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.”
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.”
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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