is 12.8 percent black and 14.4 percent Latino, but 9.4 percent and 5.1 percent in the U.S. House, respectively.)
But if the U.S. House were to add seats, how many should it have? Arend Lijphart, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, and a comparative scholar of democratic institutions, has argued for 650 seats.
That figure is based on the so-called "cube root law" of Rein Taagepera, who figured out that taking the cube root of a nation's population provided a remarkably good predictor of the size of that nation's lower house. By that logic, the U.S. was an outlier on the low side, with a House of 435 instead of the 669 that would now be expected given the U.S. population of 300 million. (Lijphart made his 650-seat recommendation in 1998, when the U.S. population was at 275 million.)
"When one looks at democracies around the world," Lijphart said, "there is a tendency for larger countries to have larger legislatures and smaller countries to have smaller legislatures. But we have a lower house with 435 members, which is less than both the British House of Commons and the German Bundestag, and Germany has 80 million people and Britain has 60 million people." (The Bundestag has 613 members; the House of Commons has 646 members and is slated to grow to 650 by the next election.)
On the other hand, the bigger the institution, the less smoothly it often operates. Generally, in larger institutions it becomes more challenging for members to get to know and trust each other, which in turn makes it more difficult to build the coalitions and consensus essential for smooth functioning.
"There is a fundamental trade-off," Frederick explained. "If you cap a representative institution at a number, you are sacrificing representation to some extent. Ideally everybody in a democratic society would represent themselves, but we know that's impractical. From an efficiency standpoint, it would be easiest to have one person make all the decisions. So we're trying to find some balance between that impossible dichotomy."
Among political reformers, meanwhile, pushing to increase the size of the House is a "sleeper of an issue," according to Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote, a national voting rights and democracy reform group. "People just haven't realized it can be changed."
Richie says he frequently uses the size of the House as an example of institutional inertia, and to show that there are some things that we just don't stop to think about. But with the 2010 census and subsequent redistricting coming up soon, Richie said that his organization plans to try to increase the profile of the issue.
The issue has been raised in Congress on occasion. Frederick said that what initially piqued his interest in the subject was hearing Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., complain how hard it was to represent 600,000 people. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., has regularly introduced legislation to create a committee to study the size of the House, as did former Rep. Pat Williams, D-Mont., though such legislation never really gained much momentum.
Public opinion also isn't particularly gung-ho on this reform. Frederick has done his own polling on the issue, and he found that only about 20 percent support increasing the size of the House, whereas 60 percent favor keeping it the same and 20 percent favor decreasing the size.
However, if people are asked if they'd support increasing the House so that no state would lose a seat following a census count (as frequently happens), support for the proposition goes up to 33 percent. And if people are asked whether they would support increasing the House to improve representation of minorities and women and create more open seats generally, support goes up to 48 percent, though almost all the support comes from Democrats, women and African Americans.
"You're asking people to support more politicians, to pay more salary, and to many people that may not be an easy cost to bear," Frederick said.
In other words, don't expect to see a mass popular uprising demanding a bigger House anytime soon. But as members themselves come under more and more strain from representing larger and larger districts, and as good government groups perhaps take a second look at this issue in advance of the 2010 census and subsequent redistricting, perhaps, for the first time in a century, this country will be ready for a serious discussion about whether the House of Representatives can still be the "people's house" when districts are as big as they are today.
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/376
But a bigger House also meant a more unwieldy House. And so in 1911, Congress somewhat arbitrarily decided that 435 was enough already and set the number down in a statute. The House had gotten as big as it was going to be.
And so it has been ever since, even as the country has more than tripled in size. The average U.S. congressional district now contains roughly 640,000 citizens, as opposed to about 200,000 in 1911.
With so many people to keep up with, do relationships between the representatives and their constituents inevitably begin to fray? And if so, does this mean that the so-called "people's house" isn't really living up to its name anymore?
Brian Frederick, a professor of political science at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, thinks that things are heading that way. His research shows that as districts get bigger in population, constituents are less likely to report that they had contact with their member of Congress, less likely to think their member would be helpful, and less likely to favorably evaluate their member of Congress (and more likely to see their member as out of touch with the district).
These findings confirm what most theory on representation already suggests: Members from larger districts should have a harder time connecting with and thus representing their constituents. But until Frederick combined National Election Survey data with district and member characteristics, there was no solid empirical evidence to back it up.
Based on such findings, Frederick said he is now convinced that increasing the size of the U.S. House would, on balance, be a good idea. "It would make it easier for members to serve fewer constituents and a more homogenous constituency," he said. "It would allow for smaller geographic areas. There is something to be said for that kind of connection between members and their constituents."
It would also likely lead to better minority representation in Congress, Frederick noted, because it would create more majority-minority districts. (The representation of minorities lags behind their percentage of the general population. The U.S. population is 12.8 percent black and 14.4 percent Latino, but 9.4 percent and 5.1 percent in the U.S. House, respectively.)
But if the U.S. House were to add seats, how many should it have? Arend Lijphart, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, and a comparative scholar of democratic institutions, has argued for 650 seats.
That figure is based on the so-called "cube root law" of Rein Taagepera, who figured out that taking the cube root of a nation's population provided a remarkably good predictor of the size of that nation's lower house. By that logic, the U.S. was an outlier on the low side, with a House of 435 instead of the 669 that would now be expected given the U.S. population of 300 million. (Lijphart made his 650-seat recommendation in 1998, when the U.S. population was at 275 million.)
"When one looks at democracies around the world," Lijphart said, "there is a tendency for larger countries to have larger legislatures and smaller countries to have smaller legislatures. But we have a lower house with 435 members, which is less than both the British House of Commons and the German Bundestag, and Germany has 80 million people and Britain has 60 million people." (The Bundestag has 613 members; the House of Commons has 646 members and is slated to grow to 650 by the next election.)
On the other hand, the bigger the institution, the less smoothly it often operates. Generally, in larger institutions it becomes more challenging for members to get to know and trust each other, which in turn makes it more difficult to build the coalitions and consensus essential for smooth functioning.
"There is a fundamental trade-off," Frederick explained. "If you cap a representative institution at a number, you are sacrificing representation to some extent. Ideally everybody in a democratic society would represent themselves, but we know that's impractical. From an efficiency standpoint, it would be easiest to have one person make all the decisions. So we're trying to find some balance between that impossible dichotomy."
Among political reformers, meanwhile, pushing to increase the size of the House is a "sleeper of an issue," according to Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote, a national voting rights and democracy reform group. "People just haven't realized it can be changed."
Richie says he frequently uses the size of the House as an example of institutional inertia, and to show that there are some things that we just don't stop to think about. But with the 2010 census and subsequent redistricting coming up soon, Richie said that his organization plans to try to increase the profile of the issue.
The issue has been raised in Congress on occasion. Frederick said that what initially piqued his interest in the subject was hearing Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., complain how hard it was to represent 600,000 people. Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., has regularly introduced legislation to create a committee to study the size of the House, as did former Rep. Pat Williams, D-Mont., though such legislation never really gained much momentum.
Public opinion also isn't particularly gung-ho on this reform. Frederick has done his own polling on the issue, and he found that only about 20 percent support increasing the size of the House, whereas 60 percent favor keeping it the same and 20 percent favor decreasing the size.
However, if people are asked if they'd support increasing the House so that no state would lose a seat following a census count (as frequently happens), support for the proposition goes up to 33 percent. And if people are asked whether they would support increasing the House to improve representation of minorities and women and create more open seats generally, support goes up to 48 percent, though almost all the support comes from Democrats, women and African Americans.
"You're asking people to support more politicians, to pay more salary, and to many people that may not be an easy cost to bear," Frederick said.
In other words, don't expect to see a mass popular uprising demanding a bigger House anytime soon. But as members themselves come under more and more strain from representing larger and larger districts, and as good government groups perhaps take a second look at this issue in advance of the 2010 census and subsequent redistricting, perhaps, for the first time in a century, this country will be ready for a serious discussion about whether the House of Representatives can still be the "people's house" when districts are as big as they are today.
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/376
Friday, May 16, 2008
CEOs fly closer to the golden sun - Providence Journal
Lee Drutman: CEOs fly closer to the golden sun
01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, May 15, 2008
LEE DRUTMAN
WASHINGTON
THOSE WACKY CEOs are at it again. Why look, there’s “crazy” Kenneth Chenault at American Express, raking in $46.23 million, even as the company’s stock fell 13 percent for the year. And there’s “rich” Richard Fuld Jr., of Lehman Brothers, bringing home 40 million in baco-bits while the company’s stock dipped 14 percent for the year. And don’t forget about Merrill Lynch’s John Thain, whose money train delivered a $78.52 million package, despite a 41-percent tumble in the company’s stock. And so on and so forth, a parade of designer suits whose lack of modesty is only outdone by their lack of modesty.
You might think that a down economy and the continued public outrage that CEOs make roughly 400 times the average worker and that new disclosure rules make it harder to hide perks and that shareholders have become more active in going after excessive pay have some impact, that it might at least put even a small dent in the golden cufflinks atop corporate America.
But alas. The new pay disclosures for 2007 are now public, and depending on whose analysis you like, CEO salaries at large publicly held companies are up between 5 and 12 percent, to between $11 million and $12 million, on average. Nobody, however, disputes the gravity-defying hot air keeping corporate executives soaring high, high in the sky.
So how does this keep happening? One reason seems to be that up in the rarified stratosphere that CEOs and their boards inhabit, a very special logic prevails. Worth reading on this subject is a book called The Myths and Realities of Executive Pay, by Ira T. Kay and Steven Van Putten, a pair of executive-pay consultants for Watson Wyatt Worldwide. (These are the guys whom companies hire to advise them on how much to pay the CEO — nice work if you can get it!) They reveal the self-serving claims that inspire such generous compensation: 1) the right CEO makes all the difference (forget anybody else in the company); 2) the pool of talent for executive leadership is exquisitely tiny (and remember the old saw about supply and demand); and 3) CEOs can only perform at full Apollo-like capacity if they are given a gazillion shares of company stock (incentives, incentives, incentives!).
Yet, too often the reality of these CEO pay packages is that they tend to overflow with the kinds of tails-you-win, heads-you-win-even-more incentives that insulate corporate leaders from the stakes of actually running a large company. Consider the case of KB Home CEO Jeffrey Metzger, who despite presiding over a $929 million loss (on $6.4 billion in revenue) still got a $6 million cash bonus for meeting “objectives.”
Or even better, take Bear Stearns, whose wanton foray into the wild world of mortgage speculation ended in a quite spectacular implosion. Pity CEO James Cayne. He had to trade in his stock for a mere $61 million, instead of the $1 billion he might have made had he been smart enough to sell it all at right time.
But don’t worry. Cayne, a 10-time national bridge champion, will be okay. He already has about $1 billion to his name. Perhaps, then, this was just for thrills. Why not gamble big and see if you can make it $2 billion? After all, beyond a few million, money becomes more a way of keeping score than anything else. Might as well go for the gold. Keep the hot air pumping! Closer, closer to the golden sun!
Meanwhile, back on the ground, the poor specs are struggling. According to the Economic Policy Institute, over the last 20 years, while the top 5 percent of America’s families have seen a 60 percent jump in their wealth, the bottom 20 percent have seen just an 11 percent rise (and if you control for inflation, 1 percent). The divide is growing, and if/when we are in a recession, we know who is going to have a harder time getting through it. We know which homeowners are being foreclosed on now and which get to keep their penthouse apartments.
The disconnect is obviously troubling, but it is at least historically accurate. At the top of the economy, there are always those who have figured out the game, so that no matter what else happens, they win. Problem is, it never lasts forever. Simple economics: If working-class Americans owe everything to the banks, they can’t keep buying new computers to keep the economy growing. Today’s levels of American inequality were last reached in 1928. And we all know what happened in 1929.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former writer for The Providence Journal and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, May 15, 2008
LEE DRUTMAN
WASHINGTON
THOSE WACKY CEOs are at it again. Why look, there’s “crazy” Kenneth Chenault at American Express, raking in $46.23 million, even as the company’s stock fell 13 percent for the year. And there’s “rich” Richard Fuld Jr., of Lehman Brothers, bringing home 40 million in baco-bits while the company’s stock dipped 14 percent for the year. And don’t forget about Merrill Lynch’s John Thain, whose money train delivered a $78.52 million package, despite a 41-percent tumble in the company’s stock. And so on and so forth, a parade of designer suits whose lack of modesty is only outdone by their lack of modesty.
You might think that a down economy and the continued public outrage that CEOs make roughly 400 times the average worker and that new disclosure rules make it harder to hide perks and that shareholders have become more active in going after excessive pay have some impact, that it might at least put even a small dent in the golden cufflinks atop corporate America.
But alas. The new pay disclosures for 2007 are now public, and depending on whose analysis you like, CEO salaries at large publicly held companies are up between 5 and 12 percent, to between $11 million and $12 million, on average. Nobody, however, disputes the gravity-defying hot air keeping corporate executives soaring high, high in the sky.
So how does this keep happening? One reason seems to be that up in the rarified stratosphere that CEOs and their boards inhabit, a very special logic prevails. Worth reading on this subject is a book called The Myths and Realities of Executive Pay, by Ira T. Kay and Steven Van Putten, a pair of executive-pay consultants for Watson Wyatt Worldwide. (These are the guys whom companies hire to advise them on how much to pay the CEO — nice work if you can get it!) They reveal the self-serving claims that inspire such generous compensation: 1) the right CEO makes all the difference (forget anybody else in the company); 2) the pool of talent for executive leadership is exquisitely tiny (and remember the old saw about supply and demand); and 3) CEOs can only perform at full Apollo-like capacity if they are given a gazillion shares of company stock (incentives, incentives, incentives!).
Yet, too often the reality of these CEO pay packages is that they tend to overflow with the kinds of tails-you-win, heads-you-win-even-more incentives that insulate corporate leaders from the stakes of actually running a large company. Consider the case of KB Home CEO Jeffrey Metzger, who despite presiding over a $929 million loss (on $6.4 billion in revenue) still got a $6 million cash bonus for meeting “objectives.”
Or even better, take Bear Stearns, whose wanton foray into the wild world of mortgage speculation ended in a quite spectacular implosion. Pity CEO James Cayne. He had to trade in his stock for a mere $61 million, instead of the $1 billion he might have made had he been smart enough to sell it all at right time.
But don’t worry. Cayne, a 10-time national bridge champion, will be okay. He already has about $1 billion to his name. Perhaps, then, this was just for thrills. Why not gamble big and see if you can make it $2 billion? After all, beyond a few million, money becomes more a way of keeping score than anything else. Might as well go for the gold. Keep the hot air pumping! Closer, closer to the golden sun!
Meanwhile, back on the ground, the poor specs are struggling. According to the Economic Policy Institute, over the last 20 years, while the top 5 percent of America’s families have seen a 60 percent jump in their wealth, the bottom 20 percent have seen just an 11 percent rise (and if you control for inflation, 1 percent). The divide is growing, and if/when we are in a recession, we know who is going to have a harder time getting through it. We know which homeowners are being foreclosed on now and which get to keep their penthouse apartments.
The disconnect is obviously troubling, but it is at least historically accurate. At the top of the economy, there are always those who have figured out the game, so that no matter what else happens, they win. Problem is, it never lasts forever. Simple economics: If working-class Americans owe everything to the banks, they can’t keep buying new computers to keep the economy growing. Today’s levels of American inequality were last reached in 1928. And we all know what happened in 1929.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former writer for The Providence Journal and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
The Minority Legislative Gap - MillerMcCune.com
POLITICS
The Minority Legislative Gap
Despite increasing representation in the U.S. Congress, minority representatives still lag behind their white colleagues in legislative activity — and minority-majority districts set up to increase their power may contribute to the lag.
By: Lee Drutman | April 16, 2008
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/306
When it comes to increasing diversity in the U.S. Congress, the representation rates of minorities have gotten better in recent years. Just how much better depends on your evaluation of minority representation.
Over the past two decades, the number of African Americans in the House of Representatives has grown from 27 to 41, and the number of Hispanic representatives has grown from 11 to 22. While this lags the groups’ overall share of the U.S. population (12.8 percent for blacks and 14.4 percent for Latinos, as compared with 9.4 percent and 5.1 percent in the House, respectively), it is getting closer, thanks in part to a growing number of majority-minority congressional districts.
Does this translate into increasing substantive representation for the concerns of blacks and Latinos in Congress?
Not necessarily, say two political scientists who have studied the legislative behavior of minorities in the U.S. House of Representatives. Professors Michael S. Rocca and Gabriel R. Sanchez, both of the University of New Mexico, report in the January issue of American Politics Research that, over the last two decades, both blacks and Latinos have sponsored or co-sponsored legislation at roughly 75 percent of the rate of their white colleagues.
This is significant, the professors argue, because legislating is a key aspect of being a legislator. If black and Latino members are introducing and co-sponsoring fewer bills, how effectively are they advancing the concerns of minorities?
“The academic side of me was not surprised, based on everything that’s been written about blacks and Latinos in Congress over the past 20 years,” said Rocca. “But a more personal side of me was shocked.”
One reason to think that minorities are less active is a line of scholarship that describes Congress as a “racialized institution” in which ethnic minorities, because of their smaller numbers and limited history of participation, remain on the outskirts of the networks of power.
“You’ve heard of the good-old-boy phenomenon,” explained Sanchez. “Like many institutions, like Fortune 500 companies, the power players in Congress who decide how the agenda gets shaped tend to be nonminority, and their interests and backgrounds and experiences are disconnected from the average minority. There’s something like a glass ceiling that provides an obstacle to minorities having more influence, because they’re not part of that network.”
One possible — and controversial — implication of these findings, Sanchez notes, is that if Congress really is a racialized institution as the sponsorship and co-sponsorship numbers suggest, majority-minority districts may not lead to the most effective representation for minorities.
“There’s a lot of literature on descriptive representation about the need to have diversity in Congress, because it’s important for Hispanics to see Hispanic representatives,” Sanchez said. “But (our findings) might lead you to ask whether it would be better for a heavily Latino district to have a non-Latino representative — if that might be more effective. It might cause you to rethink the value of descriptive representation.”
Such a rethinking would be quite significant because it goes against several decades of efforts to get more minority members into national office. Sanchez, however, wonders whether such efforts failed to consider the realities of congressional behavior that make it harder for minority members to actually advance the causes of their constituents. “If they’re less active in co-sponsoring and sponsoring bills,” he said, “it means they’re less responsive to their districts.”
The professors also investigated the sponsorship and co-sponsorship activities of female legislators, since received wisdom on Congress suggests that, in addition to being a “racialized institution,” Congress is a “gendered institution” in which men dominate. But women actually sponsor and co-sponsor more legislation than men. In part, Rocca and Sanchez argue, this is because women are not clustered into specific districts but spread out across both parties, giving the leadership of both parties more incentives to make sure female lawmakers are active participants.
One thing that jumped out in the professors’ analysis was the difference in the minority-white legislation gap depending on which party controlled Congress. In Republican-controlled Congresses, African-American members sponsored, on average, 11.4 bills; Hispanic-Americans sponsored, on average, 10.4 bills; and whites sponsored, on average, 14.8 bills.
Under the Democrats (back before the Republicans took over in 1995; the scholars haven’t analyzed the current congress yet), whites sponsored, on average, 16.7 bills; African Americans sponsored, on average, 14.8 bills; and Latinos sponsored, on average, 17 bills (although a significant part of that was the work of one particularly active congressman in the early 1990s, current New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat).
This makes sense, the scholars say, because most minorities in Congress are Democrats (85 percent of Latinos and 97 percent of blacks). When Democrats are in power, minorities are closer to the center of power.
Additionally, because many of these members come from heavily Democratic majority-minority districts, they lean toward the liberal end of the political spectrum. So issues they might like to legislate on, such as redistributive tax policy, social welfare and civil rights, are so far from what the Republican leaders would consider that perhaps they see no point in wasting their effort. Instead, they do what they can in other areas, like making floor speeches or focusing on constituent services. (The professors also didn’t make judgments about the “quality” or import of the bills introduced, only the raw number.)
“If you think about it strategically,” said Rocca, “the interests that minorities typically represent aren’t going to be well represented on the Republican agenda. So, if you have no chance that a bill is going to pass, you won’t bother. Why go through all that work if it is not going to go anywhere?”
Now that Democrats are back in the majority, both African Americans and Latinos are in prominent positions in the House. Charles B. Rangel, D-N.Y., now heads the powerful Committee on Ways and Means; John Conyers, D-Mich., heads the Judiciary Committee; and Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, heads the Intelligence Committee.
Will this translate into better substantive representation of minorities? The professors have some doubts. Leadership also means compromise, and compromise may mean putting onto the back burner more controversial issues that minorities tend to care most about. “Now that they are party leaders, they are getting pressure from other areas,” Rocca said.
But Sanchez remains hopeful. “We’re wondering, if you look at this 20 years from now, whether minorities will reach a critical mass in Congress,” he said. “The rates overall are increasing substantially, and if they continue at that pace, I think they’ll reach a critical mass enough in Congress so that they’ll no longer be disadvantaged.”
The Minority Legislative Gap
Despite increasing representation in the U.S. Congress, minority representatives still lag behind their white colleagues in legislative activity — and minority-majority districts set up to increase their power may contribute to the lag.
By: Lee Drutman | April 16, 2008
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/306
When it comes to increasing diversity in the U.S. Congress, the representation rates of minorities have gotten better in recent years. Just how much better depends on your evaluation of minority representation.
Over the past two decades, the number of African Americans in the House of Representatives has grown from 27 to 41, and the number of Hispanic representatives has grown from 11 to 22. While this lags the groups’ overall share of the U.S. population (12.8 percent for blacks and 14.4 percent for Latinos, as compared with 9.4 percent and 5.1 percent in the House, respectively), it is getting closer, thanks in part to a growing number of majority-minority congressional districts.
Does this translate into increasing substantive representation for the concerns of blacks and Latinos in Congress?
Not necessarily, say two political scientists who have studied the legislative behavior of minorities in the U.S. House of Representatives. Professors Michael S. Rocca and Gabriel R. Sanchez, both of the University of New Mexico, report in the January issue of American Politics Research that, over the last two decades, both blacks and Latinos have sponsored or co-sponsored legislation at roughly 75 percent of the rate of their white colleagues.
This is significant, the professors argue, because legislating is a key aspect of being a legislator. If black and Latino members are introducing and co-sponsoring fewer bills, how effectively are they advancing the concerns of minorities?
“The academic side of me was not surprised, based on everything that’s been written about blacks and Latinos in Congress over the past 20 years,” said Rocca. “But a more personal side of me was shocked.”
One reason to think that minorities are less active is a line of scholarship that describes Congress as a “racialized institution” in which ethnic minorities, because of their smaller numbers and limited history of participation, remain on the outskirts of the networks of power.
“You’ve heard of the good-old-boy phenomenon,” explained Sanchez. “Like many institutions, like Fortune 500 companies, the power players in Congress who decide how the agenda gets shaped tend to be nonminority, and their interests and backgrounds and experiences are disconnected from the average minority. There’s something like a glass ceiling that provides an obstacle to minorities having more influence, because they’re not part of that network.”
One possible — and controversial — implication of these findings, Sanchez notes, is that if Congress really is a racialized institution as the sponsorship and co-sponsorship numbers suggest, majority-minority districts may not lead to the most effective representation for minorities.
“There’s a lot of literature on descriptive representation about the need to have diversity in Congress, because it’s important for Hispanics to see Hispanic representatives,” Sanchez said. “But (our findings) might lead you to ask whether it would be better for a heavily Latino district to have a non-Latino representative — if that might be more effective. It might cause you to rethink the value of descriptive representation.”
Such a rethinking would be quite significant because it goes against several decades of efforts to get more minority members into national office. Sanchez, however, wonders whether such efforts failed to consider the realities of congressional behavior that make it harder for minority members to actually advance the causes of their constituents. “If they’re less active in co-sponsoring and sponsoring bills,” he said, “it means they’re less responsive to their districts.”
The professors also investigated the sponsorship and co-sponsorship activities of female legislators, since received wisdom on Congress suggests that, in addition to being a “racialized institution,” Congress is a “gendered institution” in which men dominate. But women actually sponsor and co-sponsor more legislation than men. In part, Rocca and Sanchez argue, this is because women are not clustered into specific districts but spread out across both parties, giving the leadership of both parties more incentives to make sure female lawmakers are active participants.
One thing that jumped out in the professors’ analysis was the difference in the minority-white legislation gap depending on which party controlled Congress. In Republican-controlled Congresses, African-American members sponsored, on average, 11.4 bills; Hispanic-Americans sponsored, on average, 10.4 bills; and whites sponsored, on average, 14.8 bills.
Under the Democrats (back before the Republicans took over in 1995; the scholars haven’t analyzed the current congress yet), whites sponsored, on average, 16.7 bills; African Americans sponsored, on average, 14.8 bills; and Latinos sponsored, on average, 17 bills (although a significant part of that was the work of one particularly active congressman in the early 1990s, current New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat).
This makes sense, the scholars say, because most minorities in Congress are Democrats (85 percent of Latinos and 97 percent of blacks). When Democrats are in power, minorities are closer to the center of power.
Additionally, because many of these members come from heavily Democratic majority-minority districts, they lean toward the liberal end of the political spectrum. So issues they might like to legislate on, such as redistributive tax policy, social welfare and civil rights, are so far from what the Republican leaders would consider that perhaps they see no point in wasting their effort. Instead, they do what they can in other areas, like making floor speeches or focusing on constituent services. (The professors also didn’t make judgments about the “quality” or import of the bills introduced, only the raw number.)
“If you think about it strategically,” said Rocca, “the interests that minorities typically represent aren’t going to be well represented on the Republican agenda. So, if you have no chance that a bill is going to pass, you won’t bother. Why go through all that work if it is not going to go anywhere?”
Now that Democrats are back in the majority, both African Americans and Latinos are in prominent positions in the House. Charles B. Rangel, D-N.Y., now heads the powerful Committee on Ways and Means; John Conyers, D-Mich., heads the Judiciary Committee; and Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, heads the Intelligence Committee.
Will this translate into better substantive representation of minorities? The professors have some doubts. Leadership also means compromise, and compromise may mean putting onto the back burner more controversial issues that minorities tend to care most about. “Now that they are party leaders, they are getting pressure from other areas,” Rocca said.
But Sanchez remains hopeful. “We’re wondering, if you look at this 20 years from now, whether minorities will reach a critical mass in Congress,” he said. “The rates overall are increasing substantially, and if they continue at that pace, I think they’ll reach a critical mass enough in Congress so that they’ll no longer be disadvantaged.”
The Minority Legislative Gap - MillerMcCune.com
POLITICS
The Minority Legislative Gap
Despite increasing representation in the U.S. Congress, minority representatives still lag behind their white colleagues in legislative activity — and minority-majority districts set up to increase their power may contribute to the lag.
By: Lee Drutman | April 16, 2008
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/306
When it comes to increasing diversity in the U.S. Congress, the representation rates of minorities have gotten better in recent years. Just how much better depends on your evaluation of minority representation.
Over the past two decades, the number of African Americans in the House of Representatives has grown from 27 to 41, and the number of Hispanic representatives has grown from 11 to 22. While this lags the groups’ overall share of the U.S. population (12.8 percent for blacks and 14.4 percent for Latinos, as compared with 9.4 percent and 5.1 percent in the House, respectively), it is getting closer, thanks in part to a growing number of majority-minority congressional districts.
Does this translate into increasing substantive representation for the concerns of blacks and Latinos in Congress?
Not necessarily, say two political scientists who have studied the legislative behavior of minorities in the U.S. House of Representatives. Professors Michael S. Rocca and Gabriel R. Sanchez, both of the University of New Mexico, report in the January issue of American Politics Research that, over the last two decades, both blacks and Latinos have sponsored or co-sponsored legislation at roughly 75 percent of the rate of their white colleagues.
This is significant, the professors argue, because legislating is a key aspect of being a legislator. If black and Latino members are introducing and co-sponsoring fewer bills, how effectively are they advancing the concerns of minorities?
“The academic side of me was not surprised, based on everything that’s been written about blacks and Latinos in Congress over the past 20 years,” said Rocca. “But a more personal side of me was shocked.”
One reason to think that minorities are less active is a line of scholarship that describes Congress as a “racialized institution” in which ethnic minorities, because of their smaller numbers and limited history of participation, remain on the outskirts of the networks of power.
“You’ve heard of the good-old-boy phenomenon,” explained Sanchez. “Like many institutions, like Fortune 500 companies, the power players in Congress who decide how the agenda gets shaped tend to be nonminority, and their interests and backgrounds and experiences are disconnected from the average minority. There’s something like a glass ceiling that provides an obstacle to minorities having more influence, because they’re not part of that network.”
One possible — and controversial — implication of these findings, Sanchez notes, is that if Congress really is a racialized institution as the sponsorship and co-sponsorship numbers suggest, majority-minority districts may not lead to the most effective representation for minorities.
“There’s a lot of literature on descriptive representation about the need to have diversity in Congress, because it’s important for Hispanics to see Hispanic representatives,” Sanchez said. “But (our findings) might lead you to ask whether it would be better for a heavily Latino district to have a non-Latino representative — if that might be more effective. It might cause you to rethink the value of descriptive representation.”
Such a rethinking would be quite significant because it goes against several decades of efforts to get more minority members into national office. Sanchez, however, wonders whether such efforts failed to consider the realities of congressional behavior that make it harder for minority members to actually advance the causes of their constituents. “If they’re less active in co-sponsoring and sponsoring bills,” he said, “it means they’re less responsive to their districts.”
The professors also investigated the sponsorship and co-sponsorship activities of female legislators, since received wisdom on Congress suggests that, in addition to being a “racialized institution,” Congress is a “gendered institution” in which men dominate. But women actually sponsor and co-sponsor more legislation than men. In part, Rocca and Sanchez argue, this is because women are not clustered into specific districts but spread out across both parties, giving the leadership of both parties more incentives to make sure female lawmakers are active participants.
One thing that jumped out in the professors’ analysis was the difference in the minority-white legislation gap depending on which party controlled Congress. In Republican-controlled Congresses, African-American members sponsored, on average, 11.4 bills; Hispanic-Americans sponsored, on average, 10.4 bills; and whites sponsored, on average, 14.8 bills.
Under the Democrats (back before the Republicans took over in 1995; the scholars haven’t analyzed the current congress yet), whites sponsored, on average, 16.7 bills; African Americans sponsored, on average, 14.8 bills; and Latinos sponsored, on average, 17 bills (although a significant part of that was the work of one particularly active congressman in the early 1990s, current New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat).
This makes sense, the scholars say, because most minorities in Congress are Democrats (85 percent of Latinos and 97 percent of blacks). When Democrats are in power, minorities are closer to the center of power.
Additionally, because many of these members come from heavily Democratic majority-minority districts, they lean toward the liberal end of the political spectrum. So issues they might like to legislate on, such as redistributive tax policy, social welfare and civil rights, are so far from what the Republican leaders would consider that perhaps they see no point in wasting their effort. Instead, they do what they can in other areas, like making floor speeches or focusing on constituent services. (The professors also didn’t make judgments about the “quality” or import of the bills introduced, only the raw number.)
“If you think about it strategically,” said Rocca, “the interests that minorities typically represent aren’t going to be well represented on the Republican agenda. So, if you have no chance that a bill is going to pass, you won’t bother. Why go through all that work if it is not going to go anywhere?”
Now that Democrats are back in the majority, both African Americans and Latinos are in prominent positions in the House. Charles B. Rangel, D-N.Y., now heads the powerful Committee on Ways and Means; John Conyers, D-Mich., heads the Judiciary Committee; and Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, heads the Intelligence Committee.
Will this translate into better substantive representation of minorities? The professors have some doubts. Leadership also means compromise, and compromise may mean putting onto the back burner more controversial issues that minorities tend to care most about. “Now that they are party leaders, they are getting pressure from other areas,” Rocca said.
But Sanchez remains hopeful. “We’re wondering, if you look at this 20 years from now, whether minorities will reach a critical mass in Congress,” he said. “The rates overall are increasing substantially, and if they continue at that pace, I think they’ll reach a critical mass enough in Congress so that they’ll no longer be disadvantaged.”
The Minority Legislative Gap
Despite increasing representation in the U.S. Congress, minority representatives still lag behind their white colleagues in legislative activity — and minority-majority districts set up to increase their power may contribute to the lag.
By: Lee Drutman | April 16, 2008
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/306
When it comes to increasing diversity in the U.S. Congress, the representation rates of minorities have gotten better in recent years. Just how much better depends on your evaluation of minority representation.
Over the past two decades, the number of African Americans in the House of Representatives has grown from 27 to 41, and the number of Hispanic representatives has grown from 11 to 22. While this lags the groups’ overall share of the U.S. population (12.8 percent for blacks and 14.4 percent for Latinos, as compared with 9.4 percent and 5.1 percent in the House, respectively), it is getting closer, thanks in part to a growing number of majority-minority congressional districts.
Does this translate into increasing substantive representation for the concerns of blacks and Latinos in Congress?
Not necessarily, say two political scientists who have studied the legislative behavior of minorities in the U.S. House of Representatives. Professors Michael S. Rocca and Gabriel R. Sanchez, both of the University of New Mexico, report in the January issue of American Politics Research that, over the last two decades, both blacks and Latinos have sponsored or co-sponsored legislation at roughly 75 percent of the rate of their white colleagues.
This is significant, the professors argue, because legislating is a key aspect of being a legislator. If black and Latino members are introducing and co-sponsoring fewer bills, how effectively are they advancing the concerns of minorities?
“The academic side of me was not surprised, based on everything that’s been written about blacks and Latinos in Congress over the past 20 years,” said Rocca. “But a more personal side of me was shocked.”
One reason to think that minorities are less active is a line of scholarship that describes Congress as a “racialized institution” in which ethnic minorities, because of their smaller numbers and limited history of participation, remain on the outskirts of the networks of power.
“You’ve heard of the good-old-boy phenomenon,” explained Sanchez. “Like many institutions, like Fortune 500 companies, the power players in Congress who decide how the agenda gets shaped tend to be nonminority, and their interests and backgrounds and experiences are disconnected from the average minority. There’s something like a glass ceiling that provides an obstacle to minorities having more influence, because they’re not part of that network.”
One possible — and controversial — implication of these findings, Sanchez notes, is that if Congress really is a racialized institution as the sponsorship and co-sponsorship numbers suggest, majority-minority districts may not lead to the most effective representation for minorities.
“There’s a lot of literature on descriptive representation about the need to have diversity in Congress, because it’s important for Hispanics to see Hispanic representatives,” Sanchez said. “But (our findings) might lead you to ask whether it would be better for a heavily Latino district to have a non-Latino representative — if that might be more effective. It might cause you to rethink the value of descriptive representation.”
Such a rethinking would be quite significant because it goes against several decades of efforts to get more minority members into national office. Sanchez, however, wonders whether such efforts failed to consider the realities of congressional behavior that make it harder for minority members to actually advance the causes of their constituents. “If they’re less active in co-sponsoring and sponsoring bills,” he said, “it means they’re less responsive to their districts.”
The professors also investigated the sponsorship and co-sponsorship activities of female legislators, since received wisdom on Congress suggests that, in addition to being a “racialized institution,” Congress is a “gendered institution” in which men dominate. But women actually sponsor and co-sponsor more legislation than men. In part, Rocca and Sanchez argue, this is because women are not clustered into specific districts but spread out across both parties, giving the leadership of both parties more incentives to make sure female lawmakers are active participants.
One thing that jumped out in the professors’ analysis was the difference in the minority-white legislation gap depending on which party controlled Congress. In Republican-controlled Congresses, African-American members sponsored, on average, 11.4 bills; Hispanic-Americans sponsored, on average, 10.4 bills; and whites sponsored, on average, 14.8 bills.
Under the Democrats (back before the Republicans took over in 1995; the scholars haven’t analyzed the current congress yet), whites sponsored, on average, 16.7 bills; African Americans sponsored, on average, 14.8 bills; and Latinos sponsored, on average, 17 bills (although a significant part of that was the work of one particularly active congressman in the early 1990s, current New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat).
This makes sense, the scholars say, because most minorities in Congress are Democrats (85 percent of Latinos and 97 percent of blacks). When Democrats are in power, minorities are closer to the center of power.
Additionally, because many of these members come from heavily Democratic majority-minority districts, they lean toward the liberal end of the political spectrum. So issues they might like to legislate on, such as redistributive tax policy, social welfare and civil rights, are so far from what the Republican leaders would consider that perhaps they see no point in wasting their effort. Instead, they do what they can in other areas, like making floor speeches or focusing on constituent services. (The professors also didn’t make judgments about the “quality” or import of the bills introduced, only the raw number.)
“If you think about it strategically,” said Rocca, “the interests that minorities typically represent aren’t going to be well represented on the Republican agenda. So, if you have no chance that a bill is going to pass, you won’t bother. Why go through all that work if it is not going to go anywhere?”
Now that Democrats are back in the majority, both African Americans and Latinos are in prominent positions in the House. Charles B. Rangel, D-N.Y., now heads the powerful Committee on Ways and Means; John Conyers, D-Mich., heads the Judiciary Committee; and Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, heads the Intelligence Committee.
Will this translate into better substantive representation of minorities? The professors have some doubts. Leadership also means compromise, and compromise may mean putting onto the back burner more controversial issues that minorities tend to care most about. “Now that they are party leaders, they are getting pressure from other areas,” Rocca said.
But Sanchez remains hopeful. “We’re wondering, if you look at this 20 years from now, whether minorities will reach a critical mass in Congress,” he said. “The rates overall are increasing substantially, and if they continue at that pace, I think they’ll reach a critical mass enough in Congress so that they’ll no longer be disadvantaged.”
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
The bathos of the Blogosphere -- Providence Journal
Lee Drutman: The bathos of the Blogosphere
01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, April 15, 2008
LEE DRUTMAN
WASHINGTON
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_drutman15_04-15-08_7A9NFH4_v19.39d4902.html#
APPARENTLY, if you spend too much time at home churning out non-stop verbiage for the insatiable World Wide Web, you may die of it. So warns a recent New York Times article, which, upon the unexpected deaths of two middle-aged bloggers in one week, connects the dots and declares blogging a “digital-era sweatshop.” (“They work long hours, often to exhaustion,” the article begins. “Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts.”)
At long last, the dark underbelly of the Internet revealed! An army of pallid content-mules chained to their computers (no fresh air for them!), typing away furiously at all hours so that somebody, somewhere, will have yet another thing to read.
But, caricatures and health issues aside, there is something troubling about this increasingly non-stop go-go-go blogging world, this odd pressure to be able to throw up an immediate response to every new development, regardless of one’s understanding of the subject, and far in excess of what anyone wants to read (even if some of us feel compelled to try to read it all just to remain “in the know”). Such appears to be logic of the 24/7/365 global knowledge economy: If you don’t put up that quarter-baked bon mot right away, somebody else probably will. And then there go your unique page views, and with them the trickle of advertising that just barely pays the rent and puts ramen on the table.
Now, it is often said that this new world of blogging is good for democracy, because it broadens the conversation and lets more people participate. I don’t know. I’ve read the message boards on these blogs. It seems to me more like any angry shouting match than a conversation worthy of Deweyan deliberative democracy.
And as University of Chicago Law Prof. Cass Sunstein has noted, the Internet makes it that much easier to inhabit an insular intellectual environment in which one’s ideas are rarely seriously challenged, the sad result being that “deliberation” leads mostly to a kind of extremism in which the same basic talking points are over time masticated into an unshakable worldview. Here, the metaphor of never leaving one’s apartment is too good to resist.
Moreover, in the few years that blogging has exploded, a few particularly prolific bloggers seem to have emerged as the new Internet power elite, and the distribution of influence in the blogosphere can hardly be said to be democratic anymore, if it ever was. But these new gatekeepers have even more arbitrary qualifications than the old gatekeepers, who at least had to work their way up the proving grounds of the editorial ladder over decades.
But the biggest problem is that instant-comment pressures inherent in the Blogosphere sweatshop generate a reflexive (as opposed to thoughtful) political discourse. It’s not so hard to pull a few generic talking points off the shelf, throw in a few clever turns of phrase, and link to the latest Washington Post article on the war or the election, all in a matter of minutes. The problem is it’s the same talking points over and over again, and so round and round we go, from the bed to the computer and back to the bed again, never going for a contemplative walk in the fresh air, perhaps to come across new insights and observations.
In such a world, the perambulating scholar and essayist is out of luck. The day belongs to the caffeinated neophyte who has yet to be slowed down by the twin demons of doubt and nuance. Read one book on a subject, and you can become an authority. But read 10, and you’ve missed your chance.
Surely, the exigencies of the Internet economy are against me. Thoughtful restraint does not seem to generate Web traffic. And perhaps the wild rocket-paced world of blogging is simply endemic in our instant-gratification culture, on which an otherwise appropriate tilting at windmills allusion would be lost anyway.
After all, who has time to sit down to a lengthy essay in The New York Review of Books anymore? Or, heaven forbid, a whole book? What could possibly be worth thinking about for that long!? Besides, the two-sentence sound bite is so much easier to digest, with none of that uncomfortable nuance that comes with actual detail, and so much easier to move onto the next new new thing (even if it is just the old thing repackaged as something new).
But always being onto the new new thing sure is stressful, and for what? All this rush to make the same carping comments on the same never-ending political horse races, to point out the same obvious flaws in the latest New York Times story, and all before someone else does. Entertaining? Occasionally. Edifying? Rarely. Unhealthy? Yes, both for the body and the body politic.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California at Berkeley.
01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, April 15, 2008
LEE DRUTMAN
WASHINGTON
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_drutman15_04-15-08_7A9NFH4_v19.39d4902.html#
APPARENTLY, if you spend too much time at home churning out non-stop verbiage for the insatiable World Wide Web, you may die of it. So warns a recent New York Times article, which, upon the unexpected deaths of two middle-aged bloggers in one week, connects the dots and declares blogging a “digital-era sweatshop.” (“They work long hours, often to exhaustion,” the article begins. “Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts.”)
At long last, the dark underbelly of the Internet revealed! An army of pallid content-mules chained to their computers (no fresh air for them!), typing away furiously at all hours so that somebody, somewhere, will have yet another thing to read.
But, caricatures and health issues aside, there is something troubling about this increasingly non-stop go-go-go blogging world, this odd pressure to be able to throw up an immediate response to every new development, regardless of one’s understanding of the subject, and far in excess of what anyone wants to read (even if some of us feel compelled to try to read it all just to remain “in the know”). Such appears to be logic of the 24/7/365 global knowledge economy: If you don’t put up that quarter-baked bon mot right away, somebody else probably will. And then there go your unique page views, and with them the trickle of advertising that just barely pays the rent and puts ramen on the table.
Now, it is often said that this new world of blogging is good for democracy, because it broadens the conversation and lets more people participate. I don’t know. I’ve read the message boards on these blogs. It seems to me more like any angry shouting match than a conversation worthy of Deweyan deliberative democracy.
And as University of Chicago Law Prof. Cass Sunstein has noted, the Internet makes it that much easier to inhabit an insular intellectual environment in which one’s ideas are rarely seriously challenged, the sad result being that “deliberation” leads mostly to a kind of extremism in which the same basic talking points are over time masticated into an unshakable worldview. Here, the metaphor of never leaving one’s apartment is too good to resist.
Moreover, in the few years that blogging has exploded, a few particularly prolific bloggers seem to have emerged as the new Internet power elite, and the distribution of influence in the blogosphere can hardly be said to be democratic anymore, if it ever was. But these new gatekeepers have even more arbitrary qualifications than the old gatekeepers, who at least had to work their way up the proving grounds of the editorial ladder over decades.
But the biggest problem is that instant-comment pressures inherent in the Blogosphere sweatshop generate a reflexive (as opposed to thoughtful) political discourse. It’s not so hard to pull a few generic talking points off the shelf, throw in a few clever turns of phrase, and link to the latest Washington Post article on the war or the election, all in a matter of minutes. The problem is it’s the same talking points over and over again, and so round and round we go, from the bed to the computer and back to the bed again, never going for a contemplative walk in the fresh air, perhaps to come across new insights and observations.
In such a world, the perambulating scholar and essayist is out of luck. The day belongs to the caffeinated neophyte who has yet to be slowed down by the twin demons of doubt and nuance. Read one book on a subject, and you can become an authority. But read 10, and you’ve missed your chance.
Surely, the exigencies of the Internet economy are against me. Thoughtful restraint does not seem to generate Web traffic. And perhaps the wild rocket-paced world of blogging is simply endemic in our instant-gratification culture, on which an otherwise appropriate tilting at windmills allusion would be lost anyway.
After all, who has time to sit down to a lengthy essay in The New York Review of Books anymore? Or, heaven forbid, a whole book? What could possibly be worth thinking about for that long!? Besides, the two-sentence sound bite is so much easier to digest, with none of that uncomfortable nuance that comes with actual detail, and so much easier to move onto the next new new thing (even if it is just the old thing repackaged as something new).
But always being onto the new new thing sure is stressful, and for what? All this rush to make the same carping comments on the same never-ending political horse races, to point out the same obvious flaws in the latest New York Times story, and all before someone else does. Entertaining? Occasionally. Edifying? Rarely. Unhealthy? Yes, both for the body and the body politic.
Lee Drutman, a frequent contributor, is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California at Berkeley.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Simple Ways to Increase Voter Turnout - Miller-McCune
POLITICS
Simple Ways to Increase Voter Turnout
By: Lee Drutman | March 31, 2008 | 08:59 AM (PDT) | Comments
Two political science experiments suggest that a prick of social pressure and a dash of old-fashioned Election Day partying could go a long way toward getting America voting again.
It’s often said that we live in an era of civic decline. Where Have All the Voters Gone? asks one recent book. Another chronicles The Vanishing Voter. Academics and social commentators shake their heads at the cynicism and apathy and wonder, as another book title puts it, Does American Democracy Still Work?
How, then, to get America voting again? Maybe all it takes is a return to the good old-fashioned idea of elections as community events — just like they were in the late 19th century, when upwards of 90 percent of eligible American voters participated. At least, that’s what two recent political science experiments point toward.
One experiment shows that just holding Election Day poll parties would notably increase turnout. But more-significant results come from another experiment, in which a piece of direct mail informed voters that their participation was a matter of public record and that their neighbors would know whether or not they voted.
This prick of social pressure increased voting rates by eight percentage points over the baseline rate, a finding that surprised even the professors behind it — Yale political scientists Donald C. Green and Alan S. Gerber (University of Northern Iowa assistant professor of political science Christopher W. Larimer also worked on the experiment). After all, scholars and campaigns had already studied direct mail extensively and found that it didn’t matter how colorful the mailing was or what it said — nobody could find an effect of more than a percentage point.
But they hadn’t studied social pressure.
“We analyzed it for a week to see if there was some mistake or something was missing,” Green said. “Nothing changed.”
The experiment worked like this: During the 2006 Michigan primary elections, about 200,000 voters got no mailing. This control group voted at a rate of 29.7 percent.
Then came the four mailings, each to 38,000 voters. Group 1 was told, “Do your civic duty and vote!” This increased turnout to 31.5 percent. Group 2 also got the civic duty reminder and then was told, “You are being studied!” (Members of Group 2 were informed that researchers would be watching them, though the results would remain confidential). This increased turnout to 32.2 percent.
Group 3 got the civic duty reminder as well, plus information on whether they voted in the past election. They were also told, “Who votes is public information.” This increased turnout to 34.5 percent.
Finally, and most notably, Group 4 received the civic duty reminder, plus a list of their neighbors’ voting histories — all public information. They were asked: “What if your neighbors knew whether you voted?” This group voted at a rate of 37.8 percent — almost 8 percent more than the control group.
A good part of the explanation seems to lie in the power of social norms. “It’s possible that people simply felt that they were a little more attuned to their civic duty norm of participation once they had the sense they were compiling a track record, and I think that probably had a pretty substantial effect on their incentive,” Gerber said, suggesting that these mailings “might prick the civic conscience of a voter.”
Green called the technique “lightning in a bottle” but warned, “You gotta be very careful. If campaign exerts social pressure, there could be quite a backlash.”
For those who prefer a more carrotlike approach, another set of experiments suggests that hosting an Election Day celebration can also increase turnout — mostly because it gives people another reason to get to the polls, tipping their cost-benefit analysis in favor of participation.
In the spring of 2005, Green, along with James M. Glaser, dean of undergraduate education and a political science professor at Tufts, and Elizabeth M. Addonizio, a political science doctorate student at Yale, organized an “Election Day Poll Party” in a randomly chosen precinct in the quiet town of Hooksett, N.H., during its municipal elections. The event wasn’t anything fancy — some free sandwiches, a cotton-candy machine and a professional DJ playing “upbeat” music, all on the lawn of the local middle school that doubled as a polling place.
But it worked.
Turnout went up.
The trio also sponsored parties in the New Haven, Conn., municipal elections that spring and inspired Working Assets, a long-distance phone company that supports progressive causes, to conduct similar festivals in several cities in 2006. And sure enough, these events brought more people to the polls than otherwise expected. Controlling for past turnout rates, the researchers calculated that a simple poll party in a precinct where 50 percent of voters typically turn out would increase turnout by 6.5 percent — a highly significant result.
“I think we did the best we could with limited resources,” said Glaser. “But if you get this idea to catch on and get some significant funding possible to do this on bigger scale, with the parties being more of a draw, there is a lot of room for this to grow.”
Making politics fun is largely uncharted territory. In part, the professors say, it’s because analysts and academics have been fixated on the idea that the reason people didn’t vote was mostly the costs of voting (i.e., the time and effort it takes), as opposed to the benefits.
“When I was in graduate school, the talk of the town was increasing voter turnout by making it easier for people to register,” said Green, who earned his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988. “There were policy innovations of the sort that extended voting during weekends and increased absentee ballots. But right now the sense is the most recent wave of extended voting and mail voting has not even had a 1 percent impact on voter turnout.”
Green is now convinced that the cost side of the voting equation is pretty minimal. “It’s really much more the motivation side, the benefits side, that is a large part of why people go off and vote,” he said.
Making politics fun also goes against the lingering Progressive-era view that elections should be serious, sober affairs, where informed and independent voters come to rational choices — as opposed to the raucous cash- and booze-infused elections that dominated the Gilded Age. But while progressives succeeded in making elections less corrupt, they also squeezed out the excitement, leaving behind what Green called a “morguelike experience.”
“There are other places that celebrate voting in ways that we don’t,” said Glaser. “There are Latin-American countries where Election Day is much more celebratory. And there is reason to celebrate if you’re living in a healthy democracy. I don’t think we’re calling for a return to beer taverns and crookedness of old systems. We are trying to say, ‘Here’s a creative idea about how to promote participation and promote community and put these things together.’”
All the scholars note that these results are preliminary. They expect campaigns, nonprofit groups and other researchers to begin experimenting further with these approaches, just as they did when Green and Gerber published research in 2000 that found that door-to-door canvassing was significantly more effective than phone calls or direct mail. “It’s gonna be darn interesting,” Green said.
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/265
Simple Ways to Increase Voter Turnout
By: Lee Drutman | March 31, 2008 | 08:59 AM (PDT) | Comments
Two political science experiments suggest that a prick of social pressure and a dash of old-fashioned Election Day partying could go a long way toward getting America voting again.
It’s often said that we live in an era of civic decline. Where Have All the Voters Gone? asks one recent book. Another chronicles The Vanishing Voter. Academics and social commentators shake their heads at the cynicism and apathy and wonder, as another book title puts it, Does American Democracy Still Work?
How, then, to get America voting again? Maybe all it takes is a return to the good old-fashioned idea of elections as community events — just like they were in the late 19th century, when upwards of 90 percent of eligible American voters participated. At least, that’s what two recent political science experiments point toward.
One experiment shows that just holding Election Day poll parties would notably increase turnout. But more-significant results come from another experiment, in which a piece of direct mail informed voters that their participation was a matter of public record and that their neighbors would know whether or not they voted.
This prick of social pressure increased voting rates by eight percentage points over the baseline rate, a finding that surprised even the professors behind it — Yale political scientists Donald C. Green and Alan S. Gerber (University of Northern Iowa assistant professor of political science Christopher W. Larimer also worked on the experiment). After all, scholars and campaigns had already studied direct mail extensively and found that it didn’t matter how colorful the mailing was or what it said — nobody could find an effect of more than a percentage point.
But they hadn’t studied social pressure.
“We analyzed it for a week to see if there was some mistake or something was missing,” Green said. “Nothing changed.”
The experiment worked like this: During the 2006 Michigan primary elections, about 200,000 voters got no mailing. This control group voted at a rate of 29.7 percent.
Then came the four mailings, each to 38,000 voters. Group 1 was told, “Do your civic duty and vote!” This increased turnout to 31.5 percent. Group 2 also got the civic duty reminder and then was told, “You are being studied!” (Members of Group 2 were informed that researchers would be watching them, though the results would remain confidential). This increased turnout to 32.2 percent.
Group 3 got the civic duty reminder as well, plus information on whether they voted in the past election. They were also told, “Who votes is public information.” This increased turnout to 34.5 percent.
Finally, and most notably, Group 4 received the civic duty reminder, plus a list of their neighbors’ voting histories — all public information. They were asked: “What if your neighbors knew whether you voted?” This group voted at a rate of 37.8 percent — almost 8 percent more than the control group.
A good part of the explanation seems to lie in the power of social norms. “It’s possible that people simply felt that they were a little more attuned to their civic duty norm of participation once they had the sense they were compiling a track record, and I think that probably had a pretty substantial effect on their incentive,” Gerber said, suggesting that these mailings “might prick the civic conscience of a voter.”
Green called the technique “lightning in a bottle” but warned, “You gotta be very careful. If campaign exerts social pressure, there could be quite a backlash.”
For those who prefer a more carrotlike approach, another set of experiments suggests that hosting an Election Day celebration can also increase turnout — mostly because it gives people another reason to get to the polls, tipping their cost-benefit analysis in favor of participation.
In the spring of 2005, Green, along with James M. Glaser, dean of undergraduate education and a political science professor at Tufts, and Elizabeth M. Addonizio, a political science doctorate student at Yale, organized an “Election Day Poll Party” in a randomly chosen precinct in the quiet town of Hooksett, N.H., during its municipal elections. The event wasn’t anything fancy — some free sandwiches, a cotton-candy machine and a professional DJ playing “upbeat” music, all on the lawn of the local middle school that doubled as a polling place.
But it worked.
Turnout went up.
The trio also sponsored parties in the New Haven, Conn., municipal elections that spring and inspired Working Assets, a long-distance phone company that supports progressive causes, to conduct similar festivals in several cities in 2006. And sure enough, these events brought more people to the polls than otherwise expected. Controlling for past turnout rates, the researchers calculated that a simple poll party in a precinct where 50 percent of voters typically turn out would increase turnout by 6.5 percent — a highly significant result.
“I think we did the best we could with limited resources,” said Glaser. “But if you get this idea to catch on and get some significant funding possible to do this on bigger scale, with the parties being more of a draw, there is a lot of room for this to grow.”
Making politics fun is largely uncharted territory. In part, the professors say, it’s because analysts and academics have been fixated on the idea that the reason people didn’t vote was mostly the costs of voting (i.e., the time and effort it takes), as opposed to the benefits.
“When I was in graduate school, the talk of the town was increasing voter turnout by making it easier for people to register,” said Green, who earned his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988. “There were policy innovations of the sort that extended voting during weekends and increased absentee ballots. But right now the sense is the most recent wave of extended voting and mail voting has not even had a 1 percent impact on voter turnout.”
Green is now convinced that the cost side of the voting equation is pretty minimal. “It’s really much more the motivation side, the benefits side, that is a large part of why people go off and vote,” he said.
Making politics fun also goes against the lingering Progressive-era view that elections should be serious, sober affairs, where informed and independent voters come to rational choices — as opposed to the raucous cash- and booze-infused elections that dominated the Gilded Age. But while progressives succeeded in making elections less corrupt, they also squeezed out the excitement, leaving behind what Green called a “morguelike experience.”
“There are other places that celebrate voting in ways that we don’t,” said Glaser. “There are Latin-American countries where Election Day is much more celebratory. And there is reason to celebrate if you’re living in a healthy democracy. I don’t think we’re calling for a return to beer taverns and crookedness of old systems. We are trying to say, ‘Here’s a creative idea about how to promote participation and promote community and put these things together.’”
All the scholars note that these results are preliminary. They expect campaigns, nonprofit groups and other researchers to begin experimenting further with these approaches, just as they did when Green and Gerber published research in 2000 that found that door-to-door canvassing was significantly more effective than phone calls or direct mail. “It’s gonna be darn interesting,” Green said.
http://www.miller-mccune.com/article/265
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