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Learning Objectives
1. Understand why the U.S. Constitution was designed the way it was.
2. Understand Marx and Mill’s different visions for a just society.
3. Understand contemporary approaches in political theory.
Sometimes overlooked among political philosophers is James Madison (1751–1836). A small man with a high voice, he nonetheless became the fourth president of the United States after being the chief author of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Madison read history and political philosophy and was able to build on the ideas of those who came before him. Unlike Locke, he argued for a balance of power in government, more like Aristotle, Machiavelli and Montesquieu (1685–1755), a French philosopher who influenced the American Founding Fathers. This balance of power became, in practical terms, the division of power in U.S. government between the states and the national government; the division of power between the executive, legislative and judicial branches; and the literal encouragement of interest groups who would, Madison hoped, keep each other in check.
This last idea was a crucial one, for interest groups (which Madison called “factions”) had been the downfall of Athens and other states throughout history. Factions, he argued, tended to become so obsessed with their own concerns that they forgot about everything else. That could mean that important issues were neglected and that good leaders could be thrown from office over differences on a particular topic. But, Madison argued, limiting the influence of interest groups would in fact limit the liberty they had just fought so hard to win. The answer, he said, was a system of government with many checks on power, so that no one group could dominate the government, and letting interest groups flourish so that they will keep each other in check. The challenge to this idea is the danger of ending up like the Roman Republic, with so many checks on power that you can’t get anything done. For the United States, at least, we don’t have a final score on that yet.
Revolution and Counter-Revolution
The American Revolution was followed by the French Revolution in 1789, with somewhat less benign results. The French monarchy was not meeting people’s needs, and avenues for political participation and regime change were limited. When the cork finally popped on this over-shaken bottle of civic champagne, royals and revolutionaries lost their heads, literally and figuratively. (Eventually, Napoleon made himself emperor, and ushered in a few more decades of war in Europe.) Revolution produced different reactions among political thinkers.
Edmund Burke (1729–1797), a British politician, found himself on both sides of the issue. While serving in Parliament, he argued against any oppression of the American colonists, recognizing that a wealthy America would make Britain richer than it could imagine. He turned the other way on the French revolution, as people who disagreed with the new regime kept ending up dead.
A strong believer in representative government, Burke is nonetheless often regarded as the father of modern conservatism. Like Confucius, he argued against rapid, radical change, saying instead that human institutions are there for a reason, and embody the collective wisdom of generations.
Thomas Paine (1737–1809), whose pamphlet Common Sense helped reinvigorate the American revolution, later served in the revolutionary legislature in France (even though he didn’t speak French). Paine was anti-monarchy, which made him a radical for his time and rather unpopular in his native Britain. In his pamphlet Rights of Man, he argued for a right to revolution when government does not protect people’s rights. He also argued that rights are natural to human beings, and are not granted by government, because then they become mere privileges, which can be taken way.
The 1800s saw a broader push for more popular participation in government, at least in Europe and the Americas. It also saw the Industrial Revolution, which began the movement from a world in which most people were farmers to a world in which most people were not. The Industrial Revolution, beginning with the widespread use of steam and water power and continuing through the revolution of electricity late in the 1800s, changed how we live. Farms got more efficient, so that fewer farmers were needed. Meanwhile, mass production, rapid transit (beginning with the steam train and the steam ship), and rapid, widespread communications (beginning with the telegraph and then the telephone), led to the creation both of efficient factories and of large business enterprises. When most people were farmers, people worked outdoors and, in theory, could at least feed themselves. Factory work meant less pleasant if not downright dangerous working conditions and, frequently, low pay and no benefits. This was a world in which there were no child labor laws (and children were sometimes chained to the machines they operated), no overtime, no day off except Sunday, no industrial insurance, no unemployment insurance, and no protection for workers at all. (Some folks on the right would tell you that this was better; you’ll have to decide that for yourself.) In this world, in which civic institutions were playing catch-up with the realities of modern life, a couple of different philosophers approached the problem in widely different ways.
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) argued for broader political participation. Mill saw the benefits of expanding wealth, and thought that popular political institutions were the way to address the inequalities generated by the uneven flowering of capitalism.
Mill had a strange childhood. His father, a political philosopher in his own right, gave his son a rather rigid upbringing, so that he learned Ancient Greek at age 3 and was reading Plato and Aristotle by age 12. He has been estimated to have had the highest IQ in history, and at age 20 he had a mental breakdown, having become, in his own words, “an intellectual thoroughbred and an emotional hobbyhorse.”
Mill recovered, and wrote a lot of important work. He believed in individual liberty and limits on the power of government. He believed that society existed for the benefit of the individual, who ought to be able to do what she or he likes, as long as they aren’t hurting others. In the concept of utilitarianism, in which Mill built on the work of his father and of the economist Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), Mill argued that society should provide the greatest good for the greatest number. For the most part, he believed that people should be allowed to participate in government (for the most part, because he allowed that despotism was OK in “backward” societies). He did, however, oppose slavery. But while he was not always a progressive thinker on race, he was perhaps the first major philosopher since Plato to argue for the rights of women (his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, is regarded as a first-rate philosopher in her own right).
Mill believed in free markets—leaving the economy alone and letting capitalism work as intended (though later in life he began to edge toward socialism). He also believed in some sort of workplace democracy, with workers given a say in choosing managers.
The Marx Brother
Karl Marx (1818–1883) did not believe in free markets (or God or capitalism or democracy. None of this, he said, helped people). Born in Germany, Marx described the world as he saw it. Like most political philosophers, he was a voracious reader, a critical thinker, a voluminous writer, and a bit odd. (A visitor to his house in London, where he later lived, described a chaotic scene of dirt, broken furniture, randomly placed children and a heavy patina of stale cigarette smoke.) His analysis of the modern capitalist world was compelling, and his ideas had a huge impact on world history.
While Mill saw the upside of an evolving world, Marx saw the costs. Workers were oppressed, and capitalists, “the bourgeoisie,” as he called them, were unduly profiting from their labor. This led to what he and his writing partner, Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), (who, ironically, was himself a wealthy member of the bourgeoisie), called the labor theory of value: The worth of anything is reflected by the labor it took to produce it. Profit, therefore, was merely value stolen from the workers.
Also unlike Mill, Marx said that the state was merely an instrument of the capitalist class, “the committee of the bourgeoisie,” there to enforce the rules that kept the workers in their places. Neither elections nor labor unions, which were quite weak in Marx’s time, would provide the workers with any meaningful protections against the depredations of capital.
Marx gave us what he called dialectical materialism. This argued that the conditions of production determined the material and political conditions of life. So, for example, under feudalism people were ruled by aristocrats such as kings and dukes, and were treated badly in the process. But, Marx said, each new system sewed the seeds of its own demise. So feudalism managed to create order out of chaos, which led to trade, the growth of cities, and the end of feudalism.
For Marx, history wasn’t a series of random events, but instead unfolded with all the crystalline clarity of a strand of DNA. One gene leads to another. The history of man was essentially the history of class struggle. And so, Marx predicted, capitalism would plant the flowers of its own funeral. It would so impoverish the workers that they would rise up, overthrow their capitalism overlords, and begin the happy march toward a workers’ paradise. (It was for this reason that Marx expected that what he calledcommunism would arise first in the industrialized west, rather than in the agrarian east.)
Marx’s answer was socialism, an idea developing in various times and places in the 19th century in response to the excesses of industrial capitalism. Under socialism, the workers would control the means of production, and people’s needs would be met: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” as Marx once put it. Marx understood that some people wouldn’t like this idea much, and so the workers’ paradise is to be reached through a transitory phase, “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” The proletariat are the working class, and the dictatorship will allow them to learn, over time, that the promises of a market-based, capitalist economy are merely the siren song of our old friends the bourgeoisie, who never have your best interests at heart. Eventually, Marx said, people will be properly educated and the state will just “wither away,” leaving people to produce for use, not profit, and leading more fulfilling lives. “Workers of the world unite,” Marx and Engels wrote at the end of The Communist Manifesto. “The proletariat have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” (Translations of this line vary from place to place, but you get the idea.)
Marx was a little hazy on how all this was supposed to work. As trenchant as his analysis of his time was, his prescriptions were a bit foggy. We are left to guess at how Marx would have regarded the oppressions that were later visited in his name.
The objections to Marx are many and worth considering. First, while he sees human history as an evolutionary process, for some unexplained reason it apparently just stops evolving when we get to communism. Seriously, if capitalism sewed the seeds of its own demise, wouldn’t communism also naturally give birth to its own Oedipal assassin? (The Greek tragic hero Oedipus kills his own father to become king. Of course, he didn’t know it was his own father, but that’s Greek tragedy for you.) Second, if the problem with capitalist classical liberalism is that it tends to centralize power to the point where the system oppresses the many for the benefit of the few, wouldn’t communism, run by a doctrinaire dictatorship, have the same problem all over? The anarchist writer Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) correctly predicted that if Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat came to pass, it would simply be just that, a dictatorship, oppressing people in much the same they’d been oppressed by business and government under capitalism. Finally, Marx may have underestimated people’s ability to get change through normal democratic means—choosing leaders who would pass laws to empower and protect workers through the excesses of capitalism. It’s worth noting that while Marx predicted communism would occur in the industrialized west, in fact it was two very poor, largely agrarian societies—China and Russia—that took to communism, whereas Europe and the Americas never really did. In societies where people already owned nothing, perhaps communism offered something. In societies where people were becoming wealthier, perhaps it did not offer as much.
Modern/Contemporary Theories
History did not stop with communism; people have continued to make arguments about the nature of politics and government long after Marx. Human beings are pretty clever, and people frequently think of new ways of looking at and explaining things. (And, let’s be honest: In contemporary academics, you have to say something new and different if you want to get anywhere.) And while some of this theory isn’t quite as fun as the older theory, it can be helpful in explaining why things happen the way they do (even if the answers aren’t any clearer than they’ve ever been).
For example: Institutionalists have long looked at the institutions of politics and government, and tried to understand how the way we organize things can influence how we behave. From Madison until recent times, institutionalism was the dominant school of political philosophy in the United States. Certainly, as people figure out how the institutions of modern governments actually work, they will adjust their behavior to try to achieve what they want by making best use of those institutions. Institutionalism fell somewhat out of vogue as governments that looked good on paper, such as the Soviet Union’s (whose constitution had substantial guarantees of individual liberty) failed to match their descriptions.
Other contemporary (which usually means after World War II) theories have drawn on other disciplines to try to explain politics, such as psychology, sociology and biology. Behavioralists have attempted to collect data on people’s actual behavior and use that to explain why they behave the way they do. Post-behavioralists attempt to combine this with more traditional forms of analysis to form a more well-rounded picture of current political behavior. Systems theory, which borrows from biology, tries to look at politics as a living system, in which all the players interact to create the political environment in which we live. As a change in climate would affect a forest and the creatures that live in it, a change in political and economic conditions tends to produce reactions among citizens, which are somewhat reflected in actions by government (presuming the government is at all responsive to public pressure). Modernization theory notes that as nations get richer, they become more stable and more democratic (rich people don’t riot, except maybe at sales where they run out of Guccis). Feminist theories examine the role of women in politics, rightly pointing out that, historically, women were excluded from politics and economic and public life. While feminist political theory is generally aimed at gaining and preserving an equal footing for women in politics, it comes in all kinds of flavors, from Marxist feminists to democratic feminists, with several stops in between.
Rational choice theory attempted to apply economic logic to politics: People calculate what serves their interests best, and behave accordingly. This may seem sort of obvious, and it is, and it’s also not so easy to predict what’s rational from person to person. It also presumes that people are completely self-interested, and operate with perfect information, neither which is likely to be true all the time. And it also ignores culture-driven aspects of people’s behavior. It can, however, help us predict elected officials’ behavior. For example, will a city council approve a rezone for an apartment complex, or insist that the land be used for single-family homes? Rational choice theory would tell us that they will choose single-family homes, because they will attract wealthier people who will pay more taxes and demand less services, thus costing the city less money (and this is what often happens).
Critical theory might best be summed up in a light-bulb joke: How many critical theorists does it take to screw in a light bulb? Only one, but first he has to sit in a darkened room and determine whether light is something he really needs, or if it’s just something that’s been culturally imposed upon him. Critical theory looks at communication and culture to try to determine if 1. We make choices because we are driven by culture (which might lead us to make less than optimal choices) and 2. If, when we communicate, we are actually getting true to each other. The assumption of the leading light of critical theory, the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, is that if we create this “ideal speech situation,” is that we’ll all be Marxists. And since communism ended up looking so much like Plato’s guardian plan, that rather takes us back to the beginning, doesn’t it?
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Madison and the Founding Fathers sought to balance government’s need for power with citizens’ need for liberty
• Mill thought that government and society should create the greatest good for the greatest number.
• Marx thought that capitalism would so impoverish the workers that they would revolt and create communism.
• Contemporary theories have sought explain people’s political actions by applying the disciplines of other social sciences.
EXERCISES
1. Read the preamble to the U.S. Constitution athttp://www.archives.gov/exhibits/c...ranscript.html (It won’t take you long to read the whole thing.) Based on what you know about American government, is the nation living up to this?
2. Imagine Karl Marx’s ideal state, run by and for workers. What could be better about this? What might be worse? Could this work? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/02%3A_Political_Philosophy-_Taking_a_Theorem_to_Keep_From_Getting_Thick/2.03%3A_From_Modernity_to_Today.txt |
• 3.1: Liberalism
Liberalism can be a confusing term because it can mean more than one thing. Classical liberalism describes a major direction in western politics, of which American liberalism is a subset. Despite some wild-eyed conservatives accusing President Obama of being a socialist (because that’s still dirty word in American politics), both Democrats and Republicans in the United States fall under the umbrella of classical liberalism. In the big picture, U.S. politics are fairly homogenous.
• 3.2: Alternatives to Liberalism
Since World War II, and particularly since the end of the Cold War, many economies have turned away from planning and toward markets for decision making, and people have pushed for more democratization in government. While this movement has been uneven both in timing and results, completely undemocratic states have declined in number. So in only a relative handful of states is either one or a small group of people in charge. But classical liberalism isn’t the only way to run a society.
Thumbnail:Che Guevara (left) and Fidel Castro in 1961. (Public Domain; Alberto Korda via Wikipedia)
03: Ideologies and Isms
Learning Objectives
In this section, you will learn:
1. What liberalism is.
2. The different types of liberalism.
3. The difference between American liberalism and American conservatism.
Classical Liberalism
Liberalism can be a confusing term because it can mean more than one thing. Classical liberalism describes a major direction in western politics, of which American liberalism is a subset. Despite some wild-eyed conservatives accusing President Obama of being a socialist (because that’s still dirty word in American politics), both Democrats and Republicans in the United States fall under the umbrella of classical liberalism. In the big picture, U.S. politics are fairly homogenous.
Classical liberalism has two prominent features:
1. A reliance on markets for economic decision making.
2. A reliance on democratic institutions for political decision making.
A reliance on markets means that people get to vote with their dollars, pounds, rupees or euros on what they want to buy and how much they’re willing to pay for it. A market is all the producers, sellers and buyers of any product or service, such as the market for smart phones. In classical liberalism, we tend to try to leave markets alone to function as consumers and businesses see fit. So instead of the state deciding what gets produced and how much it will cost, the market decides through millions of individual transactions. Individuals can own and invest in businesses; businesses have some ability to choose what to make and what to charge for it. We call this economic system capitalism (a term first used, perhaps, by the English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray in 1852, although the term “capitalist” appears to be older).
Capitalism aims to promote maximum wealth by letting people try, fail and succeed in business. The Scottish philosopher Adam Smith (who didn’t call it capitalism) described this in his work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Smith (1723-1790) noted that just letting people do what they wanted to do produced more wealth, more efficiently, than did the prevailing economic theory of the time, mercantilism.
Mercantilism was a very Euro-centric theory (though it has since been applied elsewhere). It argued that the nation with the most gold was the best off. It also argued that nations should maximize imports and minimize exports, while maintaining overseas colonies to serve as sources of raw materials and markets for finished goods. This was the kind of policy that helped spur the American revolution, by limiting the British American colonists’ ability to make what they wanted and trade with whom they wanted to. Ironically, perhaps, it is the very strategy that allowed the “Asian tigers”—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore—to grow so much in the post-World War II era—limit imports, maximize exports, and build up domestic industries so they can compete effectively on world markets.
Adam Smith’s book is long enough, and few enough people have read it, that it gets used to justify almost any sort of behavior. To our eyes, he didn’t understand so much about how prices are set, particularly rents on property (he wrote, more or less, that it was about costs). But he did seem to grasp some ideas that are still with us today. In perhaps his most famous (and in some ways, most unfortunate) phrase, Smith wrote that if people simply tried to take care of themselves (make money), they would in fact make others better off (as if, he wrote, guided by “an invisible hand”—a verbal construction that makes it seem as if economics was some mystical science. It isn’t). What Smith was really saying was that by working hard, saving, investing and consuming, people in a market economy generate more wealth, which means they are able to take care of themselves and their families, in the process of which they spend some of that wealth which generates more economic activity elsewhere in society. What is sometimes overlooked in Smith’s work is that he understood, explicitly, that people are often trying to rig the market to limit competition, raise prices, and increase profits. Smith reserved special scorn for the East India Company, the government-sponsored monopoly that was in the process of robbing and conquering India and the Indians. In particular, Smith criticizes the company for how bad it was treating the Indians, who were in the process of being excluded from meaningful participation in the economic and political life of their country. Despite (and perhaps because of) its monopoly status—it had no legal competitors for British trade with India—it was a terribly inefficient business, so much so that the British government had to repeatedly bail it out. This led the Brits to dump tea on the North American market, which led to the Boston Tea Party and the American revolution.
The British economy of the time still featured a lot of medieval laws restricting trade and the movement of workers, both of which kept prices high, supply down and the wages of most people lower than they would be otherwise. Smith understood that capitalism would generate more wealth for more people, as long as markets could be kept free of restraints.
The other half of the classical liberal prescription is a reliance on democratic institutions: In classical liberalism, political decisions are made in some way by people casting votes. States decide who is a qualified citizen, and those people get to vote in free elections. The state may set rules on who can run for office, such as a minimum age requirement, but if you reach that age, the state cannot decide that you can’t run. Candidates don’t have to be approved by the government before they can seek office. In most if not all instances, citizens elect people who make decisions on their behalf. This kind of government is called a republic.
As with every approach to government and the economy, classical liberalism has its share of strengths and weaknesses. By allowing people to spend and invest as they wish, and by depending on open elections, it provides a higher degree of individual liberty than do some alternatives. It creates opportunity for participating in the economic and political life of a country. By relying on markets to make economic decisions, it tends to produce more wealth, more efficiently (at lower cost). Because it depends upon elections for political decision making, it gives citizens an outlet for their discontent, and allows them to make changes to law and policy.
On the other hand, while classical liberalism tends to produce more wealth, it may distribute that wealth unevenly. An uneven distribution of wealth can lead to wealthy people dominating the political system. They have more money to contribute to election campaigns, and more resources with which to lobby the government. The U.S. Senate is pretty much a millionaires’ club now, for example, and while it’s not impossible for a very wealthy person to understand the concerns of someone who is poor, it may also be harder for them to understand the concerns of the less wealthy. Because the creation of wealth often gets tied to the broader concept of liberty, the system may have a difficult time dealing with problems generated by market activity, such as pollution. State controls on pollution, because they cost money, lower profits, and, under this equation, loss of profits gets portrayed as a loss of liberty.
Conversely, if the specific political system is more inclusive—gives everybody a real voice—it may not be very efficient in decision making, and may in fact be slow to respond to people’s needs. So, for example, in the United States, the financing of the Medicare system faces problems down the road. Although it’s a train wreck that everybody can see coming, the political system has so far been unable to deal with it because, in part, because of pressure from so many interest groups. Nobody wants to pay higher taxes to pay for the system, but nobody wants to reduce benefits in any way. While the political system may eventually deal with this, it might be better to deal with it sooner rather than later.
The form of the republic is not terribly important in considering how liberal it is. So it doesn’t matter of the republic is a constitutional monarchy, a parliamentary democracy, or has an American-style division of power between president and the Congress. What matters is the availability of free and fair elections. Scholars classify some republics as “illiberal democracies,” because although there are elections, they don’t appear to be completely free and fair, such as in Russia. They may have either a parliamentary or a president/legislative government, but the system does not always work as advertised. Singapore is sometimes called an illiberal state, because of the dominance of a single party and restrictions on civil liberties. Mexico was an illiberal democracy for much of the 20th century, when the Institutional Revolutionary Party won every national election, regardless of the actual vote count.
American Liberalism
Classical liberalism isn’t what many people in the United States mean when they say “liberal,” however. American liberalism is a particular flavor of classical liberalism. Originally, it was a political philosophy that argued that government had a positive role to play in society. This movement and its cousin, progressivism, grew out of the reaction to the excesses of late 19th and early 20th century capitalism—no protections for workers such as a 40-hour week and mandatory overtime, child workers chained to factory floors, and very few health, safety and environmental laws.
Progressives (which some liberals have begun to call themselves, after American conservatives managed to turn “liberal” into a dirty word) saw a world that was dominated by big business and by big city political machines. Big business limited competition and raised prices through the creation of trusts, conglomerations of firms in the same market so that one really big company dominated the entire market. Big city political machines dominated urban politics for much of the first half of the 20th century, uniting blocks of immigrant voters behind regimes that controlled much of what happened in large cities. While they empowered the powerless, who had been excluded from the political spoils of city life by business interests, they tended to exclude all the people who didn’t agree with them. So the Progressives pushed for electoral reforms such as non-partisan elections (in which candidates don’t run on the basis of party), open primary elections (previously dominated by party organizations, who thus controlled which candidates got on the ballot), and a stronger role for government in economic management (such as breaking up the trusts).
American liberalism can find its roots in the Progressive movement, but it really took flower after the Great Depression. Private charity was completely overwhelmed by the high level of unemployment, and so American politics turned heavily toward an active role for government in economic and eventually personal affairs. Liberals fought for more protections for workers and unions, a broader social safety net for the poor and unemployed, and health, safety and environmental regulations. As always, this approach to government has both costs and benefits—fewer people starving to death (which sometimes happened before welfare and unemployment compensation), versus higher taxes and higher costs for businesses and consumers, driven in party by complying with more regulations.
American Conservatism
American conservativism, like American liberalism, is a subset of classical liberalism, though perhaps a tiny big closer to the ideal. American conservatives have tended to argue for less government involvement in the economy, a movement that also grew out of the Great Depression. As the size and scope of U.S. government grew in the post-World War II era, conservatives began to argue that taxes and regulation were hampering economic growth and actually lowering people’s standards of living. Conservatives argue that people should be able to make their own choices about where to spend their money, pointing out that taxes to support government programs effectively make those choices for you. They also argue that too wide a social safety net discourages people from working and taking care of themselves.
Traditional American conservatives tend to favor lower taxes, a balanced federal budget and less regulation of the economic system. In more recent years, however, a subset of American conservatives have become more concerned about issue such as abortion rights and gay marriage, topics that traditional conservatives might have avoided. For some conservatives, less government means less government. Others, including some who might call themselves Christian conservatives because of their faith, support social legislation to ban some kinds of behavior and encourage others. Conversely, so while American liberals have usually tended to advocate more government involvement in economic life, they now tend to favor less government involvement in private life. Religious conservatives tend to favor less government involvement in economic life, but more government involvement in private life. And liberals and religious conservatives sometimes find common ground over environmental issues. As the American writer Charles Dudley Warner said in the 1800s, “Politics makes strange bedfellows.”
Realistically, we shouldn’t be surprised that people hold opinions (more government in some areas, less in others) that don’t always appear to be logically consistent. When we consider the liberal/conservative dichotomy, it’s difficult to draw a clean line. Many of us have issues on which we are conservative, and others on which we may be liberal. For example, conservatives are for less government involvement in the economy, and yet southern conservative members of Congress consistently vote for subsidies for tobacco farmers.
Populism
While we’re on the subject of American political isms, we shouldn’t forget populism. Populism is not so much an ideology as an approach to politics. At its best, populism displays a genuine concern for citizens whose rights and needs have not been considered. At its worst, populists can be as oppressive as the people they replaced. A lot of the time, populism often displays a sort of talk-radio level of understanding of complicated issues (which is to say, not very much. Talk radio hosts on the left and on the right often seem to oversimplify complex topics, without always grasping the difficult choices behind them).
Generally speaking, populists make an appeal to the common person, and claim to represent their interests, as opposed to the interests of the rich and powerful. American political figures such Huey Long, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan were or are populists. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who claims to represent the common people of his country but who has also enriched his family while in office, is a populist. Populism is a common theme in American politics; most American political candidates attempt to paint themselves as ordinary folks just like you and me. A movie such asDave, a 1993 film starring Kevin Kline, plays on the American attraction to populism. Kline plays an average, well-meaning guy who’s a dead-ringer for the president. When called upon to fill in for the incapacitated (and not very nice) president, Dave, among other things, manages to balance the federal budget with the help of his accountant over sandwiches one night. (Seriously, if it were that easy, wouldn’t it have happened by now?) But the theme is common throughout American politics—if only honest, hard-working people of good moral standing could make it into office, all of our problems would go away.
Populists are fond of bashing big business, and/or big government; of promising to stand up for the little guy; and of vowing to save the nation from its certain doom. The problem with populists is that in those rare occasions where they get elected to major office, they tend to run things in the very way they have criticized the establish order about—high-handed, unresponsive, with surprisingly little real concern for what might best serve the state as a whole. When Huey Long became governor of Louisiana in 1928, he raised taxes on oil companies, got free textbooks for school children, and got roads and bridges built for a state that desperately needed them. However, he also forced state employees to donate 10 percent of their wages to his re-election fund, doled out highway contracts based on who kicked back the most money, harshly punished political opponents, and, by the time he was assassinated in 1935, had become the virtual dictator of the state. So while populists, like most people in politics, mean well, they don’t always perform well.
Libertarianism
Libertarians believe in the least amount of government possible—national defense, police and fire, and not much else. (I’m over-simplifying here, but not by much). True libertarians are not at all concerned with social issues, as they don’t see that as government’s job. Hard-core American libertarians tend to oppose a global role for the U.S. beyond trade and commerce, leaving most decisions about everything up to private citizens.
Libertarianism grew out of the reaction to Soviet-style communism in the post-World War II era. Soviet-style communism was not noted for its commitment to liberty of any kind, and a number of writers, such as the novelist Ayn Rand, and economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman pushed for hands-off approach for the state.
Libertarianism offers considerable freedom of choice on a range of issues, and this is its chief virtue. By not encumbering the economy with higher taxes and regulations, it may promote economic growth. And the idea of maximum personal freedom is often very appealing. But to argue that if less government is better, then nearly no government is ideal is a difficult assertion. For one thing, the government of the United States (and parts of Europe) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was very much like the libertarian prescription. Government was incapable of dealing with economic downturns, and people suffered as a result. Workplace, food and transportation safety issues were not addressed, and the concentration of economic power tended to prod government to favor the wealthy even more. The first anti-trust laws, passed to break up business monopolies, were used instead to prevent workers from forming unions. You might think that’s a good idea or a bad one, but if businesses can organize, why not workers? (You will, as always, have to make up your own mind on questions such as this.)
Libertarianism doesn’t seem designed to deal with environmental issues in particular, as markets by themselves aren’t always very good at dealing with problems such as over-fishing and air and water pollution. Libertarians would argue that such questions really are a matter of property rights, as in if what you do impacts the value of my property, then I have a valid complaint. However, that presumes that not much that happens on my property will impact your property, a notion that some ecological scientists would probably take issue with.
Libertarianism appeals to some people in current American politics, perhaps because when government does not seem to be performing well, the idea of less government sounds like a potential improvement. Many Americans are sympathetic to the notion of keeping the government from telling people how they should live. We might call that small “l” libertarianism, as opposed to those who belong to or support the Libertarian Party, which seeks to win elections to put their principles into practice. Some citizens probably also find appeal in the notion of a smaller government in hopes that would mean lower taxes.
It’s an open question whether libertarianism could be made to work better than it did in the 1800s. Some people would tell you that it worked just fine; others point to the problems of the era as evidence that it didn’t work all that well. A lot of services that government provides would go away, and how much infrastructure investment—roads, bridges, port facilities, public education—would happen under a libertarian government is not clear. Obviously, I’m skeptical of this ideology, though you may not be (and that’s OK). Libertarian students will sometimes respond to my criticisms of libertarianism by saying “But Any Rand said…” to which I reply, “For an economist, Ayn Rand was a helluva novelist.” Suffice it to say that libertarianism, like most ideologies, has its strengths and weaknesses.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Classical liberalism is currently the dominant political and economic philosophy in the world.
• Classical liberalism and its variants all have strengths and weaknesses.
EXERCISES
1. What seems to be different between American conservatives and liberals at present? In what ways would you say you are conservative or liberal in your political beliefs?
2. If Libertarians were to win enough elections to take charge of a government, what changes would happen? How would people respond to the changing mix of public services and taxes? How would this work? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/03%3A_Ideologies_and_Isms/3.01%3A_Liberalism.txt |
Learning Objectives
In this section, you will learn:
1. What the difference is between socialism and communism.
2. What the difference is between fascism and nazism.
3. What anarchism is, and how it views people and politics differently from many other philosophies.
Classical liberalism is perhaps the dominant ideology of our time. Since World War II, and particularly since the end of the Cold War, more countries have moved from authoritarian governments to liberal ones. Economies have turned away from planning and toward markets for decision making, and people have pushed for more democratization in government. While this movement has been uneven both in timing and results, completely undemocratic states have declined in number. So in only a relative handful of states is either one or a small group of people in charge. But classical liberalism isn’t the only way to run a society.
Socialism
Socialism is purely an economic system, and one that gets thrown around a lot in American political discourse (with reference to scary things Americans may not like). What it really means is public ownership of productive resources. Instead of private firms such as Ford, GM and Chrysler, you might have the Department of Automotive Transportation. This would be a state agency, charged with producing automobiles for society and with employing people to do that. Whereas capitalism is more concerned with generating wealth and efficiency, socialism is more concerned with equality of outcome. Socialists point to decades of growing inequality under capitalism and argue that it just doesn’t work.
And right there is where we find the strengths and weaknesses of socialism. A private corporation such as Ford has shareholders—investors who own the company—who want to see the company be profitable and be paid back for their investment (through dividend payments and a higher share price). So Ford’s management has to pay attention to costs as well as sales, so in theory it won’t employ any more people than it has to. The automotive department also has to try to produce cars with reasonable efficiency, but it also is supposed to employ people so they all have jobs. More to the point, it is less likely to lay people off when sales are down. That adds costs and will make the organization less efficient. It will probably generate less wealth, although it may spread that wealth around more evenly. So, at a minimum, there’s a trade-off there between efficiency and equity. In effect, more people will get benefits, but the average benefit level may be lower.
From a consumer standpoint, there’s also a cost. Government managers historically cannot predict what people will want in terms of consumer goods, so that high-demand items tend to be in short supply while low-demand items tend to be oversupplied. And the goods tend to be of substandard quality. In a market-oriented system, firms that make bad goods go out of business. In a managed system, the organization making the bad goods is unlikely to be punished for making bad goods; it will be rewarded for putting more people to work. A market system also will make many of the same mistakes, but they are corrected more quickly.
An example of the challenge of socialism could be found in Poland before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Poland was then ruled by the Communist Party, and under the thumb of the Soviets. But what matters to us in this example is that the economic system involved socialism. In many parts of the world, bread is a basic foodstuff. In order to make bread available for everyone, state-run bakeries were limited in what they could charge for bread. As the bakeries could not thereby increase production (added ingredients cost extra money which, in a market economy, often means higher prices in the short term). So production was limited, and bread, perhaps because of the artificially low price, was always in short supply. The price of cake was not limited, however, and the bakeries always had plenty of cake. Marie Antoinette may not have said, “Let them eat cake,” but socialist Poland’s economic managers effectively did.
So socialism tends to offer a higher floor and a lower ceiling. Wealth is more evenly distributed and people tend to get the minimum of what they need—food, clothing, housing and health care. On the other hand, there’s just less of everything to go around, and consumers tend to see less quality and less choice. Overall standards of living may be lower. And while a socialist state could be democratic in terms of open elections, the lack of a meaningful private sector at least calls into question whether there will be political interests who are able to oppose the power of the state.
We should understand that in fact most states have what we might call a mixed economy, combining elements of both socialism and capitalism. That means that some services and goods will be provided by the private sector, while others may be provided by a public agency. So in the United States, for example, in some parts of the country people buy their water from private water companies. But in other parts, especially in the west, water is often provided by utility districts, which are owned by the people who live in the district and managed by an elected board of commissioners. The same thing is true for a number of utility services, such as sewage treatment and electricity.
People routinely argue both sides of this question, even in an ostensibly capitalist nation such as the United States. Advocates of markets maintain that socialism will limit freedom and lower living standards, while critics of capitalism point to poverty amid the considerable wealth created by market activity. You will have to decide for yourself where you land in that debate.
Communism
Communism is another complicated idea. For the men who coined the term, the 19th century German philosopher and economist Karl Marx, and his partner Friedrich Engels, it meant a state that “withered away,” as people evolved out of the basic greed that makes capitalism possible. For critics of the idea, it tends to mean the economic and political system employed in the Soviet Union (1917-1991) and in China from 1949 until the early 1980s. We can’t really know what Marx would have thought of this, as he was somewhat vague on how to get to the workers’ paradise he envisioned, and he didn’t live to see what a self-professed Marxist state actually looked like. So we should be careful to separate Marx from his several stepchildren. This system is also sometimes called Marxism-Leninism, after Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), founder of the Soviet Union and the person who put Marxism into practice. So while we can’t say for sure what real communism might be like, we can talk about what people who said there were communists did.
For lack of a better term, Soviet-style communism meant a high degree of socialism (and hence a low degree of private ownership), coupled with a one-party state. So while there were elections in the Soviet Union, there was usually only one candidate, who had been approved by the Communist Party.
Soviet communism had all the problems of socialism, and then some. While it did mean that people had jobs, homes and health care, consumer goods were often inferior and in short supply. The old joke about the Soviet Union was that it’s minus-60 degrees Fahrenheit in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in February and you still can’t get a cold Coke (Soviet-made refrigerators being not very good at actually keeping things cold).
For a while, especially after World War II, it looked like the Soviet system might actually work. The Soviet Union enjoyed substantial economic growth in the years after the war, and you had to wonder when Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev promised “We will bury you” in a famous speech to western ambassadors in Poland in 1956.
It didn’t last. When much of your economy has been destroyed by war, and you’re effectively starting from zero, your initial growth rates will look pretty good. In reality, it simply wasn’t a very efficient system. Other than weapons, there were no Soviet-made consumer goods that anybody in the rest of the world wanted to buy. Western travelers to the Soviet Union often reported making money selling denim jeans on the black market to fashion-hungry Russian consumers. And you could always get a better exchange rate on rubles to dollars if you met somebody around the corner.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economic echoes continued. When I covered air shows around the world, at which aerospace manufacturers pitched their products to airlines and defense officials, it took some years before Russian aerospace representatives learned to say “we think this product will help our customers make money.” Before that, they mostly talked about how much product they could push out the door, not whether it was any good.
I visited a friend of mine in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, in 1993 after the collapse of the Soviet empire. His fax machine didn’t work; three employees from the state telephone company came out to tell him that it was broken, and they offered to sell him a new one for \$600 (about \$900 in 2012 prices). The problem was in the phone lines, however; his fax machine worked fine at his neighbor’s apartment.
“This is the legacy of 40 years of socialism,” said my friend. “These guys just don’t want to work.”
Later that day, however, we happened across the monument to the victory of the west in the Cold War. As we rounded a corner in Bratislava, we came upon on a K-mart with a Pepsi billboard on the side.
“There, you see?” I told my friend. “That’s it. We won.”
That being said, Soviet citizens, when surveyed, said they didn’t mind the system, but they were often unhappy with the government. The one-party state meant there were no avenues for public protest and discontent, and throughout Soviet history people were thrown in jail or even killed for disagreeing with the state. So while the system provided basic standards of living for most people, it tended toward political repression. That’s because the system was aimed at creating a broad version of socialism, and because ruthless people were sometimes more likely to take power. The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin may have killed 6-7 million of his own people; Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-Tung may have killed 30 million.
Chinese communism was different than Soviet communism. In a time of unrest and disunion in China following the collapse of the Qing Dynasty early in the 20th century, Mao led what amounted to a peasant rebellion to take control of the country in 1949. China was a land of millions of landless peasants. Unlike the Nationalists led by Chaing Kai-Shek, Mao was not beholden to the landlords and moneyed interests. He insisted that his soldiers treat the peasants with respect, and he offered those peasants hope. Mao redistributed land to the peasants, and agricultural production boomed. He then declared that peasant farmers could form cooperatives to pool their resources, and production rose even more. But then he declared that the farms were to be collectivized—owned by the state—everybody and nobody—and production fell.
So while Chinese communism was never quite the unyielding monolith that Soviet communism became, it increasingly became a function of Chairman Mao’s quirky ego. Around 1958, in a quixotic bid to produce more steel than the United Kingdom (and modernize China’s economy), Mao pushed the people to create backyard steel furnaces. This led to smelting down lots of useful stuff to make useless steel, and to a famine that killed 20-30 million people (since so much food was diverted from the countryside to the cities). Even the current Chinese government has declared that the Great Helmsman was right only about 70 percent of the time. Later, Mao pushed what became known as the Cultural Revolution (roughly 1966-1969, with echoes until 1976), in which legions of young people led an effort to denounce people who appeared to have backslid away from true communism. This led to widespread destruction of Chinese cultural artifacts, some deaths, and millions of people persecuted for their alleged capitalist beliefs. A Chinese colleague of mine in graduate school said that his parents, schoolteachers, were forced to the school every day to be denounced for their crimes. He said this lasted for two years.
Defenders of communism argue that a Marxist state doesn’t have to be like that, but too often it was. The Soviet constitution was full of guarantees of human rights, but there was no way to compel the state to enforce those guarantees. Any citizen could join the Communist Party, but that was no guarantee of having any influence. The lack of meaningful political participation both delegitimized the state in the eyes of its citizens, and also failed to provide any kind of check on the power of the state when it went off course.
And that happens, because the communist governing apparatus tends to invite ruthless people to take power. Whoever can threaten or appeal to the vanity of enough people will sometimes get the job, and sometimes can be too often. (It sort of reminds me of a lot of places I’ve worked—the people who become managers are truly terrible with people, but they said what the bosses above them wanted to hear.) With no check on the power of the state, a bad leader can cause great suffering for a lot of people.
Ironically, the communist state that may have worked the best was also led by a strongman dictator, Yugoslavia under Marshal Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980). Yugoslavia had been cobbled together by the British and French at the end of World War I, ostensibly to make it big enough to defend itself. But in the process, they lumped together a diverse set of people—Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Montenegrins, Slovenians, Albanians and Macedonians—who hadn’t always gotten along. Tito held it all together for as long as he lived, and Yugoslav communism apparently did feature worker-led enterprises, higher standards of living, and less outright oppression than was common in some other states. (Although when I traveled through it in the 1970s, it still looked pretty bleak compared to the rest of Europe.) Tito was noteworthy also for thumbing his nose at both the Soviets and the Chinese. But after Tito’s death, the patchwork nation quickly unraveled, leading to a war that gave us the term “ethnic cleansing” as Serbs fought Croatians and Bosnians in a rather nasty conflict. Yugoslavia is now no more, having dissolved into at least seven different states, none of them still communist.
The performance of other communist states, like the states themselves, has been all over the map. China’s rulers still call themselves the Communist Party, but they’re not very communist, particularly when it comes to economic policy. It’s now possible to own a business in China, although the government still plays a big role in the economy. Ditto for Vietnam.
China is an interesting experiment in the long-term survival of a communism party, if not of communism. Since the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, the country has gradually liberalized its economy. Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997), “rehabilitated” after falling victim to the Cultural Revolution, became the new leader in 1978. Deng had been a Marxist since his youth, but later uttered the very un-Marxist statement “It doesn’t matter if it’s a black cat or a white cat, as long as it catches a mouse.” As the economy was opened up under this leadership, he followed up his earlier pronouncement with the less ambiguous “It is glorious to be rich.” Farms were de-collectivized, people were allowed to start businesses, and the economy boomed. China is now the second largest economy in the world, after the United States.
However, if we measure the economy on a per-person basis (per capita GDP, or gross domestic product), China ranks 95th (the U.S. slips to 20th), which means there are hundreds of millions of very poor people among China’s estimated population of 1.5 billion. Rising living standards is one of the key ways in which the not-very-Communist Party maintains legitimacy. Western scholars have two theories about how this will all play out: In the hard-landing scenario, China falls apart. The soft-landing scenario, China evolves into something more like a liberal democracy. Chinese officials in different parts of the country have different theories—in the north, they say they will remain “communist,” while in the south I have heard scholars say “we’ll be a democracy in 20 years.” Despite a substantial degree of government control and influence on the economy, the Chinese for the moment have rejected the economic portions of communism.
North Korea remains an economic and political basket case, where the government maintains legitimacy by convincing people that the state is all that stands between the people and sure annihilation by the rest of the world, even as the people literally starve to death. At the other end of the spectrum is Cuba, which has high rates of literacy, housing, employment and good health care, but no political freedom and a fair amount of political repression. Under founding father Fidel Castro’s brother, Raoul, some small economic liberalization has occurred—you can own a restaurant, for example, but only employ family members. This is of small consolation to the Cuban-Americans, exiles, who lost land and businesses when Cuba went communist in 1959. Despite its successes, Cuba has gone from a food exporter to a food importer in 50 years of communism, and its future remains uncertain.
Anarchism
Anarchism is an interesting and challenging school of thought, and perhaps the one that might not actually have been really tried (aside from the occasional experiment). Anarchists, like libertarians, want nearly no government, but unlike libertarians, theirs is a vision driven by localized cooperation rather than by a faith in markets.
The anarchist vision is a little bit like Marx’s workers’ paradise, but anarchists are less likely to call for a dictatorship of the proletariat to get us there. Some thinkers have said that what Marx missed was the idea that it doesn’t matter what kind of state and economic institutions you have, all of them will become tools of oppression. Marx would have disagreed; his vision was that the state would “wither away” as people learned to co-exist and no longer required the overarching management of a formal state. This is, in a way, the “don’t hate the playa, hate the game” school of political philosophy. We’re not bad people; it’s the state that makes us that way.
Beyond that, one lumps together the many strains of anarchism at one’s own peril. Anarchists range from people who think society should be organized collectively (anarcho-communists) to a libertarian strain that believes in private property and free enterprise, just no government (and no big business). Anarcho-syndicalists want to replace capitalism with an economy run by workers for workers, with “production for use, not for profit” and an end to wages.
The Chinese philosopher Lao Tze advocated a kind of anarchist approach to life. At one point in his writings he encouraged the good person to move to the country, and live simply with family members (and a few servants). Lao Tze may have been a contemporary of Confucius (551-479 BCE); on the other hand, he did write something, the Tao te Ching, one of those vague works of literature that has since been claimed an influence by elites, the poor, libertarians, and Moslems, as well as anarchists.
The American writer Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) said that government was an engine of evil, promoting corruption and dishonesty, but he only said one should disobey government when it does wrong. What he preached bordered on anarchism; it was Thoreau (and not Thomas Jefferson) who said “The best government is that which governs least,” following that up with “That government is best which governs not at all.” But Thoreau appeared to be speaking as much metaphorically as he was practically.
The first person to call himself an anarchist was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), a French politician and theorist. Proudhon argued that “property is theft”—in essence, saying that claiming to own something necessarily steals it from someone else. He also characterized anarchism as “order without power,” underscoring anarchists’ general belief that if left alone, most people will do the right thing. Whereas most political philosophers have focused on what people do wrong, anarchist thought does focus more on what people do right.
It’s hard to judge these ideas. This hasn’t been tried on a large scale, and it’s really difficult to imagine a society so decentralized existing amid a world of nations armed to the teeth and a world of businesses bent on profit.
But things that look like anarchism have been tried on a small scale; the history of the 1800s is dotted with town-sized utopian experiments where people tried to live the kind of life anarchists have long preached. Experiments in anarchist-style societies have been short-lived, if only because they were overrun by forces that wanted to be in power themselves. At other times and places, such as Robert Owen’s New Harmony community in Indiana in the 1820s, things fell apart if only because some people worked and some people just didn’t.
Owen (1771–1858) was a British mill-owner (and hence a capitalist) who styled himself a socialist reformer. His mill in Manchester, England, was a model for its time, and he limited his profits to try to take better care of his workers, many of whom were orphan children. This was a time when many millworkers were paid only in company tokens, redeemable only at the company store. Workers were often little better than serfs, bound to the factories where they worked and to the towns in which they lived.
Owen envisioned small, self-governing, self-supporting communities in which people would take care of themselves and provide for their own needs. Owen managed to give this a try, both in Scotland and in Indiana. Both experiments fell apart, as friction developed between people who wanted to work and people who apparently wouldn’t. So while it might be true that most of the time people will do the right thing, just often enough, they don’t. We can’t know whether anarchism is any of its forms would work; we do know that it, like every other ideology, it would have its strengths and weaknesses.
One society that looked a bit like anarchy, and worked, was the Tiv of Nigeria. The fourth-largest ethnic group in Nigeria, the Tiv governed themselves by relying on relationships. They all considered themselves descended from the same ancestor (a man named Tiv), and society was broken down into small, extended family groups who lived and worked together. Tiv society, before the British began to try to impose “order,” had no courts, no chiefs, no elected councils—just family and relationships. Disputes were settled by bargaining and negotiation, and by the knowledge that relationships are ongoing. You don’t want to anger anyone too much, because today’s opponent may be tomorrow’s ally. And so, with remarkable success, the Tiv worked things out, and long maintained a relatively peaceful, stable society.
How would this work elsewhere? Would it work elsewhere? Again, we can’t really know for sure. Clearly, for the Tiv, a sense of kinship and common lineage helped; in fluid societies in the west, people sometimes barely know their neighbors before they move. By multiple accounts, the lack of sense of community makes us less happy, but that seems unlikely to change for the foreseeable future. So the constant introduction of new people means that it could be more difficult for people in many parts Europe, Asia and the Americas to create a system of self-governance based on lineage, kinship and custom.
Clearly, in some ways, government does make people worse off. Wherever human institutions are created, for whatever reasons, some people will sometimes misuse them to exercise power over other people. Human institutions create traditions, which will be both valuable in creating predictability, and damaging because traditions can limit the possibility of needed change.
But even if we concede that human institutions can make people worse, and worse off, that doesn’t necessarily say that a lack of institutions—a lack of government—will make them better, or better off. The institutions in which we live—schools, businesses where we work, churches, governments—have an impact on how we develop and behave as people. But we also have an impact on them, and each of us, in some small way, make those institutions what they are.
Nazism and Fascism
We have saved the worst for last. Fascism, and its more racist cousin, nazism, should be the least-appealing ideologies we can find, and yet some people are drawn to them even in this day.
Fascism got its start in Italy in the mind and ideas of Benito Mussolini (1883-1945). The word fascism derives from an Italian word that originally meant a bundle, as in sticks, but later came to mean a group or a league. Mussolini was not the first to use the term that way, but he helped put fascism on the political map in the way that we understand it today.
Mussolini was a bully, a thug, a man who used fear to gain power. He started his political life as a socialist, then invented fascism as a way of gaining power and justifying the use of that power. Much of Europe was in economic and social turmoil after the end of World War I. Mussolini climbed through that window of opportunity. He took power in 1922 by marching on Rome with an army of ruffians. Despite having been defeated at the polls in previous elections, his threatening behavior led him to be named prime minister.
As Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, California, “there’s no ‘there’ there.” Stein was certainly wrong about Oakland, but it’s certainly true of fascism. To read anything by a famous fascist such as Hitler or Mussolini is to quickly recognize that this isn’t a theory as much as it is a lot of words without much real meaning. The rationalization of fascism is pretty much, “we’re right; you’re wrong if you’re against us; and we’re right because we say we’re right.” This is an oversimplification, but not much. Fascism glorifies the power of the state, but it’s hard to tell how that makes the majority better off.
Fascism argues that some people are just better than others, and they should be in charge. Naturally, the only test of this is whether you agree with the fascists. As a result, fascism appeals to nationalism, that sense of a people that they have unique qualities and a unique destiny. Fascism glorifies the state; the individual exists for the state, not the other way around. Fascism glorified war and poked fun at peace; it was also expressly anti-communist. Fear of communism, in the wake of the Russian revolution, was to be a commonly played card in western politics for decades to come. Despite how the horrors of World War II discredited fascism, it got a boost in the Cold War era (between World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union) because it could claim to be not communist, oppressive though it typically was. This became increasingly awkward for western powers such as the United States, because it meant we were allied with rulers whose politics were antithetical to what Americans say they believe about freedom and democracy. But if they were against communism, we helped prop them up.
Nazism was Adolph Hitler’s version of fascism, and Hitler was an early admirer of Mussolini (who was not so far gone that he didn’t soon realize, after they met, that Hitler was crazy). Nazi was a corruption of “National Socialist,” the name of Hitler’s party. That was an odd name, as the party clearly didn’t believe in socialism. Germany was the only Nazi state, and it lasted barely 12 years. Yet it remains worth considering because of the unparalleled damage it did to people around the world.
As with Mussolini’s writing, Hitler’s meandering diatribes don’t really describe a coherent ideology as much as they justify the use of power for private ends. Nazism, as you probably know, was expressly racist, denigrating everyone who didn’t fall into Hitler’s vision of a perfect Aryan race. (There probably were Aryans, once, and they were most likely from India.) Like Mussolini, Hitler took power through fear and intimidation. Also like Mussolini, he rapidly ended any pretense of electoral government. Unlike Mussolini, whose crimes were serious but much smaller, he proceeded over the next dozen years to horrify the world in ways it could not have previously imagined. An estimated 60 million people died in World War II, and while Hitler wasn’t responsible for all of their deaths, he was the leading cause of the tragedy.
Nazism and fascism could be said to be forms of totalitarianism, a kind of authoritarian government that relies on an arbitrary view of the law (it’s not the same very everybody), and the cult-like status of official leaders. It’s a religion in which the thing to be worshipped is the state, and the state takes human form in the guise of the leader. It becomes, in the end, an extended pep rally, with rather severe penalties for not cheering along.
So there’s not much to say for fascism in any form. The one possible strength of fascism is its ability to make decisions, but the fact they are usually such wrong decisions makes that of no consolation. Mussolini was said to make the Italian trains run on time, but even that was a myth: The trains didn’t run on time during World War I; after that, they got back on schedule.
Under fascism, the lack of meaningful elections provides no check on the power of the state, which can then proceed to systematically oppress unpopular groups. Fascism purports to be capitalist, but as the system rewards friends and punishes enemies, the uneven granting of state favors means market don’t really function efficiently, and people’s economic opportunities may be quite limited. This is sometimes called “crony capitalism,” and it tends to be a problem in authoritarian regimes in general.
Fascism only ever seems to take hold when someone is able to convince people that their order and security are at risk, even as those agents tend to be contributing to that problem. Mussolini promised a restored Roman empire and Hitler a “thousand-year reich,” but together all they got was a decade or two of incredible human suffering. No other ideology can make that claim, and none should. Mussolini was killed by his own people in 1945; they cut off his head and stuck it on a pole near Milan. Not long afterward, Hitler took poison in a bunker in Berlin. He had his henchman burn his body so that he is head wouldn’t end up the same way.
The longest-surviving fascist state may have been Spain under the rule of Francisco Franco (1892-1975). Franco took power at the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). He ruled until his death in 1975, decreeing that when he was gone, Spain would again become a monarchy. King Juan Carlos, upon taking office, called for elections and Spain became a constitutional monarchy and a liberal democracy, which it remains. Franco probably was able to remain in power because he didn’t follow Hitler and Mussolini, who had supported him in the civil war, into World War II. Franco didn’t start out as a fascist, and didn’t end up as one. He relied on the support of the Spanish fascist Falange party, but after the end of that war, Franco backed away from fascist ideology, although he continued as dictator until his death.
Fascism has never entirely gone away; there are tiny neo-Nazi movements scattered around the U.S. and Europe. Mussolini’s granddaughter, Alessandra Mussolini, after a career as a minor film star and pin-up girl, has served in both the European and Italian parliaments. While she hasn’t shied away from her grandfather’s notorious past, her politics, while generally right wing, have been all over the map. Maybe it’s something about Italian politics. Voters there also once elected former porn star Ilona Staller to parliament, but she was a member of the Lista del Sole, the first Italian pro-environment party.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Other ideologies outside of classical liberalism and its variants tend to offer greater equality of outcomes but generate less overall wealth.
• Socialism is an economic system that provides greater equality of result but less equality of opportunity.
• Communism combines a socialist economy with a one-party government.
• Anarchism has not been tried on a large scale outside of the Tiv in Nigeria.
• Fascism glorifies the state; individuals are important only as part of the state.
• Nazism glorifies the state, with an expressly racist approach to politics
EXERCISES
1. How would the place where you work be different if it was a government agency? If it’s already a public agency, what would be different if it was privatized?
2. Which countries still claim to be communist? What things could cause that to change? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/03%3A_Ideologies_and_Isms/3.02%3A_Alternatives_to_Liberalism.txt |
The precise definition of democracy is direct rule by the people. In a true democracy, the people would vote directly on whatever comes before the state—laws, amendments, and decisions by government. If your class votes for a take-home exam instead of an in-class test, that would be an example of democracy. And anything that invites people to participate in decision-making in some meaningful way, such as elections, can be said to be democratic. But that’s not the same thing as a democracy. Why does this matter? First, words should have meaning, so that when we talk about politics, for example, we’re all speaking the same language. When Americans call their government a democracy, they are also implying that they are directly in control of government. It probably would surprise many of them to learn that the Founding Fathers, about whom so many American citizens like to wax nostalgic if not poetic, thought that ordinary citizens should have a definite but limited role in directly controlling the government. Calling the government a democracy may also lead to unrealistic expectations of how government works and how quickly it responds. In fact, most of the modern “democracies” are designed to be a little bit slow and a little bit unresponsive. In this chapter, we’ll see why.
Thumbnail: Elizabeth II is the current Queen of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth realms. (OGL v.3; Joel Rouse/ Ministry of Defence via Wikipedia)
04: Types of Governments- A Republic or a Democracy
Learning Objectives
In this section, you will learn:
1. What democracy means.
2. What the difference is between direct and indirect democracy.
3. Ways that direct democracy plays a role in contemporary government.
The usual example of a true democracy is ancient Athens. The word democracy derives from Greek roots, “demos” (people) and “kratis” (power). Athens, still the capital of modern Greece, was the richest and most powerful of Greek citystates, at a time when Greece was divided into dozens of competing tiny states. Athens had democratic elements in its government from about 500 BCE off and on until the Romans effectively conquered Greece in the Second Century BCE. Other Greek city-states had democratic governments, but Athens is the one about which we have the best information.
At its peak, ancient Athens had between 250,000 and 400,000 people (estimates vary), of whom as many as two-thirds were slaves. Only free male citizens (who had completed military training) were allowed to participate actively in politics, so that only about 20 percent of the male citizens could actually vote. And, unlike a true democracy, they didn’t vote on everything; they elected councils above them to handle some decisions. But big decisions, such as going to war, were made by the assembly, a monthly gathering of eligible citizens. The assembly had a quorum (the minimum number needed to be present for the decisions to count) of 6,000, making it one of the broadest-based governing bodies in history.
This is what we now call direct democracy, in that the people, however defined, make government decisions directly. Direct democracy has the virtue of including more people and giving them a voice, and the people aren’t always wrong. Others have suggested that there’s a price in giving everybody a voice. The challenge of direct democracy for Athens is the same challenge that direct democracy faces today: Leaving decisions to people who may not be paying enough attention, and may get caught up in the passion of the moment, can lead to bad decisions. For the Athenians, that meant throwing out good leaders in favor of demagogues (candidates and leaders who say what people want to hear, as opposed to, perhaps, what they need to hear), and entering wars that succeeded only in squandering Athens’ blood and treasure. So, as with most ideas in politics, direct democracy involves trade-offs.
Contemporary Direct Democracy
Direct democracy is still with us today, nonetheless. In nearly 90 nations, and in the United States, people do sometimes vote en masse on laws. In the U.S., 27 states have some form of initiatives and referenda, which are tools of direct democracy.
Initiatives
Initiatives allow people to propose laws directly, either to the voters as a whole (direct initiative) or to state legislatures (indirect initiative). With a direct initiative, the people vote, and if it passes, the measure becomes law. With an indirect initiative, the measure goes first to the state legislature, which typically can pass the measure into law; ignore it, in which case it goes to the people for a vote; or pass their own alternative, which goes on the ballot along with the original measure. This brings voters into a gray area, since state constitutions don’t always make clear what happens if both measures pass.
Initiatives usually require some number of signatures of registered voters to make it on the ballot. In 18 states, voters can use the initiative process to amend state constitution.
Direct ballot measures tend to peak when the economy is soft; in the U.S there were 183 measures from the people on state ballots in 2010, but only 34 in 2011. In the latter year, 22 of those passed. In 100 years of initiative history, Oregon (351) and California (329) have had the most initiatives on the ballot, by far.
In the U.S., initiatives grew out of the frustration of voters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who found themselves unable to budge state governments on various issues. They saw state government as too beholden to powerful interest groups such as mining and railroads, and saw the initiative process as a convenient end-around maneuver to get past legislatures that appeared to be locked down by lobbyists.
As with everything in government, initiatives have been used for good and for greed (which is which naturally depends on your point of view). Citizens have used the initiative process to make the political process more transparent, to increase funding for schools and various other public programs, and to require more training for child-care providers. They have also been used to cut taxes, raise taxes, decriminalize marijuana, limit abortion, and, in Oklahoma, make English the official language of the state. Citizens certainly have the right to ask for these things. But when citizens in successive years raise spending on schools but cut taxes (as they did in my state, Washington), you should begin to get an idea of the challenges of the initiative process. Voters may not be paying enough attention to recognize that simultaneously raising spending and cutting revenue may not be very good policy.
A good example of the mixed blessings of initiatives is California’s Proposition 13, passed in 1978. By this initiative, citizens of California amended the state Constitution to limit future property tax increases by no more than 2 percent. Property taxes tax property owners based on the assessed value of their land and buildings. In some ways, the tax is a relic of the 19th century, when land was indeed a good measure of people’s wealth. Now that very few of us are farmers, this might not be the case. Nonetheless, property taxes continue to be a major source of revenue for state and local governments. The trade-offs in Prop 13 should be fairly obvious: Property owners were protected from rising tax rates in the often-booming California real estate market, since rising property values would otherwise mean higher taxes for property owners. Voters also were concerned that retired people could be priced out of their homes as property values and taxes continued to rise. On the other hand, state and local government have been starved for cash ever since, particularly local governments such as cities and school districts. Critics also say it interferes with the housing market since people are less likely to sell their homes (a change of ownership means a new baseline assessment for tax value; otherwise the baseline is the home value in 1975). So while it might have saved California taxpayers more than \$500 billion, some of that money might have gone to things people say they want, like good schools. Clearly, it’s a trade-off.
Meanwhile, initiatives have another shortcoming. For most initiatives, you get an up-or-down vote, and the initiative is passed into law, unchangeable for a couple of years before a legislature can refine it. Contrast that with the legislative process, in which a proposed law (a bill) is discussed, debated and amended before it becomes law, and subject to change as soon as somebody recognizes that it doesn’t work as planned.
Finally, although they are called citizen initiatives, increasingly they are a tool of people with money. Courts have allowed paid signature-gatherers, a great help when you might need 200,000-300,000 valid signatures of registered voters to get a measure on the ballot. Campaigns are increasingly funded by interest groups with an axe to grind, with money coming from out-of-state both for and against measures that, ostensibly, are to be decided by the people of that state. While everyone has a right to her or his opinion, and the freedom to express that opinion as they see fit, big-money initiative campaigns seem a little different than what the original reformers had in mind.
Referenda
Referenda (the proper plural of referendum, also sometimes called plebiscites) are another form of direct democracy, available in 24 U.S. states and more than 30 countries. Referenda allow legislatures to put things before the people for a vote, such as constitutional amendments and tax measures. (Every state except Delaware requires a vote by the citizens to approve constitutional amendments.)
Referenda also allow citizens to force a measure passed by a legislature onto the ballot, usually with an eye to overturning that measure. Often this means there’s an interest group that wants a new law changed, because it takes time, live bodies and money to mount a successful referendum campaign. This usually features an expensive campaign in which the law is painted as a threat to mom, decency and the republic, when it may in fact just be a threat to that particular industry. We may be for or against businesses, unions or environmental groups who want to repeal a law, but it is their right to pursue their interests.
Referenda have been used to make big decisions around the world. Voters in Scotland and Wales used referenda to decide to create their own parliaments in 1997. Voters in Norway said no to joining the European Union in 1994. Voters in Quebec, Canada chose not to secede from Canada in 1980 and 1995. Voters in Montenegro voted to leave what was left of Yugoslavia in 2006. And white voters in South Africa in 1992 voted overwhelmingly to formally end the policy of apartheid, in which South Africans of color were not allowed to vote.
In the U.S., in 2011 Maine voters used a referendum to overturn a new law that banned same-day registration for voters (register to vote and get to vote on election day). Voters in Ohio overturned a new law that limited unionized workers’ collective bargaining rights. In 2010, in Washington state, voters approved the repeal of a 5-cent tax on bottled water and other “non-food” consumables. So whatever we think of the measures, referenda give voters a chance to just say no.
Bonds and Levies
State and local governments in the United States in particular use direct democracy in another way—votes on special levies and bond measures for schools and other public facilities. Levies are usually additions to the local property tax—so many cents per \$1,000 of assessed value of the property. Bondsare a way in which government all over the world finance projects. If an investor buys a bond, they are lending the government agency money, which means they get an interest payment, plus their original investment back. Governments use this method of financing when they need a lot of cash up front—if the local school district is building a new high school, the contractor has to get paid so he or she can pay for the materials and pay all the workers. Investors may be willing to lend money to the school district because it’s a relatively safe investment. So in a bond-issue election, local governments are asking voters to promise to pay additional property tax to pay back the investors who buy the bonds.
U.S. state constitutions often require such votes, which force local governments to explain to voters why they need the money and what they will do with it. Some states add turnout requirements to such special levies, which is fundamentally undemocratic if you think about it. If you are against the levy, and if there’s a turnout requirement, the best thing you could do is stay home. Normally, not voting means you have surrendered your voice in this matter; turnout requirements effectively reward not voting. Others argue that it simply puts more pressure on school, water and fire districts to work harder to prove to voters that they need the money. Turn-out requirements for school levies were eased in Washington state after many school districts found themselves getting “yes” votes by as much as 90 percent, only to see the levies fail because not enough voters showed up at the polls. You will have to decide which argument makes more sense to you. Some bond measures also require a super-majority, so that the measure needs a 60 percent yes-vote to pass.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Democracy literally means “direct rule by the people.” Sometimes this is referred to as “direct democracy.”
• Direct democracy existed only partially in ancient Greek citystates such as Athens.
• Direct democracy is found in initiatives, referenda, and local levy and bond issue votes.
EXERCISES
1. Does your state allow initiatives and/or referenda? If so, how have these been used to change the law in your state?
2. How much do local governments in your area, such as school or fire districts, rely on special levies for funding? Is there a minimum turn-out requirement for approval? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/04%3A_Types_of_Governments-_A_Republic_or_a_Democracy/4.01%3A_Direct_Democracy.txt |
Learning Objectives
In this section, you will learn:
1. What a republic is.
2. The different kinds of republics.
3. Alternatives to republican forms of government.
Republics
The problems and opportunities of direct democracy haven’t changed in 3,000 years of written history. At best, they empower the people to make needed changes. At worst, they put important decisions directly in the hands of people who may get carried away by the passion of the moment, or simply aren’t paying enough attention.
How then do we create a government that both gives people a voice but still manages to let government be run by folks who are at least paying attention? The answer for some has been the republic. In arepublic, strictly speaking, people elect others who make decisions on their behalf. When you consider that even in ancient Athens, the assembly of 6,000 still elected a council of 500, you see that most democratic governments have included some features of a republic. Because they typically let a broad range of citizens vote, we might call them democratic republics, but as that term was used by so many erstwhile communist states, “democratic republic” can have multiple meanings.
Republics are designed to put a check on the passions of the people, which can make them seem remote and unresponsive. The designers of the U.S. Constitution did not see themselves as “democrats,” as democracy to them, from their reading of history, looked like rule by the mob. The party of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, which eventually became the Democratic Party, originally called themselves Republicans (in some texts, they are referred to as “Democratic-Republicans,” but they apparently never referred to themselves as such). Hence the many layers of government, and checks and balances, that one finds in various republics—all designed to slow the whole process down.
This, of course, can be maddening if what you want is government to do something—anything—make a change. On the other hand, making government work more slowly, forcing the governors to deliberate and discuss, isn’t lacking in virtue either. Governments are full of people, and people are simultaneously capable of flights of inspiration and genius as well as complete foolishness. So in a republic, the goal tends to be to stop things from happening as much as it is to make things happen. What we also hope for in republics is that an idea that becomes a law is hammered, recut and welded until the idea is so compelling that everyone says yes.
Of the 192 recognized sovereign nations in the world, only about 10 are not some kind of republic, in which people vote for representatives who in some way make up the government. Not everyone is called a republic—there are around 40 constitutional monarchies, in which they still have a king or queen who remains head of state in a ceremonial role. The United Kingdom, Spain, Norway and Sweden are constitutional monarchies. Despite the presence of a monarch, it is the people who are elected to office who make the real decisions.
In some republics, such as the United States, power is divided between executive, legislative and judicial branches. In other countries, such as Canada and the United Kingdom, the legislative branch (parliament) holds both legislative and executive power.
A handful of states call themselves republics, and also still call themselves communist, such as China and Vietnam, which should be an oxymoron. Republics rely on elections, and communism does not allow meaningful elections.
True republics are distinguished by elections, in which people seek office and citizens decide by voting who gets in office. A republic also features an elected legislature, such as an assembly, a congress or parliament, whose job it is to make laws. A republic may have a separately elected president, or a prime minister who is chosen from the majority party in parliament. Some parliamentary republics also have a separately elected president, whose job is largely ceremonial.
Some republics are categorized as illiberal democracies. They have elections, which aren’t necessarily free and fair. They tend to have less meaningful preservation of civil rights and liberties. They also tend to control the media. Russia tends to be the prime example of such a state. People who oppose sometime president, sometime prime minister Vladimir Putin keep ending up in jail. Singapore is sometimes considered an illiberal democracy, because a single party tends to dominate the government and citizens there lack some civil liberties. Mexico was an illiberal republic for much of the 20th century, as the Institutional Revolutionary Party (the PRI, in its Spanish-language acronym) dominated elections, even when they probably weren’t winning.
Some are in between the parliamentary and president/congress models. France is a semi-presidential republic. Power is divided between executive, legislative and judicial branches. But the president shares some powers with the prime minister, who represents the majority party in the French parliament and is appointed by the president. This is no problem if the president and the majority in the National Assembly are from the same party, and quite a bit trickier if they’re not. The president can dissolve the assembly and call for new elections, but if the new elections don’t change the balance of power, the president can expect to have an even more difficult time with an assembly dominated by his or her opponents. (And if that wasn’t enough complexity, there’s an appointed constitutional council to rule on the constitutionality of new laws.)
Other Forms of Government: Monarchy
Monarchy means rule by a monarch, a king, a queen, a sultan—whatever title fits the language and tradition of that country. As we just noted, most monarchies that remain in the world—around 40, depending on who’s counting—are constitutional monarchies, in which someone maintains the title and the job of “head of state” but all real political power rests with some elected portion of government, such as a parliament or other-named legislative body. For example, in 1892, William Gladstone was chosen as prime minister (head of government of Great Britain) when his Liberal Party won a majority in the House of Commons. Queen Victoria (1819-1901) didn’t like Gladstone (who had qualms about Britain’s growing empire, and the queen found herself liking this idea of empire more and more as it grew), but she was effectively bound by law to name him prime minister.
Four nations in the world (Brunei, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia) are still absolute monarchies. In several states states, Swaziland, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, are mixed, in which the monarch shares some power with elected officials. In each of these countries except Kuwait, legislative bodies are partially elected and partially appointed by the monarch. In Jordan, Morocco, Monaco and Lichtenstein, the monarch still plays an active role in government. You will note that aside from Lichtenstein, Swaziland and Monaco, are all these are Middle Eastern states, most of which are relatively wealthy from oil.
Consider Saudi Arabia. It may be the only state in the world that is named after its ruling family, the Sauds. Adul-Aziz Ibn Saud created the kingdom by force in 1932, and his descendants have ruled ever since. Normally, royal succession proceeds from generation to generation; the kings of Saudi Arabia to date all have been brothers. Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud had 22 wives, and 37–45 sons (estimates vary). As a consequence, he is survived by about 15,000 family members, including 2,000 more-or-less direct descendants who help run the country. It was only in 2006 that the ruling family agreed that subsequent kings would by chosen by a council of 32 top-ranking family members, who are to consider the skill, experience, popularity and religious sentiments of eligible candidates.
How does this all work? Saudi Arabia has 13 provinces, all governed by royal princes (of whom there may be as many as 7,000). Royal family members hold all of the top offices, such as head of defense, foreign relations, and minister of the interior. The king is both head of state and head of government.
We might also ask how such a state maintains legitimacy. Public protests against the government are officially banned, and the royal family justifies its rule as sanctioned by the Quran, the Moslem holy book. In fact, Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud gained power in part by allying himself with leaders of the Wahabbist/Salafi sect of Islam, thus adopting a fairly strict interpretation of the Quran. Religious authorities still have a great deal of influence on government and policy. Women can’t vote, but then again, not much of anybody else can either. The country had local elections in 2005 and 2011, and King Abdullah has said that women will be able to run for office and vote in local elections in 2015.
Legitimacy comes in part through the elevation of faith; the Quran and other holy documents are regarded as the national constitution. Some public participation in governance is possible through the court system, in which separate court systems deal with religious matters (the Sharia courts), grievances, and local matters. The government also maintains some of its tribal heritage, in that anyone can petition the king to discuss a grievance, and members of the royal family are regularly employed in hearing such petitions.
The state also attempts to provide higher standards of living by investing its oil wealth in education and economic development, with some positive results. But citizens sometimes complain that some members of the royal family treat national wealth as personal wealth. So the monarchy, while absolute, must balance the competing demands of citizens, religious authorities, other wealthy families within the country, and forces within and without the country that would prefer to see some other form of government there. This may be part of the reason why the great majority of monarchies evolved into constitutional monarchies—the challenges of maintaining legitimacy are greater when citizens lack enough of a voice in the affairs of state.
Authoritarian Governments/Dictatorships
Including monarchies, the world still has a fistful of authoritarian governments, but that is slowly changing. The popular uprisings of the Arab Spring in 2011 toppled authoritarian governments in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Syria is suffering through what amounts to a civil war between opponents and supporters of rule by the Assad family. Myanmar (Burma) finally allowed elections after 40 years of military rule. Turkmenistan, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, is effectively a one-party state, as is Belorussia, another former Soviet republic.
But others remain. The magazine The Economist, using a method that relies heavily on surveying “experts,” counted 53 states as authoritarian, plus 37 as “hybrid,” 53 as “flawed democracies,” and only 25 as full democracies. The Economist looked thing such as for “free and fair elections,” political participation, and whether government works the way it’s supposed to (such as civil servants being able to perform their jobs fairly). So flawed democracies don’t score well on all categories, and hybrid states have authoritarian and well as democratic elements at work.
Only two states, North Korea and Cuba, still operate the collectivized economy typical of 20th century communist states such as the Soviet Union. And from time to time, a state is ruled by its own military, such as recently in Fiji and Guinea-Bissau, while the Vatican City and Iran are theocracies—states ruled by a church.
Whereas the remaining monarchies attempt to remain in power by sharing enough of their oil wealth that citizens are willing to put up with rule by a hereditary monarch, authoritarian governments tend to hang on through force and propaganda. Authoritarian states do not have meaningful elections; public dissent is discouraged if not forbidden. They tend to grow out of responses to public unrest and dissension, but hang on because of fear, greed and a lust for power. Many authoritarian states are poor. Modernization theory suggests that states will not become democratic until they become wealthy enough; a state’s chance of becoming and remaining democratic improves greatly after per capita GDP surpasses \$5,000. Mexico did not have truly free elections until 1993, when a candidate from a party other than the PRI won the presidency and control of the Mexican Congress (and Mexico has had competitive elections ever since). The key difference seems to be Mexico’s growing wealth. When people are wealthy enough, they seem more willing to let democratic institutions work.
The two most authoritarian states, according to rankings of The Economist, are North Korea and the Central African Republic. The Central African Republic has suffered from 150 years of slave raids, colonial oppression, and the last 50 years of uncertain elections, military coups and general misrule. And it’s still probably a more free place to live than North Korea.
North Korea, at the bottom of nearly every ranking, is the better known of the two. Korea, since about 700 CE, was one country, even when it was under the thumb of China or Japan. During World War II, communist guerrillas fought the Japanese, along with non-communists. After the war, the country was divided, north and south, with the communists ending up in the north. The south, formally the Republic of Korea, was not a very liberal state, but its economy grew and eventually it entered the ranks of true democracies with real elections in 1993. By at least one measure, it has the world’s 13th largest economy.
North Korea attempted to reunite with the south by force in the Korean War (1950–1953). Things went downhill from there. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea turned inward, using the United States (and the rest of the world) as a bogeyman to keep people in a perpetual state of fear. Members of the Kim family have ruled the country throughout its history. The nation spends 25 percent of GDP on defense (the U.S. spends less than 5, which is high by world standards), including developing a nuclear weapons program, even as malnutrition and starvation plague much of the population. South Korea has roughly twice as many people as North Korea, but its economy is 17 times larger than the north’s. One report said that a third of North Korean children show visible effects of malnutrition.“Millions of North Korean children suffering from malnutrition, says UN,”www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012...alnutrition-un
So how does the government stay in power? Geography plays a role—North Korea is bordered only by South Korea and China, so it’s a little harder for people to flee. The government has eliminated all potential sources of opposition—the only real interest group is the military, and it is well supported by the state. There are no unions, no business groups, no other political factions. The state apparatus sniffs out any hint of dissent, which is dealt with brutally. People are either “re-educated” or simply executed, and under the “three-generations” policy, entire families are punished if one member makes a mistake. North Korea’s constant saber-rattling at the rest of the world keeps the military happy and many people apparently believing that whichever Kim is currently in power is the only thing that stands between them and annihilation by foreign powers. Meanwhile, other nations continue to give North Korea aid, in between nuclear tests. Economic sanctions designed to force change only affect the ruled, not the rulers; China, South Korea and the United States avoid sanctions that might hurt the elites who run the country because nobody wants to see North Korea collapse (a cure that might be worse than the disease).Daniel Bynum, et al, “Keeping Kim: How North Korea’s Regime Stays in Power,”belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/...eping_kim.html
Authoritarian governments rarely make people better off, and yet they persist. Some scholars distinguish between totalitarian and authoritarian governments. Totalitarian governments are seen as more extreme, with a single ruler relying on charisma to convince the people that he’s really on their side. Authoritarian governments have a higher level of corruption (raiding the public treasury for private gain, or simply accepting bribes). Totalitarian governments are ideological—there’s an overriding, underlying philosophy that drives the system.Sondrol, P. C., “Totalitarian and Authoritarian Dictators: A Comparison of Fidel Castro and Alfredo Stroessner”. Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3, 1991. So, Benito Mussolini’s Fascist rule of Italy was totalitarian; the military dictatorship of Myanmar/Burma was not. Totalitarian governments don’t usually have elections. Authoritarian governments might, but the results are often in doubt—the elections may not have been free and fair.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Most governments in the world are some kind of republic, although they don’t all work the same way, or even work as advertised.
• Republics usually feature open elections, and some kind of elected legislative body.
• The world still has a handful of monarchies, and a number of authoritarian governments in which political freedom is limited.
EXERCISES
1. Pick any country other than the one you live or are from. Visit a source such as the CIA World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook. What kind of government do they have? Is it a republic? Do they have political liberty there?
2. Some people have campaigned for a national initiative process for the United States. How would that work? What might be better or worse about that? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/04%3A_Types_of_Governments-_A_Republic_or_a_Democracy/4.02%3A_Indirect_Democracy.txt |
Learning Objectives
In this section, you will learn:
1. How a constitution can establish the framework for a government.
2. Constitutions are broad statements of principle, although some are very specific.
3. Constitutions often guarantee civil rights and civil liberties.
The majority of the world’s governments are some kind of republic. Republics often are established via constitutions. In fact, only three states—the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Israel—have no formal written constitution. But even those states have collections of documents that function, more or less, as constitutions. Every U.S. state has a constitution of its own. The oldest constitution in the world could be that of the tiny Republic of San Marino (written in 1600); it could be that of the state of Massachusetts (1780, but the oldest in continuous use). India has the longest constitution, more than 110,000 words; the United States has the shortest, at 4,543 words.That’s according to the U.S. Government Archives; many sources list it at around 7,000.http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_q_and_a.html#cite More than 100 states around the world have rewritten or written new constitutions in the last decade.
As concise and philosophic as the U.S. Constitution is, U.S. state constitutions are not. Most are too long and too specific; scholars say what’s in them would be better off in laws passed by state legislatures and hence easier to amend. Many states have had multiple constitutions. Vermont’s is the shortest at 8,295 words long. Alabama, now on its sixth constitution, weighs in at 357,157 words long. Generally, there’s too much detail. For example, the constitution of the state of Georgia, now on its 10th version, has 11 articles, beginning with a Bill of Rights and ending with “Miscellaneous Provisions.” It’s 113 pages long, which is actually on the short side for U.S. State Constitutions. While the U.S. Constitution left the details up to Congress and the citizens, the Georgia State Constitution tells lawmakers, in Article VII, Taxation and Finance, how to treat mobile homes, cars and stands of timber for tax purposes. Now those are actually very important items for the conduct of state government. But it’s an open question as to whether they belong in a constitution, or if they should just be matters of statute law. If nothing else, constitutions are harder to change than are regular laws, and that often ties the hands of state legislatures that may be forced to consider different policy choices.
A constitution is a statement of general principles, the blueprint, the foundation of a government. A constitution establishes a government and its rule, usually with an eye to defining citizens rights and limiting the power of government. It establishes the structure of the state. A properly adopted constitution is the supreme law of the land, and political debate often begins and ends with the question of constitutionality. Constitutions establish governments, and what they can and can’t do. A constitution can set the standards for elections, who can run for office and who can vote; it can set terms of office for elected officials; it can prescribe the rights and responsibilities of people in office.
A nation governed by impartial law is a western invention that has slowly spread around the globe, even though it isn’t always applied equally at all times and in all places. What that means is that the law doesn’t play favorites. It is to be applied equally to everybody. Law decides what is permitted and what is not. Everyone is expected to obey. Law is there to settle disputes, protect human rights, and to proscribe and prescribe various behaviors.
An alternative to constitutional law could be law that derives from custom and tradition, from clan and tribe, or from religious authority. Traditional societies in Africa and Asia created order by internal regulation—people got together and dealt with issues as they arose. This works in part because these decisions are based on ongoing relationships. Under this scenario, people are known to each other, and understand that they must get along tomorrow as well as today.
Constitutions (and the laws that derive from them) may be better at dealing with situations where everybody doesn’t know each other. They establish impartiality and predictability, and set the state as the sole legal authority. This can pose problems as states become more diverse, bringing together people whose legal traditions are different. For instance, an immigrant from a conservative Moslem state may have been used to the structure of Sharia (Islamic) law, and may find that western law is different and differently applied. Constitutions and laws must also be viewed as legitimate, including the processes by which they are made and amended.
The U.S. Constitution
The U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1788 and took effect on March 4, 1789. It is the supreme law of the land; all state constitutions are subservient to it. It has only seven articles, laying out the duties of the states and the national government, of the three branches of the national government—overall, how the government is supposed to work. Its brevity makes it pretty vague, which is both a strength and a weakness. For example, the Second Amendment says “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” What does that mean? According to some folks, it means most people can own a gun, any kind of gun. Then again, a bunch of folks with Saturday-night specials doesn’t sound like a well-regulate militia, does it? And what would the Founding Fathers have thought if there had been automatic assault rifles instead of muzzle-loading flintlocks? We can’t know for certain, so to some extent, American citizens must decide for themselves.
Some judges and scholars in the U.S. say they are “strict constructionists”—the Constitution as written, sometimes with reference to the intent of the Founding Fathers. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has said that anyone who thinks the Constitution is a flexible document is “an idiot.” Scalia espouses a view of the Constitution called originalism, in which the Constitution is to be applied as it was written and intended at the time. In the case of the Second Amendment, that might mean that Congress is incapable of putting restrictions on gun ownership.
The other theory is sometimes called the living constitution, in which it is regarded as an organic document that needs to be reinterpreted as times change. That might mean, for example, that Congress might put limits on gun ownership because bad things can happen when anybody can buy a fully automatic Uzi or AK-47.
Who is right is to some extent a matter of opinion; one could justify either interpretation without too much trouble. To say that we must interpret the Constitution as written and intended has the benefit of giving words meaning. If words mean whatever we want them to mean, the law is no protection for anybody. The law might mean one thing for you and one for me.
On the other hand, the Founding Fathers clearly were not all of one mind on government and the law. They were not, for example, all devoutly Christian; about half of them were Deists. Deism was a then-popular philosophy that acknowledged the existence of God, but argued that He didn’t give a darn. The other thing we might note is that there’s some evidence that James Madison, the chief architect of the Constitution, thought it should be flexible. For example, he didn’t allow the publication of his constitutional notes and journals in his lifetime.
The other problem with originalism is that nobody seems to apply that idea consistently. For example, the First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…” And yet in the United States there is an entire body of law limiting freedom of speech and of the press, beginning with you can’t yell fire in a crowded room (unless there is one), through government’s ability to withhold sensitive information, to laws that affect what can be reported about various classes of people. In one case, the late Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black said “I read ‘no law . . . abridging’ to mean no law abridging.” And yet Justice Black served on a court that expanded the power of the federal government in a way that some people have argued was outside what the Founding Fathers intended. So what the U.S. Constitution means often comes down to what somebody thinks it means.
Civil Rights and Liberties
The first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution form the section known as the Bill of Rights, wherein we find among the most explicit guarantees of civil liberties in U.S. government. And that is another area of constitutional concern the world over—what are the rights of the citizen with regard to government and politics? In the case of the United States, promised adoption of the amendments that became the Bill of Rights was a key element in securing ratification from the 13 original states. Across the world, constitutions are a place where we might find how a state views the question of rights and liberties.
Rights and liberties don’t mean precisely the same thing. Here are a couple of definitions:
• Civil liberties are personal freedoms inherent in each individual, guaranteed by a constitution or other laws.
• Civil rights are legal claims aimed at restraining the government to seek equal protection before the law.
The original American conception of civil liberties was not unique for its time, but was perhaps the broadest application to date. The key is the idea of them being inherent. That means you are born with them. The Constitution literally grants Americans no liberties; it seeks to stop the government from taking them away. But while Americans often support the abstract notion of rights and liberties, yet they frequently don’t favor the idea in the concrete.
It has taken hundreds of years to get them to apply equally to all citizens. For example, despite all the fine language about the inherent freedom and equality of all men, the Constitution acknowledged slavery when, in Article I, section two, it counts three-fifths of all “other persons” (slaves) when apportioning seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, and again in Article IV, section two, when it promises that escaped slaves will be returned to their owners. (These sections were eclipsed by the 14th and 13th amendments, respectively.) The Founding Fathers reserved the original right to vote for property-owning males. We didn’t really pound the last nail in the coffin of property qualifications until passage of the 27th amendment in 1964 outlawed the poll tax (another way of keeping people of color from voting in the south). Women didn’t get the right vote across the country until passage of the 19th amendment in 1920. Around the world, New Zealand gave women the right to vote in 1893, and Switzerland waited until 1971. The United Arab Emirates granted women the right to vote in 2006, and Saudi Arabia, as we noted earlier, has its eye on 2015.
Who gets what rights is always a subject of debate and dissension, for a wider dispersion of liberties is a wider dispersion of power. For much of the 19th century, the U.S. Supreme Court applied the Bill of Rights only to the federal government. It was believed that the states, being closer to the people, would not violate citizens’ rights. They did it a lot, however, and it wasn’t until the 20th century that the High Court finally applied the Bill of Rights to the legal behavior of state governments. Some states complained that this was an unwarranted intrusion into states’ rights. Until recent times, “states’ rights” was largely a code phrase for the ability of states to discriminate against some of their citizens solely on the basis of skin color.
In the United States, the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s was largely about getting government to treat all of its citizens the same way. Although the Civil War had ended slavery, across the country laws remained that made it harder for African-Americans to vote, to live wherever they wanted, or to even use the same public facilities as white people. President Andrew Johnson, who took office after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, basically told the southern states it to ignore the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, which outlawed slavery. They did, and things went downhill from there. That noted champion of democracy, President Woodrow Wilson, upon taking office in 1913, barred the hiring of African-Americans by the federal government. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, states increasingly passed laws that barred citizens of color from full participation in society.
One thing that changed the nation’s view on civil rights was World War II. It demanded the full participation of everybody in the country, so that women and people of color were called upon to work in jobs and perform tasks that they previously had been excluded from. The generation that came home from the war had different expectations about how society would treat them.
The wall began to crack in 1954 when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education, a school desegregation case, that separate facilities and programs for black and white Americans were inherently unequal, and therefore illegal. Following that, civil rights leaders began to campaign for an end to all such legalized discrimination, culminating with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Union of South Africa had its own internal struggle over racial equality. From 1948 until 1994, the country operated under the policy of apartheid, in which people of color were excluded from all meaningful political participation. By this device, the white minority ruled the black majority, buttressed by enforced residential segregation. Nearly five decades of protest, violence and international pressure finally forced an end to apartheid with the first election to include all South Africans in 1993.
This issue of who gets to participate and who doesn’t hasn’t completely gone away. Convicted felons in many U.S. states are not allowed to vote, which disenfranchises a disproportional amount of non-white citizens. In the 2000 presidential election, the state of Florida just started purging voter rolls, affecting mostly African-American voters. They started repeating this in 2012, before bad publicity and the U.S. Department of Justice compelled them to stop. Although the United States is notable for its lack of voter fraud, several states have toyed with and passed measures requiring photo ID for voters (all to stop voter fraud), which also disproportionately affects poor people and citizens of color. (Then again, how hard is it to get official photo ID?) Republicans for years tried to bar laws that would create motor-voter registration, figuring that such a plan was likely to register more new Democrats than Republicans. But Republicans have achieved greater electoral success since motor-voter laws became widespread, so perhaps they weren’t accurate in their predictions.
What should be included among civil liberties? During World War II, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt pushed for “the four freedoms”—freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. (The first two of those are included in the U.S. Constitution; No. 3 is alluded to and No. 4, not so much.) This evolved into the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the assembly in 1948. It says everyone has a right to “life, liberty and security of person”; bans slavery and torture; guarantees rights of equal standing before the law and of a fair trial, including being regarded as innocent until proven guilty; bans “arbitrary arrest, detention or exile”; right to “freedom of thought, conscience and religion”; education; equal pay for equal work; right to marry and have a family; and more.You can find the entire text athttp://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml Obviously, these are goals because U.N. declarations lack the force of law within the sovereign states, despite most of the nations of the world having voted for the measure.
So, as a planet, how are we doing? Freedom House, a non-profit advocacy group, in its annual report (2009) lists 89 countries as free; 58 as partly free; and 47 as not free. In its 2012 survey, it listed Norway, Luxembourg, San Marino, Sweden and Finland as the most free. North Korea scored zero once again.You can find the full report at http://www.freedomhouse.org/report-types/freedom-worldOn the plus side, the percentage of “electoral democracies” has risen from 41 percent of the world’s nations in 1989 to 60 percent in 2012.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Constitutions are statements of general principles that set the terms of operation of government, and the rights and liberties of citizens.
• The world has become a more democratic place in the last 50 years.
EXERCISES
1. Take a look at the U.S. Constitution athttp://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html. Does anything surprise you about what it says? Do you see places where different people might see different things?
2. Would you favor an originalist or an organic interpretation of the Constitution? Why? What would be the trade-offs for each choice?
3. What would it mean for your country to adopt the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Would changes to existing law be necessary?
4. If you live in the U.S., find your state’s constitution athttp://www.thegreenpapers.com/slg/links.phtml. Take a look: How is it different and/or similar to the U.S. Constitution? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/04%3A_Types_of_Governments-_A_Republic_or_a_Democracy/4.03%3A_Constitutions.txt |
Learning Objectives
In this section, you will learn:
1. How power is divided in republics, and why that is done.
2. What the tradeoffs are between federal and unitary systems of government.
How do societies remain free? Constitutions, as we have seen, can declare there are all kinds of freedoms. For them to work, people have to obey the law. One answer has been dividing power within a government, so that there are checks on the power of any one part of government, or on the power of any particular interest group. If the power of the government is limited, citizens see that government is not overstepping its bounds, and are more likely to go along and obey the law.
Power within a government can be divided in various ways. Obviously, in authoritarian governments, power isn’t divided, and so there is no check on the power of whoever has the authority. This can create a couple of problems. First, it robs people of the ability to peacefully take action if the government does something they don’t like. Second, there are no brakes if the government gets carried away—nothing in the system that could force those in authority to adhere to the laws as written.
Checks on power begin with elections. Elections effectively split power between the people and the government. If citizens don’t like something government is doing, they can vote the rascals out. But elections are periodic—they only happen every so often—and in the short term, government can do things that an election will take too long to rectify.
A second check on power is the division of power into different branches. This isn’t very common around the world; many republics tend to concentrate power in the legislative branch. That’s especially true of parliamentary systems, where the head of government, the prime minister, is usually the leader of the majority party in parliament. So in that system, there is no separate branch that checks the power of parliament (except, perhaps, a constitutional court that can rule on the constitutionality of a particular law). This is called legislative supremacy—most power in the government rests with the legislative body. It has the advantage of letting things happen more quickly. In a parliamentary system, a new majority party can make changes more quickly, as there is no president to veto new laws, or usually even another legislative chamber where proposed changes can bog down.
That happens in a country such as the United States, where power is divided between co-equal branches of government. In the case of the U.S., that means only Congress can pass laws; the president must sign them to become law; and the court system can declare laws to be unconstitutional and thereby null and void. Of course, the president appoints federal judges, who must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and Congress as a whole can impeach and remove any federal official from office for “high crimes and misdemeanors” (one of those maddeningly vague moments in the Constitution—a misdemeanor? Though if the president were caught shoplifting, we might all have some questions). The ancient Roman Republic had even more checks on power, to the point where needed reforms were impossible to push through because somebody nearly always had the power to keep them from happening. American government can sometimes look that way, although when the game is on the line, the system does allow change to happen, such as the passage of civil rights laws in the 1960s. On the other hand, it took nearly 100 years after the Civil War for the question of civil rights to be meaningfully addressed. Consequently, division of power into branches is both a prize and a penalty in government: The checks and balances inherent in such a division make it harder for government to get carried away, and also make it harder to get anything done.
Divisions of Power: Federalism, Unitary Systems, and Confederations
A third way of dividing power is called federalism, which is a system of government that divides power between different levels of government. A confederacy would give most if not all the power to states that make up the confederation, while a unitary system of government puts all the power in the hands of the central government.
Most of the world’s governments (nearly 90 percent) are unitary. A strong central government lends power to subnational governments, who cannot make and execute policy on their own. Unitary governments can create or abolish subnational units of governments. Federal governments typically cannot. The U.S. national government, for example, can’t decide that Wyoming would be much better as a part of Montana, or that two Dakotas is just one too many.
The other choice usually is a confederation, in which a group of states are equal partners in a government. While this prevents a strong central government from dictating to its members, it also means nobody’s in charge. The United States, from 1783-1788, was a confederacy, under the Articles of Confederation. It didn’t work very well. The national government couldn’t pay its debts, which caused the economy to shrink; the states were on the edge of war over trade and territorial issues. The Confederate States of America seceded from the Union in 1861, leading to the Civil War. They, too, suffered the problem of being unable to fully compel the member states to support the war effort.
The European Union is a confederation. Although there is a freely elected European Parliament, it lacks the full authority to force the 27 member states to do everything it might. The power of the confederation largely exists because the member nations have signed on to the treaties creating it, because they share a common currency (the Euro) and because states such as Germany and France have so much more economic power than the other members (and can’t afford to see it all fail). It helps that all the member nations are fairly well-developed states and all republics with regular elections of their own. The EU also seems to be very careful in not stepping on the sovereignty of its member nations. As a consequence, despite EU provisions that require member nations to maintain roughly balanced budgets, big budget deficits in Greece, Italy and Spain have provoked a financial crisis for the entire union.
Federalism divides and shares power between the national government (often referred to as the federal government in the U.S.) and subnational governments such states or provinces. Subnational governments may be bound by a national constitution, but have some ability to work within that framework to create their own particular laws. In U.S. federalism, for example, states have the ability to regulate trade within their borders, but only the federal government can regulate commerce that crosses state borders. National governments usually retain the sole ability to provide for national defense and the conduct of foreign relations, whereas both the states and the national government can create traffic and environmental laws. Both levels have the ability to raise revenues and spend money, while only national governments can address topics relating to international trade. Larger nations sometimes turn to federalism to manage widespread territories, such as the United States, Canada and Australia.
Federalism comes in degrees: In weak federalism, states don’t get very much power, as in Mexico or Brazil. In strong federalism, subnational governments have a higher degree of power, as in Canada. The United States, if you’re keeping score, is somewhere in between. Worldwide, 26 states are federal republics; nine more have granted some local authority to regional governments.
For example, for most of its history, the United Kingdom was a unitary state. England conquered Wales and Ireland, and was united with Scotland when James I became king of both nations in 1603. Ireland won its independence in 1921, but the six counties of what became Northern Ireland voted to remain in the United Kingdom. But then, in 1997, people in Scotland and Wales voted for devolution, by which the central government granted some authority to local assemblies there. Northern Ireland also now has its own local assembly as well. All have the ability to raise taxes, spend money and order their own affairs, but they are not sovereign states.
Creating a federal structure on paper doesn’t make one, however. China has 22 provinces, four municipalities, five autonomous regions, and two special administrative regions. Of these, only Hong Kong and Macao, the special administrative regions, can be said to enjoy any sort of self-rule, and a majority of their legislatures are appointed by the central government in Beijing. The autonomous regions include Tibet, where dissatisfaction with Chinese rule has led to violence and unrest.
American Federalism
Being in between strong and weak federalism, the American version of federalism is actually a good example of all the challenges and benefits of a federal society.
You should note a couple of things right away:
1. American federalism divides power between the states and the national (federal) government. That equation does NOT include the many thousands of local governments, which are not mentioned in the Constitution and largely borrow power from the states. Each state is, in effect, a unitary government. Some states have granted limited home-rule charters to large local governments, but that’s a state-level decision, and not provided for in the U.S. Constitution.
2. The division of power at the national level into three branches, while an important feature of American government, is NOT a feature of American federalism. A unitary-style government could also have a similar division of power into branches; a federal government could also have no division of power at its upper level.
Federalism is, in some ways, an American invention. Confederacies had existed before, and they lacked central power and hence the ability to get anything done. The Founding Fathers, having lived through four years under the Articles of Confederation, saw that they needed a central government with enough power to do what was needed, but still not so much power that it could oppress the people and the states. And the states, to buy into this, were going to want to retain some of their own power as part of the bargain. This fundamental distrust of centralized power, along with the perhaps grudging admission that some of it was necessary, led to both the division of federal power into three branches, and the division of power between the states and the national government.
So who has the power? The U.S. Constitution does seem to provide some space for a strong national government in a number of places:
• The “necessary and proper” clause (sometimes called “the elastic clause” because of its ability to stretch to cover a lot of ground) of the Constitution (Article I, Section 8, clause 18): This says Congress shall have the necessary and proper authority to do what needs to be done.
• The supremacy clause (Article VI, clause 2): The Constitution is established as the supreme law of the land.
• The commerce clause (Article I, Section 8, clause 3): Only Congress has the ability to regulate interstate commerce.
• The spending clause (Article I, Section 8, clause 1): Congress is expressly granted the ability to raise taxes and spend money.
Couple these features with the power of the presidency and the national government’s greater ability to raise money, and you have a recipe for a strong national government. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. Others disagree.
Then again, there’s the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, and the last piece of the Bill of Rights: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” That can be interpreted in any number of ways, and has been. Does it mean the federal government can only do things expressly described in the Constitution? Does it mean anything not addressed in the Constitution is up to the states? Does it create wiggle room for interpreting the Constitution, or take it away? Some people would tell you they are sure it means one thing or another, and others would simply disagree.
American federalism is said to have gone through a number of phases, including the following:
• Dual federalism: 1790–1932. The federal government did its thing, and the state government did their thing, and there was very little overlap.
• Cooperative federalism: 1933–1980. This featured a much larger role for the federal government, with more money flowing to the states, along with marching orders to go with the cash. States became conduits for federal policy, with federal matching funds there to entice the states to administer programs such as welfare.
• New federalism: 1980–present. Some scholars would divide this up into more than three categories, and probably call this era something else. But these aren’t necessarily meaningful distinctions. Sometimes the federal government has pushed programs onto the states (pay for it yourself). At other times, the federal government has attempted to dictate to the states (the Defense of Marriage Act, No Child Left Behind, the continued criminalization of marijuana and hemp). The Feds have given states money via block grants with few restrictions, categorical grants with lots of restrictions, and revenue sharing with no restrictions. Typical federal funding still often involves matching funds for a specific purpose. An unresolved question remains: Should the federal government have the ability to mandate state and local programs based on its ability to provide money for them? What if it provides no money? So it’s unclear what New Federalism is precisely, because it is not consistent in how it treats state/federal relations.
And that’s typical of U.S. federalism in general. As with so many things in U.S. government, the precise nature of American federalism is ill-defined. Thomas Jefferson, who was not an author of the Constitution, thought that states should be able to just say no to acts of Congress (a term called “nullification”). State governors in our own time are sometimes heard to express such thoughts. The term “states’ rights” gets trotted out from time to time, to justify something states want to do or to protest an imposition from the federal government. We should be clear: for most of its history, the term states’ rights largely meant only one thing: The ability of states to legally discriminate against citizens of color. So while it has taken on a wider meaning in recent decades, it doesn’t have a happy history.
Whatever the issue, the states and the federal government are often at odds at who gets to do what, and who gets to pay for it. So while states tended to favor the reform of the welfare system in the mid-1990s, they certainly didn’t want to give up federal funding of the system. Similarly, Congress has used federal funding of the highway system as a carrot and a stick to get states to raise their minimum drinking laws: Raise it to 21, or you lose your federal highway funds. Only tourism-dependent Louisiana did not comply.
Federalism’s Strengths and Weaknesses
These kinds of issues underscore both the strengths and weaknesses of the federal system, which are many.
Strengths:
• It allows experimentation and specialization at the state and local level. States are free to try different ways of pursuing policy objectives.
• It allows flexibility and diversity in making policy. States can tailor programs to the particular conditions, needs and desires of their citizens.
• It brings government closer to the people, ensuring responsiveness. All those levels of government mean that there’s someone you can turn to for help.
• It helps to protect liberty, by providing a strong national government that can prevent states from usurping liberty, but also making it hard for federal government to do the same. States provide, in effect, another interest group that can contend with the power of the national government.
• Increases opportunity for participation. Once again, there’s room amid all that government for people to get involved.
• Improves efficiency. States and local governments may be more efficient at providing public services.
• Helps to manage conflict by providing arenas for its articulation. By giving more people more access to a responsive government, people are more likely to address their grievances without resorting to violence.
Weaknesses:
• It can make government seem more remote—insulating the government from the people. While in many ways the many levels of government can be a good thing, it can also be confusing. Who’s responsible for what, and where do you turn?
• Federalism, and all those levels of government, makes elections more complex. The United States has perhaps the longest ballots in the world. Ballot drop-off is a frequent feature of U.S. elections. Citizens get to the bottom of the ballot, decide they don’t know anything about either candidate for state superior court judge, and stop voting
• It impedes the adoption of national standards. One state or province might want one set of environmental laws, while another might want fewer protections and more emphasis on economic opportunity.
• And that gets at the heart of the matter: Divisions of power make action more difficult, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing. Federalism’s strength is also thereby its weakness. It is a slow system of government, which keeps us from doing really stupid things in the heat of the moment (Prohibition being one of the few bad examples). It also, however, is slow to change, with compromise between the factions represented in Congress, the presidency, the courts and the voters being required for anything to get done. So federalism forces deliberation and caution, which can be both good and bad.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Most of the world’s governments are unitary. A few dozen are federal; very few have been confederacies.
• Federalist governments share power with subnational governments; unitary governments do not.
• Federalism has both strengths and weaknesses.
EXERCISES
1. If you live in the United States, what does your state allow or prohibit that varies from what the federal government allows or prohibits?
2. How much should a federal government have the power to compel subnational governments to do things? How much should subnational governments have the power to say no? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/04%3A_Types_of_Governments-_A_Republic_or_a_Democracy/4.04%3A_Divisions_of_Power.txt |
How people participate, and how much they participate, may be determined in part by political culture.Political culture is a broadly shared system of beliefs on the nature of government and citizens’ roles within government. “Broadly shared” means these are ideas that large numbers of people agree upon. These values influence the way decisions are made and what people think should happen in public life. The idea of political culture therefore attempts to explain why people behave the way they do - in terms not so much of their specific desires, but rather in terms of what they believe about what government should be like and how it should be run.
05: Citizens and Politics
Learning Objectives
In this section, you will learn:
1. What political culture is.
2. What political socialization is.
Political culture, and hence public opinion, starts with what is called political socialization—all of the elements and influences that go into making any one person’s outlook on political life. The influences are fairly obvious once you stop and think about them—your parents, friends and neighbors, education, media, where you work. Some of this appears to be formed by your experiences in your late teens and college years. That is, for example, why so much advertising is targeted at young adults. People in that age group haven’t entirely made up their minds about things, and so advertisers pursue them in hopes of snaring potential longtime, loyal customers.
So, college will have a big impact on how you think about politics and government. You may largely disagree with what I think, for example, but odds are you will be nudged a little bit one way or another by the experience of reading this book. The opinions of your professors and the people you meet in college will necessarily make you think a little bit differently about the world.
What you believe about government and citizens’ roles within it makes up political culture, an idea that annoys some political scientists because it’s hard to measure (and therefore you can’t really crank out fancy equations to demonstrate it). Nonetheless, political culture can tell us something about what people think before they vote or make other political decisions. It can’t necessarily tell us how people will decide, but it can tell us something about what items and choices will make their way onto the public agenda.
How do aspects of American political culture color the way our government operates? Some elements of American political culture include the following:
• Liberty: U.S. citizens believe they are free to make choices in most aspects of life.
• Equality: Everyone is regarded as equal before the law.
• Individualism: Americans tend to think individuals are responsible for themselves. Especially other individuals.
• Democracy: We expect to vote on things.
• Justice: If someone has been wronged, there should be recompense. People who have broken the law should be punished.
• The rule of law: Aside from speed limits, we expect to obey the law, even when no one is looking.
• Nationalism: Americans tend to be remarkably proud of their country, and to think it is somehow different and special. This is sometimes called American exceptionalism. This thought can go so far as to mean that the United States has a special mission to spread freedom and democracy (and capitalism). As Ronald Reagan once said, echoing Puritan pioneer John Withrop, who was quoting the Bible, America is a “shining city on the hill.” This level of chest-pounding, cheerleading self-celebration is sometimes quite annoying to non-U.S. citizens (something to keep in mind when you travel overseas). The United States has done some good things in its time, but if you stop to think about it, every country is special and different. But many Americans will tell you that the U.S. is the best place on earth, even when they’ve never lived anywhere else.
• Optimism: We expect things to get better.
• Idealism: The belief that a better political system can and will be created.
Every nation has some kind of political culture. People in other nations tend to have less faith in government than do Americans (though that may be changing in an era when so many candidates say “the system is broken” as their opening line). Europeans tend to value public consensus and state support for the individual a little more than do U.S. citizens; in India and the United Kingdom, social and economic class play a bigger role in politics than they do in the U.S.
In the case of the U.S., whereas we might agree broadly that liberty, opportunity and fairness is what we believe in, when it comes to specifics we rapidly break down into different camps as to how these ideas will be translated into policy. For example, consider the notion of equality. What does it mean for us to be equal? We believe everyone should get to vote over a certain age, although for a long time and in different parts of the country this wasn’t always true. For example the Founding Fathers thought only property owning males should get to vote. Gradually, this franchise was extended to every citizen over the age of 18.
But what else could equality mean? We generally favor equality of opportunity, at least in name if not in practice. Some Americans would prefer equality of outcome, and point to income disparities between the rich and the poor to suggest that equality of opportunity must be reflected in equality of result for it to be meaningful. Others oppose equality of result, and suggest that people need to make their own way, so that hard work and initiative are rewarded.
Regionally, we still find a great deal of variation in terms of political culture. The politics of Chicago, Seattle, and Atlanta are quite different, as are the politics of urban and rural settings. (People from the east who visit Seattle are surprised to see Seattleites waiting at crosswalks for the light to change, even when there are no cars coming. Some are even more surprised when they get tickets for jaywalking.) As a result, government operates in different ways in each setting, with different expectations and frequently outcomes.
The political scientist Daniel Elazar identified three types of American political culture (others have found more):
• Moralistic: Society matters slightly more than does the individual; government’s role is to create a good society in which the community can flourish. Typical of the Midwest and parts of the West.
• Individualistic: Government is limited to helping individuals advance; it isn’t always clean; it shouldn’t get involved in private matters. Common in the Northeast.
• Traditionalist: Government preserves the existing social order; social and family connections tend to dominate politics. Common in the South.
These are generalizations, of course. Within every state are pockets of different sets of belief and, as with ideology, people may have a mixed set of beliefs about politics.
Another related factor that can influence political outcomes is what has been called the political landscape. This includes a variety of social and demographic factors—age, race, gender, average level of education, average incomes, percentage of home ownership, level of employment, major employers. So, for example, an area with a higher percentage of senior citizens will vote more often and be more concerned about issues such as Social Security. In some communities, senior citizens may be less likely to vote for school funding measures. Some wealthier areas of the U.S. (but not all) are more likely to vote Republican; some (but not all) poorer areas may vote Democrat more often. Urban areas tend to vote Democrat; rural areas are more likely to vote Republican. Homeowners tend to vote more often than renters. Areas with higher percentages of immigrants may be more concerned about immigration issues; U.S. states on the border with Mexico, for example, will have populations who feel quite differently about immigration issues. For the United States, those two issues—increasing diversity plus an aging population—will continue to inform politics for some years to come.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Political culture can tell us what gets on the agenda, not necessarily what decisions will be made.
• Political culture varies across nations and within nations.
• Political socialization includes all of the influences in a person’s life.
EXERCISES
1. What political culture best describes the way you feel about politics and government?
2. What influences have shaped your beliefs about politics and government? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/05%3A_Citizens_and_Politics/5.01%3A_Political_Culture.txt |
Learning Objectives
In this section, you will learn:
1. How media influences politics.
2. How media covers politics.
3. How the news business works.
One of the sources of political socialization, and also a reflection of political culture and public opinion, is mass media. Clearly, mass media—including TV, radio, print publications and the internet—have a huge impact on our lives, and hence on politics. Nothing seems to consume us so much as the various forms of media, which raises the question of whether we are, as the late Neil Postman put it, “entertaining ourselves to death,” or simply doing that thing which makes us human—communicating with other humans.
Media are a way in which political officials communicate with citizens, and media also reflect feedback from citizens to those officials. “The news” is how most people find out what’s going on in government. An elected official can have a town-hall meeting in her or his district or community, for example, but will only meet with a handful of constituents. At election time, local candidates may knock on the doors of a lot of constituents, but that happens only every two to four years, and the meetings are brief. Elected officials may even mail out newsletters to constituents, but even that is only occasional.
News media provide daily coverage of the events and ideas of government. Done well, citizens get a chance to see, hear and read about what their elected officials are saying and doing, and what issues have moved to the forefront of the political discussion. Done poorly, reports may miss important issues or misunderstand factors that might be leading to one decision or another.
The idea of free speech has a long tradition in American politics. Freedom of speech has been identified as one of the hallmarks of a democratic society, and yet the job of news media is seen differently in different parts of the world. So in democratic societies, news media are relatively unencumbered in how and what they decide to cover. In some societies, reporters are allegedly free, but may be bullied, arrested or even killed for trying to tell what they perceive to be the truth. In other countries, news media are seen as simply another arm of the state, there to help the state tell people what they think they should know, and how they should understand that information.
The Roots of Free Speech in the United States
By making freedom of speech and of the press one of the very first things added to the Constitution, the Founding Fathers clearly signaled their belief that freedom of communication is of paramount importance to a functioning republic. It should be easy to see why. You have to be able to discuss things openly and without fear of retribution in order to do politics on any level. The Framers believed that an open marketplace of ideas would best allow this, and that somehow, the truth inevitably would win out. As with so much of what they wrote, the idea of free speech was soon trampled by actual practice. The Federalist Party-dominated Congress soon passed the Alien and Sedition Laws, by which pro-Jeffersonian Republican newspapers could be penalized for criticizing the Federalists and President John Adams.
But journalism, the practice of gathering and reporting the news, was different then. It was expected that publications had a particular approach to politics, and wrote about it that way. It wasn’t until the 20th century that newspapers, and eventually television and radio, would try to cover the news objectively—without a slant one way or the other. So while publishers such as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer actively pushed for war with Spain in the 1890s, the expectation today is that reporters won’t take sides. This was called “yellow journalism,” for the yellowish tint of the newsprint they used. Today’s journalism is supposed to be colorless, and sometimes is.
Court cases stretching across the 20th century helped establish that the standard of press freedom implied by the First Amendment in fact means what it says: Congress and other governments can’t make laws that restrict the ability of people to say what they want, and for reporters to write or broadcast what they want. Political speech is in fact the most protected form of speech in the United States, so that anyone may write or say nearly anything about the president, no matter how false, and not suffer legal consequences. (Unless of course you suggest violence against the president or other elected official, in which case you will get a visit from members of the Secret Service. It won’t be a friendly chat.) This allows an internet blogger such as Matt Drudge to reprint any wild rumor about the president, even things that are clearly false.
And yet despite all this free speech—and the United States may have the most expansive view of free speech of any country in the world—speech is in fact restricted in a number of ways. A so-called strict constructionist view of the Constitution then would suggest that the phrase in the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law...” means precisely that: no law. But an entire body of law is devoted to libel, for example—no one has the liberty to simply make things up about someone if it in some way damages that person (although the distinction between public and private figures allows people more leeway to make up things about politicians).
For example, broadcast television is regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. The airwaves over which TV (and radio) signals travel are in finite supply, and therefore regarded as a public possession used only under license. As a consequence, TV and radio transmissions are regulated as to objectionable content, (which means you can kill all the people you want on television, but no sex!). Gradually, the FCC has relaxed its rules, so that broadcast stations are no longer required to give equal time to opposing viewpoints, and the number of local stations that can be owned by the networks has slowly grown. Broadcast stations once were required to air a minimum amount of news coverage, which also is no longer true. Local television stations continue to air local news in part because it’s cheap to produce and so earns the stations a fair return on their investment.
Despite the restrictions, which are substantial, when it comes to content, we have news media that largely are restricted only by market forces. Mass media are largely paid for by advertising. The more people who watch, read or subscribe, the more they are able to sell ads, and the more they can charge for those ads. Media outlets go so far as to certify the number of listeners, viewers and subscribers, so as to convince advertisers that they are buying real eyes and ears.
Not having to rely on the government for funding gives them considerable leeway to cover politics. As with most things in life, some do it well, some do not. Letting the market manage the output of media gives it some freedom, but it also tends to put pressure to produce coverage that is sensational and focused on entertainment value (which draws ratings and advertisers) rather than meaningful content. Reporters face enormous pressure from management to break “big” stories, which often simply aren’t there.
Where the News Comes From
Most Americans’ news comes from half a dozen major TV networks, one wire service, a few magazines, and handful of newspapers, some radio, and, increasingly, the internet. A lot of this seems to be piggybacking off what traditional journalists have already reported. Bloggers (a contraction of the term web log) litter the internet like trash in a park after the Fourth of July, but the great majority of them only regurgitate what they’ve read in mainstream media. Very few actually do original reporting and break stories that haven’t already been reported elsewhere.
The concentration of media interests can lead to a sameness of coverage, and to the exclusion of certain viewpoints. In fact, only about two dozen major companies control the great bulk of the nation’s mass media. In the case of some organizations, such as Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., parent of Fox, conservative viewpoints tend to be pushed. MSNBC presents news from a liberal standpoint. CNN, while endlessly and annoyingly touting the quality of its coverage, tries to carve out a middle ground.
Most Americans - 50-80 percent, depending on the estimate - get their information from television, which, unfortunately, rarely covers politics on a meaningful level. TV’s ability to take you there makes it great at covering events—natural disasters, sports, items with visual appeal. But its time-bound structure and its need for visual elements makes it not very good at covering ideas, which is what most of politics is about. Much coverage of presidential elections, and elections in general, is about who is ahead, not who is saying what. That’s when politics is covered at all. In another study, researchers found that the total amount of political coverage was declining in all media, particularly state and local politics. As a couple of political scientists put it some years ago, “TV and the American electorate are partners in failure.” Local TV news is particularly weak at covering local politics. Coupled with the decline of newspapers, people increasingly lack access to information about what city councils and even state Legislatures are up to. And that information is no less important than it ever was.
Television coverage tends to focus more on the flash, on what can make good pictures, and on who’s ahead in any given race, than on any sort of useful coverage about what people actually stand for, or whether one promised agenda or another will have positive or negative effects. Even with the need to be visual and brief, however, it should be possible to present coherent coverage of politics. Watch, for instance, the News Hour on PBS and compare that with what passes for news on the networks. Odds are, you won’t recognize it.
The emphasis on splash and flash can have other impacts. When broadcast news and entertainment programming tend to overdramatize routine events, this can make the world appear more troubled than it actually is. Even casual watching of local TV news in most markets would make one think that your community is under siege by the forces of darkness. And yet crime in America has been on a downward trend since the 1970s. Yet TV will probably never report that most teenagers don’t commit crimes, that most African-Americans are typical middle class citizens with jobs and homes, and that most Americans don’t use drugs.
Entertainment television is particularly fascinating. Think about a typical murder show such as “Murder She Wrote.” It takes place in a tiny town where someone dies every week. Why does anyone live in that town? It’s an actuarial nightmare. About three out of 100 Americans will be crime victims in a given year, and yet television averages 10 crimes a night. Businessmen are most often represented as committing crimes, and yet in real life most crime is committed by males under the age of 25. Politicians are represented as corrupt at least half the time, and yet the second half of the 20th century was one of the least corrupt periods in American history.
There is quite a bit of debate over the effect of media sex and violence, although a number of studies have been done and none have been conclusive. One has to wonder about a program such as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, a mid-1990s kid franchise that apparently featured 28 minutes of the Ranger kicking the crap out of the bad guys, followed by two minutes of telling young viewers, “You know kids, violence isn’t the answer.” Which message do you think gets through?
And yet virtually every American home has a television, and at least one half have cable. Estimates suggest that Americans watch an average of 3-7 hours of television a day. That means the TV is on in a typical home from the time a person gets home to the time when they fall asleep at night.
Up to a quarter of Americans still get most of their information from newspapers, which tend to do a better job of covering politics than do broadcast media. Estimates of how many people still read a newspaper vary; it could be as much as 75 percent when you count both print and online editions. For newspapers, that’s part of the problem. Online editions still don’t generate enough revenue for newspapers to afford to be able to employ the number of reporters it takes to really cover something such as politics. This has been a particular problem for local papers, which usually provide the only meaningful coverage of local politics.
Newspapers still have an impact on “opinion leaders” (and this class will help make you one). A relatively small number of people who pay attention to politics tend to have an outsized impact on what other people think. It may be around 30 percent actually pay attention, and then spell out the details for the other 70 percent.
But are they effective? A test was done in Cincinnati in the mid-1940s, in which people were surveyed about the United Nations, which was then brand new. About 30 percent of respondents understood what it was. There followed a widespread, substantial information campaign to inform people about the U.N.—media stories, advertising, public forums. Following the campaign, a second survey was done, and about 30 percent of the people understood the U.N.
How News Media Actually Work
I will often ask students about what news sources they watch or read, and what they think of them. Many of them will answer that the news media are biased and lie just to get ratings, so they don’t read, watch or listen to anything. To which I respond, if you don’t read, watch or listen to anything, how do you know they’re biased?
The complaint is common. The United States has gone from a nation where people had complete faith in public institutions to a nation where people have almost none. Frankly, neither seems a very realistic view point. Conservatives claim there’s a liberal bias; liberals point to the obvious conservative bent of something such as Fox News. Radicals complain that the media tends to support the establishment (as though we should be surprised that reporters who are Americans in fact reflect what typical Americans are like).
Reporters do tend to be slightly more liberal that average voters; however the people who own the media are overwhelmingly conservative. Aside from the editorial pages, which tend to reflect the politics of ownership (and generally don’t hide that fact), most newsrooms don’t get dictates from above as to what they will cover and how they will cover it. Reporters at all levels try to present what seems to be the truth. If there’s a criticism to be leveled at journalism and journalists, it’s that so few political reporters know much about politics, and so don’t ask the right questions of their sources. Consequently, they tend to make errors of omission rather sins of commission.
We should understand something about how this all works. First, most reporters in the United States have gone to college and got a degree in journalism or communications. They’ve all been educated in the same tradition—go out and get the story, try to tell the truth, don’t take sides. Reporters at any kind of news organization—TV, radio, print, internet—get assigned to stories by their editors, and they go out and interview people who might know something about the topic, as well as getting reaction from people who might be affected by what’s happening in the news. So what a typical reporter is relying on is what people tell them. Reporters are biased—who isn’t?—but most of them try to work against that bias and tell the whole story.
Particularly with newspapers, the different parts and functions of a publication can be a little confusing, as readers may lump everybody together as though it was a single living organism with one goal in mind. The editorial page, or management’s commentary in some broadcast news programs, is where the management of the publication expresses its opinion. People get hired to do just that. Columns, which appear on the same page, often with the writer’s picture, are the opinion of that person. Most newspapers attempt to run a variety of columnists to express a variety of viewpoints. Print stories have headlines, which aren’t written by the reporter, and may make a story appear slanted in a different direction than the reporter intended. Reporters work with editors, who make assignments and sometimes even help reporters do a better job. They get a limited amount of time to report, write and file a story, before it ends up in print, on the air, or in the internet.
The problem reporters run into is that most news is based on what people tell them. Good sources, which reporters cultivate, may be people who are willing to talk as opposed to people who actually know something. Meanwhile, not that many people actually lie, people will say things they don’t really know for sure, because they think it’s OK if you’re making a valid point. Reporters have been trained to interview and to write, but they may not know as much about the particular subject to know when they’re being snowed. As a consequence, too many people are covering too many things about which they don’t know enough. A classic example was the coverage of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam war. This was probably the turning point in American attitudes about the war, as it was widely portrayed as a disaster for the Americans and South Vietnamese. And yet, in reality, it was a military disaster for the Viet Cong, who ceased to be a factor in the war after that point.
Conversely, the U.S. military played the major media like puppets in their coverage of the first Gulf War, except for moments when publications such as Newsweek predicted extraordinary Allied casualties when soldiers inevitably had to storm the Iraqis’ sand forts (anyone with a smattering of military history would see that the easy answer was to go around them, which we did). The few casualties that did occur were flown into Dover, Delaware, at midnight, so as to avoid the Vietnam-era spectacle of so many flag-draped caskets coming home. Patriot missiles, which may not have actually hit anything, were portrayed as technological marvels, as were smart bombs, which actually only hit about 25 percent of their targets.
At the end of the war, General Norman Schwarzkopf literally thanked the media for their help in perpetuating so many myths about where the Allies might strike (such as a rumored sea landing in Kuwait City, which pushed the Iraqis to move units to an area where U.S. forces had no intention of landing). It didn’t hurt that the Iraqi government was as inept as the U.S military was media savvy. At one point in the war, a U.S. missile took out a building that the Iraqis claimed was a chemical weapons factory. The Iraqis claimed that it produced infant formula, which might have been plausible until they released video of workers, scampering over the wreckage, in coveralls that read, in English, “Baby Milk Factory.” In a country where they nearly all speak Arabic?
Coverage of the second Gulf War was even more restricted and uneven; virtually no one reported on casualties among Iraqi civilians during “Operation Shock and Awe.” No network TV cameras showed the Iraqis who were unhappy as the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled. Saddam Hussein was a bad man, but if you’re supposed to be supplying fair and balanced coverage, then you’re supposed to show us that stuff, too.
Lacking knowledge, reporters too often fail to think critically about what they’re told, except for the many reporters who simply assume that people in positions of authority are always lying. Neither of these approaches is likely to provide citizens and voters with useful information on which to base opinions and decisions. The problem is not, as many press critics claim, the news media’s adherence to the standard of objectivity, the idea that news reporting will be unbiased. For one thing, hardly anybody in the business talks about objectivity, as most people recognize that it’s not possible to be completely objective. It is possible, however, to be fair, and fairness is a much more reasonable standard. What would be better still would reporting that tests hypotheses, as opposed to merely relaying them. Sometimes that happens, sometimes it doesn’t.
Another set of critics wants to see more interpretation and slant on the news, which usually has to do with how the critic feels about one subject or another. Even if we could argue that objectivity is the standard, or fairness, those approaches don’t have to be bland, and they have the virtue of letting the reader/viewer make up her or his own mind.
That leads to the chief fault of media consumers—too many people look for sources of news that confirm what they already believe. Anything that runs against that must be biased and is therefore evil and wrong, etc.
Similarly, the criticism that journalists tend to reflect middle class American values shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who can think beyond the end of his or her nose. Most working journalists are, like most Americans, of middle class backgrounds. The fact that their work should reflect the culture and socioeconomic stratum of which they are a part shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Journalists and politicians, naturally, have a mutually antagonistic and yet beneficial relationship. Having been on both sides of that fence, neither side truly understands the other in a useful way. The journalists frequently grasp neither politics nor policy, whereas the politicians have no appreciation or understanding what journalists are up against or what it is they hope to do. Even when they employ public relations people, often as not the PR types aren’t any better at working with the press than are their bosses, and sometimes worse. Politicians nonetheless find journalists useful for “leaks,” a time-honored process in which elected and appointed officials test-market ideas or send signals by surreptitiously “leaking” major news to selected reporters. This doesn’t always work. In 1988, George H.W. Bush was thinking of naming Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle as his vice presidential running mate. Quayle was not unintelligent, but he was not a good impromptu speaker. Bush’s aides thought he was a poor choice, and so leaked the idea to the press. Apparently, no one took it seriously and it wasn’t reported as the Bush aides hope it would be, and Quayle got the nomination.
Despite the media’s many faults, there is often enough information there to actually get a picture of what’s going on. Perhaps the best thing about American media is that there’s an awful lot of it. With a little bit of work, one can find quite a bit of information from a variety of sources, and that’s probably what’s required of anyone who wants some real understanding of what’s going on in the country. You simply have to consult a number of sources, and force yourself to look openly at things you think you oppose and critically at things you think you believe.
The News: Fair and Balanced?
This view of news as an attempt to provide an objective truth is a 20th century phenomenon and largely an American invention. Going back to the founding of the country, and in lots of the rest of the world, newspapers were expected to have a point of view—liberal, conservative, or something else. Reporters in such situations may be more likely to tell people what they want to hear, but also, sometimes, to explain what’s wrong with somebody else’s idea. Objective news coverage is more likely to give credence to ideas that make no sense in the process of telling both sides of the story.
Trade-offs are inevitable in news coverage from a point of view, however. Consider Fox News, which despite its self-proclaimed status as “fair and balanced” regularly presents favorable coverage of conservative viewpoints while trashing liberal ones. Although there’s nothing wrong with championing either viewpoint, from an informational standpoint, Fox may not be doing its viewers any favors. They probably could chuck the hyperbole and still do a good job covering news from a conservative viewpoint. But as it stands, in two different studies, Fox viewers were among the least informed people in the United States, and the more they watched, the more wrong they were about world and national events.
A third view of media, more common in authoritarian states, is that the media should be a tool of the state. In China, for example, major media are owned by the state and are expected to support and further the ends of the state (occasional Chinese protests to the contrary notwithstanding). A reporter who wrote critically of the performance of the Communist Party in running the country would have a short career. In recent years, Vietnamese journalists briefly did such things, before the communist government cracked down on them.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Mass media are in fact a critical link between government and citizens.
• Freedom of speech and the press was regarded as essential to a functioning republic by the U.S. Founding Fathers.
• Reporters at legitimate news organizations gather information by interviewing people and then try to tell stories based on that information.
• In other countries, news media may be regarded as a tool of the state.
EXERCISES
1. Which news media do you read, watch or listen to? Try something else, something you don’t normally see, and make note of what’s different about their approach to and coverage of the news.
2. Take a look at a local newspaper or a local TV newscast over several days. How much coverage of local politics do they include? What kinds of things do they cover more? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/05%3A_Citizens_and_Politics/5.02%3A_Media.txt |
Learning Objectives
In this section, you will learn:
1. What an interest group is.
2. The ways in which interest groups try to influence public policy.
A major source of information for journalists, and another way in which people can get involved in politics, is interest groups. Interest groups are formal coalitions of individuals and organizations who unite in pursuit of common policy goals. People tend to think of them as interest groups when they share or don’t mind those goals, and “special interest groups” when they disagree with them.
Interest groups are not new. In fact they are as old as politics. Plato and Aristotle warned about them, and James Madison had them in mind when he wrote the Constitution. Madison referred to them as factions. He warned that factions could be dangerous because they tend to pursue their issues to the exclusion of all else. Historically, Madison said, factions could undermine government as they single-mindedly pursued their own interests. Nonetheless, he also recognized that factions are an unavoidable fact of political life, and that limiting factions would in fact limit the very liberty the Constitution was trying to create. His answer was to divide power in the government by way of federalism and by checks and balances—dividing power between different branches and levels of government. His genius was to create a system of government in which power is so divided that it’s difficult for a single group to dominate the whole government, and that purposefully pits factions against each other in the practice of that government. The question remains, however, if this works, and interest groups continue to play influential roles in states around the world.
The public tends to view interest groups (except for the ones they belong to) with suspicion and mistrust. Depending on who you talk to, people will say that this group or another has too much influence, be it the gun lobby or religious conservatives or abortion rights activists.
Some political scientists say that interest groups aren’t all bad. In this view, interest groups are in fact a sign of a healthy political society, a sign that competition (what Madison intended) is alive and well. By that measure, you should be really concerned is when everyone is happy with a decision, because that may mean something’s not right. Elected officials can be heard to say that when everyone is equally unhappy with something they’ve done, they’ve probably done about as well as they can hope to.
Groups have a few things in common. The people who belong to groups tend to have time, money and desire. Groups without resources tend to be less organized and less successful, so the rich tend to be overrepresented and the poor tend to be underrepresented. There are welfare rights lobbies, and student lobbies, and neither tends to be successful because they don’t have money. They also represent two groups of people—students and poor people—who tend to vote less often. Contrast that with senior citizen lobbies. As they represent retired people, they’re not all wealthy, but senior citizens have one thing in common: They vote. Elected officials know that, and behave accordingly. A state legislator came to one of my classes once and began his presentation by saying, “I don’t care what you think. I just finished talking to a group of senior citizens, and I listened to what they had to say. They vote. You guys don’t vote, so why should I listen to you?” A number of the students were incensed at his comments, but some of them got his point: If you want to be heard, you have to go out and get involved, and that includes voting.
And yet not all groups are successful, even ones with money. As one lobbyist said, “I’ve seen large organizations with plenty of money with fairly pathetic public affairs efforts.” Having money is not enough; a successful interest group hires the right people and presents the right message.
How Groups Work
Groups attempt to influence policy in a number of ways:
Lobbying is a basic form of political activity. Representatives of groups attempt to contact elected officials, often directly, to tell their side of a story. The terms lobby and lobbyist might come from the habit of British members of Parliament to meet in the lobby of the House of Commons before and after debate. It might also come from the interest group representatives who would try to chase down President Ulysses S. Grant in the lobby of the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., where he liked to enjoy a cigar and a brandy.
Some lobbyists work for particular organizations or businesses; others, contract lobbyists, may have multiple clients. A good lobbyist tells the legislator both sides of an issue, so that the legislator can go home and anticipate the inevitable objections to his or her position. Consequently, good lobbyists are known for not lying. If a legislator were to catch a lobbyist in a lie, then the lobbyist would lose all access to the legislator. End of game; you lose. Lobbyists certainly try to persuade elected officials of the rightness of their position, but they try to do that through information.
Advertising and public relations campaigns which are directed at convincing voters and elected officials of one position or another. These range from “what a great company we are” (especially firms that don’t sell directly to consumers, who nonetheless purchase television ads), to campaigns directed at specific issues (such as recent campaigns singing the praises of “clean coal” and other energy initiatives). Ads such as these will sometimes target particular markets and the members of Congress who represent that market (“call Congressman Smith and tell him to stop attacking our freedom!”).
Get out the vote campaigns seek to get people to vote on ballot measures, or for or against certain candidates. Groups that can deliver votes obviously will have lots of clout. Groups send information to members at election time, often with a “report card” on people in office, detailing who voted in the direction of the group’s interests and who didn’t. Groups attempt to mobilize members to both vote and to make campaign contributions to approved candidates.
Making campaign contributions. Groups give a lot of money to candidates and, increasingly, spend money on their own. People do give money to candidates in hopes of swaying their decisions. But a lot of that money goes to people who already agree with the donor, in which case the issue could be whether certain groups overrepresented in Congress (or state legislatures)?
Engaging in legal action. Interest groups with enough money can hire lawyers, who can file suits to block unfavorable laws or the try to compel government to adhere to the law as written.
Are Interest Groups Effective?
So, do interest groups have too much power? They have power, but how much is too much? Some factors seem to limit groups’ influence. Groups rarely are coherent monoliths when it comes to policy. People join for lots of reasons, and politics often is not one of them. They join for fellowship, for group discounts and benefits (this is why the American Association of Retired Persons has more than 35 million members). As a consequence, groups often are unable to deliver the votes they promise. Interest group leaders often turn out to be a rather imperfect mirror of their memberships’ diverse desires.
The larger the group, the more diverse it is, and group diversity poses special challenges. The National Federation of Independent Businesses claims 350,000 members, but it probably has less clout than the National Association of Manufacturers, which has 14,000 members (typically larger firms with more money). A diverse membership may help deliver votes, but it makes it harder for the group to take strong stands on issues about which their members do not have a consensus.
Numbers by themselves aren’t enough. Political scientists once theorized that cities would be a powerful lobby at the federal level. The United States has thousands of cities, staffed by people who understand politics, with an umbrella group, the National League of Cities. But they can’t make campaign contributions, and despite similar issues they lack a common agenda.
A specific agenda can help a lot. Consider the National Rifle Association. It has fewer than 5 million members, and isn’t wealthy compared to a number of other organizations. It is, however, narrowly focused on issues involving gun ownership rights and the Second Amendment. Opinion polls consistently show that most Americans favor gun control laws, yet that feeling is neither organized or intense. As a consequence, the NRA has been very successful in its efforts to limit gun control, because the group is largely unified around the issue.
That speaks to another limit on interest groups: They can’t afford to watch every issue all the time. Successful interest groups stick to their knitting, as they say in business, and try to focus their resources on issues that matter most to their leaders and members.
So, do we have too many interest groups, or too much government? The number and intensity of groups seems to have risen over time, and it has paralleled the increasing size and scope of government. The nation’s rising wealth also has meant people have more at stake, and more resources to do something about it. State and federal regulation has increased in the post-World War II era, and a couple things haven’t changed since the start.
The Iron Law of Public Policy: Every government action creates winners and losers in the marketplace. Intelligent business people act accordingly.Robert A. Leone, Who Profits: Winners, Losers and Government Regulation, New York, Basic Books, 1986. This leads to Sell’s Second Law of Political Economy: Politics is economic competition carried on by other means. A lot of what happens in government is about interests attempting to tilt the rules of the game in their favor. Ask yourself who really benefitted from President Bush’s Medicare senior citizen prescription drug buying plan. Senior citizens, who do get drug coverage. But also large pharmacy chains stores, as they can best afford to subscribe to the plan and offer the group discounts. They can make it up in volume. Who loses? Smaller chains and independents, who can less afford the discounts and lacked the political clout to forestall the plan.
Should we do anything about groups? That’s a tricky question. If you limit the ability of groups to participate in the political process, in some sense you limit freedom. On the other hand, without some limits, it’s clear from history that the wealthy and powerful can at times dominate the discourse of society. Where do you strike a balance?
Madison’s original idea was to create a competitive political marketplace, where groups would keep each other in check. Does this still work? Everybody is represented somewhere in the political spectrum, but is everybody’s interest represented all the time? You may be represented by a labor union or the business lobby or a group concerned with one social issue or another. But who represents your interest when the car dealers try to weaken lemon laws, or when tax burdens are shifted from one group to another? The answer isn’t always obvious. Meanwhile, interest groups (including congressional campaign committees, who get most of their money from other interest groups), spent more than \$280 million on the 2010 congressional elections. That was five times more than was spent on the 2006 elections. Court decisions such as Citizens United, which opened the door for private groups and corporations to spend all the money they wanted on politics, further muddy the water. In the first half of 2012, interest groups had spent \$170 million on the presidential and congressional campaigns. The billionaire Koch brothers promised to spend \$100 million to ensure that President Obama was not re-elected. If the voices with the most money speak the loudest, are other voices being heard? Meanwhile, interest groups representing the private prison industry helped push for three-strikes-you’re-out legislation in various states, which has raised the prison population and increased the need for prisons. The private education industry has helped back the push for charter schools across the country.
Following the financial meltdown and the Great Recession of 2007-2008, many people called out for reform of the financial sector. For the most part, it didn’t happen, despite the substantial evidence that a lack of regulation had contributed to the enormous size of the problem. The financial services industry in 2009 and 2010 deployed 3,000 lobbyists in Washington, D.C.—five for each member of Congress. They spent \$1.3 billion battling against further regulation, and largely succeeded. It’s their right to do this under U.S. law, and it’s not immediately obvious how this could be addressed. But it’s a question worth asking.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Interest groups have always been a part of politics.
• Interest groups attempt to influence public policy through activities such as lobbying, voter mobilization, and campaign contributions.
• Interest groups are not all equally effective. Successful groups tend to be more narrowly focused on a smaller set of issues.
EXERCISES
1. What interest groups do you belong to? What issues matter to you right now that would tend to connect you to an interest group (even if you’re not an active member)?
2. If you decided to limit the influence of interest groups, what steps would you take? What would be the trade-offs involved? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/05%3A_Citizens_and_Politics/5.03%3A_Interest_Groups.txt |
Learning Objectives
In this section, you will learn:
1. How public opinion is demonstrated.
2. How much public opinion matters.
Media coverage sways public opinion, and interest groups often hope to. The people tend to matter as well. For all the influences on public opinion, the people do have minds of their own.
Public opinion is made evident in a number of ways. Voting is the obvious way, as it’s the only poll that truly counts for something. But it also shows up in direct participation, direct communication, survey research, and protests. Public opinion seems to matter. For example, studies show that, broadly speaking, Congress tends to follow the will of the American people. Most elected officials understand that they ignore the passions of their constituents at their own peril. So while an official may try to persuade voters to in one direction, most try to keep an ear to what people are saying back home.
How Citizens Get Involved
Citizens can get involved in a variety of ways.
Direct Participation
As distant as government may seem sometimes, there are many ways for people to participate in politics. Campaigns in the United States and elsewhere are always looking for volunteers (and for anybody who’s really interested in politics, there’s probably no better way to get your foot in the door). Local governments also have advisory boards of many types (such as planning, building, arts and parks commissions), which rely on citizen volunteers to staff them. Citizens on such panels do research and hear requests from the public, and report to city councils on what they think should happen next.
Direct Communication
People talk to their elected officials—in person, by telephone, by letter and by e-mail. Elected officials say that letters tend to have more impact, because e-mails are to easy to send. A stamped letter tends to say the person cares deeply about this particular issue. Elected officials often have open forums where voters come and say what they think (which, officials will privately say, can be a challenge when folks show up who are obsessed with a particular issue, or who just want to complain). You can also show up at a hearing, at city hall or at the state Legislature, and have your say. In a typical legislative committee meeting, when there’s a hearing on a particular bill or topic, there’s a sign-up sheet and if you’re there, you get your three minutes to speak your mind. In any case, democratic systems tend to be remarkably open to citizen input.
Survey Research
Another way in which public opinion is evidenced is survey research, or opinion polling. A survey is just asking a lot of people the same questions. Done correctly, this can be a fairly accurate gauge of what people are thinking. Scientific survey research involves random sampling of a population, and some fancy math to extrapolate those results to the public at large. A random sample means that everyone in the target population has an equal chance of being chosen. Survey research firms generate random lists of telephone numbers of voters in a state, district or even an entire country. What you should look for in reports about survey research is 1. a specified margin of error (you don’t get one without doing the fancy math), and 2. the sample size. The margin of error is a way of judging how confident we are that the results of the survey are in range of what the entire population thinks. If this information is included in the survey, you have some assurance that it’s a scientific survey, and not, say, one taken by a congressman by mass-mailing his district.
Legislators and members of Congress infrequently survey people back home, usually by doing a mass mailing to all the registered voters in the district. The problem with those sorts of surveys is that they are not random samples, but self-selecting samples. The only people who respond to such surveys are those with really strong feelings about an issue, and what we know about them is that there tend to be fewer of them than the mass of folks in the middle. So the answers may not be indicative of what the general population thinks. Public officials who conduct such surveys only seem to pay attention to the surveys when they confirm what the official already thinks.
A good survey also avoids question bias—questions should not lead the respondent to an answer. I had some rather substantial arguments when I was a legislative staffer over that one. The people I worked for tended to want to write questions that more or less said “do you agree with this or are you stupid?” The surveys were by no means scientific, but it seemed like we would needlessly aggravate people who read the survey and didn’t agree with the conclusions we were trying to get them to reach.
News organizations will often partner with survey research firms to find out what people are thinking about particular topics, such as whether they support a particular policy initiative or who they’re going to vote for. Political campaigns survey voters to find out what’s working and what isn’t, and which groups they’re connecting with. Surveys also depend upon people telling the truth. Most of the time, they do. In Nicaragua in 1990, however, voters told pollsters that they would re-elect the Sandanistas to power. When election time rolled around, the opposition coalition managed a convincing victory. Voters were simply not used to being asked such questions as the pollsters posed, and apparently feared retaliation by the Sandanista-led government.
Protest
Protest is yet another form of measuring public opinion, and clearly not one to be underestimated. The classic example in American politics has to be the Vietnam War. Although we tend to dwell on the many tragic aspects of the war, it was in fact a triumph of democracy. Was there ever another nation as powerful as the U.S. that changed its foreign policy so radically as a result of public protest? People—many, many young people—marched; sat in (sit-ins, which predate the Occupy movement, involved occupying public spaces in hopes of disrupting somebody’s activities, to make a point); and generally advocated an exit from Vietnam. This did not produce immediate results, but the public dissent clearly made it harder for elected officials to continue the war.
Protest can be non-violent, such as much of the Civil Rights movement, or violent, from the WTO riots in Seattle in 1999, all the way to acts of terrorism.
Non-violent protest goes at least back to the 19th century American writer Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). In his 1849 essay Civil Disobedience, Thoreau wrote that if one viewed a law as unjust, one should not obey it. Thoreau was unhappy over slavery and the Mexican-American War, and advocated resisting what he saw as government-sponsored injustice, for example, by not paying your taxes. (He spent a night in jail for this, before someone paid his taxes and he was released.)
Thoreau was a big influence on Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869-1948), who led one of the most successful non-violent protest movements in history. Gandhi was born in India, which had been effectively conquered by the British earlier in the 19th century. Gandhi went to Great Britain and studied to be a lawyer, and ended up working South Africa. After getting thrown off a train for refusing to move to a third-class coach (he had a first-class ticket), Gandhi pondered how he should respond. He recognized that he couldn’t fight his oppressors; they were too many. If he simply went along, he was empowering them. Finally, he decided, the best answer was to simply resist the unjustice he was facing as a person of color in South Africa by disobeying what were clearly unjust laws. Over the next several years, he developed what he called “satyagraha,” a Sanskrit word meaning “truth-force,” or devotion to truth.
Gandhi established the basic tenets of non-violent resistance. It is active, not passive: One actively resists injustice without being violent. Violence only begets more violence, Gandhi reasoned; non-violence disarms one’s oppressor because the oppressor can point to nothing that justifies his use of violence. Using these tactics, Gandhi was able to win some consideration for the many Indians the British had imported to South Africa, before he returned to India in 1915. There he began to lead the movement that would eventually win India’s independence from Great Britain, again relying exclusively on non-violent tactics. Gandhi and his followers marched to the sea to make salt (the British held the monopoly on making salt in India); they spun cloth in protest of British control of the textile industry; they resisted British rule whenever possible. Finally, in 1947, the British gave up and went home.
It may seem odd that Gandhi chose this method; the British had about 100,000 soldiers maintaining control over a nation of at around 400 million people (at that time). Clearly, they could have violently ousted the British, especially during World War I and II when the British were largely occupied elsewhere. But Gandhi seems to have recognized that the Indian state would be better off if born in peace rather than violence. Today it stands to as a relatively peaceful and democratic society, despite its occasional clashes with Pakistan and China. For example, it is one of the only liberated ex-colonies to never have suffered a military coup. Although Gandhi was assassinated (by a Hindu nationalist who thought he was being too kind to Moslems), Gandhi succeeded in winning independence for India and Pakistan (part of which is now Bangladesh) without any shots being fired.
Gandhi and Thoreau were big influences the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who led the U.S. Civil Rights movement until his assassination in 1968. Dr. King, in following their lead, organized Americans of all races to protest the unfair treatment of people of color in the U.S. Beginning with a boycott of city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, (where African-Americans had to sit in the back) in 1955-1956, King led a series of peaceful, direct-action “campaigns” to protest everything from school segregation to lack of voting rights for African-Americans in the south. That meant arrests, beatings, attacks by police dogs and fire hoses. A key moment—and a good example of how non-violent resistance can work—was a march from Selma to Montgomery to protest the lack of voting rights in 1965. On March 7, a day that became known as “Bloody Sunday,” 600 marchers were attacked by Alabama state troopers using horses, tear gas and billy clubs. National television cameras were there and the nation, including President Lyndon Johnson, watched. Under court order and with protection of federal troops, the march eventually proceeded, but the important detail is that the event helped push support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, outlawing a century of political discrimination against African-American citizens. Like Gandhi, King seems to have understood that non-violent resistance would win more support and more converts than would violence.
Contrast this with the 1999 WTO riots in Seattle. The World Trade Organization, which tries to set the terms of trade between nations, drew representatives of states from around the world, and perhaps 40,000 protestors as well. Most of them were peaceful, but those who weren’t did \$20 million in property damage and lost sales in downtown Seattle. One of my students’ parents had to be rescued by police when demonstrators attacked her car as she drove to work. What did this accomplish? The protestors had plenty of legitimate complaints about globalization, issues that at least deserve to be discussed (environmental degradation, the unequal impacts of trade around the world), and the protest did help put those issues on the map. On the other hand, violent actions tend to take sympathy away from the protestors. Protestors have claimed that they changed the course of history, but more than a decade later, it’s hard to tell what’s different when it comes to world trade.
The Occupy movement seems to have learned from this, and has maintained a non-violent stance throughout its brief history. Occupy, which began in New York in September 2011 with Occupy Wall Street, has grown into a global movement protesting all manner of social and economic injustice and inequality. Like other recent protest movements, Occupy has had the benefit of using social media such as Facebook and Twitter to spread its message and coordinate activities. Occupy has probably helped frame the debate over economic policies in the U.S. and around the world, but tangible results are few (although it’s early in the game). The other problem that Occupy faces is coming up with a coherent agenda. The Civil Rights movement had the luxury of having a narrowly focused agenda: changing laws that restricted people’s rights. Changing people’s attitudes has proven much more difficult. Dr. King, despite his great skills as a leader and orator, had some of the same troubles when he moved his work from civil rights to economic justice. Laws are easy to change; people’s beliefs not so much. As one elected official who met with Occupy people told one of my classes, “They’re angry. They have a right to be angry. But they don’t have a plan.” This doesn’t mean that the Occupy movement can’t or won’t accomplish what it wants to, but it won’t be a quick or a simple task.
Economic change is somewhat easier to accomplish if economic results can be demonstrated via a lack of change. The Rev. Jesse Jackson had success, for example, in getting Coca-Cola to hire and promote more African-Americans when he was able to point out how important that market segment is to Coke’s success. The Occupy movement might have more success by organizing more boycotts of firms whose practices it doesn’t like. Moral arguments in such a case might be loftier, but money talks.
Not all non-violent protest is successful. In 1989, thousands of Chinese young adults (mostly students, the shock troops of every revolution), gathered in Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, the Chinese capital. As many as 500,000 people may have assembled there at the peak of the demonstrations. The protests were uniformly peaceful, with demonstrators calling for the usual litany of economic and political opportunity and reform. They even went so far as to build a papier-mâché replica of the Statue of Liberty. But Chinese officials who opposed the protests won out over those who favored it, and on June 4 Chinese army units forcibly removed the demonstrators from the square. Casualty estimates range from hundreds to thousands; no official number was ever released.
Sometimes protests grow violent, and sometimes they start out that way. And there’s violence, and then there’s violence. Trashing businesses isn’t in the same league with blowing things up and killing people. Sadly, terrorism has become a tool of politics in recent decades.
Consider the Middle East. Some people of Jewish descent had long dreamed of returning to their historical homeland of Israel, having been forcibly ejected by the Romans in the Second Century BCE. They had been persecuted nearly everywhere they went, so reconstituting the state of Israel seemed like a chance to be left alone. But the former territory was occupied by Palestinian Arabs, ruled first by the Turkish Ottoman Empire and then by the British. Jews began to move there, nonetheless, and in 1917 the British government more or less guaranteed the Jews access to territory there. Friction resulted—between Arabs and Jews, and between Jews and the British, and in 1948, the new state of Israel declared its independence. A series of wars between Israel and its neighbors ensued, and the territory that would have been Palestine became, instead, Israel after the Arabs attacked Israel in 1948. This left a dispossessed population of Palestinian Arabs, who, unfortunately, turned to violent forms of protest against the Israelis. That has led to 60 years of intermittent warfare and frequent violence, with little to show for it but the gravesites.
The airborne terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001, are, in a way, only one chapter in a long-running clash between parts of the east and parts of the west. U.S. involvement in the Middle East is unpopular with some Arab Moslems, particularly U.S. support for Israel. But what could move people to such horrible acts?
Terrorism is politically driven, targets civilians rather than military targets, and aims to change political attitudes and decision-making. Terrorism seems to occur when one group of people can see no way of achieving their objectives other than inflicting pain on the people with whom they disagree. Usually, then, the terrorists must feel some degree of powerlessness, as the perceived oppressor has a distinct military advantage over the group that feels oppressed. Terrorists aim to spread fear among citizens, who then will put pressure on their government to change policy.
Terrorism is not new; people we might describe as terrorists have been assassinating political leaders since the 1800s. The targeting of civilians is new, as is the potential access to weapons that can kill a lot of people. But while acts of terrorism have killed more than 4,000 people in the last few decades, little has changed in terms of policy and leaders in the states where the terrorists have made their targets. In some ways, like war, terrorism is as much the failure of politics as it is a way of achieving change.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• People participate in politics in a variety of ways, including direct participation and communication.
• Surveys, media reports, and interest groups are all ways that public opinion is relayed to candidates and elected officials.
• Non-violent resistance is an active method protesting unjust laws.
• Terrorism is a method of political protest that seeks to spread fear among citizens, who will put pressure on leaders to change policy.
EXERCISES
1. Have you ever actively engaged in a political protest? What issues might make you do so?
2. Survey other students about their attitudes about a political issue. Check your results against those of existing scientific surveys on the same topic. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/05%3A_Citizens_and_Politics/5.04%3A_Public_Opinion.txt |
• 6.1: Voting
Is it worth your time to vote? Not everybody thinks so, not all the time. A majority of citizens, in democratic republics around the world, think so when it comes to big elections. Elections for presidents and parliaments attract well over 50 percent of registered voters, all over the world. But fewer people think so in less prominent elections. In the United States, voter turnout drops by at least 10 points in the swing from presidential to non-presidential elections.
• 6.2: Electoral Systems
Elections are how officials get chosen in nations all around the world. States use a variety of systems to organize elections. First, let’s talk about what we do in the United States, and then compare that with happens elsewhere.
• 6.3: Political Parties
Parties are not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, and yet much of American politics is built around them, as is politics in pretty much every democratic state in the world. Even in the rare instances in which legislative bodies are organized on a non-partisan basis, party-like factions emerge. Parties evolved first in Great Britain and the United States, although there have been party-like factions in government dating back to Ancient Athens.
06: Voting and Elections
Learning Objectives
In this section, you will learn:
1. Who votes and who doesn’t.
2. Requirements for voting.
3. Why people choose to vote or not vote.
Ask yourself this one question: Is it worth your time to vote?
Not everybody thinks so, not all the time. A majority of citizens, in democratic republics around the world, think so when it comes to big elections. Elections for presidents and parliaments attract well over 50 percent of registered voters, all over the world. But fewer people think so in less prominent elections. In the United States, voter turnout drops by at least 10 points in the swing from presidential to non-presidential elections. Across the country, fewer than half the registered voters participate in local elections, which in some ways are the most important elections you face (the president or Congress won’t put in or take out that speed camera at the local intersection). Overall, Americans vote less regularly than many of their counterparts in other republics. In fact, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, the United States, the supposed bastion of democracy, ranks 132nd out of 172 nations in voter turnout.http://www.idea.int/publications/vt/upload/Voter%20turnout.pdf The turnout numbers are even worse if you consider not just registered voters but the whole voting-age population. And yet voting is the fundamental act of democratic participation—the thing that makes a nation a true republic. It is the axle on which the wheel of government turns. Especially in the United States—a nation full of people who will tell you it’s the greatest country on earth, etc., etc., why don’t more people vote? So let’s take a moment to explore the question of voting before we ask that question—do you/would you vote?—again.
Who Votes?
The obvious part of the answer is citizens who are old enough. Universally, you have to be a citizen to vote in any country’s elections. In most countries, the minimum age is 18. The minimum is 16 in Cuba, Brazil, Nicaragua and Austria; it’s 17 in the Seychelles and Senegal, 19 in South Korea and 20 in Japan. Eight countries, including Bolivia, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Dominica, Djibouti, Fiji, Kuwait and Lebanon, have a 21-year-old minimum.
For much of its history, the voting age in the United States was 21. What changed that was the Vietnam War. Young men and women argued that if they could be drafted and sent to die for their country, they should also be able to vote. The debate actually began during World War II. President Dwight Eisenhower, who had been the Allied commander in the war, spoke in favor of the lower age in 1954. With thousands of young Americans being drafted and sent to Vietnam, and nationwide protests against the war growing, Congress was at last moved to act. In 1970, Congress passed amendments to the Voting Rights Act, lowering the minimum voting age to 18. The states of Oregon, Texas and Idaho sued to block that, and, in 1970, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Oregon v. Mitchell that while the federal government could set the age for federal elections, states could choose minimum ages for their own elections. In March 1971 Congress then passed the 26th amendment (94–0 in the Senate and 401–19 in the House of Representatives), lowering the minimum age to 18. Within four months, three-quarters of state legislatures had approved the amendment, and it became law on July 5, 1971, when signed by President Richard Nixon. Constitutional change doesn’t usually happen that fast.
Young people at that time campaigned hard to win the right to vote in the U.S. Ironically, no group of people votes less than young people do today.
The Vietnam era was a high point in youth voting; in 1972, 72.5 percent of young people ages 18–29 participated in the presidential election. It’s been largely downhill from there. In the 2008 election, when 62.1 percent of that age group voted, it was the highest since 1992. And only 48.7 percent of registered voters ages 18–24 voted in 2008.
Clearly, not having the draft and a war staring you in the face probably took away some of the impetus to vote. But what other factors could be impacting voting?
Age and education: While young people aren’t voting as much, older people still vote often. And more-educated people vote more as well. So while 27 percent of those 18–24 who didn’t finish high school voted in 2008, 51.9 percent of those age 65 and up with the same level of education voted. Among those with a bachelor’s degree or more, 70.2 percent of the 18–24 group voted, versus 82 percent of those 65 and up with at least a bachelor’s degree.
What’s different between the age groups? The longer you’re around, the more you get a sense of what matters and how government might affect you. Older people may have houses and careers, and time to think about them, whereas younger people may be working multiple jobs and trying to finish school. (According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in the 2004 election, 23 percent of 18– to 24-year-old non-voters said they were just too busy.) More educated people may also have a better sense of how elections work, why they matter, how to register and when to vote. More educated people also tend to earn higher incomes, and that’s another group that votes more often. In the 2008 election, 51.9 percent of those with less than \$20,000 in household income a year voted, versus 79.8 percent of those with more than \$100,000 in household income.
Race also appears to play a role. White and African-American citizens vote more often than do Hispanic- and Asian-American citizens. Among Asian-Americans, 47.6 percent voted in 2008, versus 49.9 percent of Hispanic-Americans (of any race), 64.7 percent of African-Americans and 66.1 percent of white Americans. The difference there may reflect the larger numbers of relatively recent immigrants among Asian and Hispanic citizens.
Why People Vote, and Why They Don’t
So why don’t more people vote, especially in the United States? In Australia, it is illegal not to vote—and you get can fined for not voting—and turnout sometimes reaches 95 percent. On the other hand, turnout also hits 95 percent in the Mediterranean island nation of Malta, where voting is not compulsory.
Many other countries make it easier to vote. In Germany, after you turn 18, you get a card in the mail telling about the next election in which you are eligible to vote. Most U.S states require a two-step process—first you register, some time before the election, and then later you get to vote. In many countries, voter-eligibility lists are taken from existing lists such as income tax or birth records (you turn 18, you can vote). Voter registration has been required to prevent voter fraud, such as voting by people who are no longer living, though it’s worth noting that the U.S. has had little if any voter fraud in the last 50 years.http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/policy_brief_on_the_truth_about_voter_fraud/
So making that process easier, such as allowing voters to register on election day, also is predicted to raise turnout. Among U.S. states, only North Dakota does not require registration. Ohio and North Carolina allow same-day registration, while Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Wyoming and Washington, D.C. have some form of same-day registration. But those don’t always have an appreciably higher percentage of voter turnout; in the 2002 election, for example, only about half of North Dakota’s voting-age population bothered to show up at the polls. In 2004 and 2006, however, same-day registration states averaged 10–12 percent higher turnout than traditional registration dates, according to one study. Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington all allow voters to register online. More recently, however, a number of states have attempted to make it harder to vote. States such as Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Georgia enacted photo identification requirements for voters, with legislative sponsors arguing this was needed to prevent voter fraud. Critics argue that such requirements will hurt lower income and minority voters. They tend to vote Democrat; the bills were passed by Republican majorities in those state legislatures. In Pennsylvania, in a court case over the law, state officials couldn’t produce any incidents of voter fraud as evidence.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/16/pennsylvania-voter-id-law_n_1790844.htmld
As for higher or lower turnout in any given election year, correlation is not causality—because two things happen in close proximity doesn’t mean that one is influencing the other. For example, a hot local or statewide election can boost the turnout in one community or state, or a lack of pressing elections on the ballot can depress it. Meanwhile, consider the circumstances in which elections take place. A low point in voter turnout came in 1996, when only about half the country voted and Bill Clinton was re-elected president. The economy was growing and the nation was at peace, so people may have been relatively content. It was the lowest turnout since 1924, when the country was also amid a sustained period of peaceful prosperity. Contentment tends to keep people away from the polls. Contrast that with 2008, when turnout was 10 points higher than in 1996. The nation was involved in two not entirely popular wars, the economy was crashing, and Barack Obama, the Democrat nominee, made a big push for young voters.
People vote when it seems to matter, but they have a lot of other reasons for voting: They vote to show support for the system, an act of patriotism. They vote because they can. People vote to support a candidate, or vote because they don’t like one. They vote to make a statement. They vote because they care about what happens to their neighborhoods and communities.
Some people vote by party. If there’s an R or a D after a candidate’s name on the ballot, that’s who they choose. Here’s a true story from my neighborhood. A few years back, an incumbent Democrat state senator was seeking re-election. She was attractive, well-regarded, in a fairly Democrat-leaning district. The Republicans were unlikely to put forth a serious candidate when they had so little chance of winning.
But one Republican filed. He was a quiet, pleasant guy from my neighborhood, known mostly for looking a bit like Keith Richards and for frequently walking to the local market for a latte. One of my students actually interviewed him—apparently the only person who ever bothered to do so. The candidate informed my student that the Russians had tried to shoot him with a laser rifle (he knew it was the Russians because they’re the only ones with a laser rifle), but that the shot had bounced off his belt buckle. They had tried to kill him because they couldn’t abide the thought of the son of God becoming president of the United States.
This guy didn’t campaign much, but it got out that he was, in fact, mentally ill (although, by all accounts, harmless). Nonetheless, in the general election, he got 30 percent of the vote. That many people, that year, were determined to vote Republican, probably not knowing much about the candidate they had chosen.
The candidate might have had a better-sounding name than his opponent, which also seems to make a difference. I tried to convince a friend of mine to run for judge, but he said his name—Lamb—wouldn’t probably fly with the voters. I then tried to convince him to change his name to “Lamb-of-God” to pick up the religious conservative vote, but he wouldn’t go for that either.
The list of reasons for not voting is a bit longer then reasons why people do vote:
First, voting is not free. It costs time—to actually vote, to become even the slightest bit informed on candidates and issues—and even a little money if you drive to the polling place or stick a stamp on your mail-in ballot. On top of which, you have to register to vote, which, until Motor Voter registration, required you to go to a public library or other public facility and fill out a form. With motor voter, you can easily register when you renew your driver’s license. But either way, you have to take a step to be able to vote.
It’s a longer process than that required in many other countries. On top of that, the United States has lots of elections and very long ballots—lots of races to decide—further complicating voters’ task when they sit down to choose.
In some U.S. states, jury pools are chosen from voter registration lists, so some people do not register to vote so they can avoid jury duty. One study showed that the threat of jury duty reduced voter registration by 11 percent.http://www.electionstudies.org/resources/papers/documents/nes002296.pdf
People also don’t vote because they feel uninformed. Not having followed politics and elections, they may feel as though they are so uninformed that they would be voting blind. People also may not vote because they don’t like any of the candidates; as a form of protest; for religious reasons; or the classic, traditional excuse: “My vote doesn’t count.”
An Argument for Voting
This is the point where I tell my students, “This is what I think, and I think you should vote.” And, like I also tell my students, you will have to decide for yourself. But most of the arguments against voting don’t make a lot of sense, at least to me.
First, it’s not difficult to become informed enough to make a sensible choice based on what you believe and what matters to you in your own life. Many state election departments send out information on candidates; candidates themselves make substantial effort to contact voters with information. Granted, it’s all biased in favor of the candidate, but it usually tells you something about which way the candidate leans. Looking at which groups endorse candidates can tell us even more. Are they supported by business, labor or environmental groups? And, in the age of the internet, candidates and interest groups provide lots of information about who’s for what and why. You don’t have to be an expert to make an informed vote.
If you don’t like the candidates, find one you do like, or run yourself. And if you do a little research, you should be able to distinguish between the bad and the not-so-bad. We should never expect to agree 100 percent with any candidate.
As a form of protest, it’s one of the weakest. If you’re trying to make a statement by boycotting an election, how can we tell if this is a protest or if you’re just lazy?
Finally, voting gives you the right to complain. If you don’t vote, and you don’t like what government is doing, who can you blame but yourself? That’s because your vote always counts.
At this point, you should be asking, how can that be true? In elections in the U.S., with frequently thousands and millions of voters casting ballots, what difference can one vote make? Sometimes not much, but sometimes a lot. Sometimes elections are very close: In September 1996, in King County, Washington, voters faced a ballot measure to impose a local sales tax to fund a new baseball stadium and keep the Seattle Mariners from fleeing town. The measure failed by 20 votes—you and your friends could have tipped the election one way or the other had you been there to vote. The Mariners subsequently went on a big winning streak and nearly made the World Series (which, for Mariner fans, is about as good as it gets), and in October the state Legislature came up with a new funding package for the stadium. The team’s success helped, but if the vote hadn’t been so close, the Legislature might not have made the moves it did.
And that points to another way in which your vote counts: Margin of victory matters greatly in electoral outcomes. If a candidate wins by a lot, say, more than 60 percent, she or he is less likely to get serious opposition next time around. Conversely, if the candidate just squeaks by, opponents will be lining up for the next go-round, because that’s a vulnerable candidate. Voting is an aggregate function: It’s the total that matters, not the individual vote. So even if your candidate seems like a safe bet to win, adding to that total helps them in the future. And even if your candidate seems likely to lose, the closer her or she gets, the more likely it is that the candidate you don’t like gets a stronger, better funded opponent the next time around.
Margin of victory clearly matters after the election as well. When Bill Clinton was first elected president in 1992, he won with only 43 percent of the popular vote. In part that was because of the third-party candidacy of billionaire H. Ross Perot, who got nearly 19 percent, leaving incumbent President George H.W. Bush with 31 percent. Although later research showed that Perot voters were pretty evenly split between people who would have otherwise voted for Bush or Clinton, so that the outcome would not have changed without Perot in the race, Clinton’s low vote total had an impact on his relations with Congress. Why listen to a president whose popular mandate was clearly so weak? That left the new president with a somewhat rocky road to travel with the legislative branch, and gave Republicans an opening to call for action in the 1994 elections. And in those elections, they took majorities in both the House and the Senate.
If the majority in Congress swings one way or another, or especially if a president wins by a lot, that sends a message that the electorate wants change, and maybe even wants it pointing in one a particular direction. Anyone who’s watched Congress for any length of time will see those results in action; conservative or liberal agendas have more success if elections point toward conservativism or liberalism. And it’s not just who’s in Congress as a result of the elections (although that obviously makes a big difference). The Democrats still held a commanding majority in the U.S. House of Representatives after the 1980 elections, but passed President Reagan’s tax cuts after seeing how well he did in the 1980 vote. And in fact, research shows that, over time, Congress generally votes in accord with the broadly expressed will of the people.
Finally, voting is a unique experience. It is the one time in your life when you can say you are absolutely the equal of everybody else. Your vote counts no more or no less than anybody else’s—you, me, Bill Gates and the president are all on equal footing at the ballot box.
So, now, ask yourself again: Is it worth your time to vote?
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• People vote to support the system, to have a say, and to support or oppose a particular candidate.
• People don’t vote because they say they lack the time, lack motivation, and lack information.
• Voter turnout varies from year to year and from group to group. Older, richer, more educated people tend to vote more often than do younger, poorer, less educated people.
EXERCISES
1. Is it worth your time to vote? List the reasons why you would or wouldn’t vote in a given election.
2. Find out what it would take to register voters in your state. Set up a table on campus and see how many people you can convince to register.
3. Students on campus on how many are registered to vote; how many plan to vote in the next election; and how many voted in the last election. Compare your results with those of national surveys. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/06%3A_Voting_and_Elections/6.01%3A_Voting.txt |
Learning Objectives
In this section you will learn:
1. How elections are structured in the U.S. and elsewhere.
2. How we choose presidential candidates in the U.S.
3. How the Electoral College works and why it’s there.
Elections are how officials get chosen in nations all around the world. States use a variety of systems to organize elections. First, let’s talk about what we do in the United States, and then compare that with happens elsewhere.
Elections in the United States
The U.S. has one of the longest, most complicated electoral systems on the planet. There’s an election for something every year, and most elections involve a two-step process—a primary election followed by a general election. You probably know the broad details: Every four years we elect a president. Every two years, we elect members of the House of Representatives. Also every two years, approximately one-third of the seats in the U.S. Senate are up for election, as senators serve six-year terms.
On top of this, states typically also elect governors, state legislators, and other statewide officials on even-numbered years. Some states elect governors in non-presidential years, some at the same time as the presidential election. Odd-numbered years tend to be for local elections, such as city and county councils, with elections for judges thrown in there somewhere in states where judges are elected.
The primary election process varies from state to state. Most primary elections reduce numbers of candidates to no more than one per party. Progressive reformers in the U.S. in the early 20th century pushed for primary elections as a way to challenge the power of political machines, state and local party organizations that controlled the nominating process and thereby who could run for office. By 1917, all but four states had adopted primaries for state and local elections.
Each method of choosing candidates, either through primary elections or by party meetings or conventions, has its advantages. When parties were in charge, they were able to exert some discipline on candidates and to push for particular agendas. Then again, parties tended to at least look like they were under the thumb of interest groups such as railroads, and the system as whole was not very democratic. Primary elections, in contrast, invite a much higher level of political participation and offer more popular control of the electoral system. It also makes election seasons longer, and may have made the party system more polarized, as the people who do show up to vote in primaries tend to be more liberal or more conservative than the general electorate.
Either system can distort the outcome. In the presidential election of 1912, former President Theodore Roosevelt decided to challenge his successor, incumbent President William Howard Taft. Roosevelt won nine state primaries and Taft only one, but since the party still controlled the nominating process, Taft was the nominee. Roosevelt ran as an independent, splitting the vote with Taft and handing the election to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Contrast that with the 1972 election, when the Democratic Party might have preferred someone other than U.S. Sen. George McGovern to run against Richard Nixon, but McGovern’s strong showing in state primaries pushed him to the nomination. Nixon won handily in the general election.
Primary elections have the advantage of making it more likely that the winner will be elected with a majority of the votes cast, especially in winner-take-all elections. If there was no primary, and anybody could file for the general election, the winner would be the candidate gets a plurality—the most votes, not the majority of votes. So, in a three-person race, the winner could have as few as 34 percent of the votes—not a very democratic outcome. A primary election, by limiting who’s on the general-election ballot, tends to produce winners who get more than 50 percent of the vote. If, as in some states, one candidate from any registered party ends up on the general election ballot, there still could be multiple candidates from which to choose. In the U.S., however, if two of the candidates are a Democrat and a Republican, one of them is more likely to end up with more than half the vote.
In 39 states, voters must register to vote by party. So, if you register as an independent, you may or may not get to vote in the primary election (state rules vary). Choice of party can happen when you first register to vote, or, as in eight states, you choose which party you will vote for on the day you vote in the primary (sometimes called a Montana-style primary, or the pick-a-party primary). Any primary election where you have to declare a primary is called a closed primary, because voters can only choose among the candidates of their declared party. Parties prefer a closed primary because A. it gives them access to people who say they are Republicans or Democrats and B. it prevents crossover voting. The fear among party leaders is that members of the other party will “cross over” and change the outcome of one party’s nomination process—say, for example, a bunch of Republicans cross over and vote for a Democrat. The fear is that it will result in the nomination of a weaker candidate, but there’s not much evidence that this happens. In 1980, Washington state voters did appear to cross over to vote against incumbent Gov. Dixy Lee Ray, but not because they thought state Sen. (now U.S. Rep.) Jim McDermott was the weaker candidate. As voters said at the time, that election was about “ABD—Anyone But Dixy.” McDermott lost to a Republican in the general election.
The opposite of a closed primary is an open primary, in which voters can choose whichever candidate of whichever party they find most appealing. So you might vote for a Republican in one race and a democrat in the next. One variation of this system is called a Cajun primary, after the state of Louisiana, where the top two candidates advance to the general election, regardless of party. Louisiana adopted this system in 1975; there’s a general election run-off only if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote.
Washington state is a bit of an anomaly among state election systems. From 1935 to 2003, Washington had a blanket primary, a system later adopted in California. Under a blanket primary, voters were not required to register by party, and could vote for any candidate of any party in a primary election. The top vote getter of each party advanced to the general election.
In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that California’s blanket primary was unconstitutional, because it violated the parties’ right to freedom of association. Washington’s law was similarly invalidated in 2003. Interest groups and voters filed an initiative to restore the primary that year, while the state used a Montana-style primary in the interim. The initiative passed, but the measure was eventually again struck down by the federal courts. The state Legislature passed a top-two primary in 2004. If you think that elected officials don’t care what people think, consider this: While state party organizations, of which the legislators were effectively members, were dead set against an open primary, 76 percent of voters surveyed said they were for it. A legislator would have to be unconscious to not see which way that wind was blowing, and most were wide awake for that vote.
Nonetheless, the state governor vetoed the legislation. In the meantime, another initiative passed, and in 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and let the new law stand. In 2008, Washington state had its first truly open primary, with several state legislative races in which the top two vote getters were either both Republicans or both Democrats, and who advanced to a run-off in the general election. California, also by initiative, adopted a top-two system in 2010. Alaska had an open primary from 1947 until 2000. The legislature there replaced it with a closed primary; voters now must request a primary ballot for the party of their choice.
Primary elections are followed by general elections, in which the winner is chosen from however many candidates qualified via the primary. In the United States, the election system is generally by district or state and is called winner-take-all or first-past-the-post. If there are more than two candidates, the winner need only have a plurality—more votes than anyone else. This doesn’t happen with a top-two primary, where the winner, by definition, has taken 50 percent of the votes plus one. This has one important effect on U.S. politics, namely the two-party system. Winner-take-all elections effectively narrow voters’ choices, as a typical voter is more likely to vote for a candidate who has a reasonable chance of winning. So you may lean Libertarian or socialist or something else entirely, but unless you just want to make a statement, you’re more likely to vote for a Republican or a Democrat. The parties, as a result, are quite broad in the range of ideologies they encompass. At various times in American political history, Republicans (and Democrats) have been elected who were actually more liberal (or more conservative) than the Democrats (or Republicans) they were replacing. As the comedian Will Rogers once said, “I am not a member of an organized party. I am a Democrat.”
There are alternatives to this system. Some countries use proportional representation. Under this system, if a party gets 5 percent of the vote, they get five percent of the seats in the national legislature. Israel’s national elections are conducted entirely in this way—there are no district elections for the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. There are a number of modified versions of this system, so that, for example, there might be a series of 10-member districts, and in that district, parties get seats according to the percentage of votes they receive. This encourages multi-party systems, because unlike in a winner-take-all system, your candidate doesn’t have to win—your party just has to get some percentage of the vote to get seats in the legislature. This system has further variations. In a closed-list system, voters are confronted with a party-selected list of candidates, ordered by the party’s preference. If Party A wins 60 percent of the vote, the top six people on its list will get 6 of the 10 seats in that district. In an open-list system, voters may also choose which of the party’s candidates they would prefer to see in office. This latter system is more common in Europe and is also used in South Africa. In some countries, such as Germany, Mexico and New Zealand, a mixed system is employed: Some seats are awarded via district elections, others by proportional representation.
Yet another system is called the single transferrable vote. This requires multi-member districts. Voters are presented a list of candidates from all parties; they then rank the candidates in order of preference. Voters don’t have to choose more than one. A formula is used (dividing the total valid vote by the number of seats to be filled, plus one, and then adding one vote) to determine the minimum number of votes needed to take office. If, say, that number is 10,001, any candidate reaching the threshold is elected. If the candidate gets more than that number of votes, the remaining votes are redistributed to the voters’ second choice. The least popular candidate is eliminated outright, and her or his votes are redistributed to the remaining candidates who were somebody’s No. 2 pick. This process is repeated until all the seats are filled. This system is designed to address “wasted votes,” which rather ignores the importance of margin of victory in influencing both policy and future elections. Nonetheless, it is used in some elections in Australia, India, and Ireland, and in Cambridge, Mass.
The upside of proportional representation is that more particular viewpoints get represented in government. Also, in winner-take-all elections, a legislative majority may effectively be chosen by less than 50 percent of the total vote, thus not truly reflecting the preferences of the overall majority of voters. The downside of proportional representation is that no party may have a majority in the legislature and hence not much may get done. Italy, using a party-based proportional system, has had nearly 60 governments since 1946, as it has been rare for any coalition of parties to maintain a stable majority for very long. Germany, however, employing a multi-party system for about the same period of time, has had fairly stable governments despite no one party ever having an outright majority in the Bundestag.
One recent electoral reform has been term limits, or the idea that anyone should only be able to serve for so long in a particular office. The United States passed the 22nd amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1947, imposing a two-term limit on the presidency. More recently, however, 15 states successfully adopted term limits for state legislators. Several attempted to limit the terms of their congressional delegations, but federal courts concluded that would put the states in the position of unilaterally amending the Constitution, and said no.
The argument for term limits is that “career politicians,” who may serve for some decades, become too out of touch with the voters and too beholden to special interests. The argument against term limits is that 1. it’s undemocratic because it doesn’t allow voters to vote for whom they want and 2. it actually strengthens special interests. This is because policymaking typically involves three groups: legislators, interest groups, and appointed public officials, who run state or federal agencies who implement the laws. Term limits, by limiting the experience of legislators, actually makes the other two groups—bureaucrats and lobbyists—more powerful, and you don’t get to vote for them. Whatever their faults, veteran legislators are more likely to know when they’re being fed a line of bovine effluent. Legislatures where term limits have been imposed have lost a lot of institutional knowledge and leadership, with less than happy results.http://www.ncsl.org/legislatures-elections/legisdata/legislative-term-limits-overview.aspx
U.S. Presidential Elections
We should take a moment to discuss U.S. presidential elections, if only because there’s not really anything else like it on earth, and many people find it confusing.
The election of the president starts with the nomination process. To be elected, a presidential candidate typically has to be nominated by a major party, although John Anderson in 1980, H. Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996, and Ralph Nader in 2000 were able to mount national campaigns as independents.
For much of the history of the country, the nominating process was controlled by the parties, with national nominating conventions often becoming battlegrounds where rival candidates jockeyed for favor among state delegations. Progressive reformers early in the 20th century began to push for democratizing the process, leading states to increasingly adopt primaries and caucuses as methods for choosing presidential nominees. But as recently as 1968, Hubert Humphrey won the Democrat nomination for president without entering a single primary.
Now, no candidate could get the nomination without entering most if not all of the primaries. They begin in January of election year with the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, and stretch on into the early summer. States have been steadily moving their primaries up so as to attract more attention from the candidates—having an early primary means candidates visit, spend money and make promises. In some ways, that’s what politics is all about.
Most states have primary elections for presidential nominees, but about a dozen states still use caucuses. Texas uses both, choosing some delegates through the primary and some via the caucus. Thecaucus system involves a series of meetings, starting at places such as schools and people’s homes, leading up to district and state conventions, where delegates ultimately decide who gets the nod for that state. The state convention chooses a slate of representatives to go to the national convention, who will cast their ballots (each state gets so many votes, largely based on population) to decide who will be the party’s standard-bearer in November.
Primaries, by contrast, are pretty simple: People vote, and candidates are awarded convention delegates on the basis of that vote. Some states use winner-take-all rules—the top vote getter gets all the delegates—party regulars and activists who will attend the national convention, pledged to vote for the winner. Some award delegates proportionally based on the vote.
Primary turnout is pretty low—usually less than 50 percent. Caucus turnout is even lower, but it does invite a deeper level of participation among voters, and brings people together in their neighborhoods to talk politics. Because caucuses are a multi-stage process, the results at the precinct level are both hard to judge and sometimes misreported. In 1976, despite having spent much of the last two years there, little-known Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter came in second behind “uncommitted” in the opening round of the Iowa caucuses. Somehow this got reported as a victory, and propelled Carter to the nomination and the presidency. Caucuses also can be overrun by a committed group, as when televangelist Pat Robertson won the Washington state caucuses in 1988. The low turnout in both primaries and caucuses usually means that the people who show up are more liberal or more conservative than the voters at large. The people who really care about issues are the ones who will more often make the effort to vote or otherwise get involved. This makes it more difficult for moderate candidates to win the nomination. So a successful presidential candidate often has to appeal to a more conservative or liberal element within her or his party, and then dance back toward the middle once the nomination is locked up.
The nominating campaign is wrapped up by spring. As candidates carve out victories among the states, they get more attention, and funds dry up for the also-rans. No Democrat or Republican nominee hasn’t had the nomination locked up well before the convention since 1972. The conventions have become, instead, elaborate dog-and-pony shows designed to boost the nominees’ chances heading into the November election. This has made the national party conventions not just tedious but largely pointless. In 2004, John Kerrey and George W. Bush had their nominations nailed down well before the conventions, leading the television networks to cover very little of the convention proceedings.
Earning a Degree from the Electoral College
After the nomination comes the general election, on the first Tuesday in November every four years. As you may know, in the United States citizens elect a president through the Electoral College. This is one of the oddest features of American politics, and worth explaining if only because it confuses so many people. They easy explanation is that we have 51 separate, winner-take-all elections for president—50 states plus the District of Columbia. Each state gets electoral votes equal to the total size of its congressional delegation—senators (two) plus representatives. So for the 2012 election, California had the most electoral votes, 55, because it has the most people of any state (37.6 million) and hence the biggest House delegation. Alaska, D.C., Delaware, Montana, Vermont, Wyoming and the Dakotas all have the minimum, three.
The electors are real people—typically Republicans or Democrats who are chosen by their respective parties. They may be high party officials or big donors. The only requirements are that an elector cannot be a currently sitting elected official, and cannot have engaged in an insurrection against the United States, or assisted with one (part of the 14th amendment to the Constitution, following the Civil War). In December they gather in state capitals to cast their ballots, which are subsequently counted in the U.S. Senate and the election is certified in January.
There are 538 total electoral votes, and a candidate has to get at least 270 to win. So he or she has to win enough states to get to 270. This changes how candidates pursue their campaigns, because all of them are smart enough to realize that a state such as Texas likely will vote Republican, while California will vote Democrat. The election then tends to come down to “swing states”—states that can go either way depending on the year. Candidates thus concentrate their efforts on those states, while not completely neglecting the others. On the other hand, the states with only three electoral votes don’t get as much attention. So in 2012, it was expected that the election would come down to a handful of states: Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida.
How did the U.S. decide to use this somewhat confusing system? It was a compromise between letting the people choose the president and letting Congress do it. The Founding Fathers didn’t have total faith in the citizens, a problem compounded by the fact that the new nation was just under 4 million—less than New York City today—spread all up down the East Coast, without any form of rapid transportation or mass communication. They feared that voters would turn only to candidates they knew—”favorite sons”—making it harder for anyone to get elected nationally. Letting the Congress elect the president would upset the balance of power created in the Constitution—the president would owe his office to Congress, making it less likely that he could stand up to them. So the Electoral College, originally to be a college of learned persons, chosen by the people, was the compromise. States were allowed to decide their own method of choosing electors, but by 1860, only South Carolina wasn’t letting the people choose their electors (they still had electors chosen by the state legislature). As soon as political parties began to germinate—basically, after the election of George Washington, the electors rapidly came to stand for one candidate or another.
The Electoral College is apportioned in part by population, and therefore depends on the Census taken every 10 years. Because if a state grows enough in population to gain a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives (or loses enough people to lose a seat), they gain not only congressional clout but also more attention from candidates. Washington state and Massachusetts literally went to court over the apportionment from the 1990 census, which Washington won by virtue of being able to count members of the Armed Forces officially stationed in Washington and though temporarily assigned elsewhere in the world. That’s how far states will go to get that extra congressional seat and electoral vote.
It’s a complicated system, and not always popular with voters. And, on several occasions, the winner of the popular vote doesn’t actually win the election, most recently in 2000. The alternative would be a national election by popular vote. Proponents of the Electoral College say that would allow one region of the country to dominate elections, which is questionable. So why don’t we change? Big states think it helps them, and small states think it helps them. Big states like the influence a lot of electoral votes generates: Candidates show up, spend money, and make promises. Small states, meanwhile, claim to see the same advantage. In a contest where the magic number of 270 is achieved by piecing together enough state victories to get there, every state counts. So, in the 2012 election, states such as New Hampshire (four votes) and Vermont (three) mattered in what was expected to be a close election.
In the United States, Election Season Never Ends
No, it doesn’t. The character of U.S. elections is to some extent defined by our rather broad conception of freedom of speech. We can’t, for example, limit the campaign season, as they do in the United Kingdom. And as long as the courts equate spending money with freedom of speech, it is difficult to limit the amount of money that can be spent on an election campaign.
In a parliamentary system, governments have to have elections every so often, such as every five years. But elections can come sooner—majority parties sometimes try to call for elections when things are going well for them, or a no-confidence vote in parliament can force a new election.
That means in the United Kingdom, for example, the whole campaign season can last only a month. An election is called, and with a matter of weeks, people vote. In the United States, in contrast, candidates for the 2016 presidential election will start visiting Iowa and New Hampshire in 2013. With political speech the most protected form of speech in the U.S., it is virtually impossible to keep anyone from campaigning for any office at any time. As a consequence, election campaigns go on for months and years, which may actually give voters a feeling of burnout long before it’s time to cast their ballots. It also means you can say anything you want, no matter how egregiously false it might be (such as Republican claims that President Obama’s health care plans included federal “death panels” who would decide who lives or dies. There was, in fact, nothing of the sort in the bill).
Money and Elections
If you want to run for office, you need money. Jesse Unruh, a California political operator with a talent for a pithy phrase, famously said, “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” Money makes campaigns possible and campaigns successful. But like oxygen for fire, it’s a necessary but insufficient ingredient. Hillary Clinton spent \$250 million pursuing the Democrat nomination in 2008 and lost. Magazine publisher Steve Forbes spent \$86 million—seven times what George W. Bush had spent by the time Forbes dropped out of the campaign in February 2000—and didn’t win a single primary. Michael Huffington spent \$28 million to run for the U.S. Senate in California in 1994, and lost. So having a lot of money is not a guarantee of victory. But without some money, it’s very hard to get elected.
Money can do a lot of things for a candidate:
Advertising: Advertising gets your name out there, and your ideas, and, quite often, something about how wrong your opponent is. The bigger the race, the more the candidate will need broadcast media—radio, TV and the internet—to reach voters across the state and the country. The more local the race, the less that makes sense. Broadcast advertising in an urban area, for example, will reach a lot of voters who don’t live in your district and can’t vote for you anyway. So that’s effectively a waste of resources. Candidates may also advertise on billboards, transit placards, and in print media such as newspapers and magazines. Not as many people subscribe to newspapers as once did. On the other hand, the people who do subscribe tend to be more educated and therefore more likely to vote.
Candidates used to spend money on doo-dads—buttons, combs, pens, emery boards—small items with the candidate’s name and something about what they’re running for. People don’t wear campaign buttons so much anymore, but items such as pens and emery boards might still catch somebody’s eye. Nonetheless, they’re increasingly rare in contemporary campaigns.
Money can also buy direct mail, which, in local races, can be very effective. Candidates, their allies and their opponents all buy lists of registered voters and mail to them directly, touting the candidate’s virtues, and telling you how wrong her or his opponent is. Usually this comes in the form of a postcard of some size, featuring a picture of the candidate, attractively posed with children, pets (and usually a dog as opposed to a cat or an iguana) and/or old people, and the printed equivalent of a few sound bites about what a great person she or he is. The advantage of direct mail is that it can reach people in your district at home. The disadvantage is that it’s still junk mail, and potentially lost amid the ads, credit card offers and pleas for money that clutter a typical mailbox.
Hire consultants and staff: Hiring a good consultant can help a candidate polish her or his message, say the right things, and look a little more polished. Good staff is essential to a campaign—people who can organize events, get them filled up with your supporters—people who can get you to the church on time, as it were.
Travel: The bigger the race, the more you’re going to have to travel. So a national campaign will spend a certain amount of money just driving and jetting around the country, meeting voters, giving speeches, kissing babies and shaking hands.
Hiring pollsters: Candidates in bigger races regularly pollsters to find out where their support is among voters, which issues matter most in this election, and trying to figure out where their own and their opponents’ weaknesses are. Like a big company test-marketing a new product, candidates in major races, if they have the money, try to leave little to chance. Nonetheless, one suspects, that the tiniest bit of common sense ought to tell you if, say, the economy is the big issue in the campaign. If there isn’t a war, it usually is.
Whether you need all this, depends upon the arena. A statewide or national campaign might require millions of dollars just to be competitive, but a local race typically costs much less. And at the street level of local politics, getting elected often is a question of who you know and how much you’re known. Somebody who’s been working in the community for a long time, in business and in civic activities such as charities, will be known by more people. If they’ve made a favorable impression, those folks will tell their friends that Candidate X is a pretty good guy (or woman), a solid citizen and a straight shooter.
The other key campaign component at the local level is doorbelling. Nothing apparently beats the candidate walking the neighborhoods, knocking on doors and meeting the voters. Candidates who’ve pounded the pavement to get elected say they meet all kinds of people, from the literally naked to the nominally nasty, but report that most people are fairly normal and are actually pleased to meet the person who represents them.
Where does the money come from? All over, but from some folks more than others. For example, in the 2010 U.S. congressional elections, 40–50 percent (depending on whether it was a House or Senate race and which party) came from large individual donors, followed by 10–30 percent from political action committees, 10–20 percent from small individual donors, and 3–20 percent from the candidates’ own funds. Political action committees are organizations that solicit money from members, who may be businesses, individuals or unions, and contribute to campaigns. U.S. federal election law still prohibits direct corporate contributions to candidates, and the size of donations is severely limited—\$2,500 per election to one candidate from one individual, and \$5,000 per election to one candidate from one PAC. So the most a PAC could give would be \$10,000—\$5,000 for the primary and \$5,000 more for the general election. There are no limits on how much of their own money candidates can spend.
Reforms in the 1970s and 1980s created this rule, but it was rather like squeezing a balloon. Money in politics is like electricity—it seeks the path of least resistance. As barriers to direct contributions grew, individuals and organizations turned to independent spending. Most recently, the U.S. Supreme Court in a case called Citizens United voted 5–4 that the government could not limit any kind of election expenditure anyone wanted to make on their own behalf. So corporations and individuals can give as much money as they want to organizations that are technically separate from any candidate. And the organizations no longer have to report who their donors are, circumventing one of what had been one of the positive features of American campaign finance—transparency. It seems like a pretty thin line; it shouldn’t be hard to figure out which organizations support your candidate and oppose the other one. And even though such organizations aren’t supposed to consult with candidates or their campaign staff, it shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out what’s needed to support the campaign.
And so a lot of money gets spent, especially in the United States, on election campaigns. A lot of money. In 2008, U.S. candidates spent \$5.3 billion, including more than \$1 billion in the race for the presidency. Around \$4 billion was spent on the 2010 elections, and 2012 spending was expected to reach nearly \$10 billion. It’s a lot of money, but we should put this in some perspective. Businesses in the United States spend more than \$100 billion a year on advertising; the automobile industry alone spends as much in six months as the candidates spend in an entire two-year campaign cycle.
Does this matter? Clearly, underfunded candidates don’t get elected. Repeated research shows that vote totals tend to track fundraising totals, to a point. At some point, a candidate just needs to have enough money. So, outspending your opponent by a factor of 5 or 6 to 1 means you have a much better chance of winning. But the more that margin falls, the worse your odds become. If candidates have enough money to run a campaign and get their message out there, who has the most money won’t matter quite as much.
Aside from who wins, the other concern is whether campaign contributions affect how sitting legislators vote. The evidence tends to be inconclusive. First, contributors tend to give money to people who agree with them anyway. Under those circumstances, the campaign contribution may have some influence on who gets elected, but it may not actually be changing anybody’s mind when they get there. Then again, lobbying organizations and interest groups who can make campaign contributions are probably more effective than those who can’t.
One reform that has been tried has been public funding of elections, so that candidates don’t have to rely on private donations to run their campaigns. In U.S. states where the amount of money offered was substantial, such as Minnesota and Wisconsin, candidates comply with the program and raise and spend less money. In states where the system is not well-funded, such as Hawaii and Arizona, serious candidates decline to participate, since adhering to the spending limits and taking the public money effectively disarms you in the face of your opponent, who can spend whatever he or she wants (more than you).
Presidential campaigns were briefly publically funded in the United States. Beginning with the 1976 campaign, major party candidates took advantage of the law and accepted public money in exchange for limiting the amount of outside contributions they received. But by 2000, candidates increasingly turned down public money in favor of private fundraising, which allowed them to raise and spend much more money than they could otherwise. Consider that President Obama spent \$240 million in the 2008 primary campaign alone, while the federal spending limit for those accepting public funds was \$10 million.
Although the data are incomplete, the United States spends more per capita on campaign finance than do other democracies. For 2008, we spent about \$17 per person; Canadians spent \$12 per person and in Australia they spent only \$7. In other countries, such as Sweden and Mexico, campaigns are largely publically financed. Three quarters of the money spent on elections in Norway is public money, and political ads are banned from TV and radio. This kind of approach is, in fact, very common in Europe and South America.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• The United States has a two-party system because of its winner-take-all elections.
• Proportional representation systems tend to produce multiparty states.
• Money is a necessary but insufficient ingredient for electoral success.
EXERCISE
1. What are the election laws in your state? What kind of primary does your state have? Do you have to register to vote by party? Does your state have a website for campaign finance information? How much did candidates in your area spend on the last election? Who were the big donors to those campaigns? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/06%3A_Voting_and_Elections/6.02%3A_Electoral_Systems.txt |
Learning Objectives
In this section you will learn:
1. How parties have evolved.
2. What functions parties perform.
Another important feature of electoral politics is parties. Political parties are a basic way in which the conduct of politics is organized. Parties are in some sense political factions, a broad-based form of interest group. They are formal organizations of like-minded individuals who unite in pursuit of common political objectives.
Parties are not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, and yet much of American politics is built around them, as is politics in pretty much every democratic state in the world. Even in the rare instances in which legislative bodies are organized on a non-partisan basis, party-like factions emerge. Parties evolved first in Great Britain and the United States, although there have been party-like factions in government dating back to Ancient Athens.
The Evolution of U.S. Parties
We have been through a number of what political scientists call party systems. After George Washington’s terms in office, the new nation’s politically active citizens began to divide into two parties, the Federalists and the Republicans. Scholars sometimes refer to them as the Democratic-Republicans, since the party eventually became known as the Democrats, but they apparently never referred to themselves as this. The Federalists were the business party, the mercantile party; the Republicans were the party of agricultural interests and ordinary workers. Being regionally and commercially based at a time when most of the country was made up of farmers, the Federalists were quickly overwhelmed and became a footnote in political history. By the election of 1824, all the candidates were of the same party.
But the party split in 1828, into a new party calling itself the Democrats and another group that called itself the National Republicans (changing to the Whigs after 1835. The term whig may come from a British party of the same name, or from a group of American revolutionaries). This was the Second Party System, and it lasted until near the start of the Civil War. The Democrats continued to be the party of agrarian interests and of states’ rights, as in just say no to the federal government. The Whigs were the party of commerce and industry, and of a strong federal government. While the Whigs elected a couple of presidents, they fell apart over the issue of slavery in the 1850s.
The Whigs were replaced by the Republicans in 1854, with the Republicans becoming the first and only successful third-party movement in the history of the country. The Republicans were avowedly anti-slavery, which helped make them the dominant party in the U.S. after the north won the Civil War. Until 1930–32, Republicans dominated national politics, except in the American South, where Democrats predominated. Some scholars divide this era into two periods, the first one ending in 1896 and then succeeded by the Progessive era, but either way, Republicans were often in control.
Republican dominance was ended by the Great Depression, which saw huge electoral gains for Democrats in 1930 and 1932. Under Franklin Roosevelt, Democrats forged what became known as the New Deal Coalition, combining working-class citizens, people of color, and Southern Democrats to become the major force in American politics for the next 50 years. Remember that politics make strange bedfellows: The coalition included northern African-Americans, who could vote, and Southern Democrats, who wanted to keep them from voting. Somehow, it worked.
The election of 1980 changed that once again. Ronald Reagan won the presidency and the South finally forgave the Republican party for the Civil War. Control of the presidency and Congress has since swung back and forth between the parties. Political historians will someday give this era a coherent name, but probably not before one of you is teaching this class. As for now, we’re in the middle of it. It is an era of divided government.
Third Party Movements
Why do we have a two-party system, especially when you hear so many people decry what they see as a lack of options when there are only two choices? Remember that it’s the nature of U.S. elections that makes it so. In winner-take-all elections, there’s little reward for voting for a third-party candidate, and starting a new party is no small (or cheap) endeavor. As a result, serious candidates and most voters gravitate toward one of the two major parties, because to do otherwise is to waste one’s time and effort. Nonetheless, U.S. third parties do play an important role: bringing new ideas into politics. The Populists and Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th centuries pushed for a number of reforms, and as those movements had success at the polls, they were adopted and absorbed by the major parties. The DNA of the Populists and the Progressives is wound into that of the Democrats and Republicans of the 21st century. For example, in Minnesota, Democrats appear on the ballot as DFL—Democratic-Farmer-Labor—so named for a 1944 merger between Democrats and the Farmer-Labor Party. It would be difficult to predict whether a growing party movement such as the Libertarians will someday influence the future of Republicans or Democrats, but that is how things get started. Libertarians believe in the least amount of government possible, so their economic ideals are closer to what some Republicans say they believe, but their social concerns align more closely with what some Democrats profess.
American parties used to be stronger. Before electoral reforms in the 20th century, they controlled who ran for office and who got the money to do so. Voters’ only real say in the system came in the general election, where it was not uncommon, for example, to get a ballot that allowed you to check one box and vote a straight Republican or straight Democrat ticket.
What Parties Do
U.S. parties still perform a number of important functions, however:
They recruit and train candidates. Especially in legislative races, each party wants a candidate in every district. This is so that even if someone is the candidate of the dominant party in a “safe” (leaning heavily) Republican or Democrat district, the majority party candidate will have to spend time and resources campaigning. This means they can funnel less support (money) to candidates in more competitive (“swing”) districts.
Parties, therefore, also provide financial support for candidates. Party officials will talk to potential donors and steer money toward those candidates who stand the best chance of winning.
Parties try to mobilize voters at election time, spending money on direct mail, e-mail and social media, traditional advertising and telephone banks to find and get voters to the polls (or mail in their ballots in states where that’s the norm). They try to identify likely Democrat or Republican voters and make sure that they vote.
Parties organize legislative politics. In Congress, and in every state except Nebraska, which has a non-partisan legislature, legislative bodies, such as the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, are organized by party. Party members meet in caucus as a group, where they plan legislative strategy and make assignments for thing such as floor debates over bills. The majority party will control the chamber, and the minority party will try to figure out how to slow them down.
Parties also write platforms, which are statements of general principles of the party. Platforms are serious, but they’re also a bit of window dressing, as they don’t have the force of law and don’t compel any elected officials to adhere to the platform. And as the people who get involved in party politics enough to get elected, say, to the state or national platform committee, tend to be either Really Republican or Diehard Democrat, the platforms that emerge tend to be a bit to the right or to the left of where the average voter (and many candidates and officials) might be. In 2012, the Texas state Republican platform, for example, advocated barring the teaching of critical thinking skills. One state reason was that it might make young people disagree with their parents. A number of Texas Republican officials backpedaled away from that plank as soon as it got out, but it’s in fact not atypical of what ends up in the platforms of both parties.When Harry Truman was running for re-election in 1948, he introduced the Republican party platform as legislation in Congress, then gleefully watched as the Republican majority voted down their own platform.
In a two-party system, the parties tend to be pretty broad. Until the 1990s, it was not uncommon in U.S. politics to find Republicans who were effectively more liberal than some Democrats, and Democrats who might be more conservative than many republicans. Parties in many other democratic states tend to be more narrowly focused, however, especially in states where proportional representation is the rule. Remember that under such electoral rules, a party need only get so many votes—not necessarily winning individual seats—to get seats in the national or regional legislature. That encourages multiple parties, because it rewards voters who choose any party, not just the top two.
Parties Outside of the United States
One thing we don’t have in the United States is a true labor party, a standard feature in most European democracies. This is because we have no aristocratic tradition. We don’t have the longstanding class divisions that still define a lot of European politics. Democrats tend to be more pro-labor than Republicans, but in such a broad party organization, labor is only one of many factions under the party umbrella. In Europe in particular, the ancient echoes of aristocracy and opposition to it are still heard in more class-based politics of the present. The British Labor Party, which has grown more centrist in the last few decades, was for much of its history the unapologetic voice of the working person. European democracies also are more likely to have an avowedly socialist party, such as the Social Democrats. Although they have shifted rightward in recent decades, they still tend to advocate for more government involvement in the economy. Nations from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe have parties that either call themselves or adhere to Social Democratic principles.
Communist parties still exist in nearly every nation, and in some, such as Brazil, Bangladesh, Denmark and Uruguay, they hold enough legislative seats to participate in the coalitions that rule the country. Like the Social Democrats, communist parties have tended to soften their stances at bit since the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Green” parties that advocate more concern for the environment are sprouting up, along with libertarian-flavored parties that argue for the least amount of government possible.
Opposite them we often find the Christian Democrats, who had religious roots but have become more of a market-oriented party in recent years. Nations from Albania to Venezuela have variants of this kind of party. Liberal parties are also right of center, leaning toward markets and away from government control of the economy, but without the religious roots of the Christian Democrats. Conservative parties are farther right still, campaigning for unfettered markets and what they see as greater economic opportunity.
Voters in other countries may face quite a few more real choices than do voters in the United States. So, for example, Germany has seven active parties: the Christian Democrats, the Christian Social Union, the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats, the Left, and the Greens. Canada has five parties: the Conservatives, the Liberals, the left-leaning New Democrats, the Parti Quebecois, which advocates Quebec leaving Canada, and the Greens. Brazil has four major and 15 medium-sized parties, and more than half a dozen other minor parties.
Wherever we find parties, we do find partisanship, which can be both good and bad for the body politic. Party politics can lead to pursuit of partisan advantage over sound policy; parties in legislative bodies sometimes spend more time trying to make the other side look bad than trying to get something positive done. Parties also can get stuck in ideological ruts, and hence fail to pursue needed reforms.
But despite their challenges, parties will never fade away. Some cities and local governments in the west have non-partisan elections, but it’s usually not difficult to figure out what stripes every tiger has. Uganda recently experimented with party-free politics; the fact that the experiment didn’t last ought to tell you something. James Madison, in campaigning for the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, warned against the evils of factions. But within a decade, he was leading one.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Political parties are a broad form of interest group.
• Parties recruit, train and fund candidates; they educate and mobilize voters; they organize the legislative process.
• U.S. parties are not as powerful as they once were, but still perform important functions in American politics.
EXERCISES
1. Which party do you more closely align with? Why? Visit that party’s website and look at their most recent political platform. Does it match what you believe about politics and government?
2. Interview an elected official, and ask them why belong to one party instead of another?
EXERCISES
1. How do you register to vote where you live? What would it take for you and your classmates to register people to vote? Do it, and keep track of how many people say no, and why they say no.
2. Survey people on campus: Are they registered to vote? Do they intend to vote in the next election? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/06%3A_Voting_and_Elections/6.03%3A_Political_Parties.txt |
Thumbnail: The western front of the United States Capitol. (Public Domain; via Wikipedia)
07: The Building Blocks of Government
Learning Objectives
In this section you will learn:
1. About the different kinds of legislatures.
2. How the U.S. Congress works.
3. How parliamentary systems work.
Basically, there are three kinds of legislatures:
• Consultative—in which the legislature advises the ruler or rulers on matters of law and policy. Members may be elected and/or appointed.
• Parliamentary—in which an elected legislature makes laws and also, through its leadership, serves as the executive branch of government.
• Congressional—in which one or more elected groups of legislators make law and share powers with other branches of government.
Legislatures typically perform a basic set of functions:
• They make and revise laws. This usually includes the sole or main authority to write budgets—to officially sanction the imposition and collection of taxes, and the spending of public money.
• They engage in administrative oversight. Legislatures usually are charged with ensuring that the laws are being carried out properly by the agencies of government. In a congressional system, they may also “advise and consent” with executives on appointments to government and the making of treaties with other countries. Effectively, this means that a legislature may deny a presidential appointment, or prevent the adoption of a treat.
• They represent constituents to the government. In legislatures where elections are based on geographically defined districts, individual legislators will spend some time attempting to help out their constituents address individual problems they have with government, such as public pension benefits or securing appointments to military academies.
The biggest job of legislatures is making laws. Having legislatures make laws pushes power toward the people, who, in a functioning republic, have in some fashion elected the members of the legislature. That gives voters the power to recall legislators by electing somebody else next time around. Legislators typically have defined terms of office, usually from two to six years in length. In parliamentary systems, the term of office may be only until the next election, which could be anywhere from a month to five years.Elections can come quickly in parliamentary systems. The Earl of Bath served as British prime minister for two days in February 1746; the government collapsed when no agreed to serve with him. George Canning served as prime minister for 119 days in 1827 before an election was called. In contrast, Sir Robert Walpole served as prime minister for 20 years, from 1721 to 1742. As explained in the previous chapter, legislators may be elected to represent certain districts, states or provinces within a nation, or elected in proportion to the number of votes received by their party in the election. And many nations use a combination of the two methods.
Consultative Assemblies
A handful of nations have consultative assemblies, which lack the lawmaking power of a traditional legislature. These include several Middle Eastern states such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait. Ostensibly communist states such as China, Vietnam, Cuba and Laos have national assemblies, which, on paper, have lawmaking power. In practice, however, as with the Chinese National People’s Congress, they meet briefly each year and have very limited ability to make law. Consultative assemblies give the appearance of giving the people a voice, but they provide no real check on the power of the government, wherever it may actually be found.
China’s legislature is worth a little examination, if only because it is so different than what is found in much of the rest of the world. At 2,987 members, it’s the largest legislature in the world, and still means only one member of Congress for about every 400,000 people in China. In contrast, the New Hampshire state House (part of the world’s fourth largest legislature), has 400 members representing about 3,000 people each. Members of the U.S. House of Representatives serve about 700,000 people each.
The People’s Congress meets for a couple of weeks each year, at the same time as the Chinese People’s Consultative Conference, which is supposed to represent various interest groups in the country. Its supporters say that it works to mediate disputes between different factions within China; its critics say it’s still mostly a rubber stamp for the Chinese Communist Party, which still holds effective ruling power in the country. Technically speaking, the members of the People’s Congress are elected by assemblies below them, and those assemblies are elected by the people. In reality, the members of the People’s Congress are largely chosen by the party. Around 70 percent are party members, and while there are eight other political parties in China, they’ve all been approved by the Communists.
Legislatures in Congressional Systems
Most legislature don’t look like that. As the American poet John Godfrey Saxe once said, “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion to how they are made.”Frequently misattributed to 19th century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Legislatures can be messy, cantankerous affairs, full of arguing, bargaining and general unease.
Let’s consider the U.S. Congress, which has some differences from other legislatures but is not atypical of how the legislative process works in general.
In the United States, Congress is the body of government that makes laws. All federal laws start in Congress; neither the courts nor the president has the power to make law.
Congress, like most legislatures, is an arena for the articulation of conflict. That means it’s a place where the people’s business can be done without real violence.Although, in the pre-Civil War 1800s, physical attacks by one member on another were not unheard of.
While Congress’ main job is making law, it must balance the needs of making policy and meeting constituent needs. This is at the heart of the internal conflict that drives Congress—how to balance the particular needs of one’s state or district against the needs of the nation as a whole. These two things may not coincide, and sometimes it appears that members of Congress tend toward considering parochial needs over national ones. So, many members of Congress have railed against what they saw as excessive government spending, but didn’t fail to direct federal funds to their home states and districts. Similarly, members of Congress may find themselves in conflict over the needs of the nation and the needs of particular constituents and interest groups. So a member of Congress likely would say that he or she is in favor of a balanced budget, but may still vote for spending that funds a local project or a defense contractor in his or her state or district.
Congress has a substantial constitutional mandate: It can levy taxes, borrow money, spend money, regulate interstate commerce, establish a national currency, establish a post office, declare war, raise and support an army and navy; establish courts; and pass all laws “necessary and proper” to implement this. It can propose amendments or call a constitutional convention; it can admit new states. TheHouse of Representatives can elect a president. The Senate advises and consents on treaties and nominations to judicial posts. The House can impeach and Senate may try any officer of government. It can investigate whatever it likes, and discipline its own members.
The U.S. Congress has 535 members: 100 in the Senate, two for each state; and 435 in the House of Representatives, apportioned among the states by population (about 600,000 people per district). The House is capped at 435 by act of Congress in 1929. The House includes non-voting delegates from the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands and American Samoa. DC voters don’t get real representation because the national capital was put outside the boundaries of any state, as the states were all still pretty jealous of each other the late 1700s. While that’s no longer as true, at various times in the nation’s history, Republicans and Democrats each feared that giving congressional representation to the district would mean more seats for the other party. The most rational solution, simply letting D.C. residents vote in Maryland’s congressional elections, hasn’t cleared that hurdle either.
Having a two-chambered legislature—the House and Senate are coequal branches of government—slows down the legislative process. For any bill to become law, it must pass both chambers in exactly the same version. This is further complicated by the nature of the Senate. As the Senate is based on states and not on population, it disproportionately tips power toward less populous states. If you added up all the smallest states to get 51 seats (and hence a Senate majority), you’d have legislators representing about 17 percent of the nation. And being able to block something in the Senate means being able to stop nearly everything. The Senate has unlimited debate, which means that even the threat of filibuster—talking without end on the floor of the Senate—can derail any piece of legislation. It’s pretty rare for any party to have 60 seats in the Senate anymore, so invoking cloture and ending debate is not a simple task.
If Senate apportionment by state wasn’t in the Constitution, it wouldn’t last a day in court. In decisions in the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. federal courts ruled that legislative districts need to be fairly equal in terms of population, usually within 1 percent. Prior that, districts often had wildly uneven populations—a good thing in a smaller district, not so good in a larger one. In Arizona, for example, the state House was apportioned by population, while the state Senate was divided by county. With the great majority of the state’s population in only two counties (centered around Phoenix and Tucson), rural interests dominated the Legislature. That’s not necessarily wrong, but it wasn’t fair to the majority of the state’s residents.
Now, following the U.S. Census, every 10 years states must redistrict, both for state legislative and U.S. House districts. Some states let legislative majority parties draw new districts, which is usually bad news for whichever party isn’t in the majority; other states appoint technically non-partisan redistricting commissions to do the job. Even there, that often means partisan appointees will try to get an edge in redistricting for their side.
House members are elected to two-year terms; from the start, it was intended to be the chamber of the people (although state legislatures commonly had annual elections before the adoption of the Constitution). Members of the Senate are elected to six-year terms. The original design was a more deliberative body to put a check on the temporary passions of the masses. With a six-year term, members of the Senate can afford to take a slightly longer, broader view of issues without having to face re-election quite so soon. Also, for that reason, originally they were elected by state Legislatures. By the late 19th century, this system had run into problems. State legislatures frequently couldn’t agree on whom to send, and seats sometimes went vacant. The lack of popular control on the Senate also meant that it tended to be dominated by the interest groups, such as railroads, much to the displeasure of many voters. The 17th amendment was passed in 1913 to provide for direct election of U.S. senators.
The vice president serves as President of the Senate, and can in fact vote to break a tie. The Speaker of the House leads the House, and the Senate Majority Leader is the boss of the Senate. The majority party typically elects both positions.
The majority party also controls the committee system, which is where the work in Congress is done. Often as not, by the time something gets to the floor, the issue is decided.This should be called McCrone’s rule, after the eminent political scientist Don McCrone, who said that nothing comes to a vote that hasn’t already been decided. Typically, if you know you don’t have the votes to get something passed, you don’t bring it to the floor, unless you want to make a statement. Statements are fine, but they don’t get bills passed.
The speaker has some ability to control floor debate, make committee assignments and assign bills to committee. This can be effective in finding out whether a bill has a future or just a past. Committee chairman have similar power with regard to their committees.
Congress convenes in early January and, with occasional recesses, will meet until anywhere from August to October. Most of the work is done in committees.
The Committee System
There are 21 standing committees in the House and 17 in the Senate, though the numbers change from year to year. They cover everything from the budget and taxes to agriculture to science. Members of Congress vie for choice committee assignments. If you’re from a farm area, you don’t need a guidebook to know you should be on the agriculture committee. If you’ve got military bases in your district, then the armed services committee would be a prudent choice. A successful member of Congress will find a specialization and become an expert. This gives the representative or senator some power, something to trade with other members, and something to hang her or his hat on when she or he goes home to the district.
Committees divide labor and allow specialization. It would be difficult for any member of Congress to be an expert on everything; committee specialization allows members of Congress to be good at something, and, hopefully, share that expertise with others.
Committees are further broken down into subcommittees. Subcommittees typically are where the nuts and bolts work of legislating is done. For a bill to become law, some member of Congress must sponsor it. Most bills can start in the House or the Senate, where they will be assigned to at least one committee, and maybe more if there’s a revenue or spending impact. The bill may get scheduled for a hearing, and maybe even a vote in the subcommittee. If it survives that, it must be voted out by committee, and then on to the House or Senate floor. If it survives all that, it goes to the other chamber, where it must go through the same process all over again. For the bill to become law, it must pass both chambers in exactly the same version. If House or Senate amendments change one version, the two sides may call a conference committee featuring members of both parties, who may be able to hammer out a compromise. And then it must be signed by the president.
Given that gantletThat’s not a misspelling: A gauntlet is not a punishing line of people whacking the person who has to run the length of the line, it’s a kind of glove. of challenges, most bills die long before they become law. But like the villains in a zombie movie, a bill is never really dead. If you’re a member of the minority party, the majority party is less likely to let you push legislation through. A skillful legislator finds a friend across the aisle and lets her or him sponsor the legislation. Alternatively, a dead bill can rise from the grave as an amendment to a bill that’s still alive. The Senate has no germaneness rule, which states that an amendment must be germane (relate) to the subject of the original bill. The House has such a rule. So, in the Senate, you can hang any amendment on any measure, and some bills get so many amendments that they get called “Christmas tree bills,” as everyone has hung an ornament on them. But even with those potential lifesaving measures, most bills are doomed to fail. Congress gets 10,000 bills a year—most from the executive branch—but only 3–5 percent will ever become law.
One of Congress’ most important jobs is among the least glamorous: administrative oversight. Congressional committees spend a lot of time talking and listening with members of the executive branch to try to figure out if everything is working the way the law said it was supposed to. But there are few immediate rewards for the important but unexciting task of oversight. An incumbent seeking re-election can’t go home and get much mileage out of “Vote for me; I oversaw the routine handling of road repair and bridge building.” And yet that’s actually a more important task than some high-profile issues.
Among the most important committees is the House Rules Committee. This is typically is chaired by the speaker or by someone he really trusts, and it sets the terms and conditions of debate, and the path through which legislation must travel. Contrast that with the Senate and its unlimited debate, and where the threat of filibuster can hold up even innocuous legislation if somebody has his knickers in a twist over something. A single senator can hold up a judicial or other federal appointment for any reason as well. One school of thought suggests that the Senate needs some reform, but its ability to stop the train may look better or worse depending on your point of view. If you’re a conservative and the Senate is blocking a liberal agenda, this might look OK, and vice versa. Absent a constitutional amendment, the Senate writes its own rules, so it would take something dramatic to force a change.
The Senate “advises and consents” on presidential appointments, including high administrative officials and federal judges, and on treaties with foreign nations. That means the Senate conducts hearings on appointments and treaties, and either approves or denies them. McCrone’s Rule comes into play once again, as the Senate will signal to the president that a nominee or a treaty isn’t up to standard long before it comes to a vote. And unlike congressional parties, presidents are much less interested in making a statement; if the Senate just says no, the president looks bad.
Members of Congress are not alone. Committee staff work on policy; legislative (personal) staff work on constituency concerns. Congress has about 31,000 staffers. Constituency service is an important part of what members of Congress do—everything from meeting the home folks, both at home and in the capital, to helping citizens sort out their issues with federal agencies. Members of Congress who are seen as too remote from their states or districts typically have a harder time getting re-elected. So they maintain offices back home as well as in Washington. Despite a travel allowance, serving is easier for members from East Coast states than for those from the west, who have a lot longer to travel and still maintain some kind of residence back home. An average member works more than 60 hours a week, at a salary of \$174,000 a year, plus a travel allowance and office support. The travel allowance is good if you live close by, less good if you don’t, and the salary would be comfortable if you lived in one place instead of two.
Congress and the President
The president must sign bills into law. He can veto them. Congress can override the veto by a two-thirds vote. But that has happened only 4 percent of the time since George Washington was president. Presidents don’t actually use veto all that often; Richard Nixon vetoed a few dozen bills in his entire term in office and that was regarded as a lot. The two sides must work together, and so there’s a lot of give and take, and Congress will take care in sending the president bills he is less likely to veto unless they’re specifically trying to embarrass him. Meanwhile, Congress has resources with which to challenge the president: The General Accounting Office, the Congressional Budget Office, and the Office of Technology Assessment. Information is power in government, and typically is seen as more impressive than money.
Congress tends to have more power in domestic policy than in foreign affairs. Foreign policy often requires quick and decisive action; Congress is not designed for this. Domestic policy, on the other hand, can be more careful and deliberative, and Congress excels at this.
Members of Congress frequently form caucuses of members concerned about a variety of issues, from economic interests to ethnicity. These can form blocs within Congress. In recent years, for example, moderate Republicans have forced Republican leadership to back down on sweeping changes to environmental laws.
Congress isn’t like the rest of the country. Congress is older, whiter, richer than the nation as a whole. In 2012, it was 8 percent African-American, 5 percent Hispanic-American and less than 2 percent Asian-American, so that is now whiter than it was 20 years ago even as the nation has become more diverse. Only 17 percent of members are women, and that’s the highest ever. Nearly 16 percent of members are over 70, and only 4 percent are under 40. The average age is 58. The average House member has served for 10 years, and the average Senator has served 13. Eighty-five percent of members are married, and fewer than 8 percent are not some flavor of Christianity. Nearly all have college educations, with professions most often listed as public service/politics, business and law.
Congress’ Lack of Popularity
The conundrum of Congress is that this symbol of American democracy is, and long has been, wildly unpopular. In July 2012, Congress’ approval rating was only 16 percent, although it’s generally on the low side when the economy is bad. But even in good years, Congress’ approval rating hasn’t moved north of 50 percent in the last half century. Studies have shown that Congress generally follows the popular will, broadly speaking, and it costs you less than the price of dinner at a fast-food restaurant, once a year. And yet people don’t like it.
Congress is a convenient repository for national blame and popular regret. Why? This, in some ways, the heart of the American system of government of which U.S. citizens are so justly proud.
Some possible reasons:
People think Congress wastes money. Among the things it is famous for is pork barrel legislation: The phrase comes from the 18th century practice of keeping pork in a barrel, and letting slaves and farmhands have a grab, and they would grab for all they could get. Hence it can be with legislators at all levels, who will grab for all the morsels they can in terms of getting money for projects in their districts. But one person’s pork is another person’s paradise. Where do you draw the line? Then again,earmarks—amendments to bills to fund projects in home states and districts—account for less than 1 percent of the federal budget. So the issue is probably somewhat overstated. You could make all the earmarks disappear, and the federal budget would not be much closer to being balanced.
Figure 7.1 [To Come] Federal Budget and Revenue Pie Charts
Some earmarks do look a bit silly, such as nearly \$1 million in 2010 to get more poetry in zoos. Consider a somewhat famous example from the 2000s. The late U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, a conservative Republican who still managed to bring home billions in federal aid to Alaska, helped get federal funding for a \$398 million bridge in Ketchikan in Southeast Alaska. As Ketchikan has a population of only about 15,000, the project acquired the nickname of “the bridge to nowhere.”
In fact, the bridge would have connected to Gravina Island, home of about 50 people and to Ketchikan’s airport, which serves about 200,000 passengers a year. Ketchikan, a lovely town, sits at the foot of impassible mountains and is connected to nowhere else by road. So the only way in or out of the self-proclaimed “Salmon capital of the world” is by boat or by plane, and you have to take a ferry to the airport (which takes about 15 minutes). That complicated the structure of the bridge, since it had to be long enough to reach the island and high enough to allow ship traffic to pass underneath. Bridge proponents also argued that it would allow development of more land on the island. Developable land is, somewhat ironically, in short supply in many parts of the country’s largest state.
The issue was controversial everywhere, even in Ketchikan. On one visit, I asked a friend of mine who lives there what locals thought about the bridge, and he responded, amid a local store, “Do you want to see me start a fight, right here?”
Criticism of the project mounted, both in Congress and in the national discussion, and the project became something of a poster-child for wasteful federal spending. Then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, originally a staunch proponent of the project, cancelled it after Sen. Stevens’ earmark was excised from the federal budget. Palin then became the Republican vice-presidential nominee, and started claiming that she had stopped the project herself. She also went ahead and accepted \$25 million in federal highway funds to build the Gravina Island highway, which would have connected with the bridge. It sits there now, largely unused, appropriately dubbed “the road to nowhere.”
Whether the bridge project was a good idea or a bad one, it underscores people’s feelings about federal spending—one person’s boondoggle is another person’s vital civic improvement. If you had to take a ferry to the airport—and if you’ve ever had to wait in a ferry line, the question changes in scope and dimension—would you rather have a bridge?
Congress vs. itself: Part of the problem is that candidates have been running against Congress for much of the last 40 years. Even incumbents may rail against the institution, even as they ask voters to send them back. If you keep telling people that “the system is broken,” in one currently popular phrase, eventually they’ll believe you. And yet incumbents win more than 90 percent of the time, year in and year out. Voters appear to like their own members of Congress; it’s those other guys who are causing all the trouble. Part of that may relate to what political scientists have called the case of the vanishing marginals: Why have so many races become less competitive over the years? More often than not, since the second half of the 20th century, congressional elections are not close. In part this may be due to redistricting efforts that have created congressional districts that are predominantly Republican or Democrat, leaving the other party with a diminished chance of ever winning the seat. Parties respond by failing to invest in campaigns in those districts, knowing they have little chance of winning.
The evidence isn’t entirely conclusive as to why incumbents win so often. But if you’re so unhappy with Congress, why keep sending the same people back, over and over again?
Misinformation: The internet, that great font of misinformation, probably hasn’t helped. You don’t have to look very far to find some version of the endlessly forwarded e-mail calling on Congress to have to adhere to its own laws (it does), to cut its pay (which would encourage either real corruption or make it impossible for anybody but a billionaire to serve), and make them pay into Social Security (they do). The list goes on, and it’s all bunk.
Lack of understanding: The fact that Congress was designed to deliberate and work slowly seems to be lost on too many people. Like that tingling sensation from your dandruff shampoo, when you see the president and Congress at an apparent impasse, that means it’s working, and working the way it was supposed to. Congress was supposed to be a check on the presidency, the courts, and, above all, on the momentary passions of the electorate. When national consensus is achieved, Congress acts. Failing that, Congress deliberates. It’s not very pretty, but that’s what was supposed to happen.
Legislatures in Other Countries
Nations in North and South America tend to have congressional-style governments, with separately elected presidents who are not entirely tied to the whim of the legislature. The alternative to a congressional-style legislature is the parliamentary style, an approach more common to Europe, Africa and Asia.
And Canada, which is a good example of how parliamentary legislatures work. The Canadian Parliament is divided into two chambers, the House of Commons and the Senate. More power and authority ride in the 308-member House of Commons. The members are elected in winner-take-all elections in districts known as ridings, which may derive from an old British term, which may derive from an old Norse term. The number of seats is expected to rise for the next election, tentatively scheduled for Oct. 19, 2015. At one seat per 110,000 people, the level of representation is much higher than in the U.S. at one seat per 650,000 people. Terms are up to five years or until the next election, which is one key difference for parliamentary systems. The ruling party or coalition of parties may call for an election whenever they want, or an election may be forced by a no-confidence vote in the Commons.
The biggest difference between parliamentary systems and congressional systems is in the structure of government. In the congressional system, power is shared and divided between the different branches of government, including the legislative, executive and judicial. In a parliamentary system, the chief legislative body serves as both the executive and legislative branches. The head of government is the prime minister, who is chosen either by the majority party or by the coalition that builds a majority in the legislature. All of what in the United States would be cabinet secretaries appointed by the president are in Canada simply members of Parliament, appointed by the prime minister and the majority party. So instead of a secretary of defense and chairmen or women of the House and Senate defense committees, they have a defense minister who is not only in charge of the agency, he or she can vote on its budget and policies.
Canada’s government has some vestiges of its British ancestry. The governor general is the representative of the British crown in Canada. He or she is appointed by the British monarch on the advice of the Canadian prime minister. Although governors general take their roles seriously, they are largely ceremonial. The 105-member Senate is appointed by governor general, again on the recommendation of the prime minister. The Senate is somewhat like the British House of Lords. It can debate and amend pieces of legislation, but cannot introduce any measures relating to spending and taxes. Once appointed, Senators may remain in office until age 75. The Senate does, on occasion, block legislation from the House of Commons, at various times holding up or rejecting bills relating to trade, abortion, greenhouse gases and taxes. The House of Lords in Great Britain has no say on revenue or spending measures.
As with the congressional system, parliamentary systems divide work by committees. Unlike congressional systems, a change in government via election can mean rapid change in government policy. With most power vested in one chamber, the only serious check on the power of the majority is elections, although court systems provide some check on power in some parliamentary states. But typically, in Canada, a victory by the Conservatives or the Liberals will mean a definite turn toward that party’s priorities. Contrast that with the United States, where a new congressional majority may face presidential vetoes, or where Republican control of one chamber and Democrat control of another may provoke disagreement and stalemate. In the British House of Commons, debate is severely limited, so that unlike in the U.S. Congress, for example, the minority party is less able to hold up legislation it doesn’t like. So things may happen more quickly in a parliamentary system.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Members of the U.S. Congress, and legislators in general, have three basic duties: Making law, overseeing the efficient operations of government, and serving constituents.
• Congressional systems are used in nations where government power is divided and shared by more than one branch. Parliamentary systems place executive and legislative power in one branch.
• The basic work of legislatures of all types is often done in committees and subcommittees, where legislators and their support staff can specialize in particular policy subject areas.
EXERCISE
1. Look up your local state or congressional representative. What committees does this person serve on? How long has she or he been in office? Contact them and ask a question about a policy issue that you are interested in. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/07%3A_The_Building_Blocks_of_Government/7.01%3A_Legislatures.txt |
Learning Objectives
In this section you will learn:
1. What executives do.
2. The difference between the head of state and the head of government.
3. The difference between a president and a prime minister.
The chief executive of a nation has two potential tasks: head of government and head of state. Head of government is in charge of the day-to-day affairs of the state, like the chief executive of a large corporation. The head of state represents the nation to the world, and may include any number of ceremonial duties. Some chief executives combine both functions; others perform one or the other.
Types of Executives
In congressional systems, the chief executive, often called the president, is both head of government and head of state. Approximately 48 nations feature a separately elected president, who is in some way a check on the power of the chief legislative body. In some handful of states, the chief executive is a monarch—a king, a prince or a sultan, for example—who owes his or her job to heredity. The majority of nations have a parliamentary system. In parliamentary systems, the prime minister or premier is the head of government. Depending on the nation, the head of state may be a hereditary monarch such as Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain. It might also be a separately elected president, such as in Germany. The German presidency is a largely ceremonial post; the president has veto powers over the Bundestag, the main house of parliament, but has never used them. He or she serves a five-year term, elected the federal convention, which includes all the members of parliament plus members chosen by the state parliaments. Policy and power, however, rest with the chancellor, the equivalent of Canada’s prime minister. And many more people around the world could probably tell you that Germany’s chancellor in 2012 was Angela Merkel than could tell you that Germany’s president was Joachim Gauck.
A prime minister or chancellor in a parliamentary system is also a member of the more powerful house of the legislature, and also typically the leader of that party. Assuming that the prime minister has an outright parliamentary majority, as opposed to heading a coalition of allied parties, he or she has some advantages and challenges with regard to governing. Since by definition the prime minister has a legislative majority, it should be easier to push through one’s legislative agenda. You start every day with the votes you need. That’s an oversimplification, of course. Members of parliament, even of your own party, will have their own take on things, and what the parliamentary majority wants may not be precisely what the majority of people want. So no parliamentary majority is completely immune from public pressure. On the other hand, unlike a separately elected president in a congressional system, a prime minister owes his or her power to his or her legislative majority. If the majority becomes unhappy with the prime minister’s leadership, they can conduct a no-confidence vote and that executive’s career at the top of the heap may be over.
Presidents in Congressional Systems
Presidents in congressional systems are separately elected. Such a president may or may not have a working majority in the legislature. If she or he doesn’t, it will be more difficult to get her or his policy agenda turned into law. The key point here is that a president in a congressional system does not have anywhere near complete power to change government and policy. Although such a president is both chief of state and head of government, she or he lacks full authority to dictate which way government is going to go. Nonetheless, citizens in countries with this kind of president tend to put all of their hopes and dreams and fears onto the presidency, and onto the particular president in office at any given time. Let us consider the presidency, using the U.S. presidency as an example.
The U.S. President
The U.S. presidency is probably the single most powerful office on earth, and yet the president finds himself (and someday herself) in the middle of competing power centers. Presidents get far too much credit for what goes right in the country, and far too much blame for what goes wrong. A president is elected every four years in years divisible by four. U.S. presidents may serve no more than two terms or 10 years, in the case of a president assuming office mid-term. This came from the 22nd amendment, adopted 1947 after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected and re-elected four times beginning in 1932.
The U.S. president has a number of formal powers. He or she can:
• Carry out legislation. The president directs the executive branch and the federal bureaucracy to carry out the laws as passed by Congress.
• Provide information and advice to Congress, including through the State of the Union address.
• Negotiate treaties and executive agreements with foreign states. Treaties must be approved by the Senate; executive agreements need not and are more easily contravened either by act of Congress or by the next president.
• Make appointments to positions in the executive branch. He has about 3,000 jobs to fill, including cabinet secretaries. The cabinet doesn’t actually function like a cabinet, however; they don’t all get together and have meetings. From the original four positions, the cabinet has grown to 14, and the president may designate other officials as cabinet level, such as UN ambassador.
• Grant pardons. The president can pardon criminals who have been convicted of crimes except in cases of impeachment.
• Act as chief of state and commander in chief of the armed forces.
• Sign legislation to make it law and veto legislation to block it (Congress can override vetoes by a two-thirds vote). The president has limited ability to impound federal funds, and can issue executive orders to the bureaucracy. Both of these actions can be easily overturned by Congress, simply by passing a new law.
The Founding Fathers didn’t really envision the president having as much power as he does today, but this was probably inevitable. If nothing else, the nature of the situation suggests that one person—the president—can pull himself together and make a decision faster than can a group of 535 people—many of whom think they should be president—divided into two typically contentious groups. The organizational dynamics of the situation dictate that the president will be the dominant player in the political scene.
Consequently, although it is Congress’ job to make law, 80–90 of legislation proposed in Congress comes from the executive branch, including all of the cabinet agencies under the president. As a consequence, at times Congress is more of an arbiter or gate-keeper of policy, as opposed to leading the way.
Nonetheless, the president has the power to persuade, not to command. He can’t say jump and expect immediate action outside of the White House. This power is not inconsiderable. U.S. citizens may be acutely unhappy with a particular president, but on the whole, Americans have tended to have a great reverence for the office of the president, and this lends itself to substantial power if used properly. That’s one reason why presidents go around and make speeches: It’s usually to try to sway public opinion in the direction of policy goals, which can be very useful if you’re butting heads with a recalcitrant Congress. This has been true since Franklin Delano Roosevelt first gave his famous “fireside chats” on the radio in the 1930s. Roosevelt spoke each week on the radio when that was the chief medium of mass communication. His comforting president gave people a little hope in otherwise difficult times. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton also were very good at using the media to persuade the masses. To the extent that the news media still covers politics in any meaningful way, the U.S. House of Representatives gets fairly meager coverage, while the U.S. Senate gets a little more. What the president says, by definition, is news, so that the president’s face and voice are ever-present.
This is important because presidents must succeed symbolically. They must be seen to be in charge, to care, to be trying to do something to make people’s lives better. So Franklin Delano Roosevelt, under whose watch the Great Depression stretched on for nearly 10 more years, still remained popular with many voters because they believed that he cared about them. Ditto for Ronald Reagan, who, as George H.W. Bush once sneered during the 1980 primaries, had “that vision thing.” The unfortunate Mr. Bush, who enjoyed record popularity at the successful conclusion of the first Gulf War, still failed to get re-elected in part because the economy was sagging and he seemed out of touch with what that meant to people. Ronald Reagan, in contrast, pursued policy that people said they disagreed with in reliable opinion polls. But they elected him twice because they liked him. So the president’s actual performance and his popularity may diverge quite a bit. Voters who may not be paying close attention are often compelled by the form rather than the substance of the president’s action.
Quick and decisive action usually helps the president’s approval ratings, which is why presidents score big points on the foreign policy front but not many on the home front (unless the economy does well). The Founding Fathers actually imagined that Congress, in particular the Senate, would direct foreign policy, but this is not workable. The gang of 535 simply can’t respond quickly enough. The president, meanwhile, can travel the world, meet with foreign leaders, negotiate treaties, open doors and be seen to be taking decisive action and solving problems. In the 1980s, as the Soviet Union collapsed from within, Ronald Reagan’s stern anti-communist speeches and efforts to negotiate with the Soviets helped him look like the conquering hero of the Cold War. Some scholars do give Reagan credit, but one could argue that the Soviet Union was on its last legs when Reagan was first elected.
As commander-in-chief, the president can put the armed forces to work. As a consequence, U.S. troops have been sent overseas more than 150 times but Congress has declared war only six times, and not once since World War II. In the wake of the United States’ involvement in Vietnam, which went from being a training mission to having half a million men and women serving there, Congress felt the need to assert itself. They passed the
War Powers Act in 1973, which requires the president to commit troops for more than six months before reporting to Congress and justifying her or his actions. It’s not clear if this works, as it hasn’t been tested, and the hammer is still with the president. Congress can’t order the troops home. Its only recourse is to cut off funding for the mission. That would likely be seen as endangering the lives of the men and women who have been sent overseas, which is likely to be extremely unpopular back home.
Other presidents in other countries will have particular mixes of duties and authority, but this is the general model for what a president in a non-parliamentary system. One could argue, as the United States has one of the oldest governments in the world, that the American presidency was the model for what followed. It’s probably no accident that this system of government is most common in North and South America.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Chief executives may have both ceremonial and practical responsibilities in government.
• A president in a congressional system is a separately elected official who represents the executive branch of government, which is usually co-equal with the other branches of government.
• A prime minister is the leader of the majority party or majority coalition in a parliamentary style of government. He or she serves as the head of government, but not usually head of state.
EXERCISE
1. What would it mean if the United States had a parliamentary style of government? At this moment, who would be in charge and what would that mean for policy for the country? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/07%3A_The_Building_Blocks_of_Government/7.02%3A_Executives.txt |
Learning Objectives
In this section you will learn:
1. The role and function of court systems in most modern governments.
2. How the U.S. court system works.
Courts are typically the branch or part of government where laws are interpreted and enforced. Courts typically feature judges, either alone or in panels, who decided legal matters in cases brought before them according to the laws of that country. The court system may be separate from other branches of government, as in divided systems; or they may be subservient to the rest of the government, as in authoritarian systems; or they may be somewhere in between, as in some parliamentary system. Courts are often set up for specific purposes, such as tax, bankruptcy and military courts in the United States. Let’s first consider courts in the United States, then see how they compare with court systems in other countries.
U.S. Courts
U.S. courts are different in a couple of ways: First, because the United States is a federal system, there is a dual federal and state system of courts, each with its own powers and area of authority; second, because of the power of judicial review, by which U.S. courts can overturn acts of Congress or state legislatures because they are judged to run contrary to the U.S. or to a state constitution. Not every court in every country has this power; all U.S. courts of a certain level have this power.
In the United States, courts are the third branch of the government, and thereby serve as a check on the first two. The highest court, the U.S. Supreme Court, is one of the most powerful in the world because of its ability to overturn legislation. It cannot, however, consider things on a review basis; someone has to bring suit for it to consider anything.
The Supreme Court is the only court mentioned in the Constitution, but that document gives Congress the power to create courts inferior to the Supreme Court. They did. Beneath the Supreme Court are 13 Courts of Appeal, and beneath them 96 federal district courts. In addition, the federal court system includes the Court of Military Appeals, tax courts, bankruptcy courts, claims courts and international trade courts.
Federal judges are appointed for life, except for bankruptcy court judges, who are appointed for 14-year terms.Apparently, this is because the courts were created until Article I on the Constitution, not Article III, which says that federal judges are appointed for life.http://www.bankruptcylawnetwork.com/here-comes-the-judge/ This insulates them from political pressure because they don’t have to run for re-election. This sometimes leads people to complain about the court’s insularity, most often when they disagree with the kinds of decisions the courts are making. Many state court judges are elected, and the evidence does not suggest any particular advantage or disadvantage for that system. Voters may find judicial elections particularly challenging, since judges are not supposed to campaign on how they would rule on a particular kind of case, as they are supposed to rule on cases based on the facts as presented in trial. The people who might know something about the quality of a judicial candidate are lawyers, but outside of bar association ratings, they’re generally not talking, since every potential judge is somebody you might have to try a case before some day. Consequently, judicial elections sometimes feature little-known candidates with good names unseating experienced judges whose names don’t sound as good. In some U.S. states, judges are chosen by commissions; in others, they are appointed by governors and confirmed by the state senate, much as with the U.S. federal courts.
In the case of federal courts, federal judicial nominations have become a serious political issue in the last 30 years. Presidents nominate federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, who must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Conservative presidents will want to appoint conservative judges, while more liberal presidents will do the opposite. So nominees, particularly for the Supreme Court, tend to undergo intense scrutiny in Senate hearings, with nearly every moment of the nominee’s adult life up for inspection. Under the rules of the U.S. Senate, one senator can hold up the confirmation of any judge, even if that senator’s party lacks a majority in the Senate. As a consequence, judicial vacancies have been filled rather slowly, especially during the presidency of Barack Obama, as conservative Republicans sought to prevent him from filling all the court openings below the U.S. Supreme Court.
Even with Supreme Court vacancies, the Senate can and sometimes does say no. In 1969, President Richard Nixon nominated Clement Haynesworth to the high court, despite the candidate’s questionable record on civil rights. The U.S. Senate rejected his nomination. Nixon, apparently angered, responded with an even more conservative nominee, G. Harrold Carswell, and the Senate again voted no. Ronald Reagan sought to nominate Robert Bork to the high court, but he did not fare well in hearings and seemed too conservative for the time. His next nominee, Daniel Ginsberg, foundered on revelations that he had smoked some marijuana in college. George W. Bush sought to nominate his private White House attorney, Harriet Myers, whose relative lack of qualifications prompted Senate leadership to make clear to the president that his was a questionable choice, the nomination was withdrawn. So, most of the time, these rejections don’t come to a vote, and a careful president tends to sound out Senate leaders on the likelihood that a nominee will be looked upon favorable.
Although the 50 state court systems have great authority within their own borders, the U.S. Supreme Court has the final say in interpreting the Constitution. The court has subsequently made many important decisions that have had large impact on U.S. politics and government.
At various times in its history the court has validated slavery and sent people to jail for nothing more than peacefully protesting U.S. involvement in World War I. The 19th century High Court simultaneously prohibited the states and the national government from regulating railroads, saying that was reserved for the other level of government (depending on the suit). The court also struck down FDR’s New Deal proposals that would have given the government sweeping powers over the economy. The court ended segregation in schools and greatly expanded civil rights protection in the 1950s and 1960s.
Not everybody will agree with every court decision. Modern courts are sometimes criticized for “judicial activism,” which seems to flow one way or another depending on whether you happen to agree with the court’s decision. Critics of judicial activism argue that the courts should strictly interpret the Constitution as written, as opposed to those who might argue that the Constitution’s often vague and open language renders that idea both difficult and questionable. And one could argue that both ways. In the 2011 Citizens United decision, the court clearly made a decision that put freedom of speech in the form of spending money on politics ahead of ensuring equal access of all citizens to electoral office. The point is not whether that was a right or wrong decisions—there’s a rational argument to be made for both positions—the point is that the high court, in making that decision, had to interpret the law.
This is especially important in light of what is known as case law. Court decisions at all levels build and expand the body of law that guides the country. Other courts, in reaching verdicts in new cases, will make reference to other decisions in other courts. In particular, U.S. Supreme Court decisions trickle down to all lower courts, informing their decisions on subsequent cases. To that end, it makes a difference if the Supreme Court has ruled 9–0, leaving no doubt as to their opinion, or merely 5–4, which means that things might someday change. In light of the importance of case law, to argue that judges should only interpret law, not make it, is to misunderstand the U.S. court system. Every judicial decision makes law.
As we discussed earlier, U.S. Courts can only hear cases that are brought before them. The power of judicial review does not extend to issuing advisory opinions on proposed or existing laws. Somebody has to file suit, and a judge has to say that the case has enough merit to be heard. In the United States, court cases start at what are called trial courts. At this level, evidence is presented and arguments are made. The case may be heard by a jury of six to 12 people; in major cases, a grand jury may be convened, to determine whether a case should proceed to trial. In some cases, defendants may waive their right to a trial by jury and have their case decided solely by the presiding judge. There are basically two kinds of cases: civil cases, featuring disputes between two or more private parties; and criminal cases, in which someone stands accused of having broken the law. In criminal cases, the judge may also set the sentence if the defendant is convicted. The defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty, so that the burden of proof lies with the plaintiff or with the state, in the form of the prosecution, to prove that the defendant has committed some wrong or otherwise broken the law. In criminal cases in particular, the prosecution must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant has committed a crime.
If either party in a civil case is dissatisfied with the verdict, or if the defendant feels he or she has been wrongly convicted, they may appeal the decision to a higher court. At the federal level, this is the U.S. Court of Appeals. Every U.S. state court system has a similar court, although it may have a different name. Appeals courts accept no new evidence; the parties making the appeal are arguing, in effect, that mistakes were made in the original trial, such as overlooking evidence or misapplying the law. Appeals courts are under no obligation to hear appeals. They can let the verdict stand; they can overturn the verdict in whole or in part; or they can send the case back to the trial judge with instructions.
It is possible to appeal all the way to a state supreme court or to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the highest courts usually only hear cases in which substantial constitutional questions are at stake. So while 5,000 cases may get appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in a single year, it may hear no more than 150–200 in that same time frame. Decisions by state Supreme Courts may sometimes be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is the court of original jurisdiction—the trial court—in cases involving top federal officials.
You probably can’t appeal your traffic ticket all the way to the Supreme Court; there’s no constitutional question involved there. But sometimes an ordinary citizen can succeed in seeking justice at the highest level. For example, in 1961, a sometime, small-time criminal named Clarence Gideon was arrested for knocking over a pool hall in Florida. Mr. Gideon was actually innocent of this crime, but as he couldn’t afford legal representation, he was forced to represent himself and was quickly convicted of this crime. Gideon didn’t give up, however, and eventually his letters reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which was looking for a case that involved this issue of legal representation—the right to attorney. The court took on the case, ruled that in all felony cases, the defendant has the right to an attorney, and sent the case back to the trial court for a rehearing. A lawyer was appointed to represent Gideon, and he quickly demolished the prosecution’s apparently flimsy case, and Gideon was set free. The public defender system, which grew out of that Supreme Court decision, is often overworked and underfunded, but sometimes, it works. It worked for Clarence Gideon, who remains a shining example that sometimes, you can make a difference.
Courts in other countries may vary from U.S. courts. In France and other countries influenced by France, under the Napoleonic code, a defendant is guilty until proven innocent. French courts also do not consider case law in making decisions. Many courts in other nations lack the power of judicial review, although the United Kingdom adopted a Supreme Court in 2009. Some countries do have a special constitutional court, which does have the power of judicial review.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• In congressional systems, courts are the third branch of government.
• U.S. courts have the power of judicial review, which means they can overturn acts of government as unconstitutional. But this requires somebody to have filed suit over the law.
• U.S. federal judges are appointed for life, to help insulate them from political pressure in making judicial rulings.
EXERCISE
1. How does your state choose judges? What are the advantages of this system, compared to the federal system of presidential appointments with Senate confirmation? Are there also disadvantages? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/07%3A_The_Building_Blocks_of_Government/7.03%3A_Courts.txt |
Learning Objectives
In this section you will learn about:
1. The role and function of subnational governments in modern governments.
2. How, in the United States, power is apportioned from state to local governments.
In the United States and other countries with federal systems of government, another important piece of the political pie are state and local governments, also sometimes called sub-national governments. In most countries, these are governments in some way below the national government, whatever form it takes. In all systems, to some extent, but especially in federal systems, state and local governments are closest to the citizens, and frequently are the parts of government that deliver services and enforce laws in your city, town or neighborhood. In the U.S., voter turnout for elections for this level of government tends to be the lowest among all elections, which is probably unfortunate. This is the level of government closest to citizens, and the one most likely to have an immediate impact on your life.
Remember that the status of sub-national or local depends on whether the nation operates under a federal or under a unitary system. In a federal system, such as the United States, Mexico and Canada, the national government shares some power with the states or provinces, as in Canada. While particularly in the area of foreign affairs, states are subservient to the national government, they may have quite a bit of leeway to set their own laws within the boundaries established by a national constitution. In unitary governments, all power comes from the national government, which delegates some of that power to local governments to carry out the local business of governing.
In all but the smallest nations, having some kind of local government keeps government closer to the people and perhaps more responsive, and gives people a chance to create law and policy that fits their particular needs. State and local governments therefore are often responsible for things such as local transportation needs, law enforcement, and public schools, and sometimes have a role in broader issues such as environmental protection and health care.
U.S. State and Local Governments
The 50 U.S. states are in some ways like 50 mini-republics, each with its own executive, legislative and judicial branches. The governor is the chief executive, although states often have separately elected statewide officials such as the state attorney general or the state treasurer. In 49 states, voters choose a two-chambered legislature, such as a house and a Senate. Only Nebraska has a unicameral legislature, with one non-partisan chamber to do the state’s legislative business.
States have substantial leeway to order their own affairs—to create and maintain laws particular to the people of that state. So, for example, self-service gasoline remains illegal in Oregon, while the drinking age in Louisiana is 19.
In addition to creating policies that might fit more with the desires and conditions of local citizens, states deliver services directly to citizens. So, federally funded programs such as welfare and Medicare/Medicaid will be funneled through state offices, with the states and the federal government sharing funding responsibility. Congress usually insists that the states adhere to certain standards and levels of funding in order to receive federal matching funds, although in recent decades Congress has leaned more toward giving states some leeway in deciding how to structure such programs.
U.S. states typically have much more authority over education than does the federal government. There is a U.S. Department of Education, and the federal government provides some funding for both K-12 and for higher education, but the great majority of funding for education, and hence the standards to be applied, the level of tuition, and the location of schools, colleges and universities, is the work of state and sometimes local governments. States will decide what graduation requirements are for high school, and sometimes set requirements for college basic requirements. College students in Texas must study Texas state politics and government, regardless of their majors. That was a decision of the state government.
States have a major say in transportation issues, aside from the interstate freeway system, which was created by the federal government. States will often set speed limits on state highways. Wyoming once had no speed limit on freeways outside of urban areas, a nod to the travel time between its somewhat far-flung towns and cities. Congress, which was concerned about energy issues, wanted states to set lower speed limits to encourage fuel conservation, and threatened to take away Wyoming’s federal highway funds if it did not comply. Wyoming got to the letter if not the spirit of the law by having state troopers issue tickets for wasting resources for drivers who treated state highways like the German Autobahn (where there often is no speed limit). States and provinces, and the local governments inside of them, often find themselves dependent on the governments above them for revenues. Nations and states have broader revenue bases, which allows them to collect more money than any state or city can. So even as they try to create law and policy that appeals to local residents, they find themselves under pressure from governments above them to spend the money in a particular way, as dictated by state or national governments.
States manage park systems, regional economic development efforts, and state legislatures set tax rates and create budgets that direct state spending. States may create more or less stringent environmental laws; expand or contract marriage rights; and regulate business and commerce within their own borders.
Local Governments: Cities
States are unitary governments—for the most part, they lend power to local governments. In some states, large cities and counties have received what’s called a limited home-rule charter, by which they have a little more authority to decide their own affairs. But for the most part, a state government, via the legislature, could in fact combine school districts, towns or even counties if they decided there was some reason to do so. When this happens, it’s usually because one of these local governments is too small to support itself.
There are more than 87,000 local governments in the United States. These range from counties to cities to special purpose districts, local governments designed to provide and manage a particular kind of service.
Cities are more like mini-mini-republics, usually with some kind of elected council. In a strong-mayor form of government, the city council and the mayor are elected separately, and relate to each other in a way similar to how the president and Congress, or a governor and a state legislature, deal with each other. The council makes law; the mayor is the chief executive of city government. This system is more common in large cities. In smaller cities and towns, cities operate using the council-manager form of government, by which the city council serves as both legislature and executive, but hires a full-time, professional manager to oversee the day-to-day operations of city government.
Cities may provide police and fire protection, local transportation planning and improvement, and laws relating to the conduct of life within city limits. It is city government that sets local speed limits, puts in a stoplight, or takes out a traffic camera from your neighborhood. Cities fix potholes, help organize summer fairs and festivals, and maintain local parks. Many cities engage in zoning, laws by which rules are set about what can be built where. So, if an area is zoned retail, a developer can put in a store. If an area is zoned residential, the only thing that can be built there is housing. Like anything government does, zoning helps some people and hurts others. It can protect homeowners’ home values, because you’re going to have a harder time selling your home if somebody builds a Wal-Mart or other large store around the corner. On the other hand, zoning, by limiting the supply of available land, can make housing and other construction more expensive. Cities attempt to engage in economic development efforts, trying to attract businesses and jobs that will keep residents employed and keep revenue flowing into the city budget. In large cities in particular, city governments often face a balancing act in promoting economic development while trying to maintain quality of life for existing residents.
Counties
Counties play a big role in local government in some states and less so in others, providing services and serving as regional governments in larger metropolitan areas. There are more than 3,000 counties in the United States, ranging from the 25 square miles of Arlington County, Virginia to the 330,000 square miles of the Unorganized Borough of Alaska. They range in population from around 10 million in Los Angeles County to less than 100 in Loving County, Texas. In Connecticut and Rhode Island, there are counties, but no county governments. In Louisiana, counties are called parishes, and in Alaska they are boroughs. Like cities, county governments may have either an executive and a council, separately elected, or, in the case of smaller counties, an elected board of 3–5 commissioners who have both executive and legislative power. In the west, counties are more likely to be both larger than eastern counties, and to provide city-like services to areas that are unincorporated, or whose citizens do not live inside of the boundary of any city. In Maryland, counties run school systems; in North Carolina, counties do not maintain local roads as they do elsewhere. Counties often maintain vital statistics records, such as marriages, births and deaths. Counties also often are responsible for local election and voter registration. In the northeastern U.S., counties may be divided into townships, establishing local governments which then have responsibility for a particular area within a county.
Special Purpose Districts
Special purpose districts, as we noted earlier, are created to provide one kind of service. The most common special purpose district are school districts, which manage K-12 school systems in most parts of the country. While much of the money for schools comes from state governments, school districts manage how the money is spent. School districts usually have regularly elected boards of directors and a hired superintendent to manage the everyday operations of the district. Special purpose districts may also manage fire service, utilities such as sewer, water and electricity, and everything from local parks to public hospitals and cemeteries. In rural areas, special purpose districts may be created to manage pest control and irrigation, allowing local farmers to pool their resources and provide common service to a wider number of people. In some states, port districts are charged with encouraging economic development and managing sea and airports to encourage commerce and foster job creation.
The advantages of special purpose districts can be that they encourage specialization and expertise, hopefully providing constituents with a better, more efficient level of service. In theory, with elected boards in charge, they are not immune to popular control. If citizens are unhappy, they can throw the rascals out and elect a new board. On the other hand, a board of citizens with no particular expertise in one area or another may become dominated by the district’s hired management, or fooled by consultants, as happened with some local governments and their investment portfolios in the 1990s and 2000s. So, like all levels of government, they are by no means perfect. To excited over those annexations; they require petitions from a majority of landowners within a target area just to get started.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Sub-national governments manage local affairs on behalf of national governments.
• U.S. states often delegate local responsibility and authority to cities, counties, townships and special purpose districts.
• The autonomy of states or provinces will depend if the overall system of government is federal or unitary.
EXERCISE
1. Look up the local government where you live. What services does it provide? What is the structure of its government? How does it fund those operations—what are its sources of revenue? How much of that money comes from the state government? Contact a local elected official and ask how much they are required to adhere to state guidelines on spending the money. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/07%3A_The_Building_Blocks_of_Government/7.04%3A_Sub-National_Governments.txt |
Learning Objectives
In this section, you will learn:
1. What is the role and function of the bureaucracy.
2. Why bureaucracies may seem inefficient or inflexible.
The last piece of government we will consider in this chapter are the agencies of government that are assigned with turning all that law into practice. Often, this part of government is called “the bureaucracy,” usually not meant as a compliment. Bureaucracy is often used as a dirty word to describe a government out of control. This is unfortunate, because it is actually only a form of organization.Bureaucracy refers to organization with a defined chain of heirarchical command; defined tasks for people within that chain; division of labor; clear lines of authority; goal-oriented approach to problems; and adherence to established rules. In fact, this describes most modern human institutions, from the college where you study to the place where you work.
Why do we have a bureaucratic form of organization? Because people have demanded a high degree of accountability and predictablity in government, and this is one way to get it. Bureaucracy delegates and handles the details. It provides governance and oversight of the government. Generally speaking, people working in government agencies try to adhere to the laws as written, and sometimes one of the challenges is figuring out just what the legislative body intended.
In the United States, this form of organization grew in part from unhappiness with the often-corrupt spoils system that was common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many if not most government jobs were handed out to party loyalists as opposed to who might do the job best; as a consequence, contracting and various government jobs often went to the highest bidder—the one who promised to kick back the most of the money made from the job. The civil service system, which was created by Congress following the assassination of newly elected President James Garfield by a disappointed office seeker in 1881, insists that government hire people based on their ability to do whatever job they’re being hired for. This is sometimes called the merit system.
This kind of system is not new. The long-term success of both the Chinese and British empires were based on their civil service systems, which required substantial learning and rigorous testing before admission into government service. Although the Chinese system, which was heavily based on knowledge of Confucian classic texts, eventually failed to keep up with a changing world, as it helped maintain the empire for 2,000 years, it can hardly be called a failure.
This gets at the heart of the important trade-off in bureaucratic systems. Because they are rule-based systems, they provide some consistency, predictability and accountability. The goal is that everybody who has to deal with a government agency is treated equally and fairly—treated the same. The trade-off is that this kind of system makes it more difficult for agency officials—bureaucrats, in the term used by people who may be unhappy with the results—to apply judgment to particular circumstances. So a city building inspector is supposed to ensure that every construction project meets particular demands for safety and durability, and isn’t supposed to give anybody a little leeway if circumstances warrant. For a contractor or a homeowner doing a remodel, this can be frustrating, but for the next buyer, she or he can be assured that the project was done “up to code” when it was first built. And while we might like our bureaucrats to be more flexible when dealing with the public, too much flexibility can lead to favoritism and looking the other way at the wrong time.
This kind of system is common now in more developed countries. Agencies, staffed with experienced experts, attempt to administer the law, provide services to people, keep an eye on the public purse, and provide feedback to lawmakers about how everything is working. As agency heads often are political appointees, this can create problems for agencies. For example, in 2003, President George W. Bush appointed Mike Brown as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which attempts to help states and communities plan for and respond to both natural and man-made disasters. Brown, an attorney, had a fair amount of legal and government experience, but not necessarily crisis management or managing a large organization. FEMA appeared to be slow to respond to the disaster wrought by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, and Brown was forced to resign. Whether he was responsible for FEMA’s slow response, or merely the fall guy for the Bush administration is by no means clear, but someone better suited to the job might have been appointed in the first place.
You have probably had good and bad experiences with government agencies—welfare offices, the Postal Service, even your college if it’s a public school and hence an agency of the state government. Either way, one should be careful in generalizing from those experiences. For the most part, however, the people who work in government agencies are just people, trying to balance the needs of their constituents and the demands of policymakers above them. So, for example, people complain about both the expense of welfare programs and object to paying people who aren’t working. That pressure leads policymakers to push agencies to keep a close eye on the books, so that agency employees try harder to ensure that no one gets on welfare illegally (and the incidence of welfare fraud is, in fact, very low in the United States). As pressure mounted to get people off welfare rolls, can it be surprising that getting on them became so much more difficult? In the end, then, the agency and its people become unpopular with both the people they serve and with the people who foot the bill.
How big is the bureaucracy? The U.S. federal government employs about 1.8 million people, plus 515,000 in the U.S. Postal Service, plus about 2.6 million in the armed forces, 1.4 million of whom are classified as active duty. That’s actually not greatly different than 40 years ago. You can check theBureau of Labor Statistics for the most current numbers. In the United States, most of the growth in government over the last 50 years has occurred at the state and local level.
The federal government also spends about \$2.8 trillion a year, versus the total U.S. economy of \$13.1 trillion. The U.S. government’s size relative to the size of the national economy actually is smaller than that of most other industrialized countries. Government spending was 38.9 percent of GDP in 2011, a down year for the economy. Internationally, the range runs from 8 percent in Burma to 97 percent in Zimbabwe. In terms of tax burden, globally the U.S. is in the middle of the pack, which ranges from 0.9 percent of GDP in Equitorial Guinea to 63.1 percent in Lesotho (both nations in Africa).
The largest U.S. agency is the Department of Defense in terms of bodies, with 1 million civilian employees. Social spending, including health care and Social Security, is the largest budget category, at about 40 percent of the total federal budget. What you may think of as traditional welfare actually is about 3 percent of the whole budget. Foreign aid, another target of internet outrage, is also around 1 percent. Defense spending is 15 percent.
The federal government, through its agencies, plays a huge role in the economy. And while it hasn’t grown that much, some people argue that it should still be smaller. One ongoing suggestion is to privatize certain public services, with the argument that the private sector will do a better job at less price. This might be true, but in the case of transit and postal service, for example, it would mean less and more expensive service for rural areas. In some states, private contractors have used their private status to avoid dealing with legally elected unions or to comply with rules on workplace safety. So, as with most things, there are significant tradeoffs to be made when choosing between public and private service providers. As for efficiency, both Social Security and Medicare have lower expense ratios (overhead) than do their private-sector counterparts. So while not every government agency is a picture of perfect efficiency, not every agency is burning piles of public cash in bonfires.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Bureaucratic forms of organization are common in governments and other organizations throughout the world.
• Bureaucracies trade flexibility for predictability and fairness.
EXERCISES
1. Think about where you do or have worked. Was it organized bureaucratically? What would it mean for that place to be organized differently?
2. What public agencies have you dealt with on a personal level? What kind of service did you receive? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/07%3A_The_Building_Blocks_of_Government/7.05%3A_Bureaucracy.txt |
Thumbnail: Charging Bull, a bronze statue by Arturo Di Modica at Bowling Green, Manhattan, New York City. (CC BY-SA 2.0; Aseba).
08: Eee Economics Economic Systems and Economic Policy
Learning Objectives
1. Understand what a recession is (and what a depression isn’t)
2. Understand the causes of recessions, and what fixes them
3. Learn why the Great Depression was such a major event, and what led to it (and out of it)
Regulation is almost a sideshow compared to the main attraction: How is the economy doing? (Think of it this way: Will I get a job when I graduate from college, or a note from parents that as long as I’m still living at home, I need to do my chores?) Despite the best efforts of the private sector, Congress, the president and the Federal Reserve, the economy isn’t always expanding. Sometimes it’s flat, and sometimes it’s shrinking. If the economy contracts (as measured by GDP) for two consecutive quarters (six months), that’s a recession. Recessions mean fewer people have jobs, and people with jobs have less money. It means more human suffering, and a lot of unhappy campers come election. In democratic societies around the world, elections often as not are referenda on the state of the economy.
A bad enough recession can be called a depression, a word picked by then-President Herbert Hoover to replace the previous term for a severe downturn, the less-happy-sounding panic. There’s no good definition for a depression, except perhaps this old joke: A recession is when your neighbor loses his job; a depression is when you do. Either way, we haven’t had a nationwide depression since the 1930s in the U.S., or largely elsewhere in the world.
Recessions are caused by one thing and one thing only: A drop in aggregate demand. Aggregate demand is a useful term to describe the total demand for goods and services in the economy. Aggregate demand has three parts: consumer spending (about 70 percent); business investment (about 10 percent) and government spending (about 20 percent). So, if total demand drops, businesses will sell fewer goods and services. Workers will have hours cut or lose their jobs entirely, and the total size of the economy—GDP—will shrink. This phenomenon tends to be reinforcing. If people have less money, or if they’re just worried about their jobs, they cut personal spending. That means fewer houses and cars are sold, and stores sell fewer goods. Those businesses now have less money, so they cut back hours and lay workers off, who now spend less money, which means firms are doing even less business, and things get even worse.
What Causes Recessions?
Your next question ought to be, what causes that drop in aggregate demand? A lot of factors can be the culprit. And one of the potentially confusing things about understanding the economy is that nothing happens in a vacuum. All of the factors that affect economic performance are happening at the same time.
• First is the business cycle: The business cycle is the ups and downs of a market economy. It’s not really a cycle, in that it’s not predictable, but it is a cycle in that it seems inevitable. (Economic policy makers can sometimes be heard to say that they’ve “solved the business cycle,” from U.S. officials in the 1960s to Chinese officials today, but it ain’t necessarily so.)
A business cycle looks like this: Let’s say there’s been a boom somewhere in the economy, say the internet and telecommunications as happened in the 1990s. New products and services mean that consumers rush out to buy these new products, which leads entrepreneurs to start new firms and existing firms to expand production. That means more hiring and higher wages and general economic expansion. Things are good, and, inevitably, somebody says “the old economy is dead. This time is different.” (When you hear that, grab your wallet: The end is near.) But nothing grows forever. Eventually, markets mature, sales level off or fall, firms begin to lay off workers or even fail, and suddenly the endless boom begins to look like a recession. Some economists refer to these periods as bubbles, and bubbles eventually burst. Overinvestment in railroads contributed to the many panics of the 1800s; ditto for automobiles and radios in the 1920s; blue chip stocks in the 1960s; the internet and telecom in the 1990s (leading to the recession of 2001); and the housing bubble that led to the Great Recession of 2007. If one thing is true about government and the economy, it is that this always happens. Sooner or later, markets take a tumble because human beings have a tendency to invest and spend like there’s no tomorrow. And tomorrow seems to show up on our doorsteps every morning, without fail.
But recessions can also come from policy:
• Cuts in government spending: President Richard Nixon managed to get Congress to balance the federal budget in 1969, and soon after we had a recession. Do the math: Cutting government spending will reduce aggregate demand. One of the challenges we have faced in the Great Recession is that cuts in government spending, particularly among cash-strapped states and cities, has meant a lot of jobs lost and softer overall demand in the economy. So even as the private sector slowly grows, those gains tend to be offset by losses in the public sector. Economic slowdowns also followed cuts in government spending at the close of World War I and World War II.
• Tight monetary policy: As we’ve already seen, cranking up interest rates in the early 1980s led to a very steep recession as the housing sector crashed and burned.
• Natural disasters: Storms and earthquakes can so devastate an area that its economy suffers. The twin hammers of Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill did no favors for the Gulf Coast region of the United States. At various points in human history, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have set back the cause of human progress by centuries. An enormous eruption of a volcano in what is now Indonesia around the year 1xxx produced years of year-round winter-like conditions around the world, leading some scholars to say that it delayed the Europe’s recovery from the Dark Ages by 100 years or more. Not every disaster leads to an economic downturn, however. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, epic tragedies though they were, didn’t cause the recession of 2001, as the economy already was turning south before the attacks occurred.
The Great Depression
A question that often comes up, and one that people still debate, is what caused the Great Depression? The truth seems to be that it was a perfect storm of economic inevitability and bad policy, with no single cause the likely villain (despite the claims of many economists that it was the factor about which they’ve just written a brilliant book).
It was triggered by the stock market crash of 1929, which points to the first culprit—a bubble in investment in automobiles and radios. Investors, enabled by lax investing rules that allowed them to borrow most of the money they were buying stocks with, bid prices on stocks up to record highs. When the market came tumbling down, a lot of private wealth was erased, and firms in those key industries began the downward spiral of the business cycle. While the economy typically had recovered quickly from downturns, this time it didn’t. President Herbert Hoover, up until that point an extremely popular politician and a very able administrator, usually gets cast as the villain of this piece, which isn’t entirely fair. As commerce secretary in the 1920, Hoover had written a paper after the recession of 1921 suggesting that next time, the nation needed to engage in spending on infrastructure to jump the start the economy. As president during the outset of the Depression, Hoover got Congress to set a number of programs in motion, including the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which loaned money to banks, railroads and other businesses to keep them afloat, and also pushed through bills to raise infrastructure spending.
But as the election of 1932 drew near, Hoover’s opponent was shaping up to be Franklin Roosevelt. As governor of New York, FDR had done nothing to reign in the excesses of the New York Stock Exchange, but had “that vision thing,” as the elder George Bush once said derisively of Ronald Reagan. FDR had the ability to make people feel good about themselves, and with unemployment climbing north of 20 percent, people wanted something positive. FDR offered a rather vague set of hopes and promises to get the economy going again, notably campaigning against what he called “irresponsible Republican budget deficits.” Hoover, too, wasn’t entirely comfortable with a budget deficit, and also worried that too much aid would make people too dependent on the government. (At this time, there was no welfare, no unemployment insurance—nothing except private charity, which was quickly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of unemployed Americans.) So Hoover got Congress to rein in spending, eliminating any stimulus effect of the added federal spending.
Roosevelt won the 1932 election in a landslide. He initiated a number of programs designed to put people back to work, but until the late 1930s, he pushed to get Congress to keep the budget balanced. He didn’t always succeed, but the stimulus effect of Roosevelt’s New Deal was always very small. In fact, in 1936, Congress cut spending so much that the economy fell further and faster than it had in 1929–1930.
Even then, the economy might have recovered sooner. On top of the cyclical downturn and tight fiscal policy, in the early 1930s, the Federal Reserve tightened the money supply to prevent an outflow of gold from U.S. reserves. So at the precise moment when the Fed should have been making sure the money supply was growing, they jacked up interest rates. That cut off borrowing and made recovery even more difficult.Monetarist guru and Nobel-prize winner Milton Friedman, and, to a lesser extent, current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, have argued that monetary policy was the sole cause of the Depression. Other scholars, such as Peter Temin, have argued that in fact the downturns Friedman and Bernanke point to occurred largely before the Fed tightened up credit markets. What seems likely true is that in the realm of policy, almost nothing anybody did was right, and that’s why the Depression lasted so long.
Some conservatives have blamed both FDR and workers for the Depression. Some of FDR’s policy initiatives, such as the National Recovery Administration, were pretty bizarre. As one political scientist noted, FDR “proposed to save capitalism by ending it.” (The NRA created industry cartels which effectively would have ended most competition. The U.S. Supreme Court threw it—and its farm cousin, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration—out on its posterior.) They have also argued that if only workers had reduced their demands for higher wages, wages would have fallen enough that firms would have been able to afford to rehire. There are a couple of problems with this analysis. First, wages fells throughout the 1930s, except for those of CEOs, and second, the NRA and the AAA didn’t last much more than a year. And, as we’ve previously observed, firms don’t borrow, invest, or hire unless somebody’s buying. And that doesn’t describe the Great Depression.
What is true is that World War II ended the Great Depression. It forced government to borrow and spend a lot of money, which put people back to work. The budget deficit grew temporarily, but given a chance to catch its breath, the economy surged toward a general expansion that lasted into the 1970s. The British economist John Maynard Keynes had tried to tell Roosevelt this at a meeting the 1930s, but Roosevelt, like Hoover and a lot of people of that era, were prisoners of their own times. Budget deficits just seemed like a bad idea. Keynes later described FDR as having “a first-rate personality and a third-rate mind.” Roosevelt, nonetheless, came off as the hero of the Great Depression, despite having done not much more than Hoover to fix it. But the changes that occurred in this era—such as Social Security, minimum wage and maximum hour laws, the right to unionize, and a lot more regulation—are with us still.
Fixing Recessions
So, we might ask, what ends recessions? Well, in the simplest terms, it’s the causes of recessions, operating in reverse.
The business cycle, left to its own, eventually will turn upward. One of the keys here, and an important economic indicator, is inventories. When the cycle is turning down, firms don’t order as much new product because sales are falling. Firms often are a little behind the curve on knowing how things are going, so that rising inventories often are a sign of coming trouble. So, when inventories start to fall, that’s a potentially good sign. Even in a deep recession, sales don’t go away entirely. Eventually, firms begin to burn through their inventories and have to place new orders. The businesses that supply them now have more work to do, which means more work for their suppliers, and so on. Slowly, the cycle begins to turn upward. Firms hire workers to meet rising demand; those workers now have more money and they go out and spend some of it pushing demand even higher. Meanwhile, in one of the great perversities of economics, recessions turn out to be somewhat good for the economy (although bad for people). Like a forest fire, the deadwood gets cleared out and new growth occurs. Some firms fail during recessions, but those are the firms that weren’t as good as the ones that survive. Surviving firms, usually by a combination of learning how to do things more efficiently and by forcing their remaining employees to work harder, become more productive and eventually more profitable. As some of that profit trickles down to employees, they get a little more money and spend a little more money and the upward spiral gets a little more steam.
And that’s what eventually happens in the economy, other things being equal, as economists so often say. Here’s the catch: This is what happens in the long run. As Keynes famously said, in the long run we’re all dead. Most people and their governments don’t want to wait for economic theory to be proven true. They want economic recovery sooner rather than later; daddy’s tired of Hamburger Helper and baby needs a new pair of shoes. So, more often than not, governments take action to counteract a recession:
Fiscal policy: Since the Great Depression, with the advent of welfare and unemployment compensation, when people lose their jobs, they get some help. That keeps total demand from falling as far as it did in the Great Depression. These kinds of programs are sometimes called automatic stabilizers, because spending on them pretty much kicks in as people lose their jobs. So recessions tend to be softer than they would be otherwise.
As we noted above, governments can also engage in added spending to try to boost the economy, such as President Obama’s stimulus package, which gave money to states and local governments, including money for infrastructure projects such as roads and bridges. Republicans who would prefer to see someone else in the White House loudly tagged it as the “failed” stimulus package, but the truth is that the economy would have done much worse without it. Liberal critics of the president, such as Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, have argued that the only problem with the stimulus program (as with Franklin Roosevelt’s), is that it wasn’t big enough. One thing that we might conclude about fiscal stimulus is that the more it contributes to gains in productivity, the better it will be for the economy in the long run. So spending on infrastructure, education and training, and small business support, will generally produce more economic gains than would just, say, dropping cash out of an airplane.
The other part of fiscal policy is taxes, and here again, governments can use tax policy to encourage economic recovery. They can give tax credits and tax breaks for certain kinds of activities, such as hiring more workers or spending on equipment (capital goods, in the parlance of business and finance). Also common are simple tax cuts—cut people’s taxes, so they have more money in their pockets. As we also noted above, tax cuts don’t have a great track record for stimulating the economy. As with cheap interest rates, firms still don’t hire more workers unless they see rising demand for their products and services. So tax breaks may also not help in that regard. The Bush and Obama tax cuts may not have worked because at that time, people seem to have used the extra money for saving rather than spending and investing. People either saved the money or paid down their debt. Neither of those is bad for the economy (in fact they’re good in the long run), but it won’t produce much short-term stimulus. It won’t boost total demand.
Monetary policy: Here again, while tight monetary policy (higher interest rates) can cool things down, cheaper money can heat things up. Lower interest rates spurred the housing industry in the 1980s, leading the U.S. out of that recession. The same thing happened in the early 1990s. But, as we’ve already noted, there has to be some level of demand already in the economy for lower interest rates to encourage people to borrow. Interest rates remained low throughout the Great Recession of 2007 and its aftermath, but neither consumers nor businesses went out of their way to borrow. The Federal Reserve, trying to ensure sufficient liquidity (ready cash) in capital markets, made sure that major banks had as much money as they could want at their disposal, and microscopic interest rates. But despite all that cash floating around, people and businesses didn’t want to borrow. Consumers, fearing for their jobs (or without them) didn’t want to take on more debt. With soft demand, businesses had no reason to borrow for expansion.
The final solution would be to wait things out and let the market sort through what’s wrong with the economy. Under this scenario, workers would cut their wage demands until it became profitable to hire them again, and the economy would then begin to turn around. This seems to have worked in the past, although it clearly didn’t happen in the Great Depression. So it’s not clear how workable this solution is in the current age, when most of us can’t go back to the farm and at least feed ourselves while we’re waiting for the economy to turn around.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Recessions can be caused—and ended—by a variety of factors.
• A recession is two quarters of economic contraction as measured by GDP. There is no solid definition of a depression, but it lasts longer and is more painful than a recession.
• The Great Depression appears to have been caused by a convergence of several factors. It was ended by World War II. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/08%3A_Eee_Economics_Economic_Systems_and_Economic_Policy/8.01%3A_Recessions_and_Depressions.txt |
That’s a lot to digest in a hurry, isn’t it? Entire courses are taught, and degrees bestowed, by and people who spend lifetimes studying no more than how government and business intersect. What you should know is that government plays a big role in the economy, and that economic forces seek to use government to their own ends. What you might also understand is that economic policy has an effect on all of us, and that paying attention to what elected officials and candidates say they will do can give you a better sense of whether you want to vote for that person.
8.03: Different Economic Systems
Learning Objectives
1. Know the difference between capitalism, socialism, communism and fascism.
2. Understand how market-based and planning-based economies work.
Our basic economic system, as you probably know, is called capitalism. Capitalism means private ownership of productive resources, with a reliance on markets to decide what gets produced and how much it will cost. So, you can start and own a business, and consumers will decide if they want your business around. Markets let consumers and business owners vote with their dollars, euros or yen on what will be for sale, what the price will be, and which firms survive to produce another day. As we’ll see, markets are very good at some things and perhaps not so good at others.
The alternative to market-based economic decision-making is some kind of government-based model. Government would decide, on behalf of people, what will be produced and how much each item will cost. As with market-based systems, government-based systems have their strengths and weaknesses. As a society, in the United States we have largely opted for a market-based approach, but not always.
Take a step back to the isms we talked about in chapter three, and think about them with an eye to how they make economic decisions, and what the advantages and disadvantages of each system is:
• Capitalism: Private ownership of productive resources, with decisions made largely by consumers and businesses deciding on their own what to produce and what to buy. Remember that capitalism is part of what we call classical liberalism—a system that relies on open elections and on markets. Generally speaking, capitalism is more efficient and less equalitarian in terms of who gets what. It produces more wealth, but can distribute it somewhat unevenly.
• Socialism: Government ownership of productive resources. Public agencies decide what will be produced and what it will cost. These agencies could be subject to political control through elections; they also could simply be imposed on consumers by the state. Socialism doesn’t necessarily imply one kind of political system over another. Socialism is generally less efficient but more equalitarian. Everybody gets something, but everybody may not get as much. To some extent, this is because a socialist system may be more focused on providing jobs for people than it is on providing goods and services.
• Communism: Government ownership of productive resources, and a one-party state to enforce decisions. The level of public ownership is usually higher than in socialism. It is even less efficient and even more equalitarian (although under communism, some folks appear to be more equal than others. Dictators and high party officials usually appear to live better than do common citizens).
• Fascism: Fascism claims to be capitalist, but as the state is not democratic, there’s little popular control over anything. The state (usually, some dictator or group of dictators) tends to reward its friends and punish its enemies, which leads both to oppression and an inefficient economy. (The firm that kicks back the most money to the government is the firm that survives and makes a profit, but it isn’t very often the firm that produces the best products at the lowest price.) Both inefficient and unequal, this seems to represent the worst of all possible worlds.
The world has tended toward capitalism in the last 30 years. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the opening of China’s economy, only North Korea and Cuba remain as communist states. And Cuba seems to be slowly edging rightward. That means more economies operated via markets.
Markets vs. Planning
A market is all the people and businesses involved in the production, distribution and consumption of any good or service. Markets are neither all bad nor all good. When the U.S. economy is doing well, you will hear how wonderful free markets are, like some fairy tale in which everyone really does live happily ever after. Conversely, when the economy is not doing well, you will hear how the market system doesn’t really doesn’t work, and that socialism, after all, is the only answer.
Realistically, neither of these viewpoints is 100 percent true. Every system has its share of strengths and weaknesses, and each represents trade-offs in the creation and distribution of wealth.
As we’ve already noted, market-based systems tend to be more productive—more goods for sale, higher quality and better prices. Planned systems have a hard time anticipating what the public will want, and so tend to produce fewer goods of worse quality, and consequently generate less overall wealth for society. As was noted in the days of the old Soviet Union in the 1970s, it was −60 degrees in Leningrad in February, and you still couldn’t get a cold Coke, because the Soviet-era refrigerators were so bad. That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but in the old communist economies, consumer goods were of poor quality and often in short supply. For example, in Poland in the 1980s, when it was still communist, the price of bread was regulated. Limiting the price of bread meant that even the state-run bakeries couldn’t supply more bread because they couldn’t raise the price to buy more flour. Meanwhile, the price of cake wasn’t regulated, and the bakeries always had lots of cake.
Hard-core socialist systems don’t always reward hard work and initiative. In the early 1990s, I visited a friend in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, which broke away from the Czech Republic after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. His business required him to have a fax machine in his apartment, but he couldn’t get the fax to work. He called the state telephone company, which sent three guys out to look at his fax machine. They told him it was broken, and offered to sell him a new one for about \$600 (a lot of money for a fax machine, then and now). The fax machine wasn’t broken; in fact, it worked fine on his neighbor’s phone line. The problem was clearly in his phone line, but the repairmen weren’t motivated to go after that. After the “repairmen” left, my friend turned to me and said, “This is the legacy of 40 years of communism. These people don’t know how to work.” But it was in Bratislava that we stumbled across the monument to the victory of the west in the Cold War: Coming around a corner, we came square upon on a large K-mart, with a Pespi logo painted on its side. “You see,” I told my friend, “there it is. We won.”
It was in part the west’s ability to produce more stuff of higher quality and better cost that enabled it to wade through 50 years of the Cold War and come out ahead. And that ability largely stemmed from its reliance on markets.
Market systems aren’t perfect when it comes to predicting demand, either. But if one firm produces more jeans than consumers want at that time, the firm (and its employees) bear the cost of that decision, as opposed to the whole society. And because most firms know that, they tend to be more careful about how much inventory to produce. Badly run firms go out of business or are acquired; well-run firms prosper and, hopefully, share that success with their employees and customers.
Conversely, however, planned systems can move resources in a way that means there will be less abject poverty. Cuba, for all its problems, has better basic health care, higher literacy rates, and less homelessness than does the United States. On the other hand, it would be much harder for you to go into business for yourself in Havana than it would in Hartford or Hawaii. (Sweden, which has much fewer natural advantages than Cuba, but a market-based economy, has an economy nine times the size of Cuba’s.) So while socialist economies have less disparity of wealth, capitalist societies tend to be richer overall. So socialist economies have a higher floor, and capitalist economies have a higher ceiling.
Capitalist or Socialist?
Finding a balance between the higher floor and the higher ceiling remains the tricky part of economic policy. Increasingly, the world’s nations rely on markets for economic decision making, even a self-proclaimed communist nation such as China. I’ve heard people say of China, “Don’t they know they’re communist?” Having spent some time there, I think they know they’re not. Officially, China’s economic description is described as “Chinese socialism with characteristics of market capitalism,” or, more recently, “market capitalism with characteristics of Chinese socialism.” Perhaps it’s an evolutionary process.
China is still ruled by what I like to call the not-very-Communist Party (or the Kaching! Dynasty), because while they are not very democratic, it is possible to start and own a business. From the time party reformer Deng Xiao Ping (the successor to Chairman Mao) declared “It is glorious to be rich,” China has been grinding its way toward building a market-oriented economy. Many firms are still state-owned, but many are not. That division between the private sector and the state is likely to drive change in China, as private firms will someday increasingly question why they need an overwhelming, unchecked state telling them what to do. So one of China’s great challenges is how to reconcile the unchecked power of the Communist Party with the growing demands of the private sector. The party’s legitimacy increasingly rests on its ability to provide rising standards of living for the nation’s 1.5 billion people. That’s a tough job under the best of circumstances; as every nation realizes at the end of a boom, nothing grows forever (except maybe people’s expectations). While China’s economic growth rates have been strong for more than a decade, when you’re starting from zero, you have nowhere to go but up. That kind of growth simply won’t last forever.
China isn’t really communist, nonetheless, and the United States isn’t 100 percent capitalist. Most nations have what is called a mixed economy—a blend of private and public enterprises. Even in the United States, while most businesses are privately owned, we have a number of publicly owned enterprises, from the U.S. Postal Service to public hospitals, water and sewer districts, and public power companies. But most of the economy depends on markets.
Figure 8.1
Chart TK: A diagram placing major nations of the world on the spectrum between socialism and capitalism.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Capitalism is an economic system that relies on markets.
• Socialism and communist rely on government planning.
• Most of the world’s economies are a mix of the two, with some decisions made by private firms and consumers in markets, but some decisions made by government.
EXERCISES
1. Identify some private firms near where you live.
2. Identify some government-run firms. What would it mean for them to be privatized?
3. Which countries in the world are still ostensibly communist? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/08%3A_Eee_Economics_Economic_Systems_and_Economic_Policy/8.02%3A_Summary.txt |
Learning Objectives
1. Understand the basics of a market-driven economy.
2. Understand the laws of supply and demand.
3. Understand different kinds of markets.
Now that we’ve established the importance of markets in understanding society, let’s learn something about how markets work. First, some basic econ. Economics is another subject that confuses some people, and it shouldn’t. In fact, most of it turns out to be common sense. People respond fairly predictably when it comes to money, and that’s true for both consumers and businesses. And if you understand the laws of supply and demand, you understand most of what you need to know about economics. And if you understand something about how our economy works, it should be easier to understand how government affects the economy.
First, the law of supply: The higher the price, the more suppliers want to sell. If the price of iPods goes up, Apple ships more units. Why? Because higher prices mean a supplier can cover the cost of added production and still make a profit. If the price falls, they ship fewer units.
Second, the law of demand: At higher prices, consumers want to buy less of an item, and at lower prices, they tend to want to buy more. If the price of downloads for an iPod go up, you buy less; if they fall, you may buy more.
Obviously, you can’t think about one law without thinking about the other. If demand rises for a product—consumers want more of it—that tends to bid up the price. More suppliers will enter that market, increasing supply, which eventually will drive down the price. If demand falls, suppliers will leave the market, supplying less of the good in question. (Suppliers will not raise the price in the face of falling demand, hoping to make up the difference. Remember the law of demand: Higher prices would simply drive demand down even further.)
A lot of other factors can influence supply and demand (such as people’s level of income, the price of inputs for suppliers, and the availability of substitutes for consumers. Taxes and subsidies also can influence supply and demand). But most of what happens in the economic world comes back to simple supply and demand.
Why this matters is because we live—and much of the world lives—in a market-driven economy. To varying degrees, most nations on earth rely on markets to make decisions about prices and production.
How Markets Work
So how are markets supposed to work? First, let’s remember what a market is: A market is the collection of buyers and sellers for a given product. So when we talk about markets, we’re talking about all the people involved in the production, buying and selling of any particular product, from artichokes to Zambonis. When we talk about markets, then, we’re not necessarily talking about a particular place. We’re talking about a lot of places and a lot of people, usually scattered all over the world.
A market has a demand side—the buyers—and a supply side—the sellers. Buyers and sellers seek each other out to improve their welfare. Markets don’t need to be organized; they just happen. At the right price, almost anything is available.A friend of mine from the gym once decided he wanted to get bigger and so set off in search of anabolic steroids (which will make you bigger sometime before they kill you). He found, for a price, all manner of drugs, people willing to do things not normally regarded as legal, and even weapons such as Uzi submachine guns, but, fortunately, didn’t find anyone willing to sell him ‘roids. If there’s a demand for a product, sellers will try to meet that demand. As the demand for fuel-efficient vehicles grows with rising gasoline prices, automakers are more willing to supply them, such as hybrid vehicles. In the last decade, for example, sales of Toyota’s Prius soared while sales of gas-guzzling Hummers plummeted. (Eventually, General Motors stopped producing Hummers altogether and started producing the all-electric Volt.)
By definition, buyers and sellers will reach an agreement on price. The price will be one that lets suppliers make a profit but isn’t more than buyers are willing to pay. For this reason, we say that markets tend to self-regulate. If demand is less than output, or exceeds output, the market will respond by changes in price and/or quantity supplied. Markets for this reason typically don’t require outside organization. As we’ll see, they do, however, sometimes require oversight to ensure that everyone is playing fair. (Not everyone agrees with that idea, and you will have to decide whether you think that’s true.)
Some people have a rather high degree of faith in markets; other people think they’re good at some things but not without their challenges. (And some people argue that markets simply have too many problems; at the moment, those folks aren’t winning the argument.) For example, markets work when there’s real competition. If there isn’t real competition, it’s not much of a market. Despite what everyone says about free enterprise, firms tend to want to limit competition, because that means higher prices. For example, in the 1930s, U.S. airlines (and also the trucking industry) went to the government and sought regulation as way of limiting “ruinous” competition—having to compete on price over what is basically a commodity—airline seats—meant that profit margins were lower. As we will discuss below, that led to 40 years of no price competition in the airline industry.
In a true market, no one sets the price alone. Prices are determined by 1) the costs of production and 2) the demand for the product [remember the laws of supply and demand]. In some countries and in some periods of our history, we have attempted to interfere with markets through price controls: arbitrarily setting the price of goods to ensure that no one has to pay too much. This usually doesn’t work very well. Price controls distort the functioning of a market, typically limiting supply. Remember, according to the law of supply, at a given price, sellers will only supply so much of a good. But the higher price, the more suppliers want to sell, so a lid on prices necessarily means suppliers will only want to sell so much. Selling more means selling at a loss, and nobody does that for very long. Price controls, such as those imposed in this country during World War II, mean that supply will be limited. That meant that people also had to be issued ration cards so that they could get their share of scarce foodstuffs such as meat. Ending rationing would have meant higher prices, but it also would have meant more meat for sale.
Different Kinds of Markets
Figure 8.2 Chart TK: Different kinds of markets, with examples
There are different kinds of markets—different kinds of competition—throughout the economy. Not every market for every product operates the same way.
Before we talk about different kinds of competition, here are a couple of concepts that are useful to understanding the nature of competition:
• Market power: this is the ability to set prices. If a firm has market power, it can set prices higher than the normal price (the equilibrium point, in economic jargon—the point where supply meets demand) that would be dictated by normal forces of supply and demand. A firm that has no market power is a price-taker—they get whatever price the market is offering. If a firm has market power, however, prices are higher than they should be because there isn’t sufficient competition.
• Barriers to entry: How easy or difficult is it to break into a business? If an industry has high capital costs (it would be very expensive to start building automobiles from scratch), or requires substantial education and skills, it has higher barriers to entry. The business of espresso stands has relatively low barriers to entry. A radiation technology clinic would have high barriers to entry. If, in a given market, there are high barriers to entry, the market may not work as efficiently as we might hope, because, once again, there is less competition.
With that in mind, consider the different kinds of competition that we might find in the economy:
• Pure Competition: Pure competition is best described as featuring many firms, none too big, and no firm has market power. These firms are price-takers. Whatever price the market offers is the price the supplier gets. Farms are probably the best example—lots of farms, a wide-open market, and no one farm can likely set the price for any commodity. This is somewhat typical of commodity markets in general—markets where the product doesn’t vary greatly from batch to batch or load to load. Everything from corn to rice to oil to iron ore to coffee beans is, to some extent, a commodity market.
• Monopolistic competition: Many firms; low to high barriers to entry; limited market power. This describes a lot of businesses, from accountants to hair salons to restaurants to attorneys. Firms try to distinguish their products and services as different from all their competitors’, which allows them to charge slightly higher prices. Hair salons, for example, target different market segments: From uptown, high-end salons, which may charge very high prices, to a hair factory such as SuperCuts, which charges lower prices. Although both kinds of salons cut hair, each offers a slightly different level and type of service and product.
• Oligopoloy: Few firms; high barriers to entry; limited price competition. This would describe the automobile industry, for example. (A duopoly has two firms, such as Boeing and Airbus.) Starting an automobile company or any heavy industrial firm requires a lot of money, equipment and technical expertise, so that not many people are going to try this from scratch. As a result, there’s less competition and prices are higher than they might be otherwise. Before foreign car manufacturers began to enter the U.S. market in the 1960s and 1970s, U.S. car prices became somewhat high.
• Monopoly: One firm. Monopolies happen for a variety of reasons: a firm has a technological advantage that no one is able to replicate; government bars other firms from competing in that market (fairly rare); a firm puts all of its competitors out of business (this can and has happened); or the market is best served by a single firm (a “natural” monopoly).
Usually, when there’s only one firm, government steps in with some level of regulation, attempting to keep the one firm from charging monopoly prices (prices higher than the market would otherwise allow). In the U.S., the government uses anti-trust regulation to keep any single firm from dominating its market, so as to preserve some minimum of competition.
In the case of a natural monopoly, for some services it may be better to have only firm providing that service. This tends to be true for services such as water, sewer, electricity and garbage collection (though not everyone agrees on this). It would not be profitable for a competing firm to build a second set of water, sewer and electric lines through your neighborhood. Consequently, these natural monopolies usually are regulated by the government—in the case of the United States, usually at the state level. This prevents the firms from charging whatever prices they want, but tends to also mean the state regulators give the service provider some minimum level of profit. It’s an admittedly imperfect system. These utility firms aren’t always as efficient as they might be, nor are regulators perfect at determining when a rate hike is or isn’t justified.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• The law of demand: The higher the price, the less consumers want to buy.
• The law of supply: The higher the price, the more suppliers want to sell.
• A market is all of the people involved in producing, selling and buying a particular good or service.
• There are several different kinds of markets, each featuring a different level of competition.
EXERCISES
1. The price of lattes as the campus coffee stand goes up. How are people likely to respond?
2. Rising demand for iPads bids the price up. How will other firms respond to this change in prices?
3. How is monopolistic competition different from a monopoly? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/08%3A_Eee_Economics_Economic_Systems_and_Economic_Policy/8.04%3A_Basic_Economics.txt |
Learning Objectives
1. Understand market imperfections
2. Understand market failures
3. Understand externalities
Markets are very useful, even though they don’t always work the way they’re supposed to. As we’re about to see, that can have a cost for everyone. As we live in a free-market economy, in which citizens are allowed to make their own economic choices, we presume that competition is an open free for all, and the market—in the form of businesses and consumers—decides what gets made and who buys how much at what price. As with most things in economics, that’s true, to a point.
So we might always ask, how well does any given market function? Classical economic theory says that markets are perfectly efficient because consumers and businesses simply vote with their dollars, and the best firms and the best products win out. Consumers, meanwhile, only spend their money where they perceive they are getting value for it.
But how can we know if a market is efficient as theory suggests it will be? One immediate problem is that people who worship at the temple of the market assume that everyone has perfect information: Consumers and businesses know everything they need to know to make rational decisions. Think about all the dumb things you’ve ever done with your money, and that pretty quickly should appear to be a really big assumption.
Market Imperfections
Markets are very good at making product and pricing decisions. People do vote with their dollars, and the market eventually responds. But they are not perfect. First, unlike the theoretical markets of free-market dreams, markets are not frictionless—markets face transaction costs. Transaction costs are the costs of negotiating and enforcing contracts. Information held by buyers and sellers is not perfect. Although buyers and sellers do find each other, that’s not without cost. Businesses have the costs of advertising and marketing; consumers have the costs of shopping for the right product at the right price. (Something like e-Bay works in part because uniting buyers and sellers in once place—the internet—lowers transaction costs.) So, for example, you’re usually at a disadvantage at a car lot. The dealer or his representative knows what the car really cost, and what might be wrong with it. The sales representative also has been trained in price negotiation, or at least has experience at it. You, on the other hand, might be very good at your job, but may be inexperienced at price negotiation and may not know what the car is worth. And you certainly don’t know that it needs a new transmission. So markets aren’t always a level playing field.
Markets don’t always make the best choices, despite their reputation for doing so. Consider Qwerty economics. Qwerty, you may recognize, is the first five letters on the upper left side of the keyboard you are probably now using. If you stop and think about this keyboard, it’s fairly awkward. The letters you use the most, such as A and S, are under your weaker fingers. This was by design. This keyboard was created in the 1800s when typewriters became commonplace. With a manual typewriter, if you type fast enough, you could jam the keys together and have to stop and separate them. This was a problem for rapid 19th century typists, so a keyboard was designed to slow them down a bit and enable them to proceed at a good steady pace.
Then, in 1932, a University of Washington professor, Dr. August Dvorak, developed a new keyboard that was more ergonomically efficient. Typewriters had gotten mechanically better, and the invention of the electric typewriter meant you could type very fast if you were any good at it. A trained Dvorak typist can kick major bunny on the best Qwerty typist.
So why don’t we all use the Dvorak keyboard? It’s better, and we’d all probably like a keyboard that put the most commonly used letters under our strongest fingers. You can convert any late-model Windows computer to Dvorak with a few mouse clicks, and it shouldn’t be too difficult to order a Dvorak keyboard for your computer.
But we don’t change. The short-term cost of retraining an entire nation in typing outweighs the apparent long-term benefits. (I tried a French keyboard once while in Paris on business. French keyboards have the letters in different places. It’s very difficult to type on a different keyboard once you’ve been trained to do one way.) Either way, that’s a market decision, and the market hasn’t made the best decision. Markets sometimes do that. The old Sony Betamax system was much superior to the VHS system, but the VHS system won out. Sony didn’t license its platform to other manufacturers; the VHS patent holder did. So even though Betamax was better, VHS was much cheaper. Apple Macintosh computers were much superior to the early Windows machines, but as Apple (like Sony) didn’t license its operating system to other suppliers, Windows-based PCs won out over Apples on price alone. In each case, greed won out over good business sense.
Market Failures
Imperfections are relatively minor concerns; they add costs to markets, but they don’t keep markets from working. But markets face much bigger challenges than that. Some economists call these market failures, or cases where markets don’t perform as well as we hope they will. (We should note that people with extreme faith in the power of markets don’t admit that markets might not be perfect. In the eye of some very conservative economists, whatever happens with the market is what’s supposed to happen. And if that means you suffer as result, well, it sucks to be you.)
First, markets have a tendency toward imperfect competition. Remember that in perfect (pure) competition, no firm controls too much of the market, there are low barriers to entry (it’s easy for somebody to get into that market and provide competition), and firms get whatever price the market is currently offering. Very few markets look like this in the real world. Commodities—raw materials, some agricultural goods, airline tickets—tend to operate this way. But even there, firms tend to try to differentiate their products so that they can charge a slightly higher price. (Giving us such puzzling products as “Eggland’s Best,” even though, for the most part, an egg is an egg. By claiming that their eggs are somehow better [they never really say why, and I can’t seem to find Eggland on a map], they can charge a little more for their product. Grocery stores also sometimes charge more for eggs with different colored shells, even though there’s really no difference beyond the way they look.) This is called monopolistic competition. Each firm tries to create its own monopoly by positioning its product or service as being slightly different from its competitor’s offering. What matters here is that positioning your product away from the field gives you a little bit of market power—the ability to set prices. That usually means higher profits, and that’s what most businesses want.
This is a condition that doesn’t stop markets from functioning—lots of firms, selling similar products, each trying to carve out its own market niche. But what happens when some firms come to dominate a market? If we get down to just a few firms, we have what’s called an oligopoly. As these firms dominate their markets, there is less competition and higher prices. Before the advent of foreign imports, U.S. auto firms were an oligopoly, and even now, there’s a relatively small number of firms worldwide that compete in the automobile industry. In the commercial jetliner business, two firms (a duopoly)—Boeing and Airbus—are the dominant players, and while they compete fiercely over this business, they mostly have the field to themselves for the moment.
Left to their own, many markets tend toward just one firm. One company manages to get an edge, and begins to either buy up or push out its competitors. This happens most often in businesses where there are high barriers to entry (it’s either expensive [also called capital-intensive] or technologically challenging to get into the field). As we’ve already noted, it would be relatively simple for you to open a coffee stand, but it’s not likely that you’ll start manufacturing automobiles in your garage (and be successful at it). Only one firm means a monopoly, and monopolies usually mean higher prices and lower quality, because there isn’t any competition to force that one surviving supplier to do a better job.
This happened in the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when business leaders managed to assemble a series of “trusts,” which controlled much of the nation’s (and sometimes the world’s) supply of everything from sugar to oil. For example, John D. Rockefeller, starting from scratch, built a behemoth known as Standard Oil, which at its peak controlled 95 percent of the world’s known oil. He ran a better business than many of his competitors, but he also undersold competitors to put them out of business (and probably arranged for accidents for some who refused to go away quietly).
In the United States, government’s response was to pass a series of anti-trust laws, making it illegal for one firm to control an entire industry and giving government the power to break up the trusts and preserve competition. So, for example, when AT&T (which had been broken up by the government in the 1980s) declared in 2011 that it would buy T-mobile, federal anti-trust regulators said “not so fast,” and filed suit to block the acquisition on the grounds that it would limit competition in the cellular telephone business.
It’s not entirely clear how well any of this works. For example, it took until 1924 to break up Standard Oil, by which point its control of the world’s oil supplies had fallen to about 25 percent. How did that happen? High prices tend to attract more competitors; by charging monopoly prices, Standard Oil had already drilled the wells of its own demise. Similarly, the break-up of AT&T in the 1980s, when it was the world’s biggest corporation and the nation’s dominant phone company, became something of a moot point in a few years as cell phones and satellite communication began to end AT&T’s dominance of local and long-distance telephone service.
The tendency toward imperfect competition takes other forms. As we’ve already noted, participants in markets frequently try to rig them by changing the rules, or by colluding with others. For example, at various times in our history, business has encouraged government to produce rules that limit competition. At other times, firms have secretly joined together to fix prices and avoid competition altogether. In the early 1960s, for example, suppliers of large generating equipment secretly agreed to stop competing (bid-rigging), so that prices would be higher for all firms involved. (Eventually, somebody noticed, lawsuits were filed, and fines were levied.) Firms also have tried to corner the market on some materials, making it difficult for other firms to compete. So although markets are supposed to be inherently efficient, and to generate whatever products are needed, markets may in fact need someone to enforce the rules of the market—to make sure that no one is cheating by finding ways to limit competition.
Markets also are cited for their failure to provide social (or public) goods: Markets can’t provide public goods such as traffic lights, because there’s no way to make a profit off a traffic light. One could argue that roads and transportation infrastructure in general fall into this category, and probably police and fire protection as well. In economic-speak, social goods are said to be non-rival and non-exclusionary, in that consumption of them does not diminish their quantity and they can be used by anybody. That means it would be difficult for a private business to make money on them. Traffic controls such as stoplights are an example of a social good since they limit accidents, help manage the flow of traffic and can be used by anybody who is driving. And if I use a traffic signal, there isn’t less of the traffic signal for you to use after me. The market won’t provide traffic signals because there’s no way to make them profitable for a private owner, so the only way to get them is gather up some money from everybody (taxes), pool those funds and build what needs to be built.
Markets also suffer from unequal distribution of wealth: Because markets generate a lot of wealth but don’t spread it around evenly, market economies can produce extremes of wealth and poverty. This generates problems for most societies. The rich get greedier, no surprise, and the poor get more envious of the rich. This often leads to more poverty, higher crime, and more social problems of all sorts. Plato and Aristotle wrote about this very problem 2,500 years ago, and not much has changed. Figuring out how to fix that, however, remains as difficult as ever, because if we make the distribution of wealth more equitable (more even), we likely also will make the economy less efficient and productive. Striking a balance, I think, is the hard part. Of course, not everyone agrees that this is a problem. Conservatives and libertarians would argue that if some people are poor, it’s their own fault, and that they are more likely to become wealthy and successful if they get going and do something to improve themselves. As usual, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. There are people who lift themselves up out of poverty, and people who can’t see their way to anything like that. And clearly some people start out ahead of the game. Your parents’ income level is a pretty fair predictor of your income level. (And if you work enough jobs, you will inevitably meet someone who owes his or her position to the wealth they inherited. You will also meet people who are brilliant at business, and, in some sense, deserve what they have.) But what is certain is that poverty has a social cost that extends beyond the poor themselves. Poor parts of every country tend to have higher crime, poorer nutrition, shorter life spans, and generally less pleasant lives. The question, as always in politics, is what to do about that.
Another kind of market failure is externalities, which are the unintended consequences of economic activity. Externalities also are said to be the costs not paid for by the user of the resource. Pollution is the classic example of an externality, and the market may not in fact account for the real costs of pollution. So, a smoke stack from a factory, or all the air pollution created by automobiles and most other forms of transportation, does create a lot of jobs and wealth. No problem there. But the cost of the pollution in terms of health and the environment isn’t paid for by the user of the resource, either you or me driving to work or school, or the people who own or work at the factory. That cost is left for society at large.
Nobody really wants to create pollution, yet the market by itself won’t do much about it. Why not? In the example of pollution, we often face the free-rider problem. If each of us owns a factory around a lake, and we’re all dumping effluent into the lake, we will ruin it in a short period of time. So we’d all be better off not polluting the lake. But absent some outside influence, there’s nothing to make any of us stop polluting the lake. One of us might decide to take steps to reduce the pollution we’re dumping into the lake, but whoever does that bears the full cost of that and yet shares the reward with everybody else around the lake, making them, in effect, free riders on our good deed. Moreover, by taking on the cost of cleaning up our plant, we have added to our costs, making our product less competitive with firms that chose not to do the right thing.
Externalities can be both positive and negative. Negative externalities make something worse for somebody else. Positive externalities make something better. A positive externality might be a business that buys an old building, cleans it up and landscapes the outside. That would make neighboring properties worth more—a benefit to those landowners, and totally unintentional on the part of the business. Public education also produces positive externalities, since the people who are educated at public expense will be more productive than if they had not been educated. That generates economic benefits for the rest of society.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Markets may not be capable of providing needed goods and services.
• Markets may not account for the full cost of using a resource.
• The free-rider problem discourages firms from doing the right thing on their own.
EXERCISES
1. Should government step in to deal with negative externalities? Are there costs and benefits, for example, for mandatory pollution controls.
2. What would be the costs and benefits of unequal distribution of wealth?
3. Think of some examples of public goods. Why doesn’t the market provide these? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/08%3A_Eee_Economics_Economic_Systems_and_Economic_Policy/8.05%3A_The_Other_Side_of_Markets.txt |
Learning Objectives
1. Understand arguments for and against government intervention in markets.
2. Understand why businesses seek protection from competition through government action.
All of this leaves us with a couple of things to think about. First, to what extent should government intervene in the economy? Second, presuming we intend to continue to use markets to determine what to produce, etc., how can we keep government from limiting competition when it does intervene? This second question may seem less obvious, but what history tells us is that markets seek intervention nearly as often as government seeks to intervene.
The Case for Leaving Markets Alone
Some people say that, left alone, the market will eventually sort all of its problems out. The public choice school of thought points out that government doesn’t always make good choices, and that people in general are a better judge of what to do with their money. Conservatives, public choice advocates, as well as libertarians, think government should be smaller, do less, tax less, and spend less money. Libertarians don’t see much of a role for government except for national defense and police protection.
Part of the argument here is that people will do what they learn to do, so if you bail them out from stupid decisions, they’ll keep making stupid decisions because there’s no consequence to their actions. So people who, say, don’t save for retirement, will just have to suffer. Others, observing that suffering, will be motivated to save more and sooner.
Public choice theory in particular says that government’s economic decisions are mostly aimed at making things better for government officials, rather than for society as a whole, such as helping officials get re-elected. A fair amount of research has shown that presidents, for example, take steps to pump up the economy just before elections (it also shows that they don’t really have much success at moving the economy forward that quickly). And the steps that government might take—raising government spending to boost demand—might lead to inflation and higher budget deficits down the road.
However government intervenes, whether by regulation, taxation or subsidies, makes markets less efficient—it raises costs, which fall on businesses and consumers. Government is particularly bad at picking winners and losers—60 years of communism showed us just how bad government can be at producing goods and services. Taken to its extreme, government control of the economy limits innovation, raises prices or leaves goods in short supply, and limits incentives for people to work harder.
Why aren’t governments as efficient as markets? Governments simply respond to different signals than do markets. Whereas markets operate largely on the basis of supply and demand, governments by nature have to care about who has a job and whether people have enough to eat. That makes them egalitarian, but it doesn’t always make them very efficient. During the 1980s oil boom years in Alaska, state government, hoping to diversify the state’s energy-dependent economy, spent a lot of money on small business development projects. That included, for example, an entrepreneur who was trying to develop a dog-powered clothes dryer. The state apparently spent so much money (before oil prices tumbled in the late 1980s) that a popular bumper sticker in Anchorage read “Please, God, just once more. We won’t piss it away this time.”
As usual, there’s some truth to all of this. Many people will probably be more careful about things if government isn’t there to bail them out. Moreover, using government to plan economic outcomes, including production and pricing decisions, has a very poor track record.
The Case for Intervention
Government’s decisions are far from perfect, and probably never will be perfect for everybody. And that’s part of the problem with arguing against government intervention. Few decisions, including non-decisions, leave everybody better off. And the people who didn’t think to save for retirement have a cost to society as well as to themselves. For public choice theory to work, people have to be rational—always making the right decision and acting in their own best interests. That’s a big assumption, and you only have to look around (or in the mirror) to know that we’re all rational only part of the time.
And while conservatives may argue that the market will indeed sort things out in the long run, waiting for that to happen has costs as well, in terms of human misery. Odds are, your life isn’t better if your neighbor’s is worse, or we wouldn’t find that the poorer parts of most places on earth have higher rates of crime, drug and alcohol abuse, and people who just aren’t living happy lives. You can, for example, pretty much correlate K–12 test scores with income levels; children from wealthier neighborhoods do better in school.
The people who most famously wrote in favor of the greatest reliance on unfettered markets—Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, for example—wrote at a time when the alternative to a market economy appeared to be communism. Communism didn’t work that well, although, frankly, its political problems (the unchecked power of the state) probably outweighed its economic problems (substandard goods in short supply, and a lack of economic freedom). But is an unfettered market or an all-powerful state the only options available? Perhaps not.
The kind of minimalist government that some folks still call for was also tried, in the United States in the 1800s. Government then, particularly in the post-Civil War era, didn’t do much with regard to the economy. There were no child labor laws, no minimum wage, no workplace safety standards, no overtime, no unemployment insurance, no bank deposit insurance—nothing except the market. The courts largely barred either states or the federal government from regulating anything to do with the economy. As a consequence, there was no social safety net, and if the economy went south, people suffered. In the Depression of 1893, some people simply starved to death. When I end up arguing with libertarian students, which I do, I usually say “we tried a libertarian government, and it didn’t work so well.”
So let’s further consider the case for intervention. The argument for the government taking an active role in the economy has a number of reasons behind it. First, the playing field isn’t very even in a capitalist economy. Everybody doesn’t start from the same point on the track. If you don’t have any money or any opportunity to begin with, such freedom of choice is small consolation. And completely unregulated markets tend to lead to great concentrations of wealth in very few hands, which often means some citizens become much more equal than others. If you live in a state with initiatives, you have already seen wealthy interest groups use the initiative process to get state law changed to benefit them. Consequently, some people favor at least some limited government intervention to address market failures and externalities.
Governments can intervene in market failures through taxes to penalize unwanted activities; through subsidies (such as tax credits) to encourage activity such as pollution abatement; through price regulation; and through regulation of business practices such as safety regulations, anti-pollution laws and anti-trust enforcement. Each of these has costs and benefits, and there will always be argument as to which way the scales tip on every government action.
The argument for doing this is that the market by itself won’t sort out pollution, poverty and the distribution of power. Markets by themselves don’t account for the cost of environmental damage, traffic, rising home prices and loss of open space. They tend to concentrate wealth and power, posing challenges to effectively functioning democratic institutions. But what about government’s storied inability to make good decisions? One might argue that we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Government intervention won’t ever be perfect, but if it can be better than non-intervention, its lack of perfection isn’t a reason not to intervene.
To my mind, unfettered markets make no more sense than an unfettered state. Again, you’ll have to decide what you think this is right. Do the benefits of government involvement outweigh the costs, or do the costs overwhelm the benefits? You may feel differently than I do, and that’s OK. You get to make up your own mind on this, and you should understand that there are rational arguments to be made both for intervention and for not intervening. Everything the government does or doesn’t do with regard to the economy imposes costs and bestows benefits upon different groups of people in every country. My hope is that whatever you decide, you will have some idea about why you believe that philosophy, and that you understand what it means.
Government to the Rescue?
As much as some business people (and many conservatives) like to complain about government meddling in the economy, a lot of that meddling comes at the request of business. Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, recognized this in one of the more overlooked sections of The Wealth of Nations: Left to themselves, businesses will try to use government to rig markets and limit competition. Markets aren’t immune from politics, and a lot of politics is about economics. So much, in fact, that in my mind, it looks like this:
My Second Law of Political Economy: Politics is economic competition, carried on by other means.
How is this true? Well, most pieces of legislation passed by national and local legislatures have some economic impact. Some largely social/moral issues—such as abortion or gay marriage—aren’t really economic issues, but everything dealing with taxes, spending, regulation, monetary policy and economic development has a big economic impact. Moreover, in most nations, firms in every sector of the economy actively seek legislation that helps them and hurts competitors. Such laws are a form ofregulation. For example, licensing requirements probably do protect consumers against bad business practices, but they also restrict the supply of doctors and lawyers and thereby raise the price of those services. This leads to:
My Fourth Law of Political Economy: Everyone favors competition, except when it applies to them.Since you might be wondering, the First Law of Political Economy is the decision will be made in the direction of the greatest value. Usually, that’s money. So, if we look at lots of government decisions, we tend to find that they make those decisions with an eye to what will generate or protect the most wealth. Particularly at the local level, for example, cities are more likely to block development of apartment complexes because they will drive down the value of single-family homes in the same neighborhood. And the homeowners vote more often than the renters do. If you think back to our discussion of interest groups, you may remember the Fourth Law: Economic interests will be politically dominant to the extent that they are economically dominant. So, firms that make a lot of money and employ a lot of people tend to have more political clout than those who don’t. (See below.) The Fifth Law is: All life is politics. In other words, wherever you go, it’s who you know that matters.
For example, a few years back more than a dozen state attorneys general joined in a “consumer” lawsuit against Microsoft, alleging anti-competitive practices. Every state had one thing in common: Each was home to one of Microsoft’s competitors. (I’ve never seen a consumer lawsuit more devoid of consumers.)
So the intersection between government and business is substantial. Economist Robert A. Leone recognized this in his Iron Law of Public Policy: Every government action creates winners and losers in the marketplace. Smart business people know this, and act accordingly. As we’ll see more clearly when we talk specifically about regulation, businesses often seek regulation to limit competition and keep prices higher than they would be without it.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Government intervention in the economy imposes both costs and benefits.
• Businesses often seek government intervention to limit competition and raise prices.
EXERCISES
1. What are the costs and benefits of speed limits? What would be the alternative?
2. Think of something you think government should be doing in the economy, or something you think it shouldn’t be doing. What would be the costs and benefits of that change in government policy? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/08%3A_Eee_Economics_Economic_Systems_and_Economic_Policy/8.06%3A_How_Politics_and_Markets_Intersect.txt |
Learning Objectives
1. Understand gross domestic product and other measures of national wealth.
2. Understand the causes and effects of inflation.
Whether we decide to intervene in the economy usually has something to do with how it’s performing. In order to tell how the economy is performing, we have to be able to measure it. In broadest terms, we measure the economy by Gross Domestic Product (GDP). That’s the total of all goods and services produced in any nation’s economy. It’s only part of the story, but it’s a big part.
For example, the United States, at around \$14 trillion, has the world’s biggest economy measured by GDP. China is No. 2 at a little more than \$5 trillion. But if we divide that by the number of people living in each country—giving us per capita GDP—the richest country on earth is tiny Luxembourg, at \$118,000 per person. The U.S. ranks no better than ninth (depending on whose data you use), while China slips all the way to 94th.
Then again, we might think about what things cost in each country. If the cost of living is cheaper in, say, Iowa than it is in New York City, you don’t need to make as much money to live comfortably. Economists call this concept purchasing power parity (PPP), and if we apply that to GDP, the top three economies are the European Union, the United States, and China.
Another way we might judge the economy is by the Gini coefficient, a statistical measurement named for its inventor, the early 20th century social scientist Corrado Gini. Gini’s coefficient measures the dispersion of wealth, so that zero means everybody has the same wealth, with 1 meaning, in essence, one person has everything and nobody else has a dime. By the Gini coefficient, wealth is most evenly distributed in Sweden (0.23 Gini score), and most unevenly distributed in Namibia (0.72 Gini score). The United States’ score is 0.45, better than most of South America but worse than all of Europe.
Figure 8.3
Charts TK: Nations of the world by GDP, PPP, per capita GDP, and by Gini coefficient.
However it is measured, GDP gives a benchmark by which to tell how the economy is doing. If GDP shrinks for two consecutive quarters (six months), that’s a recession, and you will live through more than one of those in your lifetime. More on that in a moment. About 70 of GDP is consumer spending, 10–20 percent is investment (business) spending, and 20–30 percent is government spending. Real GDP is adjusted for inflation. Inflation is measured via the Consumer Price Index and a number of other indexes. More on that in a moment as well.
GDP also allows us to compare how the economy is doing at different points in time. A “record” budget deficit may not be so remarkable if it’s, in fact, a smaller percentage of the overall economy than was an earlier, apparently smaller deficit. It’s always important in looking at current and past numbers to compare them to the size of the economy and the wages and prices of that time.
Inflation
Another factor in understanding the economy is inflation. Inflation is a general rise in the level of prices. Since World War II, it has been a near constant feature of most economies around the world.
Inflation has three basic causes:
1. Cost-push: If there’s a shortage of goods or inputs for goods, prices will rise if demand remains constant. You’ve already seen this in your lifetimes with oil and gasoline. When supply is interrupted, say, by a storm that shuts down refineries on the Gulf Coast, supply falls and prices rise.
2. Demand-pull: If demand exceeds supply, prices will rise. So, turning to gasoline once again, people drive more in the summer as the weather improves and folks go on vacation. So, typically gasoline prices will rise after Memorial Day and fall after Labor Day, when school resumes and the weather begins to get worse. High government spending in the late 1960s, when the economy was already doing well, may have contributed to inflation in the 1970s.
In both of these instances, markets will take care of the problem. Remember the law of supply: As prices rise, suppliers want to sell more of a good. The Arab Oil Embargo of the 1970s greatly restricted the supply of oil to the western world. Prices doubled and tripled in less than a decade. But higher prices made other sources of oil more economical to recover (such as the oil underneath the North Sea between Britain and Norway), and prices eventually came down. And don’t forget the law of demand: As prices rise, consumers want less of a good. In the latest run-up in gas prices, consumers stopped buying gas-guzzling vehicles and began to demand more high-mileage alternatives. More people take the bus or carpool. So the market tends to sort this kind of inflation out.
3. Printing too much money: Governments can cause inflation if they print too much money. This happened in Germany in the 1920s, when inflation got so high that restaurants stopped printing menus because prices were rising throughout the day. In more recent times, Argentina and Zimbabwe have struggled through bouts of prolonged inflation, as their governments simply printed too much money. Printing too much money can let the government spend more, which puts more cash in circulation, which makes everyone feel richer, temporarily. But if we all suddenly had more cash, we’d likely spend some of it, in the process bidding up prices.
Inflation isn’t usually good for an economy. It makes people feel somewhat helpless when they see prices rising all the time; it punishes savers, investors and lenders. Your savings account loses value as inflation increases; your investments also may be worth less. Lenders such as banks and other financial institutions see their loans lose value because they’re being paid back with cheaper dollars or euros or yuan. Conversely, borrowers are helped by inflation because their loan payments tend to stay the same even as their incomes rise with inflation. (That’s why banks began to offer adjustable rate mortgages—ARMS—for house loans. The rate can be adjusted up or down depending on inflation.) Inflation is especially hard on the poor and people on fixed incomes, because rising prices eat away at their purchasing power. Wealthier people may be able to shift their mix of investments to account for inflation (such as inflation-linked bonds). The poor don’t tend to have investments (or they wouldn’t be poor). Finally, inflation complicates business planning. So all in all, it’s not a good thing.
Another thing to remember about inflation is that it can make things seem more expensive than they are. Remember the idea of purchasing power parity—what does something cost relative to the incomes of a particular time and place? So when we talk about the price of something, there’s the money price, which is the nominal price, and the real price, which is the price accounting for inflation. We should always ask, what does a good or service cost today in constant dollars? The relative price is the price in terms of other goods and services. We also often consider the price adjusted for inflation, in order to tell if it’s more expensive now or earlier. For example, \$3 a gallon gasoline may seem very expensive, but when you account for inflation, gasoline was more expensive both in 1918 and in the early 1980s. Similarly, while Avatar is listed as the top grossing film of all time, if you account for inflation (and hence the difference in relative ticket prices), the clear winner is Gone With the Wind.
In the United States, we measure inflation by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and by the Producer Price Index (PPI). As their names imply, the CPI is a measurement of inflation for consumer goods, and the PPI measures the price businesses receive for their products. Both are measured by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Researchers from the BLS survey prices around the country, using a “market-basket” approach—a hypothetical list of things consumers might normally buy. The CPI includes a national average and several regional averages, to account for differences in costs of things in different parts of the country. It’s not bad measure, but because it is a laundry list of items, it’s not perfect. For example, if the price of clothing is rising, and you’re not buying any new clothes at the moment, the stated inflation rate is different from what you might be experiencing. The bureau also provides a “core” rate of inflation, subtracting out changes in the cost of food and energy. Those prices tend to be more volatile, experiencing wider swings in price over shorter periods of time. On the other hand, as everybody has to buy food and energy, the “core” rate may not be all that important.
Inflation doesn’t normally occur during recessions, because people are spending less money, so there’s less upward pressure on prices.The British economist A.W.H. Phillips suggested that there was a trade-off between inflation and unemployment, which became known as the Phillips Curve. Then some folks went out and tested inflation versus unemployment, to see if there was in fact a correlation. There was none. However, considering only these two statistics leaves out everything else that might be influencing either inflation or unemployment at the moment. Experience at least tells us that most of the time, if unemployment is high, we get less inflation, and if more people have jobs, prices may get pushed up. However, on occasion, a nation can experience inflation and a weak economy, which is calledstagflation. This is the worst of all possible worlds: You’ve lost your job, and prices are rising. This only seems to happen if the inflation is driven by cost-factors. So, in the U.S. in the mid- to late 1970s, a soft economy meant high unemployment and the Arab oil embargo caused inflation by driving up the price of oil. (Rising or falling energy prices affect nearly everything else, since our society is so energy dependent.) Economists even came up with a “misery index,” combining numbers for inflation and unemployment.
It’s a particularly vexing problem for policy makers, because the usual fixes tend to make one or the other problem even worse. So, doing something to spur demand and raise employment levels may make the inflation worse; curbing demand to battle inflation will make the employment problem worse. In the long run, the market will sort out the inflation problem, because high prices will attract investment and eventually either more supply or alternatives to the high-priced goods. In the case of the U.S. in the 1970s, the answer was to raise interest rates to curb demand and crush inflation. That produced a very deep recession as well. As always, there were tradeoffs. The long-term solution to both problems is gains in productivity, but most people don’t want to wait that long for an answer. More on that in a moment.
The opposite of inflation is deflation, which is when prices fall. This can be a good thing when it means prices are falling because firms’ costs are falling. The price of many electronic goods, from calculators to computers to smart phones, has fallen over the last several decades, as the start-up costs have been covered and firms have become more efficient at producing them. On the other hand, if prices are falling because of falling consumer demand, that means firms are selling goods at a loss. If firms can’t cover their costs, they go out of business, workers lose their jobs, and the whole economy takes a downward plunge. Few things scare economists and policy makers more than that kind of deflation.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• The economy is measured by GDP, the total value of goods and services in an economy.
• Inflation can come from one of three sources. For the most part, inflation is bad for the economy.
• Stagflation is both inflation and recession, whereas deflation is falling rather than rising prices. Neither of these is good for the economy.
EXERCISES
1. Think of the last thing you purchased and how much you paid for it. Go tohttp://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ and see what it would have cost in the year you were born.
2. What causes stagflation? What kinds of things can solve it? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/08%3A_Eee_Economics_Economic_Systems_and_Economic_Policy/8.07%3A_Measuring_the_Economy-_GDP_and_Inflation.txt |
Learning Objectives
1. Understand why governments make economic policy.
2. Understand the importance of productivity.
Why would government want to get involved in the economy? Nearly every government—conservative or liberal, managed or market-driven—has the same objective: Creating the conditions whereby people can live materially satisfying lives. (As I explained to students in China once, people all over pretty much want the same things: Food, clothing, a roof over their heads, maybe some nice clothes to look pretty on the weekend.) Consequently, most governments typically have three goals in terms of economic management: full employment, price stability and economic growth. If citizens have jobs, they’re happier; if prices are rising too fast, they’re less happy. Growth allows these things to happen even as population grows, and also means higher standards of living. Growth sometimes gets a bad name, though it doesn’t necessarily mean that the suburbs are sprawling across the forests, fields and farms. Full employment, meanwhile, doesn’t mean zero unemployment. It means that everybody who wants a job has one. In practical terms, that means 3–4 percent unemployment, as some people will be between jobs and some people may be just taking a break. Price stability means a relatively low level of inflation, say, under 3 percent. And if the economy is doing well, the party in power gets the credit and gets to stay in office a while longer.
Economic growth is an increase in the output of goods and services. It tends to mean more jobs and higher incomes for people, and also access to goods and services on which to spend that income. It’s worth noting that there are in fact only two sources of economic growth: gains in population, and gains in productivity. Gains in population tend to mean an increase in demand, which drives up prices and encourages more supply. Firms hire more workers, who have more income to spend on themselves and their families. Gains in population, however, also generate externalities—more pollution, less open space, more traffic, higher housing prices (a great thing if you’re selling a house, not such a good thing if you’re buying one).
Aside from Chairman Mao in China after World War II, governments typically no longer actively encourage population growth as a matter of policy. Population tends to grow when times are better, as people can afford families, such as during the Baby Boom that followed the post-World War II economic expansion in the United States. In more recent times, however, in industrialized nations such as the U.S., Japan and Europe, birth rates have fallen. Whereas in agricultural societies more children can mean more farmhands, in industrial societies children are an expense. A couple of kids is good; a bunch can get kind of spendy.
Productivity
The key to economic growth is gains in productivity, and governments do try to actively encourage that. Productivity is output per worker. It’s very important—you can track the ups and downs of the U.S. economy by watching what productivity is doing. Slow or no growth in productivity means lower profits for businesses, and when business profits are down, they hire fewer people and pay the people they have less money. Why is this so important? If a worker is more productive—produces more goods per hour worked—production costs fall and profits rise. Gains in productivity mean that you’re producing a greater number of widgets with the same resources. That means higher profits, which usually means greater wealth for more people.
Gains in productivity come from better skills; better equipment and/or processes (including specialization of labor); finding new sources of natural resources; innovation (a change in the way resources are used); or eliminating waste. Steel plows, for example, greatly improved the productivity of agriculture by allowing the plowing of more land. (Before this, plows were usually made of wood, which meant they couldn’t break up the ground of many kinds of soil to allow planting.) In another example, prices fell throughout the 1800s with the rise of the industrial revolution, despite gains in wealth and population (which usually drives up prices). More goods were produced by machine instead of by hand, so output increased even as prices fell.
Because there are limits to everything, and technological innovation is unpredictable and tends to plateau, improvements in productivity can’t just be ordered up from Amazon.com. Productivity in the U.S. soared after World War II, but then flattened in the 1970s. Productivity turned up again in the 1990s, and the economy boomed, but that boom didn’t survive the 2000s.
Any way you look at it, productivity is one of the keys to economic success. So part of the question we need to answer is, how do government policies foster or discourage productivity?
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Most governments want to achieve economic growth, full employment and stable prices.
• Gains in productivity a major source of economic growth.
EXERCISES
1. Think about where you work, or have worked. What kinds of things might affect the productivity of the business and workers there?
2. How could a nation grow its economy without driving up prices (inflation)? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/08%3A_Eee_Economics_Economic_Systems_and_Economic_Policy/8.08%3A_Government_and_the_Economy.txt |
Learning Objectives
1. Understand how budgets are created
2. Understand how fiscal policy can affect economic performance
3. Understand why earmarks are not a big deal, but Social Security and Medicare are
Modern governments spend a lot of money (including efforts to boost productivity). In most states, governments raise and spend money through budgets. That makes budgets, for the most part, a matter of law. For the United States, and most countries, and for any state or local government to raise and spend money, the legislative body of that government must pass a law authorizing how much money will be spent and for what purpose. So, in the U.S., Congress (both the House and the Senate) must agree on a spending bill that authorizes government agencies to spend money in any particular way. Budgets can be a single, large bill containing many categories of spending, or they can be broken up into different bills allowing different kinds of spending. So if you hear or read that Congress has passed a defense appropriations bill, that means they have approved a spending plan for the Defense Department, and through them, all the spending that will take place on behalf of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines.
The federal budget, passed by Congress and signed by the president, spends more than \$3 trillion dollars a year, close to one quarter of GDP. The federal budget is paid for by taxes, earnings, transfers and borrowing.
Figure 8.4 [federal budget expenditure and revenue charts]
Budgets typically have two parts: revenue (how much money is coming in) and expenditure (how much money is going out). (A revenue package may come in a separate bill, but budgets are built on the assumption that enough revenue will be available to pay for the spending.) If revenue exceeds spending, that’s a budget surplus. If spending is greater than revenue, that’s a budget deficit. As we will see, each situation has a mixed effect on the economy. The accumulated deficits are called the national debt.
Figure 8.5 [national debt chart]
For the most part, governments don’t just print money when they need more. They either cut spending, or raise taxes, or they borrow. Do you have a Savings Bond? You are helping to fund the U.S. national debt. Governments issue bonds, which are bought by investors. The bonds pay interest, and after so many years, usually 10 or 20, the investor gets his or her initial investment (principal) back. Investors buy bonds because they are backed by the faith and credit of the issuing government (so U.S. or Canadian bonds are a safer investment than, say, bonds from Zimbabwe or Afghanistan). Governments often also use bonds to fund capital improvements, such as public buildings or transportation projects. The contractors want to get paid right away; the government uses tax revenue to pay back the investors who lent them the money for the project.
One thing you may have heard in recent times is that China lends us money to fund our budget (and/or trade) deficit. That’s not quite the case. Because China has a trade surplus with the U.S. they end up holding more dollars than they know what to do with. So part of what they do is to buy U.S. government treasury securities. It’s a safe place to park your money. But funding the budget deficit doesn’t depend on Chinese investment. The U.S. government does not borrow directly from China; China buys T-bills and Treasury notes on the open market.
Deficits get perhaps a little more attention than they deserve of late, perhaps because during the George W. Bush administration Congress was persuaded to cut taxes and keep spending high. The Bush administration argued that tax cuts would stimulate the economy by putting more money in the hands of more consumers. It’s not clear how much effect this had. Supporters said that helped keep the economy moving; critics tended to say that most of the tax cut went to the wealthiest Americans, who were unlikely to raise their consumption or investment more than they were already doing. The one thing the tax cuts did do was make the budget deficit grow.
Figure 8.6 [deficits as a percentage of GDP]
Then, in the interest of jump starting the economy, President Barack Obama got Congress to increase spending even more. This also was controversial. Conservatives, including members of the so-called Tea Party movement, criticized the president for making the budget deficit larger (the deficits of the Bush years were apparently OK). Supporters pointed out that without the stimulus, the economy likely would have done worse.
Budget deficits obviously can’t grow forever, and no rational person suggests that they should or will. At some point, if nothing else, people will stop lending you money. Conservatives argue that heavy borrowing by government “crowds out” private investment (making it harder or less likely that private firms will get loans or invest in productive enterprises), but there’s basically no evidence that this ever happens. A big budget deficit—government spending extra money—can cause inflation if the economy is already booming. But if it’s not, that doesn’t appear to happen. We’ve had big budget deficits for the last 10 years, but, aside from an occasional spike in oil prices, very little inflation.
Fiscal Policy
Taxes and spending—in essence, the budget—is one way that government can influence economic performance. This is called fiscal policy. In the most basic terms, fiscal policy is using the government’s power to tax and spend to try to influence economic outcomes.
Prior to the 1930s, prevailing economic theory urged policy makers to leave things alone, an economic philosophy often referred to as laissez-faire (French for to leave alone). The Great Depression, however, challenged the assumptions of this theory, since it lingered on for more than 10 years. Despite a relatively hands-off economic policy, the economy did not recover on its own. Unemployment was high, business profits were low, and although top executives’ salaries continued to grow, the wages of most Americans did not. Unemployment was as high as 30 percent.
The economist most associated with active fiscal policy was John Maynard Keynes, a British economist who wrote about this idea in the 1920s and 1930s. He said that when consumer and business spending fell (remember that a drop in aggregate demand is what causes recessions, ultimately), government could restore the economy’s vigor by spending to make up the gap. Keynes even spoke to President Franklin Roosevelt, who, despite his promises of “bold, persistent experimentation” to end the Depression, wasn’t a very forward thinking person when it came to economics. He had little use for Keynes’ ideas. Keynes thought it would be good for government to run a temporary budget deficit to boost demand and get the economy moving again. He also thought that when times are good, you should use the resulting budget surplus to pay off the debt you acquired during the recovery phase.
Why would fiscal policy stimulate the economy? Increasing government spending would increase total demand, leading businesses to sell more product, thereby boosting profits and, hopefully, wages and employment. That increase should multiply throughout the economy, as those business owners and their employees now will have more money, and they, too, are likely to spend some of it. Depending on what government spends on, it’s a temporary fix. Opponents of fiscal stimulus would argue that in the long run the economy will fix itself, if left alone. Keynes’ famous response was, yes, but in the long run, we’re all dead.
Fiscal policy takes many forms:
• Employment: The U.S. government, for example, employs several million people at a variety of tasks. Those people spend their government paychecks on normal consumer items, such as housing and food, and add to the total demand for goods and services in the economy, while providing services that people often say they want, everything from defense to police and fire services to public education.
• Transfer payments: The government processes transfer payments such as money sent to recipients of Social Security, welfare, and unemployment compensation. This raises the income and hence the consumption of people who might otherwise not be spending as much money. This raises overall demand in the economy.
• Government consumption: The government buys a large amount of goods and services. This provides jobs for the people who make and sell the goods that government buys, from defense-related materiel to health care and construction equipment.
In more recent times, President Obama’s stimulus package provided money for infrastructure spending, and money to states and local government to permit them to balance their budgets without slashing services and payrolls. Leading up to the 2012 presidential campaign, Republicans liked to call it “the failed stimulus package,” but people who weren’t running for president tended to argue that the stimulus, together with actions taken by the Bush administration in 2007–2008, had kept us from slipping into another Great Depression. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said that the only problem with the stimulus package was that it wasn’t big enough. He estimated that the stimulus needed to be about twice as big to push the economy toward full recovery.
It seems to make a difference what government spends our money on. Transfer payments eliminate a lot of human suffering. Before Social Security, for example, senior citizens were overwhelmingly poor. Defense spending tends to be less stimulating (and that’s not the same thing as non-stimulating) to the overall economy, because the items purchased, such as tanks, don’t then circulate elsewhere in the economy. Spending on infrastructure—such as building schools, bridges, roads, ports and other public facilities—may do the most to stimulate the economy since the results—better education or transportation networks—can help the economy to be more productive overall. Spending on education, particularly post-K–12 education and training, also tends to help the economy. The GI Bill, which after World War II allowed millions of American veterans to return to college, provided a huge boost to the post-war economy, by training an entire generation of engineers, scientists, doctors, lawyers, business people and teachers. (Before World War II, not so many people went to college. After World War II and the GI Bill, people expected to.)
Earmarks
One of the budgetary categories you may have heard something about are congressional earmarks. Earmarks are amendments to bills moving through Congress that contain money for projects in a representative’s home district or in a senator’s home state. They’ve generated a lot of heat and noise because some of them look like boondoggles, and a lot of them have been described as boondoggles. But one person’s doggle is another person’s boon. So, for example, in one of the most infamous examples, Ketchikan, Alaska’s “bridge to nowhere” actually would have connected the city to the island where its airport is located. That project is controversial even in Ketchikan. I asked a friend of mine who lives there about it and he replied, “Do you want to see me start a fight?” But many of the examples listed as boondoggles don’t look so bad once you understand them. In my own neighborhood, an earmark project that repaved a beat-up stretch of suburban arterial, adding sidewalks and a turn lane, was listed on a Colorado Republican senator’s list of the worst projects in the country. Apparently, one of his staff had interviewed a restaurant owner whose business was hurt by the traffic disruptions caused by the project. I contacted the senator’s office to ask when they’d actually visited the project. I never heard back from them.
But what you should know about earmarks is that they total less than 1 percent of the entire federal budget. We could make them all go away tomorrow and the federal budget deficit would be nearly as big as ever. So while earmarks are a convenient whipping boy for opponents of federal spending, they’re not a significant source of fiscal calamity.
Social Security and Medicare
Another controversial budget category is Social Security. It is the main retirement program for most citizens of the United States. Most industrialized nations have some sort of public retirement program. Today, more than 100 nations—for Algeria to Zimbabwe—have public retirement programs that operate more or less like Social Security. People pay in something, and get something out when they retire. Arguably, it has been one of the most successful and popular programs in the United States, but still not without controversy as the nation’s demographics evolve toward an older average population.
Social Security got its start in the Great Depression. With the advent of more modern medicine and public health campaigns, average lifespans in the U.S. increased by 10 years from 1900 to 1930. Meanwhile, beginning in 1920, more people lived in cities than on farms for the first time in the nation’s history. So, people were no longer self-sufficient farmers who lived several generations in one home, but increasingly were urban dwellers who lived in single-family homes and apartments. With the onset of the Great Depression and high unemployment, many older people lost their jobs. Although some states had public pension systems, it was hard to qualify for them and most of them were woefully underfunded.
Enter Social Security. The early years of the Great Depression led to a lot of reform, including the Social Security Act of 1935. People started paying Social Security taxes in 1937, with payments kicking in over the next three years. At the time, life expectancies after retirement were not great, so few people if any anticipated that people might, someday, collect benefits for 30 years after retirement. In fact, when the act was passed, the life expectancy for a man born in 1930 was only 58 (62 for women), and the retirement age for benefits was 65. Now, on the other hand, if you were born in 1990, you should expect to live at least another 15 years if you’re a man and nearly 20 years if you’re a woman. That puts a strain on the system. In recent times, there are at least 35 million people over the age of 65 in the United States, and the great majority of them are collecting Social Security.
And part of the reason for that is Social Security. In 2008, Social Security provided more than \$600 billion in benefits to more than 50 million Americans, plus another \$43 billion paid to 7.5 million people receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a 1974 program that seeks to cover people who may not have qualified for Social Security. Once Congress adopted automatic Cost of Living Adjustments (COLAs) in the 1970s, Social Security served to virtually eliminate the incidence of poverty among senior citizens. And as everybody pays in, and everybody who worked enough in their lifetimes qualifies, for a long time Social Security was described as the “third rail” of American politics—a reference to the electrified “hot” rail that powers some transit trains. Touch it, and you die.
In more recent times, some conservatives have taken aim at the program. President George W. Bush proposed letting people invest part of their own Social Security tax payments in whatever they wanted. The Great Recession of 2007–2009, which saw the stock market tumble, called the wisdom of that into question, but even before then, voters seemed inclined to reject the president’s proposal. (It was never very popular in public opinion polls. And it’s worth noting that both Social Security and Medicare have much lower expense ratios than do their private sector counterparts [Wall Street investment firms and private insurance companies]. So it’s not a given that the private sector would provide these services more efficiently.)
In 2011, another Texas governor, Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry, called Social Security a Ponzi scheme. Charles Ponzi was a con man who was famous in the 1920s for promising high returns on small investments. Ponzi paid off the earlier investors with later contributions. As long as his fund kept growing, he could keep his investors happy. But eventually somebody figures out that the emperor is indeed, buck naked, and the whole scam collapses. The same thing happened with financier Bernie Madoff in the 2000s. (Ponzi and Madoff both ended up in prison.)
Is Social Security a Ponzi scheme? Current contributions do go to pay current expenses, in a way. For all of its history, Social Security’s contributions have gone into a trust fund, which invests the proceeds in U.S. government treasury securities, one of the safest but not always the best-paying investment in the world. As the nation ages—more older people living longer relative to the number of young people still working—the demands on the trust fund grow relative to the amount of money going into it. In theory, it won’t ever run out of money, but the trust fund could be exhausted by somewhere between 2036 and 2049, depending on who’s doing the estimating. That could mean a decrease in benefit levels.
It’s not impossible to fix this. Several options are available:
• Raise the retirement age. If people have to work longer, they’ll pay more into the system. And, with life expectancies rising, more people are working longer, sometimes just for something to do.
• Raise the tax rate. Never a very popular solution, but one option nonetheless.
• Raise the income threshold. Because wages are taxed for Social Security only up to the first \$106,800 you make, there’s a lot of untapped income potential out there. Again, a politically challenging option because Americans, in general, don’t want to pay more taxes.
Medicare is a slightly different story. It operates much like Social Security—working people pay taxes into a trust fund that provides insurance coverage. It was created by Congress in 1965, at a time when only half of seniors had any kind of health care coverage (and 30 percent still lived in poverty).
And nobody needs health care quite like senior citizens do, so there are great demands on the system. Medicare’s trust fund could run dry by 2024, a situation exacerbated by Congress and President George W. Bush adding a prescription drug benefit—without any increase in funding—in 2003. The plan also barred Medicare from bargaining with drug companies (the Veterans Administration gets to bargain and pays half for drugs what Medicare pays).
Again, the solutions are similar to those found in Social Security—some combination of higher taxes and lower benefits. In recent years, Democrats have proposed broader health care reform that would spread the risk among more people. Insurance programs work best when they cover a broad base of people. Republicans, on the other hand, have proposed privatizing the whole operation, which would mean senior citizens pay much more out of pocket for health care expenses.
Taxes
Taxes: The other side of fiscal policy is taxes. Taxes redistribute income from those who have to those who don’t by funding the above-mentioned activities; they also are used to discourage some activities (such as taxes on cigarettes and liquor) and encourage others (like the income tax mortgage interest deduction, which helps make housing more affordable for many people).
The nature of the taxes used to fund the government also has an impact on the economy. Taxes can beflat, progressive or regressive.
• A flat tax is just that—everybody pays the same rate. Flat taxes are the darlings of the ultra-rich, since many of them would pay less tax than they do now. Flat taxes also are regressive, however. Let’s say the tax rate is 10 percent. Ten percent of Bill Gates’ income would be much more money than would 10 percent of my income or yours. But that 10 percent would mean a lot more to someone who makes a lot less. Someone making \$1 million a year, although paying \$100,000 in taxes, still would have \$900,000, on which, we might guess, he or she still would live pretty well. But 10 percent of the income of someone making \$40,000 a year—\$4,000—would be much more of a hardship for that person. Taxes are regressive when they take a bigger share of low-income people’s money than they take of wealthy people’s money.
• Progressive taxes are those that take a progressively larger share of someone’s income. The federal income tax is graduated, because depending on your income, you may pay 15–35 percent. (Not the whole 35 percent—the top marginal rate is only applied to your earnings over a given threshold, say \$100,000. So the 15 percent applies to the first \$20,000 or so of everyone’s income, and the additional rate—in a series of steps—applies only to what you earn over that.) When the top marginal rate was 70 percent, that appeared to have encouraged people to find ways to legally hide their money from the government, as opposed to investing it and making more money. Parking your money in an off-shore bank account in the Cayman Islands doesn’t do much for the U.S. economy (although it’s good for the Caymans); investing in almost anything in the U.S. tends to do more good.
• Any tax that charges everybody the same, regardless of income, is regressive. So a flat tax is regressive, as are most sales taxes.
Tax cuts also can be a tool of fiscal policy. A tax cut can put more money in consumers’ pockets, thus encouraging spending; a tax hike can help cool the economy off by doing the opposite. Despite the claims that tax cuts will spur economic growth, they don’t seem to have that affect. Tax cuts in the early 1960s, in the early 1980s, and in 2001 and 2003 all failed to make the economy grow much. In the last example, the Bush administration said the tax cut would so spur the economy that the budget deficit would disappear, but as with Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts of the early 1980s, that didn’t happen. The budget deficits just got bigger. What Reagan was arguing, and what Bush was perhaps unwittingly agreeing with, is called supply side economics. Supply side economics were the brainchild of Arthur Laffer, once an economics professor at the University of Southern California. At a party with a journalist, Laffer drew what became called the Laffer Curve on a cocktail napkin (I’m not making this up). Laffer’s idea had some logic to it. He suggested that if taxes were too high, economic activity would be discouraged. And if they’re too low, the same thing happens. If they’re too high, people don’t get enough reward for their efforts. If they’re too low, government doesn’t provide enough services to allow the economy to function. The question remains, however, where we might be on the curve—are taxes too high, too low, or just about right? President Reagan’s argument at the time was that taxes were too high, so that cutting them would spur economic activity and actually generate more tax revenue. Instead, Reagan oversaw bigger deficits than those he inherited from his predecessor, Jimmy Carter.
Who Pays the Most Taxes?
How you answer this question depends on how you slice the economic pie. It’s an important question because taxes allow the government to pay for the services and benefits that people say they want. And as Americans, in general, don’t like taxes, it’s a subject of never-ending debate.
First of all, everybody pays something. One of the Fox News buzz phrases about taxes of recent vintage has been that a flat tax would give everybody “a skin in the game,” borrowing a metaphor from the world of golf (which I still don’t understand). The truth of the matter is that while some people make so little money that they effectively pay no federal income tax, everybody who works pays payroll taxes, which contribute to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. Everyone also pays sales tax in the 45 states that have such a tax. And taxes such as property taxes get passed on to people who rent in the form of higher rent. So everybody, it would appear, has a skin in the game.
As noted elsewhere in this chapter, the United States has a graduated income tax, which means the more you make, the higher your tax rate. The higher tax rate is only applied to income over a certain level. So if the basic rate is 10 percent on your first \$8,500 of earnings, everybody pays that, regardless of their total income. The top marginal rate is 35 percent on incomes over \$379,150. But no one pays that rate on all their income. People who earn more than \$1 million a year, for example, pay an average total rate of 24 percent. The top 400 wage earners in the country paid 18.1 percent in 2008.
Upper income earners do pay the most federal income taxes. The top 1 percent of wage earners—people earning more than \$380,000 a year—pay 19 percent of the total federal income tax bill in a typical year. The bottom 50 percent—people earning less than \$33,000 a year—pay only 2.7 percent of total federal income tax. (The fact that half the country makes less than \$33,000 a year ought to jump out at you, as it raises a whole host of other issues.)
And this is where things get complicated. The top 1 percent also control 50 percent of the nation’s total wealth and earned a little over 20 percent of the nation’s total personal income. Wealth in this case includes stocks, bonds, real estate—anything of measurable value. The top 20 percent control more than 80 percent of the nation’s wealth; the bottom 20 percent is worth effectively zero (meaning that, if anything, they have debt, not wealth). Meanwhile, the very richest Americans—those making more than \$10 million a year, pay only about 25 percent of their income in taxes. So while they pay a lot of tax, they still have a lot to live on.
If you take all federal taxes, most of the money comes from the middle class—people earning between \$34,000 and \$140,000—a year, paying slightly more than 50 percent of the total tax bill. That includes all other federal taxes, including the payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare.
People who think taxes are too high look at the numbers on share of personal income taxes; people who think they’re too low look the relative tax burden. The argument for lower taxes tends to be that with more money in their pockets, the wealthy classes will invest more and make the economy grow. The argument against lower taxes, aside from their effect on the federal budget deficit, tends to be that the so-called job creators aren’t really letting much of the wealth trickle down. Corporate profits rose 16 percent from 2001–2007, but average wages rose less than 1 percent over the same time period. You will, as always, have to make up your own mind as to who’s right in this debate.
Another common complaint is that the U.S. has the highest corporate tax rate in the world, which is more less true in any given year (tax rates do change). But few U.S. firms, if any, pay this rate, thanks to a generous array of allowable deductions and credits. According to the Tax Policy Center, a non-partisan research outfit, the total tax burden in the U.S. is a little over 25 percent of GDP. The next six biggest economies in the world have a higher tax total tax burden (almost 34 percent) and the 34 countries of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) average 34.7 percent. Americans pay slightly more in income taxes, less in corporate taxes, more in property tax and much less in sales taxes than do citizens in other countries.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Budget deficits can have a mixed impact on the economy.
• Fiscal policy can be used to stimulate economic activity.
• Tax increases and tax cuts, a part of fiscal policy, can be used to stimulate the economy or cool it down.
EXERCISES
1. What tax rate would discourage you from working more?
2. What do you think the government should spend money on? What do you think it shouldn’t spend money on? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/08%3A_Eee_Economics_Economic_Systems_and_Economic_Policy/8.09%3A_Budgets_and_Fiscal_Policy.txt |
Learning Objectives
1. Understand the operation of the Federal Reserve.
2. Understand the impacts and limitations of monetary policy.
Another way in which government can affect economic performance is by controlling the supply of money in circulation. This is called monetary policy.
The Wonderful World of Money
First, a word about money. Humans have been using money as a means of exchange for a long time. Early forms of money have ranged from rare shells to cocoa beans; rare metals such as gold and silver also have long been popular. Money is a store and standard of value—it allows flexibility and lowers transaction costs by serving as a medium of exchange. Without money, we’d have to barter. There are groups who promote barter relations between people and businesses, but in order for barter to work, I must have exactly what you want in equal value to what I want, and you have to have exactly what I want. So money greases the wheels of the economy. It’s much easier to just give someone money in exchange for a good or service, versus finding exactly what they want in trade.
Money needs to be portable, divisible, uniform and durable. Gold and silver hence became popular as money because they are soft metals and easy to make coins and bricks out of; they are durable; and you can weigh them to determine if they are what they claim to be.
But they’re heavy. As trading relationships between cities grew in medieval Europe, it became easier to send a paper note representing the value of the gold involved from, say, Florence to Milan, rather than shipping all that gold. Eventually people began to just trade the paper notes; hence paper money was born in the west. (The Chinese also used paper money at different times in their history, but often returned to silver and other metals.)
Gold Bugs
For a long time, paper money was somewhat looked down upon, as the paper has less intrinsic value than does gold. So, typically, paper money was backed by gold; for much of the 19th century, you could go to a bank and trade your paper for gold.
You will hear the occasional critic claim that we should be back on the gold standard, or some other commodity standard. This would severely limit the money supply, which tends to limit inflation. But this also presents certain problems. If you can’t change the money supply, you can’t prime the economic pump when necessary. Moreover, if there’s not enough money in circulation, the economy is less likely to grow, if only because people hoard money (at that point, by definition, it is a scarce commodity). Some scholars assert that the world faced a 20-year depression from the 1870s to the 1890s because there was a shortage of money, a situation rescued only by the discovery of gold in South Africa and elsewhere in the 1880s and 1890s. In the 20th century, most nations, including the United States, jettisoned the gold standard, so that now paper money is the main standard of value. Fans of gold argue that prices have far outstripped the gain in value of gold, but the truth of the matter is that gold is much less valuable now than it was 100 years ago. And paper money, also sometimes called fiat money (and not because you can buy an Italian car with it), is backed by something—by the strength of the economy that issued the money. Around the world, currency values fluctuate along with the performances of the underlying economies.
What matters most about money is how much is in circulation. Money is measured in a couple of categories:
• M1—Cash money, which includes 2–3 percent coins, 25–30 percent paper currency and the rest in checking accounts.
• M2—this includes M1 plus savings accounts and certificates of deposit (CDs).
The Money Supply
Different schools of economic thought disagree on how much the money supply matters. Monetarists say it’s the only thing that matters; others say it doesn’t matter at all. Neither of these points of view makes much sense to me. The evidence is that it does matter, but it’s not the only thing that matters.
True story: A group of couples with young children formed a babysitting co-op. This way they could have babysitters they knew and trusted, and be able to have an occasional evening out. So the group printed up coupons, each good for one evening of babysitting, and gave each couple two coupons. In a short period of time, people were going out less than they had before they formed the co-op. The reason was simple: money, in the form of the coupons, was in such short supply that no one was willing to spend any coupons. Everyone was willing to babysit, but nobody wanted to part with the scarce coupons. Eventually they issued more coupons and people started going out again. At one point, however, they had too many coupons in circulation, and nobody wanted to babysit because there were so many coupons available. So it took a few tries to reach a point where the price of babysitting was neither too high nor too low.
Nonetheless, the world is never entirely free of gold bugs, who argue that a return to the gold standard is the answer to the nation’s economic woes. For example, sometime Libertarian/Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul proposes to do away with the Federal Reserve. (And if not gold, some other basket of commodities.) As we’ve already noted, a fixed money supply would stop inflation. It also would contract the economy right along with prices. With less money, less business will be done. Gold Monday likely would look a lot like Black Tuesday did in 1929. It would also rob the country of the ability to use monetary policy as a tool, both against inflation and recessions.
Managing the Money Supply
Most nations have a central bank that is in charge of managing that country’s money supply. In the U.S., the money supply is largely controlled by the Federal Reserve Board (the Fed). The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress in 1913, creating the Federal Reserve System. The nation had been without a central bank since the 1830s, when President Andrew Jackson blocked congressional efforts to renew the charter of the Bank of the United States. As a consequence, the money supply was under the control of large private banks (and the mining industry, since any new gold strike meant that more money would be in circulation). The nation thus suffered a serious economic downturn about every dozen years or so, which, by the Panic of 1907, prodded government to leaders to take action and create the Fed.
The Fed is an odd mix of public and private. It’s a government agency; its top officials are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, but it’s also a private bank run by private bankers. By not being subject to election, it is hoped the Fed will make the tough choices needed to keep the economy moving, and not worry so much about short-term political pressure.
The Fed has a chairman and vice chairman, and a board of governors, plus 12 regional Fed banks scattered across the country. The Fed controls the money supply through setting the discount rate, reserve requirements, and through open market operations.
• The reserve requirement tells banks how much of their customers deposits they can lend out and how much they have to keep on hand. A lower reserve requirement gives banks more leeway to make loans. Typically, the reserve requirement is around 20 percent.
• The discount rate is the rate the Fed charges member banks (and nearly all U.S. banks are members of the Federal Reserve system) on short-term loans. A higher rate of interest makes money more expensive, which means banks will charge more for loans to their customers. And if you remember the law of demand—at higher prices, consumers want less of a product—you can see that higher interest rates mean less borrowing and less economic growth.
• Open-market operations: This is the Fed’s most common tool. The Fed buys and sells U.S. Treasury securities (remember all those bonds the government sells to fund the deficit?) to influence interest rates and the money supply. If the Fed buys securities (in the open market), investors have more cash in their hands. Under these circumstances, money is more plentiful, loans are cheaper, and economic activity can pick up. If the Fed sells U.S. government bonds, investors have less cash in hand—the money supply shrinks, loans become more expensive, and economic activity slows down.
Why would the Fed do that? The Fed is assigned with two sometimes conflicting tasks: Ensuring economic growth and keeping a lid on inflation. If the economy overheats, inflation can result. As basically a bunch of bankers, the Fed detests inflation, and will try to kill it by tightening the money supply. But if the economy is stagnant or shrinking, increasing the money supply can help nurse it back to health.
Does this work? Sometimes, and sometimes remarkably effectively. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, inflation in the U.S. topped 10 percent. It was killing banks and lenders, destabilizing commerce and industry, and making consumers feel helpless as their savings and investments were eaten up by rising prices. The Fed, under Chairman Paul Volcker, engaged in an experiment in strict monetarism. Strict monetarists believe that the only thing that matters is the precise growth rate of the money supply. So the Fed put the brakes on that, interest rates soared, and the inflation dragon was at least temporarily caged if not slain. As with most policy choices, there were tradeoffs. High interest rates hurt the auto industry (often, you have to borrow money to buy a car) and all but killed the housing industry, which may be as much as 25 percent of the U.S. economy (you borrow a lot of money to buy a house). Inflation went away, replaced by the steepest recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s (and the deepest economic downturn until the Great Recession of 2007). By the mid-1980s, however, the Fed ended its monetarist experiment and the economy began to recover.
Expansionary monetary policy can have a positive effect on the economy. In 1987, easy Fed monetary policy kept a stock market tumble from becoming anything more than a blip. Expansion by the Fed also helped the economy recover in the early 1990s. In the Great Depression, tight money policy probably helped contribute to the worst economic era in the nation’s history.
Nonetheless, monetary policy doesn’t always work. What the Fed can control is the money supply, not demand. And while cheap money encourages people to borrow, nobody’s borrowing if they’re afraid they won’t be able to repay the loans. Businesses in particular don’t borrow to expand production if nobody’s buying in the first place. So, despite constant efforts by the Fed amid the Great Recession of 2007, the economy didn’t fully recover because nobody was borrowing anyway. Arguably, things could have been much worse without the Fed’s actions, but at some point, lower interest rates and plenty of available money becomes the equivalent of pushing on a string: the back end moves, but the front end of the string goes nowhere.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• The Federal Reserve Board controls the money supply in the U.S. Most nations have a central bank that performs a similar function.
• Monetary policy can make the economy heat up or cool down, but monetary policy by itself may not be enough to encourage consumer or business demand.
EXERCISES
1. What tools does the Fed use to influence economic outcomes?
2. Why might monetary policy sometimes not help the economy recover? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/08%3A_Eee_Economics_Economic_Systems_and_Economic_Policy/8.10%3A_Monetary_Policy.txt |
Learning Objectives
1. Understand the trade-offs involved in the regulation of the economy.
2. Understand some of the ways in which the government regulates economic activity.
The third area of government intervention in the economy is perhaps the most controversial:regulation. Regulation imposes both costs and benefits on consumers and businesses, and frequently represents substantial tradeoffs between economic efficiency and protecting people and the environment. Regulation both helps and hampers economic performance. Too much regulation can choke an economy, but it is also arguable that no regulation will allow too many market failures (and no amount of reading Ayn Rand will change that). People too often look at either the costs or the benefits; let’s try to consider both.
Regulation shows up in a variety of ways, from standardized weights and measures to workplace safety rules. Regulation imposes costs and benefits; it both helps and hurts economic performance. Ironically, a lot of regulation comes at the request of the regulated, oftentimes as a way to limit competition and create economic profits. More about all of this as we go.
Weights and measures is a good example of just what regulation does. Standardizing a pound—so that when you buy a pound of flour, you know you’re getting a pound, has costs and benefits. The cost is the equipment needed by the flour mill to be certain that every bag comes out the same. The benefit is lower transaction costs for the consumer—you don’t have to bring a scale with you to check the merchant’s measurement. But while most regulation does pretty much the same thing—lowering some costs while raising others—much of it is more controversial than the weight of a pound.
The Evolution of Regulation: Is That Any Way to Run a Railroad?
In the United States we have had economic regulation since colonial days, from standardized weights and measures to rules about who could do what to whom. The adoption of the U.S. Constitution, however, limited the ability of states to regulate commerce that crossed over their borders, in one stroke of the pen creating one of the world’s widest-ranging free markets. This played no small part in both the development of the nation and its growing wealth.
However, by the late 19th century, amid the industrial revolution, people began to notice various market failures, or at least the uneven rewards that markets sometimes dole out. Farmers, whose biggest problem was most likely too much debt and falling food prices (prices fell throughout the 19th century as productivity rose), clamored for regulation of railroads. They believed that railroads were charging too much to haul agricultural products. Railroads were the dominant interest group of the late 19th century—railroads were the only way to move goods east to west.
The power of railroads demonstrates my Third Law of Political Economy: Economic interests are politically dominant to the extent that they are economically dominant. And although the railroads were often badly run, they did enjoy high profits as long as they didn’t have much competition (and in the late 19th century, there were no highways, no airplanes, not even the Panama Canal). Because railroads were a dominant economic interest—you pretty much had to use them to ship anything—they had political power, particularly in northern and western states. That led them to dominate state legislatures, which at that time elected U.S. Senators. So railroads had a lot of pull in the U.S. Senate, which then as now could say yes or no to presidential nominations to the federal courts. Consequently, the courts consistently ruled that neither the states nor the federal government could regulate railroads, and railroad interests dominated national politics.
The railroads, Congress, courts and constituents battled it out in court and at the ballot box, until finally in 1887 Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission. Over the next few decades, the ICC was given enough teeth to regulate the prices and practices of not only railroads, but also the trucking and bus industries, so that until the 1970s, there was little price competition among freight haulers. Unfortunately for the railroads, they became heavily regulated just when competition finally appeared, in the form of trucks, highways, aircraft, faster steamships and the Panama Canal. Railroads were hurt so badly by regulation that America’s rail system went from the finest in the world to one of the most pathetic, and only recently have rail firms begun to recover.
Airlines underwent a similar bout of regulation beginning in the 1930s, but they asked for regulation from the federal government to end “ruinous” competition and preserve the industry. For the next 40 years, only rich people flew, and the prices charged were the same for everyone. Airlines competed only on service, and only two new routes were approved at a time when the nation’s population was on its way to doubling.
Finally, in the 1970s, economists and policy makers began to realize that all this regulation had created a highly inefficient transportation sector, whose products and services were overpriced and whose businesses were badly run.
Deregulation came on in a big way in the 1970s and 1980s. This has made business more challenging for all transportation firms, but that’s what competition is supposed to be about, isn’t it? The transition has been painful; lots of airlines and trucking companies went out of business, and profits for the remaining carriers fell. The answer might have been to not regulate such businesses in the first place—where there’s room for competition, markets can usually sort things out—but hindsight is easy, isn’t it?
On the other hand, safety regulation has made workplaces safer and more predictable; environmental regulation has made the environment cleaner. Critics of regulation like to point to the cost of such regulation, but they never bother to add up the savings in workers who aren’t injured, in lakes and rivers that you can swim in again (and that don’t catch fire, as some did in the 1970s), and in lower health care costs from cleaner air. The fact that regulation sometimes goes too far doesn’t lead to the conclusion that zero regulation is better still. One only has to think of the recent problems with dangerously bad food imported from China to understand, for example, the importance of food safety regulation.
This is, of course, my opinion, and you needn’t agree. At a minimum, regulation represents a lot of tradeoffs. Regulation imposes costs and benefits on everyone. Costs are higher for producers, which they usually pass on to consumers. On the other hand, some costs are lower for producers because, if they’re adhering to the law, they should face lower legal costs, and their costs won’t be different than their competitors if everyone faces the same regulations. Costs for consumers, in terms of safety and predictability, also are lower. The same is true for regulation of workplace safety—higher costs in terms of compliance, lower costs in terms of fewer work hours lost to injury; and for pollution and environmental damage—higher costs for meeting pollution requirements, for both producers and consumers, and lower costs for society from less environmental damage and health problems.
Electric Dreams: the Life and Times of Regulation and Deregulation
From the time Thomas Edison figured how to make a practical electric light bulb, electricity had a huge impact on human existence. In a few decades, we went from a world lit only by fire (to borrow the historian William Manchester’s phrase) to one where people could and did stay up later, because there was light. How to accommodate this new wonder in terms of business models and regulation quickly became a lightning rod issue for both business and government.
As we’ve already discussed, public enterprises such as power and water districts arise in part because they are what are called natural monopolies—the market is more efficiently served by one provider. That’s because it wouldn’t make financial sense for firms to build a separate set of water, power or sewer lines every time a business or homeowner switched from one provider to another. Natural monopolies such as these tend to be regulated—state agencies rule on pricing decisions by private firms that are natural monopolies; in the case of public firms such as a local water district, they have an elected board of directors who can be unelected if they don’t do a good job of both maintaining the system and keeping rates low. For much of the 20th century, this was the prevailing wisdom.
Whereas deregulation of airlines made flying a lot cheaper for everyone, some deregulation hasn’t worked as well. Deregulating trucking and airlines was a success for consumers if not for the deregulated firms. In the midst of the euphoria over deregulation, some folks began to argue that traditionally regulated monopolies such as electric utilities also could be deregulated.
What changed? During the first half of the century, electric rates fell as generating became more efficient. Utilities, usually regulated at the state level, didn’t have to go state utility commissions to ask for rate hikes. (Utilities had in fact sought state-level regulation so as to avoid tangling with big-city political machines, who could and would just say no to business.) So even though they weren’t always very well run (such as including the cost of their political activities in their electric rates, which was pretty much illegal all over the country), no one complained because electricity only got cheaper. But as technological improvements reached a plateau, costs stopped falling at a time when electric service was expanding and population was booming. By the 1960s, rates were rising. Consumers complained, and eventually got state legislatures to fund consumer advocates. Now, when utilities asked for rate hikes, there was somebody there who could tell the state utility commission that perhaps this rate hike wasn’t justified. By the 1970s, utilities started losing rate cases.
And so they sought deregulation, arguing that it was possible to have competition for electric service (through a somewhat complicated method called “retail wheeling,” by which the electricity in your outlet came from the same generator, but somebody else got paid for it). More than 20 states toyed with the idea, and about a dozen went for it.
It didn’t work all that well. In the most egregious example, the state of California saw its electric rates soar and rolling blackouts become a regular feature of the electric landscape. Electric generating firms (surprise!) said they had to pull generating equipment off line for maintenance (thus restricting supply and raising the price). California’s system was particularly badly designed—firms bid into the market with offers of service, and the highest price bid was the price that everybody got. Seven electricity suppliers eventually all pled no-contest to charges of rigging the market.
But even outside of California, things haven’t gone so well. Prices generally have risen and there isn’t much competition, except for the largest consumers of electricity. Why? Simple supply and demand. A residential household just doesn’t buy enough electricity to make it worth a generator’s while to spend the time and money to win that account. And you probably don’t spend enough on electricity to make you want to shop around. (The promise of deregulation was competition and cheaper electricity. But some states went so far as to institute temporary price caps—limits on the price of electricity—and some even barred people from switching electric suppliers more than once a year. So, what kind of market needs a price cap? And what kind of market is it if you can’t shop around?)
When to Regulate?
What we might learn from all of this, once again, is that where’s room for real competition, markets can work. But where there isn’t, some regulation might be in order. The other, overall point to understand is that the government plays a large role in the economy, and that regulation is one part of that. We should at least ask who is hurt and who benefits from any given piece of regulation; what are the costs and benefits of regulation; and does this regulation address a market failure or simply interfere with the efficient operation of the market? So, for example, I tend to think that gasoline price regulation (which people call for every time the price goes up at the pump) merely interferes with an otherwise functioning market, whereas air traffic safety regulations tend to ensure that airlines have no temptation to cut corners in order to make more profits. But you, as always, will have to make up your own mind on this.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Regulation imposes both costs and benefits on consumers, producers and on society as a whole.
• Regulation can be used to limit competition, which can raise prices. It also can limit prices where there wouldn’t otherwise be competition.
• Businesses sometimes oppose but sometimes seek regulation.
EXERCISES
1. Think of an economic activity in your area. How is it regulated? (For example, food safety regulations that impact the college cafeteria.) What would it mean if it had more or less regulation?
2. Should governments impose more or fewer regulations on economic activity? Why?
3. What is the rationale for regulating a business? When might that be a good idea or a bad one? What kinds of things might we think about when thinking about regulation? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/08%3A_Eee_Economics_Economic_Systems_and_Economic_Policy/8.11%3A_Regulation.txt |
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09: International Relations
Learning Objectives
In this section you will learn:
1. How the concept of sovereignty affects international relations.
2. The formal difference between a nation and a state.
In the world in which we live, the globe is divided up into sovereign nations. Remember that asovereign state is one in which the state in the form of the government is the highest earthly power—there’s no place to appeal a decision of the state except the state itself. So a sovereign state has defined borders that are respected by its neighbors, and control over its own territory. In this part of the discussion, when we use the term “the state,” we really mean a sovereign nation, not a political subdivision such as a U.S. or Mexican state. States in federal systems such as the U.S. and Mexico are formally referred to as sovereign states, but they are still ultimately dominated by national governments.
And this is where the challenges of international relations begin. In much of our discussion of politics, it is presumed that the state holds power and uses it as the people who control the state see fit. The power may be divided into different branches and levels of government, or not divided; through mechanisms such as elections different people may assume power and state policies may change as a result of those elections. This presumption of a kind of state and a kind of allocation of power casts the study and practice of politics in a certain light. There is a way to resolve disputes; ultimately, somebody has the power to say yes or no and, absent violent revolution, everybody has to go along. But in a world of truly sovereign states, which recognize no higher authority than themselves, the system is best described asanarchy: Ultimately, nobody is really in charge. And that is a different ballgame.
So first, let’s be clear once again on the term sovereign: A sovereign state is said to be the ultimate authority within its own boundaries, borders that are respected by its neighbors. The government is legitimate in the eyes of the citizens, who generally obey the law. The United States is a sovereign nation; so are France and Indonesia. Most of the 192 recognized nations on earth are in fact sovereign nations.
Somalia, on the east coast of Africa, isn’t quite. The nation is currently divided into three parts. First is the erstwhile legitimate government of Somalia, which controls very little of the country, mostly in the south, and is beset by various warlords and religious factions. In the middle is a functioning state calling itself Puntland, which does not seek independence from Somalia but, at this point, might as well be. In the north is a state calling itself Somaliland, which is largely functioning as a sovereign nation although few other countries currently recognize it as such.
This world of sovereign states came together in a treaty called the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. That treaty ended the 30 Years War, literally a three-decade-long conflict between Catholic and Protestant rulers and their subjects that tore apart what is now Germany and caused widespread suffering across Europe. Throughout history, people have found creative and largely pointless reasons for killing each other. But the upshot of the treaty was that states had a right to order their affairs, in this case the largely northern, Protestant principalities of Germany and what was then called the Holy Roman Empire. The treaty, in effect, created the notion of sovereignty as an acknowledged fact of international law and diplomacy, and the Europeans exported the idea from there to the rest of the world.
European colonialism, as when the European nation states carved up Africa at the end of the 1800s, forced sovereignty onto sometimes disparate groups of people that had previously been more or less sovereign nations in their own parts of the continent. Only two African states—Liberia, which had been carved out earlier in the century by freed American slaves, and Ethiopia, which had been successfully fending off invaders for a thousand years—survived the onslaught. Although Africa had long been home to a number of substantial kingdoms and empires, the Europeans by the late 1800s had taken a technological leap forward that allowed them to conquer the continent in a few decades. The redrawing of the African map lumped together groups of people who had previously been part of different states, creating political challenges when the Europeans were forced out after World War II.
A world comprising sovereign states means that there is no overarching world power that can tell them what to do. Why not, then, a world government to sort everything out? First, most if not all the sovereign states would have to agree, and both political leaders and ordinary citizens tend to dislike having someone else tell them what to do. The farther away that someone is, the less they like it. Visions of black helicopters and invading U.N. troops were the stuff of many Americans’ paranoid nightmares in the 1970s and 1980s, despite the lack of any reality to this fear. Even if such a government could be established, the variety and diversity of the world would make it very difficult to rule, even in a highly democratic state. A world government would have to keep control and settle local and regional disputes, becoming, in the process, as despotic as the states it replaces, if not more so.
So, what we are left with are a lot of sovereign states, and a world system that is based on that single fact. And as there is no referee or overarching power, one state can erase another, as when Prussia and Russia effectively erased Poland, once the biggest state in Europe, from the map in 1795. The Poles, and their language, culture and traditions remained, but the Polish state did not reappear until 1918. This does not mean that a state can act without consequence. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, states from around the world united in the effort to drive the Iraqis out and re-establish Kuwaiti sovereignty. Later in the same decade, Europeans and Americans joined to end ethnic cleansing in what was then Yugoslavia. So no state operates in a vacuum.
What remained of Poland after its 18th century partition, and what most defines a place such as Somalia today, is a nation. In the precise terminology of international relations, a state has defined borders, but a nation has a cultural, linguistic or ethnic similarity among a group of people. A nation is a sense of community among a group of people; that group of people may want to control themselves politically and become a nation as well. So, for example, the Kurds, of whom around 30 million live in the Middle East, are a nation but not a state. They are divided chiefly between Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran, comprising the largest single ethnic group in the world without its own state. Kurdish separatists have fought for independence in Turkey, and all but carved out a sovereign state in the north of Iraq. But at the moment, the Kurds remain a nation, and not quite a state.
Sometimes, we speak of a nation-state, an entity which combines elements of both these things. The United States, perhaps alone among the states of the world, is a nation based on an ideology rather than an ethnicity. Still, the U.S. is sometimes given to nationalism, a sense of how to act and think, a sense of right and wrong, and a sense of separateness from others that includes a sentimental attachment to one’s homeland. Americans are not unique in this regard, but do tend to exhibit it more than others. This is sometimes called American exceptionalism, or the belief that the United States is unlike other states and in fact has a special destiny in the world. In fact, all states are unique in their own ways. Whether the U.S. has a special role to play is for you to decide.
Sometimes the system is dominated by a hegemon—a single state that is powerful enough to exert some influence on world politics. Hegemony means leadership or dominance of one person or state over others. In the case of international relations, Great Britain exercised a degree of global hegemony in the 1800s; the United States has exercised a similar role in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. But a hegemon is not all-powerful, and the price of maintaining hegemony can be very high. Consequently, states are either stiving for hegemony, or for a balance of power, so that no hegemon arises. The anarchic system is world politics is in fact anti-hegemonic, as it resists attempts by any one power to take over the whole world.
States interact through diplomacy, international law and war. The Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) referred to war as “War is merely the continuation of policy by other means.” Clausewitz wasn’t completely a warmonger, so his famous quote probably shouldn’t be taken to mean that he thought it was OK to go on the warpath. However, in contemporary international politics, war can be seen as the failure of policy, given the extraordinarily high cost of modern warfare.
To that end, states often prefer to find other ways to solve disputes. For that reason states pay some attention to international law, which seeks to constrain the behavior of states. International law exists through treaties and agreements negotiated by states, and through rule-making mechanisms in multinational agencies and groups. They also attempt, through diplomacy, to try to convince other states to make choices that will be beneficial to the state, the region or the world. Diplomacy works when both sides are rational, in the sense that they each have some understanding of their own self-interest. We will see examples of efforts to achieve change in this way later in this chapter.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• The world is a collection of autonomous, sovereign states, which creates a world system that is effectively anarchic in nature.
• States interact with each other through international law, diplomacy and, sometimes, war.
EXERCISES
1. What makes a state sovereign? The world has a number of states that want to be sovereign but are not universally recognize by other states. Why not?
2. Consider the idea of American exceptionalism. Is the United States truly different from other countries, with a special destiny? Why or why not? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/09%3A_International_Relations/9.01%3A_The_Challenges_of_the_State_System.txt |
Learning Objectives
In this section you learn about:
1. Realism, liberalism, constructivism, feminism and neo-Marxism as ways of explaining international relations.
2. Considering other factors to explain why states behave the way they do.
The study and practice of international relations has led international relations scholars to suggest different ways that states might and should behave with regard to their neighbors around the world.
Realism
Realism suggests that states should and do look out for their own interests first. Realism presumes that states are out for themselves first and foremost. The world is therefore a dangerous place; a state has look out for No. 1 and prepare for the worst. When George W. Bush convinced the U.S. Congress that he should send in U.S. soldiers into Iraq in 2003 and take out Saddam Hussein, this was realism in action. Realism suggests that international relations is driven by competition between states, and states therefore do and should try to further their own interests. What matters, then, is how much economic and especially military power a state has. When your neighbor misbehaves, you can’t call the police.
Classical realists say this is just human nature. People, by nature, are at some level greedy and insecure and behave accordingly. So even if you’re not greedy and insecure, you have to behave that way, because that’s the game. Structural realists say it’s more about how the world is organized—an anarchic system creates the Hobbesian state of nature, referring to the 16th century English philosopher who justified the existence of the state by comparing it to a somewhat hypothetical “state of nature,” a war of all against all. So states should seek peace, but prepare for war.
This tends to make national security look like a zero-sum game: Anything I do to make myself more secure tends to make you feel less secure, and vice versa. A realist might counter that a balance of power between states in fact preserves the peace, by raising the cost of any aggression to an unacceptable level.
Realists argue that war, at some point, is inevitable. Anarchy persists, and it isn’t going away anytime soon.
Liberalism
Liberalism suggests in fact states can peacefully co-exist, and that states aren’t always on the brink of war. Liberal scholars point to the fact that despite the persistence of armed conflict, most nations are not at war most of the time. Most people around the world don’t get up and start chanting “Death to America!” and trying to figure out who they can bomb today. Liberalism argues that relations between nations are not always a zero-sum game. A zero-sum game is one in which any gain by one player is automatically a loss by another player. My gains in security, for example, don’t make you worse off, and your gains in anything don’t make me worse off. Liberal theory also points to the fact that despite the condition of anarchy in the world, most nations are not at war, most of the time. So the idea that international relations must be conducted as though one were always under the threat of attack isn’t necessarily indicative of reality.
There are different flavors of liberalism. Liberal institutionalism puts some faith in the ability of global institutions to eventually coax people into getting along as opposed to going to war. Use of the United Nations, for example, as a forum for mediating and settling dispute, will eventually promote a respect for the rule of international law in a way that parallels respect for the law common in advanced democracies. Liberal commercialism sees the advance of global commerce as making less likely. War isn’t actually very profitable for most people, and it really isn’t good for the economy. Liberal internationalism trades on the idea that democracies are less likely to make war than are dictatorships, if only because people can say no, either in legislatures or in elections. Consider that public protest in the U.S. helped end U.S. involvement in Vietnam—that kind of thing doesn’t always happen in non-democratic states.Although it can. Argentina’s misadventures in Las Malvenas—the Falkland Islands—led to protests that brought down a longstanding military dictatorship and restored democracy to the nation in 1982. Together, these three are sometimes called the Kantian triangle, after the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who outlined them in a 1795 essay,Perpetual Peace.
Figure 9.1 [To Come] Prisoner’s Dilemma Chart
The liberal argument that states can learn to get along is somewhat supported by the work of Robert AxelrodRobert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books, 2006., who used an actual experiment involving a lot of players and the prisoner’s dilemma game to show how people and perhaps states could learn to cooperate. The prisoner’s dilemma is a fairly simple game that is useful for understanding various parts of human behavior. In this game, you have two players, both prisoners. Each player has two choices: Defect to the authorities and rat out the other player in exchange for a reduced sentence, or cooperate with the other player and go free. If the players each defect they get 1 point apiece; if they cooperate they get 3 points apiece. If, however, one player cooperates and the other defects, the defector gets 5 points and the cooperator gets zero. Given that set of constraints, in a realist world, both players defect and score only 1 point each. The best result would be for both to cooperate, go free, and generate the most points between them. In the Axelrod experiment, the game was iterated or repeated, so that in a round-robin featuring dozens of players, each player played the other player multiple times. The players were all notable game theorists, and each devised a particular strategy in an attempt to win the game. What Axelrod found was the player in his experiment who used a strategy called “tit-for-tat” won. Tit-for-tat simply began by cooperating, and then did whatever the other player did last time in the next round. In a repeated game, which certainly describes relations between states, players eventually learned to cooperate. Axelrod cites real world examples of where this kind of behavior occurred, such as the German and Allied soldiers in the trenches of World War I, who basically agreed at various times not to shoot each other, or to shell incoming shipments of food. As the soldiers came to understand that they would be facing each other for some time, refraining from killing each other meant that they all got to live.
Constructivism
Constructivism is another and also interesting way of looking at international relations. It may tell us more about why things are happening the way they do, but somewhat less about what we should do about it. Constructivism argues that culture, social structures and human institutional frameworks matter. Constructivism relies in part on the theory of the social construction of reality, which says that whatever reality is perceived to be, for the most part people have invented it.Of course, if the theory were entirely true, then the very idea of the social construction of reality would also be socially constructed, and therefore potentially untrue. To the extent that reality is socially constructed, people can make choices. Hence the constructivist argument is, in part, that while the world system is indeed a form of anarchy, that does not demand a realist response to foreign policy. People can choose to otherwise. So constructivists might argue that the end of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was at least in part a decision by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to change his thinking. He attempted then to ratchet down tensions with the U.S., and to liberalize Soviet society.Bova, 2012, p. 26. The fact that the Soviet Union promptly disintegrated doesn’t change that.
2.4 Combining theories to explain: The Cuban missile crisis
Although constructivism can be a bit mushy, some clear versions of it are quite interesting and useful in helping to understand why states behave the way they do. Realism tends to treat states as single, rational actors—as though the state were a single being, behaving in a consistent fashion with a constant eye to its own interest. As detailed by the scholar Graham AllisonGraham Allison, Essence of Decision, 1971., the rational actor model of analysis sees states nearly as single organisms, pursuing policies with some planning and coherence. Allison used the 1963 Cuban missile crisis, in which the United States and the Soviet Union nearly came to blows over the Soviets’ efforts to put nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba, to explain how other factors could explain why states behave the way they do. Allison suggests two other models. In the organizational process model, the regular behavior and processes of government agencies (bureaucracies) tends to dictate how and why things happen in government. So, for example, one of the ways in which U.S. officials were able to figure out that the Soviets were building missile sites was from aerial reconnaissance and satellite photos of the sites. Despite the fact that the Soviets were trying to keep the missiles a secret, so they could be set up and ready to go if the Soviets should have to confront the U.S. in anyway, the sites they were building looked just like all the Soviet missile sites they’d ever built.
In the governmental politics model, internal political struggles can lead to decisions that may at least be questionable. In this case, Soviet President Nikita Khruschev may have been pushed by internal political forces to put missiles in Cuba. President John F. Kennedy faced internal pressure for air strikes on the Soviet sites in Cuba, but resisted them.
In the end, the two sides were able to negotiate their way out of the standoff and ratchet down the rhetoric. The Soviets pulled the missiles out of Cuba; the U.S. pulled missiles out of Turkey—like Cuba for the U.S., right on the Soviets’ doorstep—and promised not to invade Cuba. What’s also useful and interesting about Allison’s work is that it shows how using different theories together can explain why states behave the way they do. Putting missiles in Turkey and Cuba was a realist approach to international affairs. A constructivist view can tell us why things happened the way they did: The culture and politics of the U.S. and the Soviet Union led them to make decisions, and respond to each other’s decisions, in ways that can’t be viewed as entirely rational. And, finally, the solution came from a somewhat liberal approach to policy: Sit down, talk it out, reach an agreement and pull back from the brink. Although in succeeding decades where the missiles were placed became less of an issue, as each side developed weapons that could hit any spot on the globe from anywhere else, despite all the weapons, nobody fired a shot. Despite more than five decades of nuclear tension, threats and military buildup, the world failed to blow itself up.
Feminism
Realism, liberalism and constructivism may be the three most prominent theories of international relations, but they are by no means the only ones or the most important. Feminist scholars look at international relations through the prism of gender relations, noting that for much of human history, women have been relegated to a sideline role in politics and government. This isn’t wise: More than half the people in the world are women. Nonetheless, males have dominated both the study and practice of international relations, but feminist scholars note that women’s roles as wives, mothers and workers have made all of that possible. Also, a female perspective on foreign policy might be different.Feminist theory sometimes argues that having more women in positions of power could change things, as women may be more likely to believe peace through international cooperation is possible.
Feminist international relations theory has variants, of course. Liberal feminism wants to ensure that women have the same opportunities in society as do men, so that means liberal in the broader sense of general support for democratic capitalism. Critical feminism, on the other hand, sees capitalism as the source of women’s oppression, and seeks to create new structures for society. Cultural or essentialist feminism stresses the differences in how women view and think about the world. It argues that women’s approach to the world would be more likely to bring peace and avoid conflict.
As usual, there’s probably some kernel of truth in all of these ideas, and places where we could find cases that contradict these notions. Clearly, for example, women tend to be less involved in violent crime, and women in some parts of the world are being sold into slavery and prostitution, where their lives are largely controlled by men. On the other hand, it was a female politician, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who marshaled her country’s military to go to war with Argentina and reclaim the Falkland Islands in 1982. But while history is full of valiant female warriors and strong leaders—from the Trung sisters and Trieu Thi Trinh of Vietnam, to Joan of Arc, and Queen Elizabeth I—they are much less common than are men famous for their conquering exploits. And the women warriors, generally, are famous for having defended their homelands as opposed to conquering somebody else’s. While some men have felt threatened by the rise of feminism in the last 60 years, it really is an opportunity to look at the world in a slightly different way, perhaps shedding some light on why things happen the way they do.
Neo-Marxism
Neo-Marxists look at international relations through the perspective of our old friend Karl Marx. Remember that Marx saw the world in terms of its productive relations, so that the way in which we organize production determines social and political relations as well. Neo-Marxist theory applies this to international relations, and tends to argue that capitalism drives states to compete and attempt to dominate each other.
For example, under the variant known as Marxism-Leninism, named after the Russian revolutionary leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–924), world relations are really defined by the desire for industrial nations to develop both sources of raw materials and markets for finished products (what Lenin called the core and the periphery). Lenin was writing at a time when most of Africa had been carved into colonies by the European powers, and the British Empire still stretched from Africa to India to Hong Kong, so there was some evidence for what he was saying. The collapse of the Soviet empire and China’s turning away from purely Marxist economics has taken some of the steam out of the Marxian railroad of history, and we may not agree with Marx and Lenin’s suggestion that a socialist dictatorship is a necessary step on the road to nirvana. But it could be wrong to completely reject their analysis. Economic problems and conflicts do continue to inform international relations, and states do continue to try to acquire raw materials as well as markets for finished goods. China, for example, is investing heavily in Africa to lock up supplies of minerals for its growing manufacturing sector. The Chinese apparently aren’t always the best employers. To the extent that they mistreat African workers, the states where this happens will face the competing demands of a big country that is paying them a lot of money for resources, and the needs of its own citizens who work for the Chinese.
Neo-Marxists might point to this an example of where liberal commercialism is really just the capitalist class protecting its own. China is nominally still a communist state, but its economic system is really much more a sort of state-sponsored capitalism. Capitalism, Neo-Marxists argue, in its relentless quest for rising profits, leads to the degradation and impoverishment of workers. The realist explanation of U.S. policy with regard to Central America is that the U.S. propped up right-wing dictatorships there because they opposed communism. The other explanation was that U.S. commercial interests, such as the United Fruit Company, pushed to maintain their stranglehold on the banana industry. This helped lead, for example, to a CIA-sponsored coup in Guatemala 1954. The company had convinced the U.S. government that the democratically elected Guatemalan president was pro-Soviet. What is known for sure is that he was promising to redistribute land to Guatemalan peasants, which would have threatened the company’s monopoly on the banana trade.
In the view of neo-Marxist analysis, the Cold war was about the threat to U.S. business interests. The same would be true for the first and second Gulf Wars, with the U.S. fighting Iraq in part to preserve access to Middle Eastern oil. The United States intervened when Iraq invaded Kuwait much more quickly than it intervened in the former Yugoslavia, when Serbs were killing Bosnian Moslems in much greater numbers than Iraqis were killing Kuwaitis. Neo-Marxism also is realist in its orientation, since it presumes that conflict and potential between states is the reality of international affairs. But in their eyes, that conflict is driven by the conflict between business interests and workers.
Combining Theories to Explain: Mexico and the Drug Wars
Let’s look at these perspectives using Mexico as an example. Many of Mexico’s foreign policy issues involve the United States. The U.S. is Mexico’s biggest trading partner; Mexican workers in the U.S. send back a lot of money to their families still in Mexico; and U.S. drug policy has helped lead the Mexican government into an ongoing war with drug lords. That in itself raises a question: Why does Mexico persist in fighting the drug war when drug consumption is a much bigger problem for the United States than it is for Mexico?
From a realist perspective, Mexico is not in a position to go to war with the U.S., so working with the U.S. seems a much more likely alternative. As Mexico’s overall economy is so dependent on sales to and from the U.S., Mexico will do what it can to protect and preserve an open trading relationship between the two nations. A liberal perspective might suggest that Mexico put pressure on the U.S. to address its own consumption problem, while continuing efforts to bring the drug lords to heel. A constructivist approach might suggest that the real problem for Mexico is poverty and the disparity of wealth in the country; it is generally not rich people who go out and decide to sell illegal drugs. It might also suggest that Mexico’s leaders can and should make choices that differ from what realism or liberalism might suggest. A feminist analysis might suggest that Mexico’s somewhat patriarchal society leads it to overlook more peaceful avenues to solving the problem. A neo-Marxist take on it all would suggest that the capitalist nature of Mexico’s economy virtually ensures an unequal distribution of wealth, leading the poor to seek other means of empowerment, and the rich to seek to maintain the system that helped them become rich in the first place. There may be some truth to all of these ideas; you will have to decide what makes sense to you.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Realism suggests that because of the condition of anarchy in the world, the world is a dangerous place, and states should prepare accordingly.
• Liberalism suggests that rather than focusing on war, states should seek to use diplomacy, international institutions, and commerce as ways of building peaceful relationships with other states.
• Constructivism suggests that human institutions often influence states to make certain choices, blinding them to other foreign policy options.
• Feminist theory looks at international relations with an eye to gender relations, stressing both the historical role and the potential role women can play in foreign policy.
• Neo-Marxist theory suggests that productive relations—capitalism—causes states to compete with each other for scarce resources, negatively affecting workers in the process.
EXERCISE
1. In 2001, following 9/11, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. Which theory of international relations would account for this action? Using the other theories, what else might have been done instead? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/09%3A_International_Relations/9.02%3A_Theories_of_International_Relations.txt |
Learning Objectives
In this section you will learn:
1. The difficulty of basing foreign policy on moral standards.
Another conundrum of international relations is that private morality and the morality of public policy may not always coincide. On a personal level, most of us wouldn’t kill somebody. But with the state’s exclusive legal franchise on violence, states do send their soldiers off to kill other people, without penalty back home. Rightly or wrongly, states view that use of force as serving a higher purpose—preserving the state—that outweighs the personal rejection of murder as a tool of policy.
Some would argue that public morality—how states behave—should match how people expect to behave all the time. So a state is never justified in supporting tyranny in another state just to serve its own interests, nor should it commit acts overseas that it would never tolerate at home. Others argue that since a state must provide security to its citizens, it may be compelled to take extraordinary actions to preserve that security.
Sometimes the morality question appears to be 50 shades of gray. In the early 1980s, U.S. policy toward El Salvador was a subject of much debate inside the United States. Vietnam was still fresh in people’s minds, so it was a period when we were less likely to send in the Marines to try to clean things up. Nonetheless, the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was still smoldering, and the U.S. found itself supporting a right-wing government that wasn’t noted for its respect for human rights and liberties. The opposition appeared to have Marxist leanings, so the U.S. government presumed they would support the Soviet agenda and export revolution to other non-communist states in Central and South America. The Salvadoran government, meanwhile, allowed if not encouraged right-wing paramilitary “death squads” to chase after the left-wing revolutionaries who opposed the government. So the U.S. found itself in the morally ambiguous position of supporting a government whose practices ran counter to much of what the United States says about itself.
A leftist professor at a seminar at the time emphatically declared that “A just person does justice,” implying that a good person would oppose the U.S. position and thereby support the rebels. But if you were to look carefully at the situation, may not have been as black-and-white as that professor tried to paint it. How does a just person do justice when justice in general appears to be in short supply?
In the case of El Salvador, it might have been possible for U.S. leaders to make other choices. The Salvadoran civil war, as it became to be known, was driven by poverty and extreme inequality of wealth. When civil unrest over extreme poverty and lack of economic opportunity grew, the government responded by violently cracking down on protests. The war lasted from roughly 1979 to 1992, with at least 70,000 people killed. Military successes by the rebels eventually led to peace negotiations and the rebel groups have since been allowed to participate in the political process.
From the U.S. point of view, the Carter and Reagan administrations saw evidence of the threat of Soviet and Cuban influence among the rebels. Now that the fog of the Cold War has cleared somewhat, that assessment may have been exaggerated; other accounts say that the main rebel groups were not interested in Soviet-style communism. The other issue for the U.S., operating from a realist perspective, was that failing to support the Salvadoran government would send the wrong message to both allies and to states on the fence amid the Cold War. A liberalist or constructivist approach to the problem, however, might have counseled putting pressure on the Salvadoran government to positively address the issues that were driving the rebellion in the first place.
The same ambiguity confronted U.S. citizens who opposed or supported U.S. efforts in Vietnam. While it was one thing to protest, say, the Vietnam War, it was quite another to argue that the Vietnamese communists were simply good-hearted revolutionaries along the lines of the American Founding Fathers. This was perhaps as nearsighted as blind support for the South Vietnamese government, which was also not a shining example of classical liberalism. But in the 1960s and 1970s, a number of opponents of the war tried to paint the Viet Cong as simple revolutionaries fighting to free their homeland. In fact, the war was as much about North Vietnam’s desire to reunite the country as it was about communism, and the north quickly marginalized the Viet Cong when they succeeded in defeating the south in 1975. The communist rulers of the reunited Vietnam proceeded to kill a lot of people, and sent a lot of people to camps for “re-education,” and generally curtailed civil and economic liberties. Unless you were a diehard Marxist, these were not the good guys any more than the South Vietnamese government had been the good guys. Since then, while Vietnam’s economy has since been liberalized, its political system has not. For example, journalists in Vietnam still get thrown for writing stories that are critical of the government.
Contrast El Salvador with Nicaragua, where at about the same time the U.S. pulled the plug on an oppressive, anti-communist dictator only to see a Marxist government take over and oppress different groups of people. This time the U.S. found itself supporting the rebels, while the new Nicaraguan government sought to limit civil and economic liberties of its citizens. One could argue that this was the right thing for them to do, or not. In any case, the resulting war eventually led to elections, and the somewhat Marxist Sandinistas were peacefully removed from power. an war; any close examination of the situation should have revealed a decided lack of white hats and good guys on either side. Again, the U.S. in this instance took a realist view of the situation and looked out for its own interests first. This happened even after Congress barred U.S. funding for the Contra rebels in Nicaragua; the Reagan administration began to secretly sell weapons to Iran, using the profits to fund the Contras. The U.S. ultimately got what it wanted—a non-Marxist government in Nicaragua—at a significant cost in human lives there.
The question remains, however, of how a “just person does justice” when justice is in short supply. So it can be a bit of a challenge to argue that foreign policy should be absolutely moral, because human beings can justify almost anything as moral. Any war probably looks like a just war to the people who are waging it. Granted, there is a line that we shouldn’t cross. No sane person argues that something like the Holocaust is moral, and the assumptions that underlie arguments for “a just war” may be absurd. But what is unconscionable in one setting may appear necessary in another.
These are the kinds of choices policymakers face, although that doesn’t mean that morality can’t enter into their decisions. During the Bush administration, U.S. officials, working overseas in places such as the Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba, used what amounted to torture to extract information from suspected terrorists being held there. International law forbids torture under any circumstances; Bush administration officials said it was justified so as to prevent further terrorist attacks on the U.S. In retrospect, many of the hundreds of detainees apparently were not terrorists, and the information gained from various forms of what amounted to torture was of questionable value. Bush administration officials argued otherwise, though the bulk of the evidence appears to be side with critics of the Guantanamo operation. It did put the U.S. the awkward position of appearing to ignore treaties, such as the Geneva Conventions, which protects the rights of war prisoners, to which the U.S. is a signee.
KEY TAKEAWAY
• Morality is not entirely absent as a concern in foreign policy, but can be difficult to define and apply.
EXERCISES
1. What do you think is justified in terms of foreign policy behavior? Are there situations where a state would be justified in taking extraordinary measures to protect its citizens?
2. To what extent should a powerful state such as the U.S. look out for itself first? Is that simply a wise policy, or simply a too-narrow definition of what U.S. interests are? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/09%3A_International_Relations/9.03%3A_The_Problem_of_Morality.txt |
Learning Objectives
In this section you will learn:
1. The role and function of intergovernmental organizations.
2. The role and function of actors outside of the formal state, such as non-governmental organizations and multinational corporations.
The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s changed the foreign policy equation radically. Gone, or at least greatly reduced, was the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. It has been replaced by a somewhat multipolar world, in which the United States is the dominant military power, but finds itself among competing power centers in Europe, China, India and Russia, with radical change occurring in the Middle East and North Africa, potential conflicts with Iran, and the threat of global terrorism a reality since the tragedies of 9–11.
So while this is a world still defined by anarchy, it is not a world that appears to sit on the edge of some version of World War III. The issues that define foreign policy may have more to do with resource allocation and environmental protection than with negotiating a nuclear standoff. So the end of the Cold War coincided with and perhaps accelerated the rise of other organizations who are now players in the field of international relations. While some of these institutions grew out of the end of World War II, their role in the world perhaps been magnified since the 1990s.
International Institutions
Even as the Cold War dragged on, the nations of the world created international forums for attempting to address disputes between nations. World War I, the war to end all wars, as it was known at the time, prompted the victors to create an international body known as the League of Nations. At its peak, it included 58 nations, and created a number of forums for addressing political and economic issues. It lasted from 1920 to 1942, and suffered immediately from the failure of the United States to join. The U.S. became rather isolationist following World War I, the end of which created only an uneven peace and seemed to foster as many problems as it solved. Nonetheless, the league represented the high point of intrawar idealism, built on a belief that nations could talk instead of shoot, and that diplomacy would solve more problems than would bombs. Despite its best intentions, it was largely powerless, and the member nations failed to act when Italy invaded Italy unprovoked in 1935. The league effectively collapsed with the start of World War II.
Following the end of the war, however, the nations gathered to try it again, creating the United Nations in 1947. The U.N., headquartered in New York City, declared its support in its charter for a broad range of human rights, and attempted to provide a multilateral forum for talking things out. Although every member nation gets one vote, a certain number of decisions must be funneled through the 15-member Security Council, which consists of five permanent members, including the U.S., France, China, Russia and the United Kingdom. The other 10 members are elected by the General Assembly to two-year terms, with each region of the globe represented on the council.
The five permanent members each has veto power, and can block action by the council. And since the members are often taking what can only be described as a realist perspective on their approach to foreign policy, Russia may seek to block concerted action in war-torn Syria, where it has interests, just as the U.S. will block U.N. resolutions to condemn Israel’s handling of the Palestinian question.Which is, in case you’ve missed it, whether there will ever be a fully sovereign Palestinian state. The Security Council’s permanent membership is overwhelmingly white and western. One suggestion has been to add Brazil, India, Germany and Japan (sometimes called the G-4) as permanent members, plus perhaps one African and one Arab state. The existing permanent members haven’t exactly jumped on that bandwagon, as doing so would reduce their power on the council. The U.S. supports adding Japan and perhaps India; the Chinese oppose adding Japan. Great Britain and France have supported adding the entire G-4.
The U.N., through its member nations and its various branches, has had some success. Member nations have contributed combat troops for peacekeeping missions, which attempt to separate belligerent groups in one country or region so as to forestall all-out war. It has in fact, since its inception, negotiated 172 peace settlements that have prevented all-out war in various parts of the world. U.N.-led efforts, via the World Health Organization, to stamp out various diseases have met with some success, as few nations will object to efforts to end deadly diseases such as smallpox. U.N. cultural efforts have probably also helped preserve important historical sites all over the world, and have at least underscored the importance of preserving some of our shared past. So while the U.N. hasn’t managed to end war, it has not been an abject failure.
The U.N. includes the International Court of Justice, which has been used to settle disputes between nations. It has 15 justices elected from the U.N. General Assembly, and while the Security Council has the ability to enforce its decisions, council members may also veto that action. Consequently, the court has acted with mixed success. In 1984, for example, the court ruled that U.S. efforts in Nicaragua in fact violated international law; the U.S. ignored the decision. In other instances, the court has been able to help solve border disputes between nations. Special courts also have been established by the U.N. to try war criminals from conflicts in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
Other international organizations have had some impact globally, particularly in economic areas. TheWorld Bank and the International Monetary Fund have attempted to spur economic developments and end poverty, with decidedly mixed results. Critics abound on both the left and the right. Conservative critics say they waste too much money; liberal and left critics say it simply helps cement the economic dominance of the western world. Sometimes they fund projects that make sense, such as wastewater treatment projects around the world, while at other times, they support efforts, like digging a canal to flood a seasonal river in Africa to produce fish in the desert, manage only to produce the most expensive fish in the world. Similarly, the World Trade Organization (WTO), which is basically a forum for resolving trade disputes and for encouraging open trade, is neither all good nor all bad.
Not every intergovernmental organization (IGO) is global in scope. The world is peppered with regional organizations, ranging from the European Union (EU) to the Organization for African Unity.
Figure 9.2 [To Come]: Intergovernmental Regional Organizations
The EU is particularly noteworthy. It grew out of the end of World War II, beginning with a customs union to ease trade between Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. From there it grew into trade agreements over coal and steel, to the European Common Market, and finally to the EU in 1993. It now has 27 member states in a political and economic union. While not quite the United States of Europe, it does have an elected parliament with the ability to make some common law for the entire group, and a common currency, the euro. Travel and trade over national borders is greatly eased, and crossing from one EU state to another is now little more complicated than crossing from one U.S. state to another.
No other intergovernmental organization is quite that extensive. For example, ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Countries, has 10 member states and focuses on promoting economic development and shared expertise and resources. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a relic of the Cold War. Originally created to help forestall Soviet aggression in Europe, it remains a mutual defense pact between the U.S., Canada and much of Europe. An attack on one member is regarded as an attack on all, so that the U.S. response to 9.11 was in fact at NATO response.
To the extent that international institutions work at all, it is because nations adhere to what the institutions say. While a hard-line realist perspective would encourage ignoring the U.N. or the WTO, a liberal perspective would suggest that nations go along if only because it’s in their interest for others to do the same. A nation can’t very well expect another nation to observe the rule of law if it doesn’t do so itself. International law therefore works because of reciprocity—each state expects the others to behave the same way, so it adheres to the law to encourage others to do the same.
Non-Governmental Organizations
Non-governmental organizations, or NGOs as they are often known, are essentially groups of citizens, often of multiple nationalities, who work together to try to achieve social change on a global scale. So in one way they are international interest groups, lobbying for change with the governments of the world. But they also often are groups who take action, working for better treatment for political prisoners (Amnesty International), better health care (Doctors Without Borders), or better access to clean water (Rotary International and WaterAid).
NGOs rely on moral suasion—compelling governments to do what is right and learning to see that as in their own self-interest. They also rely on fund-raising in wealthy countries so they can deliver services and help people in less-fortunate parts of the world. They can and do make a difference, from building schools in Ethiopia to providing clean drinking water in Angola and Bangladesh. Governments sometimes get unhappy with the representatives of NGOs and kick them out, but like a pesky wasp, they will try to come back when possible. In democratic states, NGOs take on the role of interest groups who then push for particular approaches to foreign policy.
Multinational Corporations
The largest companies on earth now span the globe. McDonald’s has restaurants in 100 countries; Wal-Mart and its French counterpart, Carrefour, can be found around the world. Ford builds cars in the U.S., Canada and Europe; General Motors models are produced in both Detroit and Shanghai. Airbus is attempting to circumvent competition with Boeing by building a plant in the U.S., and Toyota, Nissan and Honda have built cars in both the U.S. and Japan for nearly 30 years.
So, realistically, these companies and the people who run them owe their allegiance to no country in particular. They are merchant princes now, whose interests are scattered around the globe and whose reach is consequently that broad. This makes it harder for sovereign states to clamp down on their activities. The era of global capital means they are fluid and mobile. They can leave if they have to. Of course leaving a market entirely poses problems for sales, and the reason firms locate in multiple markets is to develop sales in those markets. But as the goal of those firms, as with most if not all firms, is to make a profit, they become political players in trying to get sovereign states to keep markets open and trade flowing, regardless of what other costs that might entail.
Multinational corporations may move operations to nations with lower human rights or environmental standards; companies moved factories from the Philippines when that nation adopted more worker-friendly labor laws. On the other hand, rising standards of living and more wealth represented by those jobs tend to eventually put pressure on governments to improve human rights and environmental conditions, though that can take a long time.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• The post-World War II and post-Cold War eras have seen the rise of extra-governmental organizations, and intergovernmental organizations, as major players in international relations.
EXERCISE
1. Identify and research an NGO. What is this organization’s objective? In what countries does it operate? What is its annual budget and where does it get its funding? Does it appear to be successful? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/09%3A_International_Relations/9.04%3A_Post-Cold_War_International_Relations.txt |
Learning Objectives
In this section you will learn:
1. How the nuclear question has changed but remains a feature of international relations.
2. The challenges of applying economic sanctions as an instrument of foreign policy.
Despite all that has changed in the last three decades, nuclear weapons issues persist into the 21st century. The nations that admittedly have nuclear weapons—the United States, China, Russia, Britain and France—have signed a nuclear non-proliferation treaty, in hopes that the weapons will not be spread elsewhere. Nonetheless, Israel has them and Iran is trying to develop them; North Korea has them although it lacks a consistent delivery system. India has them and so does its arch-rival Pakistan. And still, since their sole usage in World War II, nobody has used them in war.
In fact, weapons of mass destruction have never been used except against people who don’t have them. Poison gas was used by both sides in the First World War. At the time it was the most horrible weapon ever devised. The Italians under Mussolini used them against Ethiopia when they conquered that country in 1935–36. So there was great fear that World War II would see renewed use of these weapons. And yet neither side did. In fact, at one point U.S. forces inadvertently fired gas-laden artillery shells at some Italian troops. They immediately contact the Italians and apologized, and there was no reprisal. They were not used again until Saddam Hussein used them against rebel Shiites and separatist Kurds who attempted to overthrow him following the First Gulf War in the early 1990s. Moreover, since the end of the Cold War, the number of nuclear weapons has declined from 65,000 in 1985 to under 25,000 at present.
Still, the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran causes no small concern in the west. The Iranians claim their nuclear program is for energy generation only, although western analysts dispute this claim. The quixotic government of Iran, which combines democratic elements with an Islamic theocracy, makes no secret of its desire to wipe Israel off the map. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said, among other things, that Iran’s enemies are seeking to create drought in the country by destroying rain clouds before they reach Iran. He also has claimed that the Holocaust and the deaths of six million Jews never happened. Moreover, Iranian support for terrorist groups makes western leaders fear that they will give them a bomb, with resulting destruction that would make 9–11 seem trivial by comparison.
The realist perspective on this problem, which some conservative American and pro-Israeli politicians have advocated, would be to attack Iran and try to destroy its nuclear program. Allowing Iran to develop nuclear capabilities would not only allow it to attack Israel, a U.S. ally, but also to dominate its neighboring states and threaten the world’s supply of oil. An Iran-Israel nuclear war would threaten to grow into a much broader conflict, with dire consequences for everyone, including the U.S.
The liberal approach would be necessarily different. The fact that Iran is a big country and that the nuclear program is spread all over it doesn’t seem to deter the realist line of thinking, even as U.S. military leaders suggest we are very unlikely to take out all of their nuclear development sites. President Ronald Reagan once spoke of what he called “constructive engagement,” by which we would work with another state to try to coax them along to where we want them. But while the Reagan administration advocated this approach with allies, such as South Africa, then non-communist but still driven by the racist policy of apartheid, the president and his advisers never seemed to try this with anyone they really disagreed with.
The advantage of constructive engagement—tempting and cajoling the other side into doing what you want them to do, as opposed to just trying to force them—is that it maintains the moral high ground for the U.S., and doesn’t antagonize relations with most other Muslim states. So the liberal approach would be to talk first and shoot last, and hope it never comes to that.
President Barack Obama, in contrast to George W. Bush, tried this approach with Iran, and it’s difficult to say what it achieved. Like North Korea, Iran’s government seems intransigent when it comes to negotiations. And like North Korea, they may be using the threat of attack by western powers as a way of maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of a restive populace, including a lot of young people who have a hunger for western goods and culture and who don’t march around shouting “Death to America!” Given that the Iranian regime’s real goal may be something other than or at least in addition to nuclear weapons, they may see it in their interests to continue the standoff with the U.S. and other western powers for the foreseeable future.
Part of the response of the west to Iran has been economic sanctions, by which states agree to suspend or limit trade in some or all goods with the targeted state. Sanctions are difficult to make work. First, they have to affect the leadership of the country. So Iranian voters would have to vote out the ruling factions in government, who then would change course for Iran’s nuclear program. Given that religious authorities in Iran control who makes the ballot, this seems unlikely. For the most part, sanctions tend to hurt ordinary people more than they hurt governments. Sanctions also need to target third-party states, who may not be part of the sanctions effort and would prefer to continue trading with the target state. So while the U.S. the EU and a host of other nations have halted trade with Iran in everything from military hardware to oil equipment, Iran continues to trade with China. The sanctions on oil technology appear to be having some impact on the Iran’s economy, but the Iranian government continues to drag its feet over its nuclear program. Multiple U.N. resolutions also have called upon Iran to give up the program, with little effect.
Does this mean this relatively liberal approach to Iran should be abandoned for military action? Not necessarily. Military action comes with its own costs, and wouldn’t necessarily end Iran’s nuclear ambitions. The combination of diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions and offers of economic aid may yet do the trick.
Contrast this with the approach to North Korea. One of the world’s last communist states, it has nuclear weapons and an economy that is so bad its citizens face the constant threat of malnutrition and starvation. It has test-fired missiles over Japan, and still has occasional small-scale military clashes with South Korea. Three generations of rule by the Kim family have been maintained by rigorous control of public information, painting a picture that whichever Kim is in power is the only thing that stands between the people and annihilation by foreign powers (the United States). This further complicates negotiations with the north because pressure from the outside, and North Korea’s resistance, helps cement the state’s legitimacy at home. Consequently, the reason for the north to have nuclear weapons is precisely to invite the attention of foreign powers. Nonetheless, despite agreement among the Russians, Chinese, Americans, South Koreans and Japanese that the north should end its nuclear program, no one is threatening military action. The South Korean government favors reunification with the north, but is willing to wait for it to happen. Perhaps they think that North Korea’s economy is so bad that the state will eventually collapse from within.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• The nature of nuclear weapons issues has changed since the end of the Cold War.
• Economic sanctions face certain challenges to be effective, but can have an impact on targeted nations if there is widespread compliance with the sanctions.
EXERCISE
1. What different approaches could be used in dealing with Iran or with North Korea? Which approach would you favor and why? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/09%3A_International_Relations/9.05%3A_The_Nuclear_Question%2C_Revisited.txt |
Thumbnail: pixabay.com/photos/handshake...-hand-2998302/
10: Applying What Youve Learned- Three Issues
Learning Objectives
In this section you will learn:
1. How international trade works, and what it means to people.
2. How international trade affects politics.
Trade is a controversial issue because it can make some people richer and some people poorer. Trade has great benefits as well as costs; it is neither all good nor all bad. Trade can mean lower prices, higher quality and more selection for consumers. It can force domestic producers to be more efficient. It can also cost people jobs, drive down wages in some industries, and contribute to environmental damage. The thing we might understand most fundamentally about trade is that it tends to help a lot of people a little, and to hurt a few people a lot. Keep that in mind as we explore the topic of international trade.
Free trade—trade with limited or no barriers between nations—has been a widespread policy goal since World War II. Trade barriers erected at the outset of the Great Depression helped make the depression worldwide and perhaps contributed to the rise of Nazism, fascism and World War II. So beginning first with an international agreement known as the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) in 1947, the nations of the world have worked to lower trade barriers. Make money, not war has been the battle cry of the current era.
In political science terms, this approach to international relations has been called liberal commercialism. If the nations of the world are interconnected through commerce, the reasoning goes, they will be less likely to make war. Is this true? In 1909, before World War I, Sir Norman Angell wrote a well-regarded book arguing that war was not really profitable for anyone. His argument has sometimes been misunderstood as saying commercial ties will make war less likely. That didn’t prove to be true; World War I, however, wrecked the economies of Europe for decades. But economic ties at least raise the cost of war, and that was Angell’s point.Sir Norman Angell, The Great Illusion. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2010. The fact that 100 years later, the book remains in print, ought to suggest something about the power of Angell’s arguments.
That GATT was replaced in 1995 with the World Trade Organization, or the WTO, which attempts to set the terms of international trade. It has the unenviable job of trying to balance the desire for open markets against nations’ desires to preserve jobs and the environment. It has provoked riots and protests around the world, but trade continues unabated. Like all international organizations, it lacks a serious enforcement capability, but nations have generally abided by its terms, if only because they want other nations to do the same.
A good example of how free trade can work is the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was adopted between the U.S., Canada and Mexico in 1992. NAFTA was spurred by Mexico, as that nation’s leadership came to realize that 80 percent of their economy was tied up in buying from and selling to the United States. Any disruption to that relationship would spell economic catastrophe for Mexico, so they sought an agreement with the U.S. to cement that trade relationship. NAFTA provides for no tariffs, and a way of resolving trade disputes through negotiation. Although the presidential candidate H. Ross Perot—who had a potential free-trade zone at an old airport that was likely to be worth a lot less if NAFTA was approved—once described the impending flight of jobs to lower-wage Mexico as destined to produce “a giant sucking sound,” the tariff or tax on imports from Mexico before NAFTA was only 3 percent. A 3 percent tariff was not preventing anybody from moving a factory south of the border. Mexico has weaker environmental laws than the U.S., but diversifying development away from Mexico City was likely to help that issue. In any event, higher wages in Mexico are likely to mean, in the long run, less illegal immigration to the U.S. and more wealth with which to deal with problems such as environmental damage. That being said, 20 years of NAFTA has not radically altered the political or economic landscape of North America. The agreement has failed to produce either all the benefits or all the costs that were both promised and warned about when it was adopted. And that’s the story in general with the results of free trade: Not as good as promised, not as bad as predicted.
Figure 10.1 [To Come] Trade between Canada, U.S. and Mexico
The Logic of Trade
Why trade to begin with? Why not produce what you need at home and preserve jobs in the process? There is an economic logic to trade, and that’s one of the reasons why it’s not all bad.
The idea that underpins international trade is the theory of comparative advantage. All of the arguments for global trade are based on this one theory. Like a lot of theories, there is evidence for it and evidence against it.
The most basic way to understand comparative advantage might be to put it this way: Make what you’re good at, and buy what you’re not good at. On a purely personal level, this should be easy to understand. We’re not all equally good at everything. Let’s say you major in accounting at college, and become proficient. You pass your CPA exam, and get a good job with a firm or even go out and start your own firm. One of things that will happen is that you will spend a lot of time at work as well as making a living wage. Your time is about to become more valuable. So, when you were a starving college student, perhaps you changed the oil in your car yourself because you could do it and save the money you would have spent at Minute Monkey or some other local oil change business. But, comparatively speaking, as a successful CPA, in some ways it makes more sense to pay a nearby mechanic to change your oil, because he’s better and faster at it than you are and your time is really better spent on a client’s tax return, or better spent just not working.
That’s comparative advantage: Do what you’re good at, and pay somebody else to do the other stuff. This translates to national economies as well. In the classic hypothetical situation, we have a two-person economy consisting of Bob and Carly.
Figure 10.2 [To Come] Comparative Advantage with Broccoli and Cabbage
This economy consists of two commodities: broccoli and cabbage. Now Bob can produce two broccoli and three cabbages in a given time period, whereas the ever-resourceful Carly can produce three broccoli and five cabbages. So, at first glance, things don’t look good for Bob. But under the theory of comparative advantage, Carly should make cabbages and Bob should produce broccoli. Why? Whereas Carly has an absolute advantage in both products, she stands to gain the most by making cabbages. She gives up more by producing broccoli. Bob thus should make broccoli, because he gives up less to do so. He thereby has a comparative advantage in broccoli.
There are clear examples where this is true. It would be possible to grow citrus fruit in Canada, perhaps in heavily climate-controlled greenhouses. But it would be very expensive fruit. Better for Canada to grow trees and produce lumber, and leave oranges to Florida, Mexico and Brazil. Nobody argues with this kind of comparative advantage, rooted as it is in geography and climate.
But in fact most trade is in similar kinds of goods, such as automobiles and parts, aircraft and parts, heavy equipment and raw materials. Rich nations trade with other more often than anybody trades with poor nations. Canada remains the United States’ biggest trading partner, and among the biggest category of what we trade with each other is automobiles and parts, which are produced in abundance on both sides of the border.
And even then, trade gets tricky. Softwood trees such as spruce, pine and hemlock grow well on both sides of the border, and despite their generally rosy relationship, the U.S. and Canada are frequently in dispute about softwood lumber exports. U.S. lumber producers argue that Canada’s low taxes on timber harvests constitute an unfair advantage. Canadian timber producers will argue that they need that tax break in order to compete with more productive forests south of the border. Both sides want to preserve jobs in the timber and wood products industries; both sides face lobbying pressure both from workers and business owners.
These kinds of trade disputes get even more complicated with more complicated products. Take commercial jetliners, for example. During World War II, the U.S. produced most of the Allies’ heavy bombers, which meant that U.S. firms left the war poised to seize a comparative advantage in producing large commercial aircraft. Some European firms attempted to build commercial jet transports, but they weren’t as good as the planes built by U.S. manufacturers such as Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed. The DeHavilland Comet, the first commercial jet transport, tended to come apart in mid-air, which was not very popular with passengers or pilots.
Building commercial aircraft, however, was a point of national pride for the Europeans, as well as a potential source of jobs and a way to maintain technological and engineering skill. So firms from Great Britain, France, Germany and Spain joined to form what became known as Airbus. Airbus was heavily subsidized by the governments of the member firms—literally billions of dollars in “loans” that, apparently, will never be repaid—and Airbus was able to become competitive in the commercial jetliner market. Essentially, they pushed McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed out of that business, so that only Boeing and Airbus remained as dominant competitors in the large jetliner business. What’s important to understand here is that if you invest enough money, you can buy a comparative advantage. The theory of comparative advantage would have said that the Europeans shouldn’t build jets, and the Japanese shouldn’t build cars, and the Chinese shouldn’t be building anything. Theory, however, provides few jobs and pays no taxes.
It doesn’t always work; the French once spent a lot of money trying to develop a domestic computer industry, without much success. However, the ability to buy a comparative advantage undercuts the entire theory, since making what I’m good at may depend on how much I’m willing to invest in becoming good at making it.
It should also be noted that virtually no nation has built its economic success on free trade. The U.S. and Europe built up their economies in the 1800s in large part via protectionism—limits on imports while trying to maximize exports to other countries, while protecting jobs and profits in domestic industries. The roaring success stories of the last half century—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore—pretty much did the same thing. To a lesser extent, China has practiced the same approach to trade and economic development.
Pro-free trade economists would argue that if other governments want to subsidize the heck out of their products, we should sit back and enjoy the lower prices. This, however, creates the Wal-Mart conundrum. Wal-Mart, which gets about 80 percent of what it sells from China, is in fact a very efficient firm that offers lower prices on many products. However, it also pays very low wages and offers few affordable benefits to the majority of its employees. Wal-Mart has even gone to so far as to coach their employees on how to apply for public assistance, because many of them earn so little they qualify for some kinds of welfare benefits. So, to some extent, the lower prices are offset by the low wages. Low prices are of limited consolation if you’re not making any money to begin with.
The Case Against Trade
There are a number of arguments against trade, not all of which make sense, but which are worth considering:
It promotes low wages. This is true domestically, since if a factory threatens to move overseas, it’s usually in pursuit of lower wages. However, while workers overseas are making less than their American or European counterparts, they’re probably making more than they were before, or they wouldn’t have taken those jobs. So in other countries it may force wages up. Meanwhile, workers in the countries which lost the jobs typically don’t make as much as they did in their old jobs.
It promotes poor working conditions. This much seems to be true. The wages in overseas factories in nations such as China are generally good by local standards. However the working conditions can be terrible—long hours, no overtime, dangerous conditions. In fact, it looks a lot like factory conditions in Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th century, conditions that were only addressed through extraordinary political efforts that included legalizing unions and creating workplace safety laws. Chinese workers frequently are unionized, but like non-communist Chinese political parties, they are powerless.
It costs countries jobs. There’s certainly some truth to this. The United States lost more than 800 shoe factories between 1972 and 1992, and very little clothing is made in the U.S. anymore. These were not, on the whole, highly paid jobs, but if it was your job and it walked away, this couldn’t have been much fun.
The United States in particular has been slow to do anything about lost jobs. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration had a trade assistance program for people who lost their jobs due to trade, but it was nearly impossible to qualify for and helped very few people. Only recently has government stepped up to try to help people who need to be retrained for new work. Nonetheless, in general, the jobs that people find after trade displacement don’t pay as well as the jobs they lost. On the other hand, there’s also a structural problem that has little to do with trade: Manufacturing employment has been falling worldwide for decades—it simply takes fewer people to make a widget than it used to.
The infant industry argument: To get an industry going, it may be necessary to protect it from competition until it gets on its feet. The evidence is not good that this works, however; only Harley-Davidson, among major American companies, has successfully used protective measures to recover from a down period and become profitable again.
The strategic industry argument: Without protection of vital national industries, a nation may lose capacity in important sectors such as shipping and shipbuilding. For a nation that sees itself as having global interests, such as the United States, this has to be a serious concern.
Similarly, some economists argue that nations should not do so much to protect domestic agriculture, probably the most protected sector in the global economy. Much to the frustration of poorer countries whose economies are still heavily dependent on agriculture, richer nations still erect substantial barriers to trade in food and agricultural products. Part of that is because farmers are usually politically influential—farm-region and farm-state legislators tend to be cohesive and focused on farm issues, and basically nobody hates farmers. It’s hard to dislike someone whose job is growing food. But perhaps more importantly, a nation that couldn’t feed itself would be vulnerable to any kind of interruption in trade—either war or natural disaster. Allowing one’s food domestic food supply to wither away, strategically speaking, is pretty much like putting a gun to your own head.
Overspecialization could leave a nation’s economy vulnerable to downturns in a particular sector. This has been especially true for nations that have relied on a particular industry, such as nations whose foreign earnings depend on sales raw materials, such as minerals such as tin or copper. If copper prices fall, you’re in trouble.
Nations who let their industries wander away to other countries also lose technological expertise and industrial infrastructure that makes it harder for them to participate in the next big thing, whatever that might be. As with food, disruptions in supply could then mean difficulty in acquiring products that people want.
Dumping: An exporting nation could engage in dumping—selling goods at below cost to drive competitors out of business. There’s some evidence that this happened with Japan and television sets in the United States. There’s less evidence in other industries, such as steel. What’s also apparent is that U.S. firms failed to build on their comparative advantage in many industries after World War II. They got greedy, and didn’t push their advantage with new technology and more innovative ways to pay workers to get wages to reflect actual costs and profits.
Environmental damage: This could be the single biggest argument against unfettered trade. For example, in the United States, the next bite of food you take traveled an average of 1,500 miles to get your plate. The pollution generated by transporting stuff around the world that could be produced closer to home—such as manhole covers from India to the West Coast of the U.S.—is one of the leading sources of greenhouse gases, which appear to be the main source of climate change. More about that later. Trade also can result in localized environmental degradation, such as cutting down tropical hardwood forests to produce chopsticks for the U.S. and Asia.
The Political Dimension of Trade
In terms of politics, nations are faced with conflicting demands. On the one hand, trade has helped economies grow and lifted more people around the world out of poverty. Domestic political interests push for both more trade—such as firms that export a lot—and for less trade, such as firms that must compete with foreign producers, and also labor groups who hope to see their members continue to have jobs.
This has led to an ongoing movement for fair trade, which usually means that the foreign producer has been fairly treated and paid. So, if you buy certified fair trade coffee, the grower in Burundi or Costa Rica is supposed to have been paid a better-than-market price for his crop. The market price is the price per pound currently being offered on world coffee markets, and markets don’t much care if you’re in the poorhouse or a millionaire. In commodities markets, such as wheat and coffee, the crop is worth what somebody is willing to pay for it, and not a dime more.
So governments around the world face conflicting demands when it comes to trade. To date, free trade advocates have been winning, despite widespread citizen protests against trade and globalization. Remember Sell’s First Law of Political Economy: The decision is made in the direction of the greatest value. Usually that’s money. So if increased trade makes somebody richer, the interest groups that represent those people will successful pressure government to keep trade barriers down. Governments have the idea of liberal commercialism on their side, so that makes it easier to accept the idea that more free trade will be better for everybody. And once free trade is established, the cost of reversing it gets added to the balance sheet. Limiting imports and thereby raising their prices won’t be any more popular than watching jobs get shipped overseas.
Trade Deficits and Currency Exchange
The one trade issue about which you shouldn’t lose any sleep is the trade deficit. If a nation exports more than it imports, it has a surplus. If it imports more than it exports, it has a deficit. The United States has run a trade deficit since the 1960s. If, personally, you had in essence spent more than you earned over the last 50 years, you would either be broke or heavily in debt, and maybe both. However the U.S. trade deficit is in fact a tiny portion of the U.S. economy and hence not a major issue.
For example, in 2010 the total size of the economy was \$14.6 trillion. The total trade deficit was \$497.9 billion. That’s about 3 percent of the total economy. We run a trade deficit in goods, which is partially offset by a surplus in services and by earnings of U.S. firms from overseas operations.
Left alone, this situation will resolve itself. Ultimately a U.S. trade deficit forces the value of the dollar down. Our trading partners end up holding more dollars than they know what to do with, and that surplus of dollars means they are worth less. Money is a commodity like any other. Meanwhile, the currency of the nation with the trade surplus gains in value, since there’s a higher demand for that currency from nations who want to buy that country’s goods and services. Those shifting currency values, by themselves, would address trade imbalances. For the nation with a weaker currency, imports become more expensive since it takes more dollars to acquire the equivalent amount of yen or euros. Exports, meanwhile, become cheaper for foreign buyers, since they need fewer euros to get the right amount of dollars. So exporting firms are helped, although consumers will see higher prices.
That’s all true if currency values are allowed to float on open markets. An issue between China and the rest of the world is that China has tended to assign its currency at a fixed exchange rate relative to the dollar and the euro, for example. As China has been running a trade surplus, the yuan would normally be rising in value against the dollar and the euro, making Chinese exports more expensive but lowering the price of imports for Chinese consumers. Why are they doing this? Because the Chinese Communist Party maintains legitimacy in part through providing continuing economic growth, and a slowdown in its export-driven economy would mean higher unemployment and more civil unrest. So the U.S. and Europe continue to push China to let the yuan float, and the Chinese keep holding back. As serious as this issue sounds, you should keep in mind that if the yuan did float, it would only address about 3 percent of the U.S. trade deficit with China.
Trade Policy Options
Presuming that we might be most concerned about the jobs issue, what should be done about trade? For much of modern history, the usual answer was tariffs, which are simply taxes on imported goods. Tariffs raise the price of imports, and make domestic goods more cost-competitive. The GATT and the WTO have largely done away with tariffs, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. When, as in the 1800s, tariffs were up to 50 percent of the price of a good, they did indeed reward inefficiency among domestic producers and make it difficult for foreign firms to compete. However a low tariff, say 2–3 percent, wouldn’t penalize or reward anybody too much, and the money could be used to help people who lost their jobs because of trade.
Truly protective tariffs, which would make imports unaffordable, are expensive. They cost a lot of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars per job for jobs, such as those at textile mills, that don’t actually pay all that well. Unfortunately, tariffs have been replaced by non-tariff barriers, which still make products more expensive but don’t produce any revenue. In short, they leave consumers holding the bill.
Non-tariff barriers include quotas, which are limits on the number of units that can be shipped into the importing country. U.S. steel firms, which emerged from World War II with a comparative advantage over the rest of the world, failed then to invest in new products and processes and so fell behind Europe and Japan. Producers in Europe and Japan, having been destroyed by the war, were forced to build new mills with the latest technology. U.S. firms responded by getting quotas on steel imports. Foreign steel makers responded by moving into specialty steel, where U.S. firms had previously held an advantage, and so they lost that business too. American steel manufacturers have limped into the 21st century after dominating the 20th.
Another form of non-tariff barriers include health and safety requirements. The Japanese protected that country’s tiny and nearly sacred apple industry safe from competition with U.S. apples by barring imports for fear of an infestation of the coddling moth, which can in fact devastate orchards. It wasn’t until U.S. producers shipped apples packed in nitrogen gas—so that no pests could live—that the Japanese finally opened up that market. The Japanese did the same with various arcane measurements on automobiles, contending that U.S. cars were not safe. Of course, it didn’t help that Japan is a right-hand drive market, and U.S. cars exported to Japan still had the steering wheel on the left side.
A nation also could simply devalue its currency, declaring a low official exchange rate to raise the price of imports and lower the price of its own exports. This in effect is what China has done. Nations also engage in export subsidies: using various financial means to make buying your products cheaper for foreign customers. The U.S. uses the Export-Import Bank to make loans to buyers of U.S. products, particularly Boeing aircraft. Finally, nations rely on domestic content legislation: Laws that dictate that a given product will have so much “domestic content,” that is material or parts that come from the importing nation. Sometimes also called offset agreements—we’ll buy your jets if you buy enough parts from us—these are supposed to be outlawed under the WTO. And if you believe this, I’d like to sell you your neighbor’s car. He said it would be OK. Honest.
In fact, the WTO is supposed to address all these kinds of barriers, but as we’ve seen, nations have all kinds of strategic and domestic political reasons for resisting free trade when it comes to imports but being all for it when it comes to exports. For example, WTO-style free also makes it more difficult for a nation such as the U.S. to bar imports of fish that are captured in an unsustainable way. It is these kinds of environmental issues that may create the biggest political challenges of the current century.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Trade is neither all good nor all bad.
• Trade imposes both costs and benefits on states and consumers. It can provide greater selection, quality and better prices for goods; it can also cost people jobs and lower wages in countries that lose jobs. It also can add to environmental damage around the world.
EXERCISE
1. Think of the last thing you bought. Where did it come from? How far did it travel to get to you? Could you have bought the same product closer to home? What would that have meant in terms of price or quality? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/10%3A_Applying_What_Youve_Learned-_Three_Issues/10.01%3A_Trade.txt |
Learning Objectives
In this section, you will learn:
1. How the European debt crisis came to be.
2. How much the U.S. budget deficit matters.
A current problem is many parts of the world is debt. Nations spend a lot of public money to provide people with the services they say they want. If tax revenues exceed expenditures in these public budgets, the nation has a budget surplus. If, however, spending exceeds revenue, nations have a budget deficit. Nations fund budget deficits in one of two ways—either by printing money, which is fortunately fairly rare anymore, or by borrowing on the open market. If you have a U.S. Savings Bond, you are helping the fund the federal budget deficit. Governments sell bonds, which are financial obligations that come in specific denominations (\$1,000, \$5,000 and \$10,000 for U.S. treasury securities) to cover expenditures in the short term. Investors lend money to governments by buying the bonds, collecting interest payments for the life of the bond and getting their initial investment back when the bond matures, in say 10 or 20 years.
Figure 10.3 [To Come] International budget deficits
Part of the recent debt problem has been in Europe. In 1999, 17 nations in Europe adopted a single currency, the euro. The goal was that by lowering the transaction costs that follow from having to turn francs into deutschmarks, the single currency would in fact raise gross domestic product (GDP) by 1 percent. That may not sound like a lot, but 1 percent across an economy that’s bigger than that of the United States is both a lot of money and a huge economic gain.
As always, however, there were tradeoffs. It meant that all the member nations of the Eurozone would have the same monetary policy. In practical terms, this means the monetary policy of the German central bank, since they are the biggest economy in Europe. The Germans, dating back to their experience of hyperinflation in the 1920s—which helped Hitler take power—are fairly obsessed with keeping inflation at bay. But what’s good for one country might not be good for another. One nation wants to control inflation; another nation wants monetary stimulus. Under the Eurozone, that’s not happening.
For whatever reason, the economies of northern Europe—Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden—are stronger than the economies of southern Europe, in particular Spain, Italy and Greece. So the latter three nations have been running larger budget deficits. But without the ability to engage in monetary policy on their own, they cannot inflate their currencies so as to pay back their debts with cheaper money.
Why are these governments budgets’ so out of whack? In Greece, for example, tax evasion is apparently a way of life, so that the Greek government is not collecting all the taxes it should. Government benefits are extraordinarily generous, so people retire after age 50, and even more taxable earnings are lost to the state. It should be easy to see why the government pays out such benefits: Government largesse is a key source of maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of voters. Voters come to view this every-day-is-Christmas approach to governing as a social contract, and change becomes difficult to achieve.
As Greece’s debts have mounted, lenders begin to demand higher interest rates so as to cover the risk of Greece defaulting on its debts. Default would mean that investors lose a lot of money. You might be tempted to think, “sucks to be them,” but the losses would mean investors would be more wary of loaning money to anybody, raising borrowing costs all over the world, and making the global economy shrink. Even in the U.S., a Greek default would have echoes, beginning with higher interest rates on credit cards and on home and auto loans. In short, it would be a lose-lose situation.
European policy makers, particularly the leaders of Germany and France, have responded by bailing out the Greeks, the Spaniards and the Italians, in exchange for tight “austerity” budgets, in which government spending is greatly reduced. The problem with this is that quick, large-scale reductions in government spending will mean that those three economies go toward if not into recession, impacting their neighbors and trading partners as well as making the governments’ revenue problems even worse.
The Greeks could pull out of the Eurozone, but that would mean high inflation on imports and a substantial whack to the Greek economy. So there are no easy answers here, at least until the Greek government can convince people that what they need to do is pay their taxes. But, the world over, telling people that they need to tighten their belts and pay their taxes is never politically very popular. And saying “revenue enhancements” instead of taxes doesn’t fool as many people as perhaps it once did.
The American Problem
The United States faces a somewhat similar problem with regard to its budget deficit, although the U.S. economy is much larger than the Greek economy, giving the U.S. a lot more wiggle room when it comes to monetary and fiscal policy. The U.S. budget deficit is not nearly as serious as, say, the Greek deficit, and the U.S. can still engage in monetary policy to suit the needs of the moment.
Nonetheless, the budget deficit became a very big political issue in the 2012 presidential campaign, with Republicans decrying the deficits of the Obama administration. Where did they come from?
In 2001, George W. Bush became president and inherited a budget surplus. He convinced Congress to pass rather substantial tax cuts, thus reducing revenue and ending the surplus. Then, following 9.11, the president and Congress got the U.S. involved in two wars, and the budget deficit returned with a vengeance.
And then came the financial meltdown. With low interest rates in the 2000s, and a financial industry that discovered it could make a lot of money on the fees on home loans to people who couldn’t really afford them, the nation got a bubble in the housing market. A bubble is when investment exceeds potential in a particular market. In the case of housing, which represents about a quarter of the entire U.S. economy, the bubble was of substantial proportions, perhaps \$1.4 trillion. This was fine as long as housing prices continued to rise, but as with any bubble, prices could not and would not rise forever. In 2007, prices began to fall, and the housing market collapsed. People could no longer sell their homes for more than they paid for them. Once your home is worth less than you paid for it, you are unable to sell it any price. As a home represents the single largest investment most people will ever make, overall wealth in the economy shrank and the entire economy went into recession.
Economists expected a recession; we’ve had lots of bubbles before, most recently in internet and technology stocks in the late 1990s, and going all the way back to railroads in the 1800s. People lose their jobs, some wealth evaporates, and eventually the economy recovers and we move ahead. It’s not pretty, but since the Great Depression, we’re usually able to recover in a year or so.
But this time, the problem was much bigger than a typical bubble. People used to say “safe as houses” with regard to home loans, because financial institutions subjected prospective borrowers to intense scrutiny. The loans are then bundled into blocks of loans, and resold to big borrowers who want a safe, profitable place to park their money. So the new bundled home loans, which included loans to people who were likely to default, were sold to investors all over the world.
What economists didn’t realize was that the biggest banks had made side bets on the mortgage loans. Called derivatives, because they derive their value from the value of something else, such as a bundle of home loans, they were unregulated bets on which way the market would go. In some instances, banks even bet against the people they were lending to (without telling them, of course). In some senses, these were insurance policies on the loans. But if everybody files a claim at once, you have a problem. Say I’m Lehman Bros., a big Wall Street investment bank. I’ve sold billions in bundled home loans to investors. Then I go to AIG, the world’s largest insurance firm, and buy an insurance policy on the loans, in case they go bad.
Then say everybody else does this. (They did.) Then say many of the loans go bad. (They did.) With everybody having bet the same way, like everybody betting on the same horse at the race track, there’s nobody left on whom to lay off the risk. And so instead of a \$1.4 trillion mortgage bubble, we were faced with a \$60 trillion derivative bubble, or more than four times the size of the entire U.S. economy. It’s worth noting that U.S. investment banks had lobbied heavily to prevent the regulation of the derivatives market in the 1990s. So the derivatives bubble threatened to destroy the financial system and provoke a second Great Depression.
Even with bailouts of the banking system and a fiscal stimulus package to help right the economy, the United States still endured the steepest recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Increased federal expenditures and reduced state, federal and local revenues meant a bigger budget deficit. As of 2012, the economy hasn’t fully recovered, with private sector job gains offset by reductions in public sector employment.
So how important is the budget deficit? As a percentage of GDP, the U.S. budget deficit is slightly higher than Greece’s, both at around 10 percent. Then again, at \$15 trillion, the U.S. economy is 50 times larger than Greece’s. So the scope of the problem is not quite the same. We should understand that no one in or near government in the United States, Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, thinks the United States can sustain that level of deficit forever. Nor do they plan to.
Conservatives propose to cut spending and taxes and shrink the overall size of the federal government. If they just proposed cutting spending, this would help balance the budget, but cutting taxes as well will probably not fix the deficit. First, cutting spending would lower overall demand in the economy, threatening the push the nation back into recession. The argument for cutting taxes is that lower tax rates will help the economy grow, but tax cuts have a somewhat uninspiring record for spurring economic growth. It’s not difficult to grasp how they should work: Tax cuts mean more money in people’s pockets, which, hopefully, they will go out and spend, creating more economic activity and percolating throughout the economy. Firms get more business, place more orders and hire more people. However, that doesn’t happen as often as you might expect. The problem could be that tax cuts most often come in response to a soft economy. So that people who have jobs, despite having more money in their wallets, are afraid that they, too, will get laid off or have their hours cut, so rather than spending the money, they save it. Increased saving is not bad for the economy, or for people, but it doesn’t generate the rapid bounce that policymakers are hoping for.
Liberals propose to address the deficit by raising taxes and trying not to bust the piggy bank on spending, while maintaining public investment in things such as infrastructure and public education. They argue that this kind of spending will in fact make the economy grow more than tax cuts will. In their defense, it was the combination of a growing economy, small tax increases and restraint on federal spending that allowed Democrat President Bill Clinton and a Republican-controlled Congress to balance the federal budget in the 1990s. On the other hand, government has to have the political will to spend on things that will generate economic recovery, and it has to be just as willing to use any budget surplus in the future to reduce the deficit. None of that is a given.
Are budget deficits a problem? As then-Vice President Dick Cheney said, responding to criticism of the Bush-era budget deficits, “Deficits don’t matter.” Or maybe they do, as in 2012 the budget deficit was a big campaign issue for many Republican candidates. In political terms, deficits seem to matter more if somebody else is responsible. The usual argument against deficits is that if the federal government borrows too much, it will crowd out private sector borrowing, hurting the economy. There is no evidence that this ever happens. A more serious problem is that the bigger the deficit, the more of the federal budget that is spent on interest on the debt. That leaves less money available for everything else, from investment to tax cuts.
U.S. Debt Abroad
A third complaint you may hear is that the trade deficit and budget deficit together mean we have to borrow money from China. China holds around \$1.2 trillion of the United States’ total outstanding debt of around \$14 trillion. Nonetheless, repeat after me: We do not borrow money from China. First, China holding U.S. debt is not a remarkable thing. In fact, foreign nations hold close to half (47 percent) of outstanding U.S. debt. Why? Because they end up holding more dollars than they know what to do with in their foreign currency accounts. They could use the money to buy things, or invest, and one safe place to invest is U.S. government treasury securities. If you were left more Euros than you know what to do with, you might buy Eurozone bonds. Ditto for yen and Japanese bonds, or Canadian dollars and Canadian bonds. At this point, you probably only buy Greek bonds if you’re feeling frisky and risky. It’s important to note that no foreign investor, public or private, buys U.S. debt instruments directly from the U.S. Treasury. They buy them in the open market, sold by other investors such as the large banks that participate in Treasury auctions.
There is small potential risk in having foreign states holding U.S. debt. If, for example, China were to dump its U.S. debt holdings on the world market, the value of the dollar would fall and U.S. consumers would experience inflation in the price of imported goods. And that would mean that they would buy fewer Chinese-made goods as well, hurting China along with the U.S. For better or worse, the U.S. and Chinese economies are currently joined at the wallet if not the hip.
What is likely to happen with the U.S. deficit? Most U.S. states by law must balance their budgets, and so they have tried various methods to restrain spending. However, items such as sunset laws and line-item vetoes also have proved incapable of reining in spending. A line-item veto allows an executive the ability to strike only part of a bill as opposed to the whole thing. States where governors have line-item vetoes do not have budgets noticeably more in balance than do states without. Sunset laws require legislatures to reauthorize state agencies, or they go the way of the sunset. But sunset laws typically haven’t been effective at ending the lives of government agencies, which tend to find new reasons to exist once their original tasks are complete. Congress went so far as to give the president a line-item veto in 1996, but the Supreme Court invalidated it as an unconstitutional delegation of budgetary power to the executive branch. In 1985, the Gramm-Rudman Act, named for its two authors, was to pare down non-essential spending when Congress failed to balance the budget. However this was voided by the courts because it gave executive power to the Congressional Budget Office, which is simply a tool of Congress.
Rest assured that the deficit dilemma will not persist forever. American politics look like this: There’s a lot of posturing, particularly in election years, and then the problem gets serious enough that Democrats and Republicans come to some kind of compromise, so that between growth, taxes and spending restraint, the budget is balanced again. The simple answer then becomes using the resulting budget surplus to buy back and retire the debt, at least to a more manageable level. And sometimes that looks like the harder task.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Nations can sustain budget deficits for a while, but not forever.
• Too much debt raises borrowing costs for the government and leaves less money available for other things.
EXERCISE
1. Look at the U.S. federal budget. What categories of spending would you cut? What would be the consequences of those cuts? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/10%3A_Applying_What_Youve_Learned-_Three_Issues/10.02%3A_Debt_and_Deficits.txt |
Learning Objectives
In this section you will learn:
1. Why climate change appears to be a problem.
2. Why doing something about it is politically difficult.
3. How resource shortages pose political problems, but also invite market-based solutions.
Perhaps the most difficult political issue of our time is the environment. Although some people try to cast this as a scientific issue, there’s actually less scientific disagreement over the challenges of the environment than you may realize. As with everything in life, and especially in this book, you will have to make up your own mind; in the meantime, I won’t hide anything I believe from you.
Resource Shortages
The unfortunately common idea that conservation—using less of finite resources, or using them more efficiently—means a lower standard of living, is generally wrong. Conservation means not wasting resources needlessly. It doesn’t mean living like a medieval peasant or a caveman. Equally unfortunate is the notion that running out of a particular resource, such as oil, will result in society reverting to a dark and distant past when, as the historian William Manchester put it, our ancestors lived in a world lit only by fire.
Indeed, it was a sad day in the mid-1800s when the world ran out of whale oil and everyone had to live in darkness. In fact, electricity really did revolutionize human existence. Electricity expanded the day wherever it went. Before electricity, people tended to go to bed a lot earlier, and the night shift was a largely unheard of event. The advent of the internal combustion engine and automobiles saved major cities the world over from a sea of horse manure and, often, abandoned dead horses.
The point is not that technology will save us from resource shortages, but markets might. A shortage of any resource raises its price and thereby makes substitutes more affordable and desirable. In your own lifetimes, higher gasoline prices have prompted consumers to seek and auto makers to provide hybrid and electric cars. The documentary Who Killed the Electric Car misses the key point that at the time, the economics of building a new technology car didn’t justify the expense of developing and selling that vehicle. One could argue that General Motors and other auto makers were a bit shortsighted in not pushing the idea further, but at the time it was essentially a market-based decision, and not terribly surprising.
So there’s good news and bad news on the energy front. First the good news: For 200 years, until the mid-19th century, whale oil was the chief source of lighting for much of the United States, and in some other parts of the world. And yet the demise of the whaling industry didn’t plunge the nation into darkness. People discovered uses for oil from the ground, such as refining it into kerosene, and gave the whales a break. The great advantage of oil and its derivative fuels, such as diesel oil, gasoline and kerosene, which is used in jet fuel, is that they are energy dense: They pack a lot of energy into a small volume.
What has many people’s knickers in a twist at the moment is Hubbert’s Peak. M.K. Hubbert was a Shell Oil geologist who, back in the 1950s, predicted that U.S. oil production would peak about 1967. Derided by experts at the time, he was pretty close to perfect in his estimate. Using Hubbert’s methods, others have now predicted when world oil production will peak. Estimates have ranged from 2004 to 2112, with the gloomiest group aiming for sometime this decade.
Someday, we will run out of oil. With China and India’s economies blooming into fuel-burning, car-driving splendor, consumption of oil is rising. There are a couple of rocks in the path of this wheel of misfortune, however. First, the estimates all depend on how much recoverable oil you assume is out there. Estimates range from 1.8 trillion to nearly 4 trillion barrels.
It was probably easier for Hubbert to estimate how much U.S. oil was left, if only because the OPEC nations—the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which includes the nations of the Middle East—tend to try to keep the wraps on just how much oil they have in the ground. Nor do the estimates include oil from the tar sands of Alberta or the oil shale of Colorado. As prices rise, reclaiming those becomes profitable. The average estimate is for oil production to peak about 2037, including 2 percent annual growth in consumption. This seems like a reasonable guess.
Left alone, oil prices will rise, which will make substitutes such as hydrogen fuel cells more economical. Markets aren’t good at everything, but they are very good at allocating resources. Expensive oil eventually means more transportation choices. It’s no accident that higher prices have coincided with more offerings of hybrid gas-electric vehicles for sale. Moving from a petroleum-based economy to one based on another source of energy will have costs, but they are likely to be gradual and spread across the nation and the world.
Such a transition also will have benefits. Automobiles continue to be a major source of air pollution and greenhouse gases. And that’s what markets aren’t good at: dealing with the unintended consequences (externalities, in economese) of economic activity, such as pollution.
The pressure is thus on policymakers in governments the world over to plan for the day when in fact oil becomes scarce. The challenge there is the up-front cost of developing new technologies, and whatever technologies the government chooses to support means that some technologies will not be supported. Remember the role of interest groups in government; the people who have put their money on the technologies not chosen will campaign both to get government support and to block support for the other technologies. It is possible right now to reduce one’s dependence on oil. Brazil, the fifth largest country in the world with the sixth largest economy, essentially imports no oil from anywhere, as they have developed fuel alcohol production to the point where they don’t need foreign oil. In Brazil’s case, they rely on sugar cane, a relatively cheap feedstock from which to distill alcohol.
The Corn Problem
In the United States, in contrast to Brazil, we heavily subsidize the production of corn, a lot of which gets turned into ethanol, which gets added to gasoline to produce a slightly cleaner burning fuel. The problem with ethanol is that it takes nearly as much energy to produce alcohol from corn as you get from the alcohol produced. It’s not very efficient. Corn also requires copious amounts of nitrogen to grow, which then washes into the Mississippi River basin and into the Gulf of Mexico, where the overabundance of nitrates is slowly turning the gulf into an underwater desert. Meanwhile, a lot of the corn is fed to cattle in industrial feedlots to help fatten them up before they are slaughtered. Unfortunately, beef cattle can’t properly digest corn, so if they’re not pumped full of antibiotics, they become sick. The overuse of these antibiotics is quite likely breeding strains of drug-resistant bacteria, since, like our ancestors who survived the plague in the Middle Ages, some of the bacteria will simply survive the assault of antibiotic drugs. These bacteria eventually will be consumed by humans who may then become ill.
This raises the question of why the U.S. adopted this policy. First, the corn farmers are not inherently evil people. They are, like most of us, just trying to make a living. Agricultural subsidies in the United States were ratcheted up during the Nixon Administration, when inflation was high and food prices in particular were rising. Oil prices were rising, and energy costs tend to affect everything else. A policy that provided for more affordable food would help the government maintain legitimacy, and so it was pursued. Farm-state members of Congress would of course be very supportive of such policy, because their constituents are likely to be very connected to and reliant upon the farm economy.
But say that current U.S. policymakers recognized what was going on and found themselves on the corns of a dilemma. How could they respond? Simply ending subsidies for corn and for ethanol production would impact a lot of people and their jobs, and so the corn lobby, the ethanol lobby and the farm-state legislators would all work to keep that from happening. Whether you think this is right or wrong, you should not be surprised that this is how politics works. People seek to preserve and advance their own interests.
The answer might be to pay the farmers to do something else, such as grow a better feedstock, such as sugar beets, from which alcohol can be produced more cheaply and with less environmental impact. The challenges here are that 1. People don’t like change and 2. This would have a substantial up-front cost. So even if the government were able to offer a low-cost conversion to another way of making a living for some corn farmers, there would be resistance.
It’s worth noting that some resource shortages aren’t as easily dealt with. Overfishing of the world’s oceans has caused many fish populations to collapse, threatening a major source of food for the world. Although nations by themselves can check this through various methods, when the problem spills over into disputes between nations, the situation gets trickier, as we’ll see with the question of water.
Water
Another resource issue is water, in particular fresh water. Current estimates suggest that one-fith of the world’s population lacks consistent access to clean drinking water. Moreover, several large aquifers are steadily running dry. Aquifers are the often-gravelly spaces under the ground where rainwater collects. Ever since human beings figured out how to dig wells, people have been tapping aquifers to get water for drinking and irrigation. Along with rivers, aquifers are one of the chief sources of usable water. But now, with population growth and thereby rising demand for water, the Ogallala aquifer, which stretches from the Dakotas to Texas and irrigates one-fifth of U.S. farmland, is being depleted faster than rainfall can fill it up. Aquifers in Africa, the Middle East and China face the same problem. Water is being pumped out of the ground in the world’s largest city, Mexico City, at such a rate that the city is literally sinking into the earth.
Rivers pose additional challenges. Rivers are useful for raising fish, generating power, irrigation, and capturing fresh water for drinking. However any one use reduces the amount available for any other use. Hydroelectric dams generate clean electricity, but greatly decrease the numbers of fish, since even with fish ladders, fish returning to spawn upriver get there in much lower numbers. Running more water through the turbines for electricity affects both fish and the water available for irrigation and consumption; diverting more water for irrigation or consumption impacts fish and electricity.
People the world over waste a lot of water. In the city of Phoenix, Ariz., two rivers flow into the city, and none flow out, even as citizens’ lawns remain green and outdoor malls employ battalions of nozzles spraying mist to keep the walkways cool for shoppers. Estimates are that the United States loses 7 million gallons a day to leaky pipes and faucets; another estimate says England and Wales are wasting 20 percent of their treated water through leakage. And these are developed countries. Worldwide, estimates range as high as 60 percent.
Meanwhile, 2.6 billion people in the world live without adequate sewage treatment, and another chunk of the world’s sewage system needs repair and upgrading. Sewage treatment helps prevent disease and limits the pollution of groundwater, which could further extend drinking water resources.
The importance of sewage treatment can’t be overstated. On Hood Canal, near where I live, houses are on septic systems, which leak into the canal, creating a zone of water devoid of oxygen, and hence devoid of fish. The easy answer would be replace the septic tanks with a sewage treatment facility. The technology is fairly simple: Pipes run from people’s homes to the treatment facility, where the effluent is pumped into a vat, slowly stirred by a large agitating blade, like you’d find in a washing machine, and bacteria do their job. Primary sewage treatment involves one vat; secondary treatment involves two. Tertiary treatment, which is both expensive and uncommon, can remove 99 percent of impurities. Experiments with running sewage through mini-canals of swamp plants, has produced drinkable water as well. But even adequate secondary treatment systems would do a lot to prevent water pollution and improve human hygiene, and create at least temporary construction jobs all over the world.
So why doesn’t this happen? At this point, you should be able to break down the steps of seeing the political challenges of making something like this happen, even with the obvious benefits involved. First, none of this would be free. Somebody will have to pay. In the U.S., homeowners can jointly agree to pay the cost of hooking up to a sewer line. That can cost thousands of dollars per home, money people may not have or may not want to spend. Otherwise government will have to step in and foot the bill. Local or national legislatures will have to vote to allocate funds, and sources of revenue will have to be found. And all for a project that, while important, lacks the excitement of more obvious economic development projects, or the immediate gratification of a new bridge or highway. We should note that the World Bank has helped finance wastewater treatment projects in several locations around the world.
Some scholars predict that the relatively near future could see wars over water allocation. The technological fix, desalination of seawater, is growing in use but still very expensive. Nations might solve the problem within their own borders. Leaking pipes and faucets and excessive irrigation consume an apparently frightening amount of water, as you may discover when you own a home of your own one day. But disputes between nations over water allocation poses greater challenges. Remember that unlike within the borders of a sovereign state, where the authority of the government can, ultimately, impose a solution, between states there is no higher authority. Anarchy prevails because no one is in charge.
Once again, domestic politics complicates a bilateral or multilateral solution. A treaty with a neighboring state to share a water resource will provoke some opposition inside each state, and it’s an open question as to whether those interest groups will compel a change in policy. Moreover, the realist perspective on the part of the stronger state may suggest thumbing the collective nose at the weaker state and sharing less of the water, if any at all.
Market forces will help; increasing shortages of water will raise prices and encourage conservation, while making desalination more affordable. Of course, inland communities and states without ready access to ocean water will face greater challenges than will coastal states. Areas where desalination plants already are a major source of drinking water, such as Dubai on the Persian Gulf and Key West, Florida, have plenty of water close at hand. Either way, states will face increasing pressure to do something more. If states can force themselves to think ahead, so that water allocation and resource development can be planned an implemented on a regional and global scale before tempers become too hot and lines are drawn in the spreading desert sand, there may be a way past this problem. States that successfully navigate the water course may also find ways to convince their neighbors that the solution is one that somehow makes the well wider and deeper.
Climate Change
Climate change may be the most important issue of our time, and also the most challenging. The great majority of scientific research and evidence suggests that it’s happening, and that human activity is a major contributing factor. The evidence against climate change tends to come from scientists who have been paid by the energy industry.See, for example, Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010. The argument that some people make, that people who believe that climate change is both a problem and a manmade problem simply want to lower our standard of living, is absurd from every angle. Nobody really wants a lower standard of living. Even people who contrive to live “off the grid,” in homes that are largely energy self-sufficient, are not really trying to live like our pioneer ancestors. It’s difficult to imagine what profit there could be to people who argue that climate change is a serious issue that should be dealt with.
How do we know there’s climate change? Ice and snow have been piling up on Greenland for at least 110,000 years. The ice includes tiny pockets of air. By drilling and taking core samples from lower strata in the ice, scientists are able to tap those tiny air pockets and see what the atmospheric composition was like in previous millennia. What they have found is that the amount of carbon in the atmosphere has never risen so far so fast as it has since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s. That’s when humans began cutting down forests and burning large amounts of fossil fuels such as coal and oil. They’re called fossil fuels because they were created from layers of vegetation laid down millions of years ago, which then was compressed by layers of sediment piled on top over time. The pressure turned the decaying vegetation into coal, oil and natural gas. As we noted earlier, fossil fuels have the great advantage of being energy dense—they pack a lot of power into a very small space. A coal fire, for example, burns much hotter than a wood fire; steam engines became much more powerful and efficient when they changed from burning wood to burning coal, and more efficient still when they burned oil. In many ways, they made the modern world possible.
They do, however, release large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, which creates the greenhouse effect. A greenhouse works because it traps heat inside, raising the average temperature and allowing you to grow plants out of season, for example. On a global scale, however, this means average higher temperatures worldwide, as evidenced by steadily retreating glaciers around the world.
This phenomenon led to the use of the term global warming, which is probably unfortunate because the real effect includes not just global warming but more temperature extremes everywhere, including colder temperatures in some places and warmer temperatures in others. It also means more and more powerful storms, more droughts in some areas, and rising sea levels, threatening coastal communities and islands around the world. In a worst-case scenario, the arctic ice cap melts at the North Pole, releasing massive quantities of frozen carbon now held in check under the ice cap, greatly raising average temperatures and radically altering the biosphere. Trees, as we know them, likely would disappear. And, among other places, goodbye, Florida; so long, Seychelle Islands; adios, Aruba.
In any event, scientists now speak of climate change as opposed to global warming. We’ve known this for a while; the second Bush administration suppressed a study by government scientists who concluded both that climate change is real and that people are causing it. One study concluded that it would only really impact food production, but that in itself should be enough to be cause for alarm. By one estimate, climate change will lower world GDP by 1–3 percent, and that is a lower standard of living for everybody.
Figure 10.4 [To Come] Per Capita Carbon Emissions by Country
Do we know that all these terrible things will come to pass? We don’t, but it’s a big bet to make that they won’t. Assuming all this is true—and at the moment, it doesn’t appear to be a big assumption—it will require global policy solutions. It’s unlikely that the market forces by themselves will address this. As valuable as clean air and more stable temperatures are, they are hard to put a price tag on. The production of greenhouse gases is a classic free-rider problem. Any one of us can do something to lower our carbon footprint, but the individual (or nation) assumes all the cost of doing that and shares the benefit with everybody else for free. Under that scenario, few people are likely take on that expense. Once again, absent a world government the power to enforce the decision, anarchy prevails and nations do not unilaterally change policy.
In 1997, the nations of the world went to Japan and negotiated what became known as the Kyoto protocol. To date, 191 nations signed the agreement to lower their output of greenhouse gases, but the two big kids on the block—the U.S. and China—have not complied. Profit and legitimacy seem to be the two drivers. In the case of China, the legitimacy of the government largely relies on continued economic growth. China’s booming economy is every hungry for more electricity, so China keeps building coal-fired electric plants and gets nearly 70 percent of its electricity from coal. Burning coal is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing its reliance on coal would cause at least short-term dislocations in China’s energy supply and threaten the country’s stability.
Coal is the leading source of the world’s energy, including 68 percent in China and 50 percent in the U.S. Technology to create energy from “clean coal” is at best decades away. No one is even sure if solutions such as sequestering carbon emissions from coal in abandoned mine shafts would even work. The excess carbon produced does eventually filter to the ground, including seawater, which is becoming more acidic and less hospitable to fish as it happens.
Again, it’s probably not helpful to look at coal companies or coal miners as inherently evil. Coal mining is a dangerous and therefore well-paid occupation. U.S. states with big coal interests will feature members of Congress who will stand by their constituents in the coal industry and try to protect them from being put out of business by the government. A lot of jobs and profit are at stake, and those things are important too. Unlike oil, we’re apparently in little danger of running out of coal anytime soon.
Alternatives are uncertain at the moment. The process known as fracking is getting more natural gas, a much cleaner-burning fuel, out of the ground, but threatens underground drinking water sources in the process. Nuclear power is actually remarkably safe, overall, but when things go wrong, as at Chernobyl and more recently in Japan, they go wrong in a big way. Consequently safe nuclear power is one of the most expensive forms of electricity available. Hydropower from dams is very clean, but poses all kinds of other challenges, as we’ve already noted. Biofuels don’t add more new carbon to the atmosphere but require substantial resources, such as water, to produce.
Economists in the last few decades suggested a market-based solution to help deal with carbon emissions, generally known as cap-and-trade. Under cap-and-trade, government sets a lid (the cap) on allowable carbon emissions. So, major carbon producers such as factories and power plants pay a tax on higher emissions, or get a credit if they fall below the cap. They can sell those credits on the open market to firms that go over, who thereby avoid the tax. This puts a market value on pollution, and gives firms an incentive to clean up even as it rewards clean producers. It has been used with some success in the western United States, and in Europe. The Europeans, however, dealt with the cap in part by moving the most-polluting factories to India and China, and that’s one of the problems. Unless it’s a global system, a major polluter can simply relocate to someplace where there’s no cap. It also doesn’t address a major source of pollution—individual people and their households. Non-point source pollution, as it’s known, is in some ways harder to deal with. One nasty factory could be cleaned up directly; a million smoky car exhausts is a different sort of challenge.
It’s not difficult to imagine a world where every house features solar panels and some kind of windmill on the roof, and a hydrogen fuel cell in the back yard. And therein lies the policy challenge: a high short-term cost in exchange for a long-term benefit that many people will not live to see. As with corn farmers, the answer for coal producers may be to pay them to do something else. But that requires revenue, in the form of taxes from people who may very well question why they have to spend money to convince other people to stop producing a product they don’t see as affecting their immediate lives. And as soon as government starts picking winners, it also is picking losers, and nobody likes to be on the losing side.
This chapter is a bit of a downer, but ignoring problems, like ignoring exams, doesn’t make them go away. The broader point is that all of these problems will require something in the way of policy solutions, which is government’s job. Perhaps you can now see that within one country, such problems are challenging enough; in the global society, convincing a collection of sovereign states that they all need to take the same steps may be even more difficult.
None of this is impossible; human beings have a remarkable ability to adapt. Remember that your ancestors, wherever they were from, were the clever ones, the resilient ones, the ones who could cope with and make the best of change. Your ancestors were the ones who figured out how to survive. So you come into this world with a very, very good genetic history. As college students perhaps just beginning your way in the world, you should at least understand that this is the world you are inheriting. And perhaps understanding the business of politics and government will help you navigate that world a little more skillfully.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Resource shortages often are dealt with effectively by markets. Rising prices for a resource can make alternatives more affordable and hence more available.
• Items on which it is more difficult to put a price, such as clean air, are less amenable to market-based solutions, and may require government intervention to address.
EXERCISES
1. Assume for a minute that you agree that climate change is both caused by humans and is a problem, what would you do about it. Presuming that governments have to involved in policy solutions, what groups in society would have to be convinced to go along? What would it take to convince people that these kinds of changes are in their own self-interest?
2. Contact your local water provider. Do they have estimates on how much water is being wasted within their service area? What plans do they have to deal with this? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/An_Introduction_to_Politics_(Sell)/10%3A_Applying_What_Youve_Learned-_Three_Issues/10.03%3A_The_Environment.txt |
“Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.”
–American Philosopher John Dewey (1)
The Definition of Politics
Political scientists study politics in its many forms. One of my professors told me that politics is everywhere except for heaven and hell and other perfect dictatorships. That may be true. If it is, it requires political scientists to cover considerable ground. However, they tend not to concern themselves with things like office politics, family politics, or student-government politics. Generally speaking, political scientists are interested in political matters of consequence at the city, state, national, or international level.
Political scientist Harold D. Lasswell came up with a concise definition of politics that we can use as a starting point for this course. He said that politics can be defined as “who gets what, when, and how.” (2)
Who in this definition can refer to any member of a polity—a political organization that includes actors such as individuals, groups, corporations, unions, and politicians.
What in the definition might refer to government programs, societal resources, access to rights and privileges, or something as banal as tax breaks.
When in the definition refers to timing. Let’s not forget that often the timing of a thing can be as important as the thing itself. Quoting a distinguished jurist, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his Letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963, “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
How is very important. Political scientists are keenly interested in the processes through which someone gets something in a polity, whether it be democratic or undemocratic, open or closed, fair or unfair; or which institutional arrangements are involved, such as constitutions, regulations, and laws; or which practices are employed, such as voting, lobbying, demonstrating, and decision making.
Lasswell’s definition is a good starting point, but we want to be a bit clearer about the definition of politics that underlies the content in this text. The word we haven’t yet accentuated in Lasswell’s simple definition is gets, and yet this is an important word because it implies that someone has to make a choice among competing interests, that resources or benefits have to be allocated among potential recipients. At this point, it is important to make a distinction between political issues that are zero sum and those that are win-win situations. In a zero sum situation, a benefit for a particular political actor equates to a loss for other political actors. Budgets are often a good example of this—assuming a government is unwilling to go into debt. A dollar spent on military spending or subsidizing corporate profits is a dollar that cannot be spent on medical care or developing pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure. On the other hand, many political situations are win-win in nature. If I have the right to speak freely, it does not diminish your right to also speak freely. If I can marry the consenting adult of my choice, it does not affect your marriage.
Try this definition of politics on for size: Politics is the authoritative and legitimate struggle for limited resources or precious rights and privileges within the context of government, the economy, and society.
This is the definition we’ll use in this text. It implies all that is in Lasswell’s definition, but it more precisely defines our analysis. For instance, we will be concerning ourselves with the commonly understood practice of authoritatively and legitimately allocating resources—i.e., of who gets what. Of course, these are loaded terms, because one person’s view of authoritative and legitimate struggles over allocating resources might be different from another’s view. What we mean here is that regularized, established, legal, and generally accepted procedures are employed in allocating resources. If I work through the system and get more resources than you, it’s politics. If I steal something from you, it’s not politics.
We also want to highlight the word struggle in this definition. Too often, students are introduced to U. S. government as though it were some sort of frictionless machine that makes decisions rationally, with an eye toward the greatest good for the greatest number of people. The fact is that politics in the United States is often a chaotic and painful clash of entrenched interests. Sometimes, a reasonable accommodation can be reached that satisfies all, but often the solution grossly favors one set of interests over others. As we’ll see—and as hinted at in John Dewey’s quote above—the struggle is often an unfair one, as those with the most resources and the most persistence have clear advantages in getting what they want out of the political system.
Government is a prime location for political struggles. Government refers to the collection of institutions and people who occupy them that is recognized as the legitimate authority to make decisions regarding the whole public in a defined geographic territory. An institution is an established organization, custom, or practice formed for a specific public purpose. Governments are composed of institutions like legislatures, courts, bureaucratic offices, and the like. Other institutions like civil marriage or corporations exist because government establishes rules and practices by which they operate.
Note that our definition broadens the traditional scope of politics to include the economy and society in addition to specifically governmental matters. Politics exists not only in legislative votes, Supreme Court nominations, and the voting behavior of citizens. Politics exists in other contexts as well, and these other contexts are important considerations for this course. For example, how have historical developments preconditioned certain outcomes in today’s political world? Are economic and social considerations such as race, gender, and class relevant in allocating resources or accessing rights and privileges? Should people have a say in all major decisions that affect them? At work? In school? In church? If people do not have the ability to be full-fledged political actors in those settings, what impact would that have on their behavior and approach to traditional political campaigns, legislative debates, political news, and elections?
Political Imagination
Beyond understanding this definition of politics, you should also exercise your political imagination while you read this textbook. It takes no imagination to leave decisions to the already rich and powerful. Political imagination is our ability to envision new and creative ways to make the political system work for ordinary people and to ask “what if” questions: What if being informed about political issues and being registered to vote were a high school graduation requirement? What if we got rid of the nomination process and chose our candidates by lottery instead of primaries and caucuses? (By the way, selecting decision makers by lottery is an idea as old as the ancient Greeks.) What if every person were given an equal amount of money by the government each year to donate to a political cause and that money was the only money allowed to be spent on politics? What if we required that four of the nine Supreme Court justices could not possess a law degree? Asking these kinds of questions gets us into two habits: 1) Envisioning a different and potentially better future, and 2) Realizing that our future is up to us. All the good things in our country like national parks, public libraries, and public transportation—and all the bad things like homelessness, suburban sprawl, and payday loan sharks—are the result of political decisions that our polity made sometime in the past. We don’t have to accept our predecessors’ bad political decisions. We can make new, hopefully better decisions. It just takes imagination, organization, and action.
The sociologist Matthew Desmond embraced the power of political imagination when he wrote, “Even in the darkest moments, we should allow ourselves to imagine, to marvel over, a new social contract, because doing so expresses both our discontent with, and the impermanence of, the current one.” He quotes the theologian Walter Brueggemann, who wrote “We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and coopted that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.” (3)
The environmentalist Rob Hopkins wrote a great book about political imagination called From What Is to What If. I encourage you to read it. Hopkins wrote that “we need to be able to imagine positive, feasible, delightful versions of the future before we can create them.” (3) This textbook takes a cue from Hopkins’ work and occasionally prompts you to ask or respond to “What if” questions. Your answers and questions will make great conversation topics with your classmates, family, and friends. The key to a better polity is our ability to transcend the status quo and to envision a system that consistently serves us all.
References
1. John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925 – 1953. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,2008. Page 163.
2. Harold D. Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, and How. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1938.
3. Matthew Desmond, Poverty, By America. New York: Crown Publishers, 2023. Pages 135-36.
4. Rob Hopkins, From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2019. Page 29. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/01%3A_Thinking_Like_a_Political_Scientist/1.01%3A_Chapter_1-_What_is_Politics.txt |
“There’s not enough understanding of the realities of power. In a democracy, supposedly we hold power by what we do at the ballot box, so therefore the more we know about political power the better our choices should be and the better, in theory, our democracy should be.”
–Journalist Robert Caro (1)
A common element of all definitions of politics is the struggle over resources, rights, or privileges. Lasswell’s shorthand for this struggle is who gets what. This struggle requires us to understand the nature of power, which is a very important concept in political science. At the most basic level, power is the ability to prevail in struggles over resources, rights, or privileges. This is an important political concept because power is not evenly distributed in a polity. Some members of a polity are more likely to succeed in their struggle than are others. When some actors have a historical track record of prevailing in political struggles, it can warp the very system itself in ways that allow those actors to continue to prevail. In this text, we’ll focus on three dimensions of power.
The First Dimension of Power: Formal Decision Making
Early twentieth century political and social theorists who analyzed power usually focused on the results of formal decision-making, which we will call the first dimension of power. Political theorist Robert Dahl analyzed power relationships in New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1950s. In his 1961 book Who Governs, he argued that local elites from a variety of interests compete with each other for decision-making power and that these elites often compromised in their decision-making to reach a result. Dahl’s focus was on outcomes: which decision was eventually reached on each issue? In an earlier journal article, Dahl argued that “A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that he would not otherwise do.” (2) Dahl’s statement is a good place to start with respect to understanding the nature of power. This definition would also apply if A could prevent B from doing something that B wanted to do. For example, Congress (A) might get the president (B) to refrain from vetoing a bill that the president (B) disliked if it appeared very likely that Congress (A) would override the president’s (B) veto. The advantage of the first dimension of power as an analytical tool is that it focuses on observable outcomes, making it easier for political scientists to analyze a given situation. But this advantage is also a disadvantage, for it compels us to focus on the obvious at the expense of more subtle manifestations of power.
The Second Dimension of Power: Mobilization of Bias
The second dimension of power is often called the mobilization of bias. In 1962, political scientists Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz made an important contribution to our understanding of the nature of power. In their “Two Faces of Power” essay, they note that power is exercised in ways other than that described by Dahl. They argue that before we can look at the results of formal decision-making, we first need to look at what they call the mobilization of bias existing in the political system being analyzed. In other words, we should look at “the dominant values, the myths, and the established political procedures and rules of the game” as well as look at “which persons or groups . . . gain from the existing bias and which . . . are handicapped by it.” (3) For example, Bachrach and Baratz describe that A can obviously force B to do something, but “power is also exercised when A devotes his energies to creating or reinforcing social and political values and institutional practices that limit the scope of the political process to public consideration of only those issues which are comparatively innocuous to A. To the extent that A succeeds in doing this, B is prevented, for all practical purposes, from bringing to the fore any issues that might in their resolution be seriously detrimental to A’s set of preferences.” (4)
Mobilization of bias can occur in a myriad of different ways. Powerful participants can set the agenda of what is considered an “important” political issue, or they can structure political institutions in ways that preserve their own interests or power, or they can arrange procedural rules to make it difficult for others to challenge the system. Ensuring that a decision is not reached is another powerful manifestation of mobilization of bias because A can prevent B from obtaining what B wants through no apparent act at all. If A can stack the rules of the political game so that B’s issues never get addressed, then A has won without ever having to make a decision openly. Issues that are never or only weakly raised, claims to resources that are never or only weakly made, decisions that are not reached—these are also important scenarios to consider in determining who has political power.
The Third Dimension of Power: Preference Shaping
Formal decision-making as described by Dahl is the first dimension of power and the mobilization of bias described by Bachrach and Baratz is the second dimension of power. Political and social theorist Steven Lukes put forward a third dimension of power that we’ll call preference shaping. In his Power: A Radical View, which was originally published in 1974, Lukes acknowledges that Bachrach and Baratz contributed immensely to our understanding of power with their mobilization of bias idea, but he argues that power has yet one more dimension to it. Lukes starts with the observation that both of the first two dimensions of power are based on the assumption of conflict, where A and B have different preferences on key issues. In the first dimension of power, A’s preferences win over B’s preferences in a formal decision-making setting—a city council vote, an executive decision, or a court ruling. In the second dimension, the rules of the game are arranged in such a way that A’s preferences either get preferential treatment in the decision-making process or B’s preferences never get heard in the first place.
But what if, Lukes argues, A and B actually have the same preferences and that very fact is evidence of A’s power over B? What if B has real interests and preferences that differ from A’s, but B is not even conscious of their own interests because of A’s power? This may occur because B has internalized A’s values as their own. Perhaps A controls the media to such an extent that B assumes that what is good for A is also good for B. Maybe A has so structured the educational system that B cannot conceive of the world being any different than the status quo, with A on top and B on the bottom of the class structure. Maybe B has been powerless for so long, that B has internalized the idea that they don’t deserve to get what they want. As Lukes asks,
“[I]s it not the supreme and most insidious exercise of power to prevent people, to whatever degree, from having grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things, either because they can see or imagine no alternative to it, or because they see it as natural and unchangeable, or because they value it as divinely ordained and beneficial?” (5)
Analyzing an Issue Using the Three Dimensions of Power
The three dimensions of power can be visible on any number of political issues. For example, let’s say a bill comes before the U.S. Senate to tax very large estates—over, let’s say, \$10 million—upon the estate owner’s death. A vote is held, and the bill is defeated with 44 senators supporting it and 56 senators opposing it. The first dimension of power is easy to see since the vote resulted in a clear decision: one side beat the other.
The second dimension of power is visible as well. The Senate has a set of rules and procedures that are stacked against this kind of billbecause of the filibuster, the bill really needs 60 votes to pass the Senate, so the losers are even further from victory than the vote tally indicates. In addition, because Senators are predominantly white, white interests get privileged. And since whites are more likely to have large estates to pass to their children, a bill taxing those estates has an uphill road in the Senate.
What about the third dimension of power? Have preferences been shaped by elites on this issue? It’s clear that if one compares political debates from the early part of the twentieth century to that of today, you can see that wealthy interests have been able to get inordinate numbers of middle class and poor people to stand up against the estate tax, because their perception has been shaped to believe it is a “death tax” that might affect them. This is an erroneous belief, because most people are light years away from leaving assets anywhere close to \$10 million to their heirs. The false notion that the estate tax will affect ordinary people is also intentionally cultivated by elites, and gives senators cover to vote against increasing the estate tax. (6)
A Guide to Spotting the Three Dimensions of Power
When examining any political struggle, use this guide to see if you can spot the three dimensions of power in action:
First Dimension of Power—Look for situations where people who have authority to directly impact the course of an issue have a say in making key decisions. Often, this takes the form of an actual legislative vote, executive command or veto, or court ruling, but other actions might fit into the first dimension as well. Also look for nondecisions—decisions to not decide an issue, which typically benefit one side more than another.
Second Dimension of Power—Look for biases in the rules of the game and for procedures that favor one side over another. Do the rules of politics affect the struggle such that one side has higher hurdles to overcome? Look for people or groups whose stories are told by others, for those stories tend to be self-serving. The novelist Chimamanda Adichie says that “power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.”(7) Look for situations where one actor gets to tell the story of another actor. Look also for societal values and myths, the existence of which stacks the political deck in favor of particular interests
Third Dimension of Power—Look for people who have had the wool pulled over their eyes, who are apparently acting against their own interests, or who take on the viewpoint of others. Look for people who possess resources and access to media or educational tools with which to manipulate attitudes and opinions. Are they able to use those resources or that access to shape the political preferences of other actors in the polity?
As you consider the three dimensions of power, keep in mind that they become progressively more difficult to detect. The first dimension of power is more visible and more common than the second, which is more visible and more common than the third.
References
1. Quoted in Chris McGreal, “Robert Caro: A Life with LBJ and the Pursuit of Power,” The Guardian. June 9, 2012.
2. Robert A. Dahl, “The Concept of Power,” Behavioral Science2, 1957. 201-15; quoted in Patrick Bernhagen, “Power: Making Sense of an Elusive Concept,” an unpublished manuscript. March 2002.
3. Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,” The American Political Science Review. 56 (4): 1962, pp. 947-952.
4. Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “Two Faces of Power,” The American Political Science Review. 56 (4): 1962, pp. 947-952.
5. Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View. 2nd Edition. Ebbw Vale, Wales: Palgrave Macmillan. 2005. Page 28.
6. The “death tax” language is apparently the creation of the National Federation of Independent Business and Republican messaging consultant Frank Luntz. See Mark Abadi, “Republicans Say ‘Death Tax’ While Democrats Say ‘Estate Tax’—and There’s a Fascinating Reason Why,” BusinessInsider.com. October 9, 2017.
7. Chimamanda Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” TED Global. July 2009. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/01%3A_Thinking_Like_a_Political_Scientist/1.02%3A_Chapter_2-_The_Nature_of_Political_Power.txt |
“[America has] democracy by coincidence, in which ordinary citizens get what they want from government only when they happen to agree with elites or interest groups that are really calling the shots.”
— Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (1)
“America’s political establishment has created vast inequities not only in the economy, but in criminal justice, (where street crime is heavily punished, but white collar crime is not), war (it’s mostly not the sons and daughters of politicians and CEOs getting killed in overseas conflicts), healthcare (where much of the population lives in fear that getting sick will trigger bankruptcy), debt forgiveness (Wall Street bailout recipients got to write off losses, but people suffering foreclosures and student loan defaults are ruined), and other arenas.”
–Matt Taibbi (2)
Theories About American Politics
Over the years, political analysts have tended to split over how the American political system operates. This split involves three theoretical systems: pluralism, hyper-pluralism, and the power elite. Political scientists and others who take one of these perspectives disagree with each other about which theory best describes what is really going on in American politics.
Pluralism, the first branch in this debate, is well represented by French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville’s insights into the vitality of early American politics. Convinced that France was moving towards social equality similar to American democracy, de Tocqueville toured the United States in the 1830s to analyze democracy as a political potential. There, he was struck by how well developed the principle of association—a proto form of pluralismwas among average Americans. At the time, American politics was marked by a rich diversity of organized associations and interest groups vying with each other to see that their respective wishes were translated into government policy. (3) Pluralism is a theoretical approach that emphasizes how ordinary Americans are free to start or join any of these groups and that organized interests struggle with each other on a level playing field. In other words, no one set of interests is likely to dominate public policy—at least not for very long, because the many losers will temporarily put aside their differences to collaborate to influence policy. The pluralist argument is bolstered by the number and variety of interest groups and by the fact that interests in one category—business, for example—often struggle with each other and fail to put up a monolithic front vis a vis labor or environmental groups.
The second theoretical approach, hyper-pluralism, argues that America was at some point characterized by pluralism, but over time it transformed into something less healthy: an out-of-control hyper-pluralist polity. This approach is voiced by those political scientists who argue that hyper-pluralism suggests that the government has essentially been captured by the demands of interest groups. And rather than arbitrating the struggle between organized interests, the government tries to put into effect the wishes of them all to the detriment of the country. Political scientist Theodore Lowi called this pathological process interest-group liberalism, which is often used interchangeably with the hyper-pluralism label. (4) These theorists point to the contradictory nature of government policy—for example, spending money to subsidize fossil fuel extraction while at the same time passing regulations to limit carbon emissions—as evidence that there isn’t really a competition going on as envisioned by pluralism. The hyper-pluralism system more closely resembles a free-for-all.
The third approach is called elite theory, which is the theoretical perspective used in this text. Elite theorists hold that the many-interests-on-a-level-playing-field vision of the pluralists and the interest-group-chaos scenario of the hyper-pluralists fail to accurately show what is really going on: that a relatively small and wealthy class of individuals—the power elite—largely gets its way. (5) According to this theory, the power elite are either the decision-makers or they so influence the decision-makers that the elites get their way most of the time. Elite theory highlights the power of organized business and military interests combined with society’s affluent strata and points to many government policies that lavish benefits onto them. Moreover, business interests create interlocking and overlapping connections that reinforce their position and allow them to control the political system—witness the exclusive and overlapping memberships of corporate boards, foundation boards, trustee positions for public and private universities, as well as corporate media ownership. The fact that elites have disproportionate power and seek to continue their dominance is not new. As political essayist Noam Chomsky wrote, “Right through American history, there’s been an ongoing clash between pressure for more freedom and democracy coming from below and efforts at elite control and domination coming from above.” (6)
Think of elite theory like a teeter-totter in a public park. On one end sit large corporations and the elite, which is composed of a very small number of families firmly entrenched in the top five percent of America’s income and wealth distribution. On the other end sit ordinary Americans, comprised of everyone from an emergency room doctor with a very comfortable income and considerable assets to a college student living in their car and working for minimum wage at a big box store. In whose interest does government work? Elite theory, represented here by the teeter totter on the bottom of the image, holds that government primarily operates in the interest of corporations and the wealthy elite. Even though there are far fewer people on the elite side of the teeter totter, they weigh more in the deliberations of government than do the interests of the majority of the population. The aim of democratic engagement should be to better balance the teeter totter and see government serve the broad interests that ordinary Americans have for true equality of opportunity, healthcare, education, and an economy that provides a decent life for all. This aspiration is not for absolute equality, but for a political and economic system that ensures human dignity regardless of whether one is a banker or a busboy.
Applying the Three Dimensions of Power
Why does this text employ an elite theory perspective? What would we expect to see in the American political system to feel confident that this theoretical lens is a useful one? We’d expect to see public policy—the results of decision making—tilted toward the interests of the elite. This is the first dimension of power. With respect to the second dimension of power, we’d expect the rules of the game to be tilted in favor of elites getting what they want while hindering what ordinary people want. Lastly, through the third dimension of power, we would expect to see ordinary people taking on the viewpoints of the elites against their own interests.
Let’s look at the first dimension of power and the results of decision making. Political scientist Michael Parenti highlighted that “every year the federal government doles out huge sums in corporate welfare in the form of tax breaks, price supports, loan guarantees, bailouts, payments-in-kind, subsidized insurance rates, marketing services, export subsidies, irrigation and reclamation programs, and research and development grants.” (7) The public cost of corporate welfare is enormous, and we should be clear about its two immediate effects. First, the welfare that corporations receive is rarely translated into lower prices for consumers. Instead, it translates into better dividends for stockholders and higher salaries for their upper-level employees, who are already in the upper 10 percent of wage earners. Secondly, corporate welfare translates into ordinary people making up for the lost revenues from corporate tax giveaways. For instance, according to political scientist and professor Robert Reich, “Every year, Americans spend an estimated \$153 billion in taxes and on programs to subsidize McDonald’s and Walmart’s low-wage workers.” (8) In other words, while these corporations benefit from the federal government’s generous treatment, they pay their workers too little to stay off public assistance, and the rest of the population pays for food assistance, Medicaid, etc. In addition to corporate subsidies, public policy is tilted to the elite in other ways as well. The investment billionaire Warren Buffett once famously noted that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary when taken as a percentage of their respective incomes. The tax code is littered with loopholes and deductions available to upper-income earners. The marginal tax rate for capital gains—passive forms of income like stocks, real estate, and artwork from which the wealthy benefit disproportionately—has dropped significantly and is now lower than that for income from wages.
Political scientist Martin Gilens examined peoples’ public policy preferences in surveys. He then subdivided the people by income and checked that data against actual public policy changes. Gilens found that “when preferences between the well-off and the poor diverge, government policy bears absolutely no relationship to the degree of support or opposition among the poor.” Further, he found that “government policy appears to be fairly responsive to the well-off and virtually unrelated to the desires of low- and middle-income citizens.” (9) Gilens found that when the poor and middle classes got what they wanted from the political system, it was only because the affluent wanted it as well. When the poor and middle classes wanted policies that the rich did not want, they didn’t get them even though the lower and middle classes constitute the majority of people in the United States. It’s almost as if the wealthy have a veto on popular policies if they do not benefit the top 5 or 10 percent of society.
We won’t spend much time on the second dimension of power here. Throughout this text you will see how the rules of the game benefit elites. The constitutional system is stacked in favor of elites being able to stop action. Because the American electoral system runs on money, “both major parties tend to be corrupted—and pushed away from satisfying the needs and wishes of ordinary Americans—by their reliance on wealthy contributors.” (10) We’ll note how Congress frequently tends to avoid passing the very legislation that majorities of people want. We’ll see how the structure and operation of the U. S. Senate is especially undemocratic. America’s corporate media system ensures that progressive ideas have a more difficult time getting heard. The system of organized interest groups in the United States is heavily stacked in favor of business groups and the wealthy. We’ll also see how the Supreme Court has a history of primarily “comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted.” (11) And we’ll see how corporations capture federal regulatory agencies.
It’s also easy to see how well elites do on the third dimension of power. We’ve already mentioned the neat trick of getting poor and middle-class people to fight against the estate tax. But the list goes on and on: working people have been marshaled by elites to support other tax breaks, limitations on unions, free-trade agreements, and cuts to the social safety net. As political journalist Thomas Frank famously once observed, “people getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about.” (12) Elites “manufacture consent,” in the telling phrase coined by economist Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. (13) They argued that just like consumer demand for products is manufactured by the public relations industry, political consent is similarly manufactured through election campaigns that focus on superficial considerations. Consent is also manufactured by frightening people or by getting them angry. Want to cut public assistance for the poor? Get people upset about “welfare queens.” Want to invade a country? Talk about that country’s leader being “worse than Hitler,” and posing an existential threat to the United States. Want to gin up gun sales and defeat attempts to regulate firearms? Talk about crime. It works just as well when crime is at record lows as when crime is high. All these measures have been successful. These measures only require that you control the media, decide what issues get addressed, and how those issues are framed. Elites have that kind of control.
How else do elites exploit the third dimension of power? Myths. Going back at least as far as the nineteenth century Horatio Alger stories, Americans have been fed a steady diet of “rugged individualism” and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” myths. Objectively, we know that the economic success of individuals who truly do rise from rags to riches is a function of social investments in schools, roads, legal systems, monetary systems, and so on. But elites thrive on the myth that they did it on their own. They gain power from that myth, for it assumes that nothing needs to change about the status quo. According to the corollary to this myth, if you’re poor, hungry, and without healthcare, it’s your own damned fault.
Even the partisan stalemate in Washington—which is not a myth, but has taken on mythic proportions—plays into the hands of the elites because it creates a sense of futility among many people, a feeling that “politicians are all the same” or “it doesn’t matter who wins elections, so I might as well not vote.” The political demobilization of ordinary people is perhaps the best tool the wealthy and corporations have to achieve their aims. As South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko said, “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” (14) If the governed can be made to feel that they are powerless to effect change, then indeed they are powerless.
Perhaps the best illustration of elites’ use of the third dimension of power is their ability to convince many Americans that democratic government is bad and that undemocratic, unregulated markets are good. President Ronald Reagan famously said in his 1981 inaugural address that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Reagan was articulating the view that predominates in the United States—that government should scale back and step out of the way so that corporations operating largely without regulation could better serve the needs of individuals and the broader society alike. The fact that so many Americans of all political stripes take this view is the result of a centuries long propaganda effort in schools, the media, academia, churches, and politics. It is the reason that ordinary people—who would benefit from a more progressive tax structure, better public transit, or less government welfare for upper-class homeowners and corporations—often vote for politicians who are opposed to those very things. Even though unregulated markets repeatedly fail Americans in ways that require government intervention (e.g., bank failures, pollution externalities, the climate crisis, and predatory check cashing operations), many of us keep looking to markets and corporations for our solutions. This exercise of the third dimension of power, or what the late anthropologist Eric R. Wolf called structural power, makes meaningful policy alternatives disappear from our political system. (15)
The People and the Elites
The last observation above leads us to an important caveat. The people have numbers. And votes. The question is whether the people have the will and organization to counteract elite power. At times in American history, popular will has translated into public policies that benefited average men and women over the elites. People have risen up and demanded protection from monopoly corporate power. People have demanded a minimum wage, worker safety laws, and laws against child labor. Women and men together demanded that women be able to vote. People of all races demanded that we have civil rights laws guaranteeing voting privileges, the right to equality in the workplace, the right to go to neighborhood schools, and freedom from sexual harassment. People demanded that the impoverishment of the elderly be ameliorated—and it was through programs like Social Security and Medicare. People demanded that America’s rivers no longer catch on fire due to their high levels of pollution. The message of this text is that elites have the most power in the American system. But the message is also to hopefully get you to acknowledge that this situation can change if the majority organizes itself to act in the interest of the public good.
Finally, we need to remember that when we state that elites have disproportionate power, we don’t need to make conclusions about the character of corporate executives, hedge fund directors, Wall Street bankers, or Silicon Valley titans. Like any group of people, the elite encompasses upstanding, exemplary individuals as well as those whose motives are less than admirable. They act like all other people act: in their own self-interest. The question for a political system is whether concentrations of economic and political power can coexist with democracy. Will the self-interest of a powerful elite—a minority of the population—distort the political and economic rules in ways that perpetuate vast inequality? Political philosopher Danielle Allen put the challenge this way:
“A proper role of government—nearly forgotten today, but the overriding concern of the Founders—is finding ways to prevent undue concentrations of power wherever they occur. Power tends toward self-perpetuation; where it is left undisturbed, it will draw further advantages to itself, shut out rivals, and mete out ever-bolder forms of injustice.” (16)
What if . . . ?
Imagine yourself in a national leadership role. What role would it be? Senator? Representative? President? Supreme Court Justice? How would you use your understanding of who has power in the United States to enhance the collective voice of ordinary Americans? How would you use it to, in Danielle Allen’s words, “prevent undue concentrations of power?”
References
1. Martin Gilensand Benjamin Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics. Fall 2014.
2. Matt Taibbi, “Deval Patrick’s Candidacy is Another Chapter in the Democrats’ 2020 Clown Car Disaster,” Rolling Stone. November 14, 2019.
3. Classic texts in the pluralist tradition include David B. Truman, The Governmental Process, 2nd edition. New York: Knopf, 1971; and Robert Dahl, Pluralist Democracy in the United States. Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1967.
4. Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism, 2nd edition. New York: Norton: 1979.
5. See C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956; and Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society. New York: Basic Books, 1969.
6. Noam Chomsky, Requiem for the American Dream. The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth and Power. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2017. Page 1.
7. Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few. 9thedition. Boston: Wadsworth, 2011. Page 60.
8. Robert Reich, “How Corporate Welfare Hurts You,” The American Prospect. July 23, 2019.
9. Martin Gilens, Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Page 81.
10. Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Page 111.
11. Ian Millhiser, Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted. New York: Nation Books, 2015.
12. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter With Kansas?New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004. Page 1.
13. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon, 2012.
14. Takudzwa Hillary Chiwanza, The African Exponent. September 12, 2017.
15. Eric R. Wolf, Pathways of Power: Building and Anthropology of the Modern World. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Page 385. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023.
16. Danielle Allen, “The Road From Serfdom,” The Atlantic. December2019. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/01%3A_Thinking_Like_a_Political_Scientist/1.03%3A_Chapter_3-_Who_Has_Power_in_U._S._Politics.txt |
“Science is extraordinarily effective at rooting out rubbish.”
–David J. Helfand (1)
The discipline called “political science” is a branch of the social sciences, which includes sociology, psychology, anthropology, and economics. Social scientists study individual and social behavior. They explore questions that often come from established theoretical perspectives consisting of concepts, definitions, and a body of scholarly literature developed over time. As you engage in this political science class, make sure you pay attention to the various theoretical perspectives that exist in the discipline. Recall that this text approaches political science from a modified version of elite theory, which takes the perspective that a struggle exists between elites who use their money, access, and influence over political institutions and processes to consistently push government to serve their interests and ordinary people who use their votes to inconsistently push government to serve their interests. We will use this lens through which to better understand how the political system in the United States works and for whom it works.
Political scientists describe and explain political behavior. In doing so, they often look for patterns and relationships in what may appear to be a blizzard of random events. They know that while the political world is not as predictable as the physical world studied by chemists and physicists, they can study it systematically if they know where and how to look. Political scientists attempt to make empirical or verifiable statements about how the world of politics works. They carefully observe phenomena such as voting, political opinions, legislative decisions, campaign finance disclosures, presidential vetoes, Supreme Court decisions, and so forth.
The Scientific Method
Many social scientists employ the scientific method in the same ways that natural scientists do—although studying people instead of natural phenomena adds layers of complexity to the task. Other social scientists eschew using the formal scientific method in favor of rigorous interpretations, analyses, or in-depth case studies. They may do so because historical events and contemporary social phenomena are too complex for simple causal models to address or because people are too self-aware to be measured and studied without distorting results. Nevertheless, all social scientists adhere to empirical, formalized methodologies. The difficulty social scientists have is detaching themselves from their ideological or normative understandings of how they want the political world to work versus how it actually works. Science historian and philosopher Lee McIntyre argues that “the challenge in social science is to find a way to preserve our values without letting them interfere with empirical investigation. We need to understand the world before we can change it.” (2)
The phrase scientific method is a bit misleading in that it is an idealized process with a clear order of steps used to describe the often messy work that scientists actually do. You might have learned these steps in elementary school:
• Ask a question
• Research what others have learned about the question
• Formulate a hypothesis
• Conduct an experiment
• Collect and analyze data
• Communicate results
Regarding political science, we might be better off if we think of the scientific method as a systematic, logically driven process to gather information and make conclusions about natural and social phenomena. And rather than focusing on an artificial step-by-step approach to understanding the scientific method, we can go into more detail on the features that distinguish science from other ways of knowing.
We have already referenced empiricism above. The words empiricism, noun, and empirical, adjective, mean that scientists base their conclusions on careful verifiable observation and experience, rather than on intuition, revelation, prejudice, superstition, or anecdote. Empiricism in the West is a cherished gift of the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment. For example, through his telescope, Galileo patiently observed four “stars” dancing around Jupiter, which led him to make the empirical statement that they were in fact moons orbiting around the planet. In addition, English physician Edward Jenner observed that farm hands who contracted cowpox earlier in life did not get smallpox, which led him to make the empirical statement that inoculating individuals with cowpox could protect them against smallpox. He tested this proposition on an 8-year-old boy named James Phipps. Phipps did not get smallpox. The result was the insight that inoculation made a person immune from the disease. These and many other examples illustrate empiricism’s power over other forms of knowing such as tradition or revelation.
Hypotheses, Concepts, and Variables
Aside from making careful and patient observations, the scientific method requires that we formulate hypotheses, conceptualize complex phenomena, and analyze constantly changing variables. Political scientists generate a hypothesis by asking a research question—an inquiry that asks how the political world operates or why it works the way it does. The hypothesis posits an answer to the research question that you then test by conducting studies or experiments. The kinds of why or how questions that make good hypotheses are distinct from questions that elicit factual answers. For example, questions such as “What interests or organizations contribute the most money to political campaigns?” or “How many Supreme Court justices have been women?” are important—indeed, they are foundational to political science, so we will concern ourselves with many of them in this course. But they are the kinds of questions that typically elicit straightforward answers. Rather, here are some examples of large research questions in political science that make good hypotheses:
• Why does the United States—uniquely among advanced democracies—not have universal health coverage? My hypothesis might be that entrenched interests have been able to use the political system to block broad health coverage.
• Why do congressional incumbents have high reelection rates? My hypothesis might be that their financial advantage contributes greatly to their high reelection rate.
• How does the constitutional structure benefit some interests over others? My hypothesis might be that the constitutional structure privileges certain interests over others, particularly those who want to stop new policy over those who want to start it.
• How did conservatives go from spectacular defeat in 1964 to preeminence in all three government branches by 2000? My hypothesis might be that the conservative movement simply expanded to reflect real shifts in popular support on key issues that were favorable to the conservative point of view. In other words, shifts in public opinion caused the success of conservative politicians.
These kinds of questions are complex and require that scholars gather evidence from a variety of sources. Hypotheses must be supported systematically through a process of argumentation with political scientists who might disagree.
Not all hypotheses are the same. Here are the major categories of hypotheses:
Null hypothesis: This essentially asserts that there is no relationship between two variables. Often political scientists will refute the null hypothesis to make sure there is something interesting going on before they undertake more sophisticated analysis. On the question of money and incumbent reelection rates, for example, the null hypothesis would be that there is no relationship between campaign budgets and chances of succeeding in an election.
Correlative or correlational hypothesis: This simply suggests that two variables vary together. For example, I might hypothesize that there is a relationship between religious fundamentalism and acts of terrorism. In doing so, I’m not speculating which variable is causing movement in the other.
Directional hypotheses: Correlative hypotheses are not especially powerful, so we tend to construct particular kinds of correlative hypotheses. As you might guess, directional hypotheses posit a direction to the relationship in question. For example, I could say that as religious fundamentalism increases, acts of terrorism increase as well. This is called a positive relationship—the value of one variable increasing along with the value of another variable. A negative relationship involves the value of one variable decreasing as the value of the other variable increases. For example, we might hypothesize that as personal income increases, willingness to support public transit decreases.
Causal hypothesis: This goes one step further by positing that at least some of the variance in one variable is being caused by the variance in the other variable. In all the other hypotheses, the two variables do not need to connect, but in a causal hypothesis, they do. Causation is extremely difficult to establish. For example, let’s say that we could somehow measure the rise and fall of religious fundamentalism in the world and also that we have an accurate count of terrorist incidents over time. To establish causation, we would have to show a statistical relationship between the changing values for each variable and convince our readers of a valid link between the two variables—a link that cannot be explained in a better way. On top of this difficulty is the problem of social complexity. Rarely can a complex phenomenon such as terrorism be explained by one variable, which brings to mind the admonition, beware of mono-causal explanations. Political scientists are much more likely to say that a certain percentage of the variance in terrorism can be explained by the variance in religious fundamentalism than they are to say that fundamentalism causes terrorism.
Hypotheses require the political scientist to conceptualize certain terms. Earlier, we posed a research question about the conservative movement’s growth from 1964 to 2000. What exactly do we mean by “the conservative movement”? A concept is a word or phrase that stands for something more complex or abstract. Political science is often concerned with big concepts such as liberty, democracy, power, justice, equality, war and peace, and representation. But there are many mid-level concepts in the discipline such as political development, political legitimacy, electoral realignment, or globalization. In addition, terms related to political ideologies—liberal, conservative, socialist, fascist, feminist, libertarian, and so forth—are also key concepts. We must be clear about our key concept definitions. If I mean one thing by the concept “conservative movement” and you mean another, then it becomes difficult for us to have a productive academic dialogue about that topic.
In turn, researchers need to define or operationalize fuzzy concepts into measurable concrete variables. For example, earlier we hypothesized that as people’s income increases, their tendency to support public transit programs would decrease. How are we going to operationalize “income” as a variable that we can use in our analysis? We could ask a sample of people to tell us their income and then ask them questions about public transit. But, let’s say we wanted to rely on more concrete income records, assuming we could get them. We’ll still have questions to consider: gross income before taxes? Only wage income? Family income or individual income? As you can see, operationalizing concepts into measurable variables is not always easy.
A final comment about variables and testing hypotheses: the political scientist must control other relevant variables in the research design or methodology, so they are seeing the impact of the key variable on its own. For example, we might hypothesize that higher income causes people to tend to turn out to vote more, and indeed that’s what the data show. However, income correlates well with higher formal education. How do we know whether we’re seeing the impact of income or education on voting turnout? We need to control for education. One way to do that would be to sample only people with similar formal education levels and then break down the voting data by income within that educational stratum. Thus, we could look at only people with a bachelor’s degree but no graduate degree and see whether tendency to vote within that group increases as personal income rises. Statisticians have developed mathematical techniques to control the effects of unwanted variables, but those techniques are beyond this textbook’s scope.
Experiments
Scientists often employ experiments to test their hypotheses, and political scientists do as well. Experiments come in two flavors: controlled and natural. A controlled experiment is one that is carefully set up by the scientist to control the variables that might affect the outcome, thereby isolating and evaluating the variable in which they are most interested. For example, let’s imagine we are interested in how conservatives and liberals respond to new information about health policy. We could gather two groups of 100 people, one conservative and one liberal, and bring them into our office for the experiment. We would need to be sure that the conservatives were conservative to the same degree as the liberals were liberal. We would also want two groups that matched each other in important demographic variables such as race, income, and sex. Once we have assured ourselves that the two groups differed only in their political ideology, we could then provide individuals in each group with the same new information about health policy. Then, we would need to develop an instrument to gauge the responses of conservatives and liberals. That instrument might be a knowledge questionnaire, a survey, or a behavior observation, depending on our hypothesis. Note that we have controlled the variables to such an extent that we can be confident that any difference we see between the groups is related to their different ideologies.
natural experiment is an observational study in the real world where the scientist does not control the variables, but where natural processes or social events provide an opportunity for them to see the effect of a variable in action. Natural experiments are messier than controlled experiments, and therefore the conclusions that can be drawn from them are necessarily more tentative. Nevertheless, natural experiments are often compelling because they happen in the world around us rather than in a laboratory setting. For example, the Affordable Care Act—ACA or Obamacare—unintentionally created a natural experiment. The ACA required states to expand Medicaid to a larger percentage of poor people and funded them to do so. However, the Supreme Court struck down the mandate in 2012, thereby allowing states to choose whether or not to expand Medicaid. As it happens, states controlled by Republicans generally chose not to expand Medicaid, while states controlled by Democrats or that had a Democratic-Republic balance tended to expand Medicaid. Over a four-year period, researchers found that states that had expanded Medicaid reduced their mean annual mortality rate by 9.3 percent. Effectively, what this meant was that the 14 states that did not take advantage of the ACA to expand Medicaid had 15,600 people die who would not have died had the states expanded Medicaid. (3) Aside from the obvious conclusion that the decisions of the Supreme Court, state governors and legislatures caused the premature deaths of nearly 16,000 Americans, this natural experiment allowed us to see the variable’s impact at the state level—was Medicaid expansion a net positive or negative on people’s health?
Falsifiability and Professional Responsibilities
Science’s emphasis on empiricism, conceptual clarity, variables, hypotheses, and experiments underscores another characteristic that we want to highlight here: falsifiability. Falsifiability—also known as testability—refers to the fact that scientific knowledge claims are subject to being proven wrong. Science philosopher Karl Popper argued that falsifiability is central to differentiating science from nonscience. “A system,” he wrote, “is to be considered as scientific only if it makes assertions which may clash with observations: and a system is, in fact, tested by attempts to produce such clashes; that is to say, by attempts to refute it.” (4) Scientists make claims about the natural or social worlds and how they work. Those claims are so carefully documented that another scientist can either replicate the original study or marshal another set of observations with the explicit goal of testing whether or not the first scientist’s claim was correct. Systematically falsifying incorrect claims makes science progress toward greater understanding. If someone claims that providing welfare causes people to avoid work, we should be able to gather data to shed light on the claim. How would we do that? Could we compare unemployment figures from countries with more and less generous welfare systems? Could we do a pre- and post-study centered around a state or country instituting a new welfare system? Whatever we do, we are empirically testing a claim that can either be refuted or confirmed.
What does an untestable claim look like? Namely, it is a theory that cannot be refuted. The paleontologist Donald Prothero provided a great example by citing the case of Philip Henry Gosse, a nineteenth-century English naturalist and member of the puritanical Plymouth Brethren. A couple of years before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection in 1859, Gosse published a book called Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot. Like Darwin, Gosse was trying to explain the increasing evidence that life had evolved over time. But Darwin used careful observations to explicate his theory of natural selection—a theory that was eminently falsifiable. Gosse, on the other hand, put forward a theory that God had created the currently existing plants and animals as well as fossils to look like evolution had taken place over a long period, but that in fact, God had created all life relatively recently, just as Gosse’s Bible told him. He reconciled his religious beliefs with empirical observations by developing a theory that could not be refuted. When Darwin came along and wrote—in one of his many examples—that finches on the Galapagos Islands had, through natural selection over time, modified their morphology to suit the kinds of things they ate on the various island ecosystems, Gosse’s adherents could simply say, “God just made the finches look that way.” Gosse’s claim is not falsifiable through any observation or experiment, whereas the theory of natural selection has passed literally thousands of tests for over 160 years. (5)
Scientists of all stripes engage in common behaviors that support their work and to better understand each discipline’s study. Two particularly noteworthy behaviors are attending professional conferences and publishing in peer-reviewed journals. At professional conferences, scientists present their findings to their peers. There, they challenge each other, share new ideas and data sets, and develop common research interests around which they can collaborate. While professional conferences are not particularly exciting for someone who is not a member of that disciplinary community, its members greatly enjoy the give and take around poster sessions, panel discussions, and workshops. Scientists also publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals. A peer-reviewed journal is a magazine that publishes only peer-reviewed articles. Peer-review is an extremely important and often overlooked feature of science. If a political scientist sends a manuscript to International Studies Quarterly or any of dozens of political science journals, that manuscript will be farmed out to at least two other political scientists who have published in that field. They will review the manuscript and make comments on the methodology, the data, and the conclusions it offers. They will tell the editors of International Studies Quarterly whether the manuscript should be published, rejected, or sent back to the author for revisions. This is a blind process—the author of the manuscript does not know who is reviewing it, and the reviewers do not know who wrote the manuscript. The peer-review process is not foolproof, but it is a very robust way of ensuring credibility.
Political science is a member of the social sciences. While not all political scientists use the formal scientific method, they all adhere to empirical, falsifiable methods that are peer-reviewed. Political scientists at universities focus primarily on research and secondarily on teaching. Political scientists at community colleges focus primarily on teaching and secondarily on research.
What if . . . ?
What if we did a better job of developing scientific literacy among the American population? What impact would that have on our conversations about political issues that have scientific dimensions to them? How might those conversations be different? How would you go about promoting scientific literacy in America?
References
1. David J. Helfand, A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age. Scientific Habits of Mind. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Page 22.
2. Lee McIntyre, The Scientific Attitude. Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019. Pages 193-194.
3. Sarah Miller, Sean Altekruse, Norman Johnson, Laura R. Wherry, “Medicaid and Mortality: New Evidence from Linked Survey and Administrative Data,” Working Paper No. 26081. The National Bureau of Economic Research. July 2019.
4. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge.London: Routledge, 2002. Page 345.
5. Donald R. Prothero, Evolution. What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, Page 9. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/01%3A_Thinking_Like_a_Political_Scientist/1.04%3A_Chapter_4-_Political_Science_as_a_Social_Science.txt |
“Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land; they own and control the corporations that’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls; they got the judges in their back pocket, and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and the information you get to hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them.”
–Part of George Carlin’s “Owners” stand-up comedy
Common Fallacies
A key skill for any critical thinker is bullshit detection. (1) Comedian George Carlin was particularly good at seeing through bullshit, and we should take seriously his warning that some interests in society would prefer to see less rather than more critical thinking. An important component of bullshit detection is the ability to spot common fallacies. Whether you are making arguments or evaluating them in public discourse, you should be familiar with common fallacies. A fallacy is an argument that is faulty, logically invalid, or deceptive. They can be quite persuasive, but you should not use them. As entrepreneur and author Michael Boylen puts it, “When we consciously choose to use fallacy to persuade others, we degrade ourselves. When we negligently allow ourselves to be duped by logical fallacy, we similarly degrade ourselves.” (2) There are many more fallacies than are listed here, but make sure you know the following:
Ad hominem—Although ad hominem means “against the man,” it would apply to any person. Ad hominem fallacies usually happen when we attack the person who made the argument in an attempt to discredit what they said or wrote, instead of attacking the argument on its merits. If convicted former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling makes an argument about how the United States could be more energy efficient by relying on ethanol, I would commit the ad hominem fallacy if I were to say, “Why should we believe anything this ethically-challenged guy says?” I haven’t addressed his argument on its merits; I’ve merely tried to discredit it for my audience by casting aspersions on Skilling. Ad hominem critiques can be directed at individuals, religious sects, races, ethnic groups, and even nations. (3)
Reductive fallacy—We commit this fallacy when we try to address complex issues with simple solutions. Someone might say that the key to solving poverty is to “make lazy people work.” Or, to end terrorism, we should “bomb the Middle East back to the Stone Age.” Or, to have a world-class public education system, we just need to “get back to the basics.” Issues like poverty, terrorism, and educational achievement gaps are tremendously complicated, and we are not likely to solve them with the public policy equivalents of bumper sticker slogans.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc—This fallacy literally means “after this, therefore because of this.” We make this error when we assert that A caused B simply because A preceded B. If the Ajax Corporation makes a donation to Senator Jones’ campaign fund, and a week later Senator Jones votes for a tax code bill that benefits the Ajax Corporation, we might be tempted to conclude that the campaign donation caused Jones to vote for the bill. If we were to do so, we would be guilty of committing the post hoc fallacy. The two actions may indeed be related in some way, but there is no way to know for certain without other evidence. Here’s a more basic example: You accidentally drop a large book on the floor, and an earthquake starts immediately afterwards. It’s certainly an odd coincidence, but you did not cause the earthquake by dropping your book.
Non sequitur—This means it does not follow,” and refers to an argument whose evidence and conclusion don’t match the original claim. For example, let’s say a defendant has been accused of child abuse and the prosecutor’s case can be boiled down to the following points: Child abuse is an awful crime; the victim in this case has suffered horribly; therefore, the defendant is guilty of child abuse. (4) Such a tactic might appeal to the emotions of the jurors, but the prosecutor has not actually presented any evidence to support a guilty claim.
Appeal to majority—It is a fallacy to say that when many people believe a claim to be true, it is evidence of its truth. Actually, an idea’s popularity says nothing about its validity, otherwise we might still believe that the earth is the center of the solar system and the universe. The majority can be wrong. Indeed, it often is.
Straw man—The straw man tactic involves distorting an opponent’s position by stating it in an oversimplified or extreme form, and then refuting the distorted position instead of the real one. Unfortunately, this happens frequently in political debate. For example, critics of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act derided it as simply no child left untested because it emphasized standardized testing. Of course, the legislation was more complicated than that, but it was easier to boil the initiative down to one of its high-profile parts.
Red herring—Similar to the straw man, invoking a red herring is when someone brings up a non-related issue to make their case. For example, if Jack is making an argument that gay marriage should be constitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Jane might try to counter-argue by saying that we must preserve eroding family values. Jane’s counter argument does not address Jack’s constitutional point but diverts the discussion into a separate issue. Apparently, the term red herring comes from the fact that herring turns red when it rots, and a rotten fish has such a strong smell that dragging it across a game trail can throw the dogs off the scent. (5)
Begging the question—When we beg the question, we use evidence that is essentially the same as the claim. We also refer to begging the question as circular argumentAs Ted Talk speaker David Kelley reminds us, “The point of reasoning is to throw light on the truth or falsity of a proposition…by relating it to other propositions…that we already have some basis for believing to be true. If our reasoning does nothing more than relate [the proposition] to itself, then it hasn’t gained us anything.”
For example, says Kelley, a circular argument might run like this: “Society has an obligation to support the needy, because people who cannot provide for themselves have a right to the resources of the community.” Everything in that sentence after the “because” is simply a restatement—in different form—of the proposition that society has an obligation to support the needy. (6) Another example: I say God exists. Why? Because the Bible says so. Why should you believe that source? I say that you should believe it because the Bible is the word of God. A convenient, anti-intellectual circle.
Black/white thinking—Black/white thinking goes by many names, the most common of which are false dichotomy and false dilemma. When we commit this fallacy, we shrink the world of possibilities down to two choices—one of which we favor—and insist that everyone must choose between them. Invariably, the other choice is some extreme or disastrous possibility that no one in their right mind would choose. Some examples: You either support our policies or you support the terrorists; America—love it or leave it; if we don’t execute murderers, they’ll be running free and killing more people. Such thinking is fallacious because it eliminates reasonable alternatives, distorts reality, and tries to stampede people into choosing a course without fully examining all possibilities.
Ecological fallacy—This is an easy fallacy to commit. It refers to making conclusions about a person based on aggregate data that is relevant to that person. Aggregate data is information compiled into summaries for public reporting and cannot be used to make definitive statements about an individual. Here’s a great example: “Imagine two small towns, each with only one hundred people. Town A has ninety-nine people earning \$80,000 a year and one super-wealthy person who struck oil on their property, earning \$5,000,000 a year. Town B has fifty people earning \$100,000 a year and fifty people earning \$140,000. The mean income of Town A is \$129,200, and the mean income of Town B is \$120,000. Although Town A has a higher mean income, in ninety-nine out of one hundred cases, any individual you select randomly from Town B will have a higher income than an individual selected randomly from Town A. The ecological fallacy is thinking that if you select someone at random from the group with the higher mean, that individual is likely to have a higher income.” (7) | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/01%3A_Thinking_Like_a_Political_Scientist/1.05%3A_Chapter_5-_Common_Fallacies_in_Argumentation.txt |
“What annoys me most is a lazy argument.”
–Christopher Hitchens (1)
Because political scientists are members of a branch of the social sciences, they often make arguments about political institutions and behavior. As citizens of a purported democracy, we all are called upon to make arguments about public policy, political campaigns, and even about the nature of reality—for example, does widespread gun ownership deter crime or cause it?
What Is an Argument?
We should be clear about what an argument is and what it is not, about an argument’s key components, and about why we should be making arguments. When my friend says that Donald Trump ranks as the worst president in U. S. history, they are making an assertion or a claim—not an argument. If, instead, she says that Donald Trump is the worst president in U. S. history because . . . followed by sufficient evidence leading to a conclusion about Trump’s failings relative to other American presidents, then she has made an argument.
We will define an argument as a claim plus evidence leading to a conclusion. The fundamental underlying question linking claim and evidence is why. Why should I believe this claim? And the immediate follow-up: What evidence would lead me to that conclusion?
Evidence in Argumentation
What passes for evidence in an argument? Much depends on the argument’s claim, but almost anything can be used effectively as evidence. Political scientists are fond of using both quantitative and qualitative evidence. Quantitative evidence refers to numbers: voting statistics, campaign finance figures, public opinion survey results, government revenue and spending, economic data, and so forth. Qualitative evidence refers to words. A political scientist might use political speeches, national constitutions, journalists’ and commentators’ writings, interviews with average people, behavior observations, historical events, and so forth. Regardless of the evidence’s nature and strength, we should always be careful about an argument’s proof. Instead of saying, “This evidence proves that…,” we could say, “This evidence suggests that…,” or “This evidence leads us to conclude that….” It’s part of the tentative nature of scientific claims, particularly in the social sciences.
Let’s say, for example, that we want to make an argument about how well our economic system is serving the needs of ordinary Americans. We could gather qualitative evidence in the form of interviews with a variety of people and sort their answers by a simple scheme in which the person either does or does not believe the economic system is serving them well. We could also gather quantitative evidence of income growth over time. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has done this, and we might conclude that this evidence suggests that the economy used to serve all Americans, but stopped doing so in the late 1970s.
Once we have a claim supported by quantitative or qualitative evidence pointing to a conclusion, we are faced with the question of warranted inference—under what conditions are we warranted or justified in accepting a conclusion or inference? Warranted inference requires that we meet two conditions:
• The reasons/evidence must be true.
• The conclusion must follow from the reasons/evidence. That is, it must follow truth-preserving reasoning. This is known as validity in classical argument. (2)
These two conditions for warranted inference provide a road map for anyone who wants to attack a particular argument. They can attack the evidence presented or present counter evidence that calls into question the original claim’s supporting evidence. Or, they might demonstrate that even if the evidence is true, it does not merit their opponent’s conclusion.
Another strategic attack might be to undermine the argument’s assumptions. Arguments are often based upon one or more assumptions. Assumptions are unstated premises that the person making the argument is taking for granted or asking you to take for granted. For example, Democrats and Republicans may make different arguments about the best way to grow the economy, but both are making an assumption about the merits of a capitalist economic system, and both are making an assumption about the need for economic growth. An argument may include significant evidence but is nevertheless weak if it is based on shaky assumptions.
When making extensive arguments—as opposed to short, quick arguments—it is often a good idea to anticipate and deal with counterarguments. When preparing to make an argument, find evidence that supports your viewpoint, but also scout the arguments made on the debate’s other side. What are the evidentiary weaknesses in those arguments? How have others countered them? Once you can answer those two questions, you can paraphrase counterarguments to your position and shoot them down in ways that illustrate your own argument’s strength.
Also, to create an effective argument, you must define its critical terms. If we consider the Democratic and Republican argument over the best way to stimulate economic growth, we would want both sides to define economic growth. Does it mean increase in the gross domestic product (GDP)—the total value of all goods and services produced over a specified time period? Or maybe it means increase in the gross domestic product per capita over that time period? Or maybe one of the arguments rests on an economic growth definition that replaces the outdated notion of GDP with the more people-friendly genuine progress indicator (GPI), which adds the goods and services value but subtracts for expenses like crime and ecological destruction. In any case, arguments without well-defined terms are often a waste of time.
Why Do We Make Arguments?
In large part, we make arguments because of a foundational philosophy that author Connie Missimer called progressivism, which holds that the truth in human affairs is real and that we are on a never-ending journey towards it. (3) Don’t confuse this with political progressivism, which we’ll talk about in a later chapter. According to this philosophical brand of progressivism, we will never reach the truth. But through careful argumentation, we can reject various falsehoods and begin to glean a better understanding of reality. Let’s contrast the progressivist tradition with two anti-intellectual perspectives that many people unfortunately find attractive: dogmatism and relativism.
Dogmatism is a philosophy that says we have already arrived at the truth, so no new claims or evidence need to be entertained. Revealed religious teachings are almost always dogmatic, therefore, anti-intellectual in nature. This is not to say that such teachings have no value to individuals as personal comforts, but they have no place in rational argument. Similarly, dogmatism often accompanies the arguments of political ideologues. Under Vladimir Lenin and subsequent leaders, the Soviet Union’s Communist Party would not deviate from the established party line. Proponents of religious and ideological dogma proceed from the assumption that their world view is complete in and of itself.
In fleeing dogmatism’s obvious constraints, some people run right past progressivism and settle on relativism. Relativism posits that there is no ultimate truth, so there is no basis to reject one argument in favor of another. Under relativism, truth becomes a personal possession: “What is true for me may not be true for you,” or “Objective reality is always filtered through the individual observer’s context and situation, so everything we might say about it is suspect.” There is some validity to these statements, but taking them seriously means that every bit of an argument’s supporting evidence is contestable due to its context. What would be the point of arguing? Cultural relativism is a common manifestation of this philosophy, where people refuse to pass judgment on the cultural practices of other ethnic or religious groups. Relativism manifests itself in many other ways as well and is a constituent part of what author Susan Jacoby labels “junk thought.” She writes that “the real power of junk thought lies in its status as a centrist phenomenon, fueled by the American credo of tolerance that places all opinions on an equal footing and makes little effort to separate fact from opinion.” (4) We know, however, that not all opinions or arguments are equally worthy.
Other Considerations When Making and Responding to Arguments
We’ve already talked a bit about logical fallacies. We should keep in mind several other considerations when making and responding to arguments. These are not fallacies per se but are elements of argumentation that are frequently abused.
Correlation Does Not, Necessarily, Equal Causation—As we saw in the post hoc fallacy, the fact that A happens before B does not mean that A caused B. We should always be careful about making claims that suggest movement in one variable is causing movement in another or that one condition occurring with another condition means that one caused the other.
Variables can be correlated with each other in several ways, only one of which is a causal relationship. Let’s say that variables A and B are correlated. One possibility is that A might in fact be causing B, or vice versa. Another possibility is that a third variable, C, is simultaneously causing A and B, without there being a direct relationship between A and B. Also, maybe A is actually causing C, which is then causing B, in which case C is called an intermediate variable. Finally, A and B may be correlated, but there is actually no relationship between them.
Appealing to Authority—Appealing to authority can be a fallacy if the authority in question lacks credibility. We commit this fallacy when we make arguments and use evidence from sources who are not qualified in a given area, for example, religious texts or authorities who cannot be questioned or whose motivation comes into question because of partisan or financial conflicts of interest. If I make an argument that my state should open more charter schools, and I quote a state legislator who is also on the board of a company that builds charter schools, I would have committed this fallacy. I’m expecting that my state legislator’s authority will convince my audience, but I have used a person whose “expertise” is questionable. However, appealing to authority has many legitimate uses. In fact, in making effective arguments, it is a common and totally valid strategy since the authority being cited may be more knowledgeable in a given area. This seems like a good time to defer to the wisdom of two philosophy professors and critical-rethinking authorities, Robert Fogelin and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, who wrote,
“Since some people stand in a better position to know things than others, there is nothing wrong with citing them as authorities. In fact, an appeal to experts and authorities is essential if we are to make up our minds on subjects outside our own range of competence.” (5)
Thus, appealing to credible authority frequently strengthens an argument.
Argument by Analogy—People often use analogies when they make an argument. An analogy is linking or comparing two things, typically to explain or clarify. The first President Bush said that Saddam Hussein was “worse than Hitler.” John Dean, President Nixon’s White House counsel, wrote a book arguing that the skullduggery in the George W. Bush administration was “worse than Watergate.” Gay rights advocates argue that bans against gay marriage are akin to the bans against interracial marriage, which existed well into the 1960s.
Are these analogies helpful or not? Using a false or distorted analogy is clearly a fallacy and really should belong in the fallacies list above. But using a well-crafted analogy in arguments can be very effective. To judge an analogy’s usefulness in linking A with B, we need to follow a few simple criteria:
• Note the number of similarities between A and B.
• Are A and B’s similarities relevant?
• Are there differences between A and B?
• Are A and B’s differences relevant? (6)
This is a judgment call. When you are making or responding to an analogy in an argument, go through this quick checklist to see if the analogy is fallacious or not.
Slippery Slope—As with analogies, using slippery-slope arguments improperly can be fallacious. A slippery-slope argument occurs when a person suggests that if we take one action, it will lead to a chain of disastrous events. A common slippery-slope argument said that if we legalized gay marriage, we’d have to legalize polygamy, and then pedophilia, incest, and bestiality. During the Cold War, the domino theory was a popular political argument and a form of the slippery-slope argument used to justify America’s involvement in the Vietnam War: “If we don’t stop the commies there, then Laos and Cambodia will go Red, followed by Thailand, Australia…and then we’ll be fighting the communists on the beaches of California, or at least the communists will be in a position to strangle us without actually invading.” Of course, South Vietnam fell in 1975, but the subsequent cascade of dominoes failed to happen. Slippery-slope arguments can be effective if the arguer clearly lays out the progression down the slope. For example, if a white Southerner in the 1940s argued that any cracks in segregation’s bedrock will lead to its complete collapse, namely, the end of segregated schools, the end of interracial-marriage bans, the end of employment discrimination, etc., they would have been predicting exactly what happened.
Generalization, Hasty Generalization, and Over Generalization—Perhaps the trickiest part of sophisticated argumentation is making generalizations versus over generalizations. We are often counseled against making generalizations, particularly if they involve stereotyping people based on their race, gender, religion, national origin, and so forth. This is good advice, for such stereotypes are often as wrong as they are accurate, so it’s better to treat people as individuals rather than representatives of some larger group. Making a generalization from an atypical example is a fallacy called hasty generalization.
However, we should also keep in mind that very little social science analysis could take place without some well-considered and carefully stated generalizations. If we gather and analyze data that falls into certain patterns, we would be remiss as political scientists if we failed to point that out. Therefore, I am on safe ground if I make the generalization that older Americans tend to vote at higher rates than do younger Americans, because that’s the story the data tell after every election. Notice that I phrased the generalization in a nuanced way using the word “tend,” instead of distorting reality by saying, “Old people vote, and young people don’t.”
What if . . . ?
What if you were the superintendent of a public school system and you wanted to make sure that students graduated high school with the ability to recognize fallacious arguments and the ability to make strong arguments of their own? How would you change the curriculum to accomplish that? How early would you start? What would you have students do?
References
1. Original source unknown. This quote is attributed to author Christopher Hitchens all over the Web: “There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.” I’m not a fan of references to “stupid people,” so I cut that part of the quote.
2. Connie Missimer, Good Arguments. An Introduction to Critical Thinking. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990. Page 61.
3. Missimer, Good Arguments. Pages 40-42.
4. Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008. Page 211.
5. Robert J. Fogelinand Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Understanding Arguments. An Introduction to Informal Logic. San Diego: Harcourt-Brace Jovanovich, 1991. Page 117.
6. Loren J. Thompson, Habits of the Mind: Critical Thinking in the Classroom. New York: University Press of America, 1995. Page 123. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/01%3A_Thinking_Like_a_Political_Scientist/1.06%3A_Chapter_6-_Making_Strong_Arguments.txt |
“The median black family, with just over \$3,500, owns just 2 percent of the wealth of the nearly \$147,000 the median white family owns. The median Latino family, with just over \$6,500, owns just 4 percent of the wealth of the median white family. Put differently, the median white family has 41 times more wealth than the median black family and 22 times more wealth than the median Latino family.”
Inequalty.org (1)
Calculating Percentages
Political scientists use basic and sophisticated quantitative and qualitative research methods in their work. Reviewing those methods is beyond the scope of this introductory text. Still, you should be familiar with the following basic analytical techniques.
One of the most basic operations we can do in quantitative analysis is to sort things into categories and count how many instances fit into each category. Another is to translate raw numbers into percentages. Let’s look at a subtle yet important change in the United States that is reflected in the number of associate’s and bachelor’s degrees conferred in the United States between 1970 and 2000. The National Center for Education Statistics has the following data for college degree attainment in those years. (2) Check out these facts:
• In 1970, colleges and universities conferred 206,000 associate’s degrees, of which 117,000 were to men and 89,000 were to women. In 2000, colleges and universities conferred 565,000 associate’s degrees, of which 225,000 were to men and 340,000 were to women.
• In 1970, colleges and universities conferred 792,000 bachelor’s degrees, of which 451,000 were to men and 341,000 were to women. In 2000, colleges and universities conferred 1,238,000 bachelor’s degrees, of which 530,000 were to men and 708,000 were to women.
Overall, we can see the growing popularity of higher education for both sexes in the United States. The number of associate’s degrees more than tripled during those three decades, while the number of bachelor’s degrees nearly doubled. But the really interesting story has to do with the proportion of degrees women and men received. Can you see it? If you look carefully you can. The difficulty in seeing what is happening is a common one with frequency distributions. Because the total number of degrees in each category changes year by year, it is not always easy to see patterns in the blizzard of raw numbers. What if we standardize the numbers by presenting degrees earned by men and women as percentages of the total number of degrees?
• In 1970, 57% of associate’s degrees were earned by men and 43% by women. By 2000, only 40% of associate’s degrees were earned by men and 60% by women.
• In 1970, 57% of bachelor’s degrees were earned by men and 43% by women. By 2000, only 43% of bachelor’s degrees were earned by men and 57% by women.
By converting the raw numbers to percentages, we gain better understanding of what happened in that period. We can clearly see that at both the associate’s and bachelor’s level, the percentage of degrees earned by women has grown since 1970 while the percentage earned by men has slipped. Even simple quantitative analysis such as this can be very powerful and can prompt political scientists and sociologists to dig deeper. What caused this shift? What political, social, and economic impacts did this shift produce? Can we find evidence of those impacts today?
It’s easier for the brain to figure out what’s happening here if we translate the raw numbers into percentages, because doing so highlights the actual proportion of degrees received by type per year. In this course, you absolutely, positively must be able to figure percentages.
The first thing to learn is calculating percentages that are less than 100%. An easy way to remind yourself how to do that is to remember the simple phrase, “part over total, times one hundred, equals percent.” Let’s look at a few examples. A class has 35 students; 13 are wearing sandals. We can find the percentage of students who are wearing sandals by dividing the part—13 sandal-wearing students, by the total—35 students in the class, and multiplying by 100. So, the equation is as follows:
13/35 x 100 or .37 x 100 equals 37 percent
Another example: If 10,458 of a college’s total enrollment of 18,145 students register to vote, what percentage of the student body is registered to vote? Again, we find the answer by dividing the part—10,458 students registered—by the entire student-body total, which is 18,145, and multiplying by 100. The equation is as follows:
10,458/18,145 x 100 or .58 x 100 equals 58 percent
The next thing to learn is calculating percentages that are greater than 100%. When dealing with percentages, the part can be a larger number than the total if we are figuring percentages larger than 100 percent. Let’s go back to the data for degree attainment. For 1970, the total associate’s degrees conferred was 206,000, and the total bachelor’s degrees conferred was 792,000. The numbers of both degrees increased by the year 2000, but what if we wanted to know whether the associate’s degree numbers increased proportionally more than the bachelor’s degree numbers from 1970 to 2000? We would proceed like this: Put the 2000 associate’s degree number over the 1970 associate’s degree number and multiply by 100. Do the same thing for the bachelor’s degree numbers and compare.
• Associate’s degrees: 565,000/206,000 x 100 equals 274 percent
• Bachelor’s degrees: 1,238,000/792,000 x 100 equals 156 percent
If we want to say the percentage by which these figures increased, we have to discount the original base figure by subtracting 100 percentage points. Thus, the number of bachelor’s degrees earned increased by 56 percent from 1970 to 2000, and the number of associate’s degrees earned increased even more—fully 174 percent in the same time period.
Indexing Data to Population
Political units like states and countries often vary greatly in the number of people they contain. This can create confusion when looking at raw data if one doesn’t index that data to the different populations in question. One common way this is done is to index the data directly to each person by using per capita figures. In Latin, capita is the plural of caput, meaning an individual person. Let’s talk about gross domestic product (GDP), which is the total value of goods and services produced in a country. What if we have economic data indicating that India’s (GDP) is \$2.72 trillion and Italy’s GDP is \$2.07 trillion. We may be tempted to say that India’s is a more robust economy. Before we do, however, we might want to index the overall size of the two countries’ economies by the number of people in each place. Let’s say India’s population is 1,415,000,000 people and Italy’s population is 60,250,000 people. We calculate GDP per capita by dividing the GDP by the number of people in the country. Thus:
• India–\$2,720,000,000,000/1,415,000,000 people = \$1,922/capita
• Italy–\$2,070,000,000,000/60,250,000 people = \$34,357/capita
Are you still willing to say that India’s is the more robust economy? It makes a big difference when you standardize economic data by population, doesn’t it?
Often, indexing to population doesn’t make sense because the resulting number wouldn’t make sense because it was some crazy decimal like .0034. Therefore, social scientists will index to some proportion of population that will result in a number that does makes sense. For example, let’s look at homicides. Everyone knows that a liberal state like California with its large urban centers is a more dangerous place to live than a conservative, rural state like Arkansas, right? After all, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, California had 2,203 murders in 2020 while Arkansas only had 321 that year. It’s not looking good for California. But wait. With a population of 39,538,223, California also has far more people than does Arkansas, with a population of 3,011,524. Let’s compare the homicide rates of California and Arkansas by indexing the number of murders in each state to every 100,000 people who live there. To do this, we would set up an equation like this:
• Arkansas–321 homicides/3,011,524 people = X/100,000 and we would solve for X.
• California–2,203 homicides/39,538,223 people = X/100,000 and we would solve for X.
When we do this, we see that in 2020 there were 10.7 homicides for every 100,000 people in Arkansas, but only 5.6 homicides for every 100,000 people in California. Statistically, you are much more likely to be killed in Arkansas than California, and we figured that out by indexing the number of murders to population in a way that would produce an intuitive number for comparison.
Measures of Central Tendency
For many kinds of variables, we can go beyond frequency distributions and percentages and calculate simple measures of central tendency. What we are trying to do here is to describe the typical value among all those in our data sample. The two most useful measures of central tendency are the mean and median. The mean is the average of a group of numbers. The median is the middle value of a range of numbers, meaning half the data set is higher and half is lower in value.
You calculate the mean by adding up all the variables’ values and divide by the number of values in the set. In this example, the variable is salaries, and there are six values in the set. Let’s calculate a group’s mean or average salary.
1. Mojdeh makes \$45,000
2. David makes \$36,000
3. Ahmed makes \$37,500
4. Kendra makes \$47,600
5. Aidan makes \$28,000
6. Takashi makes \$29,000
Step 1: Add up all of the salaries, which in this case is \$223,100.
Step 2: Count the number of values you have, which in this case is six. There are six salaries in the data set.
Step 3: Divide \$223,100 by six, resulting in a mean or average salary of \$37,183.
We might also be interested in the value that falls right in the middle of our salary data distribution. This is called the median. Specifically, the median is defined as the value that has the same number of values above it as it has below it. Here’s how you would calculate the median value of the same data set.
1. Kendra makes \$47,600
2. Mojdeh makes \$45,000
3. Ahmed makes \$37,500
4. David makes \$36,000
5. Takashi makes \$29,000
6. Aidan makes \$28,000
Step 1: Organize the data points in ascending or descending order.
Step 2: If the total number of values is an odd number, the mean is the value right in the middle. If Aidan wasn’t in our sample, Ahmed’s \$37,500 salary would be the median.
Step 3: If the total number of values is an even number, as in our sample, the median is the average of the two middle numbers. Our two middle numbers are \$36,000 and \$37,500, and the mean or average of those two numbers is \$36,750. That’s the median.
When data conform more or less to a normal distribution curve, the median and the mean are usually close together. There is one circumstance when the median and mean differ considerably, and that’s when the data are skewed to one side or the other—often by a few outlying data values. Let’s assume that a new person joins our group. She is paid considerably more than the others.
1. Louisa makes \$5,000,000
2. Kendra makes \$47,600
3. Mojdeh makes \$45,000
4. Ahmed makes \$37,500
5. David makes \$36,000
6. Takashi makes \$29,000
7. Aidan makes \$28,000
Differences Between the Mean and the Median
Mean = \$746,157—total salaries divided by 7
Median = \$37,500—Ahmed’s salary, which is in the middle of the set.
When Louisa walks into the room, suddenly the mean salary jumps up to three-quarters of a million dollars, while the median only bumps up to \$37,500. Which is a more accurate economic descriptor of how well these people are doing? In this case, the median is more useful than the mean.
Content Analysis
Many researchers in a variety of disciplines use content analysis to gain insight into textual or mass media sources. Content analysis can be defined as “a systematic, replicable technique for compressing many words of text into fewer content categories based on explicit rules of coding.” (3) Content analysis often involves something as simple as counting the frequency of particular words in a text. It may entail categorizing the people quoted and the photographs used, or it may involve measuring sentence length, vocabulary, and so on.
An effective content analysis must be done carefully. The researcher must first specify the media universe that they are going to analyze, as well as the sample from that universe. She also must be very specific about the analytical rules for counting and categorizing aspects of the text or media. Then she must rigorously follow those rules so there is no ambiguity about the findings. This last part has become much easier with the advent of computer programs that can do much of the work, sparing the researcher many hours and strained eyes.
Content analysis can yield very informative results. What if we examined all the presidential State of the Union speeches and looked for religious references? Would the frequency of those references change over time? Would they be related to the policies pursued by each administration? What if we examined all local television news programs for a given time period and analyzed all references to our state’s congressional delegation? Are the references in a positive, negative, or neutral light? Do they fluctuate over the election cycle? What if we did a content analysis of two different news sites’ editorials and looked for ideological differences between them?
Survey Research
Surveying individuals has been a very popular analytical form in political science, sociology, marketing, psychology, and communications studies. If you want to know about people or about their opinions and knowledge, often the best thing to do is to ask them. Surveys can take several forms—from telephone interviews to in-person interviews, from controlled-environment questionnaires to mail-in questionnaires. Sometimes, a researcher wants to survey a discrete group of people—say, former Secretaries of State—in which case they will contact all the group’s members and ask them questions relevant to the research project. In other instances, the researcher is interested in surveying a large population. Because it is not feasible to survey large populations, the researcher instead selects a random sample out of the larger population and gives them the survey. Using statistical techniques, the researcher can state with much confidence that the answers given by the random sample are representative of the entire population.
Survey research is a complicated field that we can’t do justice to here, but you should be aware of the major types of questions found in surveys.
Dichotomous Questions. These questions have only two possible answers. Questions that require a yes or no answer are dichotomous, as are questions that ask you to put yourself into one of two categories, like whether you are a citizen or not.
Multiple-Choice Questions. These questions offer three or more defined choices from which the respondent can choose. Such a question might ask for the respondent’s ethnicity, for example, or for them to choose their favorite from a list of presidential candidates. A common type of multiple-choice question is to probe the respondent’s opinion using a Likert response scale.
Likert-Response Scale. For these questions, the respondent is probed for his or her agreement level with a statement. For example: “The death penalty is justifiable in some circumstances—strongly disagree; disagree; neutral; agree; strongly agree.”
Thermometer-Scale Questions. Very often these are called “feeling thermometers” because they are usually used to probe the respondent’s affect toward a certain subject or person. In an in-person setting, the respondent is presented with a thermometer that runs from 0 to 100 and is asked to point at the thermometer to reflect their positive or negative feeling. For example, we might show photos of political candidates to the subjects, who would then point to 89 for one candidate, 14 for another candidate, 67 for a third candidate, and so forth.
Ranking-List Questions. These questions present the respondent with a list of items and asks him or her to rate the item’s importance. For example, we might do this with a list of issues facing the country. The respondent gives the most important issue a 1, the second most important issue a 2, and so on.
Open-Ended Questions. These questions provide the respondent with much freedom to structure the answer for themselves. Instead of ranking issues facing the country, the survey might simply ask the person: “What do you think is the most important issue facing the United States?” Or, the researcher can follow a multiple-choice question about which candidate the respondent supports with an open-ended question, such as, “Why do you support that candidate?”
Survey research results are heavily dependent on question wording. When you see public opinion polls cited in the media, and the question’s exact wording is not published, you should be suspicious and look for the original survey so that you can check the wording. How questions are worded can have major impacts on major issues like, how much government spending people support. For example, consider the following two versions of a question:
• Are we spending too much, too little, or about the right amount on welfare?
• Are we spending too much, too little, or about the right amount on assistance to the poor?
One study found that the public was about 41 percentage points more likely to support more “assistance to the poor” than it was to support “welfare.” (4)
The other thing to look for is whether the poll is a legitimate attempt to gauge the public’s opinion or if it’s a push poll. A push poll combines a survey with biased information designed to get the results the sponsoring organization or candidate is looking for. Push polls have been denounced by all legitimate survey research organizations. (5) In a push poll, the pollster tells subjects things like (made-up example) “Representative Jones wants to give tax breaks to yacht owners and wants to end all women’s bodily autonomy,” and then the pollster poses a question like, “Should representative Jones be re-elected?” When the mostly negative results come back, the sponsoring organization or opposing candidate will try to feed the media information about Representative Jones being unpopular with his constituents.
Typologies
A smart beginning to conducting any political analysis is to organize information into a typology. A typology is a visual device that allows you to systematically classify types that have common characteristics. All sorts of political events, things, and people can be sorted in a typology. Use a basic typology to sort things by how they score on two important dimensions. Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle created a typology of different types of governing systems. Aristotle’s two dimensions were who ruled and in whose interest they ruled, producing a typology that looks like this:
Aristotle’s Typology of Political Systems
In Whose Interest? Who Rules?
The One The Few The Many
Common Good Monarchy Aristocracy Polity
Private Good Tyranny Oligarchy Democracy
The first thing to notice is that terminology has changed since Aristotle’s time. He equated democracy with mob rule—the masses ruling in their own selfish and short-sighted interest. He also makes a different distinction than we do between aristocracy and oligarchy as though the main difference was in whose interest the few ruled. Today, we tend to see aristocracies as ruling in their selfish interest just like we do oligarchies. The main takeaway is that Aristotle thoughtfully tried to apply what he knew about political regimes in a systematic way. You can do the same thing with presidential vetoes, elections, congressional bills, political demonstrations, or just about any political phenomenon in which you have enough cases to categorize. One important rule of typologies is that the interior cells must be mutually exclusive—that is, the things that you are categorizing must fit in one—and only one—box. A political system cannot be both a polity and a monarchy in Aristotle’s typology.
References
1. Inequality.org
2. National Center for Education Statistics
3. Steve Stemler, “An Introduction to Content Analysis,” ERIC. June 2001.
4. Kenneth A. Rasinski, “The Effect of Question Wording on Public Support for Government Spending,” Public Opinion Quarterly. 53(3): Autumn, 1989. Pages 388-394.
5. Marjorie Connelly, “Push Polls, Defined,” The New York Times. June 18, 2014. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/01%3A_Thinking_Like_a_Political_Scientist/1.07%3A_Chapter_7-_Basic_Political_Analysis.txt |
“Once you have learned how to ask questions—relevant and appropriate and substantial questions—you have learned how to learn, and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.”
–Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner (1)
“What if we started asking better questions?”
–Rob Hopkins (2)
Respond to Your World with Questions
Educated people—whether they are political scientists or not—assume a critical mindset with respect to the world. This is not to say that they are always criticizing everything and everyone, or that they are cynical. A critical mindset means that we refuse to automatically accept what we are told or what we read. We may eventually do so, but only after careful consideration and reflection. Also, we should be critical about challenging and seeking to improve the status quo in politics and society. Status quo basically means “the situation as it is now” in any given realm. A good education frees the mind from superstition, magical thinking, tribalism, knee-jerk reactions, and baseless deference. It empowers us with knowledge about history, art, politics, literature, and the varieties of human experience. A good education enables us to participate in the vigorous debates that sustain and enrich a republic. It allows us to recognize the limitations of the status quo and make things better.
Above all, an educated person is one who asks questions. Too often, people start out with a critical mindset—think of the questions asked by young children—but then seem to have it socialized out of them. Why is that? It’s not as though the world becomes less interesting as you grow up. Some blame a mind-numbing mass schooling system that extinguishes genuine curiosity. (3) Others suggest that dogmatic churches snuff out inquiry because religion proclaims to have the Truth. (4) Still others argue that a critical mindset can’t flourish in a society that exalts amusement the way ours does. (5) It is not this course’s purpose to get to the bottom of that problem, although it’s an interesting conundrum. In all likelihood, many factors work together to condition people not to think critically and not to question. However, we must resist that tendency. In this text, we are concerned that you become students of the American political system, that you read widely, that you think deeply, and that you ask questions.
What kinds of questions should we ask? Any will do, really, but a basic toolkit includes the following six very powerful questions:
How Was This Decision Reached?
As we noted earlier, politics involves people making decisions, or non-decisions, about allocating limited resources or rights and privileges within the context of government, the economy, and society. Whenever one of those decisions is made—or not made, in the case of non-decisions—an educated person is as interested in the decision-making process as they are in the actual decision itself. Who made the decision? Were the people most affected by the decision able to participate in the process? Were they able to do so on an equal basis? If not, is there a good reason for the inequality of input? Upon what information was the decision made? Did the decision follow established rules and procedures, or did it deviate from them? Were all the decision’s possible ramifications given ample consideration? Did the decision need to be made at this time?
Qui Bono? or Who Benefits?
There are inevitably winners and losers in the struggle over resources, rights, and privileges. One of the most fundamental questions a political scientist asks is qui bono, which is Latin for “who benefits.” In some ways, this is an addition to our question above about decision-making. Who benefits if a decision is made this way? Who benefits if it is decided another way? Who benefits if no decision is made? Who benefits from the status quo? Does one set of interests consistently benefit at another’s expense? Are the rules of the game stacked so that one set of interests is more likely to benefit? Who benefits if certain beliefs, myths, or ideas are prevalent in society?
Who Has Power?
Asking “who benefits?” is a great jumping off point when asking questions about who has power—either generally or in each policy realm. We are particularly interested when certain people or groups tend to benefit more than others or when they benefit consistently over time. To discover who has power, we can work backwards from a decision or action to see how the winners deployed resources, strategies, and tactics in ways that pushed political decision-makers to act in their favor. Working backwards helps us to see how the political process might have been preferentially structured in the winners’ favor before the struggle even started. Think about who benefits and who has power when you ask the following policy questions: What is the minimum wage? How much of our national resources should go to the military and national security? Should we aggressively respond to the climate crisis? How should we educate our children?
What Is the Evidence?
Assertions should not be taken at face value. You should get in the habit of asking for evidence when someone makes an assertion. If you are reading someone’s argument, always be scanning for sufficient evidence to warrant the author’s inferences. When a politician is claiming that they would be a good representative, senator, or president, you should be asking yourself “what evidence is there to support the claim that this person would be good in that position? Is there any counter evidence?” In most cases, you’ll need to do a little research before you come to a judgment, but don’t let that daunt you. Democracy requires much from its citizens, and one requirement is that we do not simply accept claims on faith.
Of What is This an Example?
In politics, as in life, many things are happening all the time. It is easy to get disoriented by the many political events that seem to occur in a blur—sort of like watching fence posts whiz by your side window when you’re driving on a country road. But the political world is not as complicated as it initially appears, especially if you get in the habit of asking, “Of what is this an example?” Events repeat themselves throughout history, although they may manifest themselves differently each time. Still, by sorting and categorizing events, we can begin to generalize and systematically analyze how similar events manifest themselves somewhat differently each time. Is event A behaving like all those other events in that category? If not, what is different about it?
Take something as basic as an election, for example. Elections come and go, and many people see them as individually distinct events that are entirely new each time—new election year, new candidates, new attack ads, new results. But if you analyze them more carefully, elections fall into patterns as well—e.g., elections with an incumbent defending their seat versus open-seat elections; elections in good economic times versus elections during economic downturns; elections before the invention of the Internet versus elections since; and elections during presidential years versus mid-term elections.
By first asking ourselves “Of what is this an example?” and doing some careful sorting, perhaps in a typology, we can begin to generate interesting research questions, such as “Why is voter turnout so much higher in presidential elections than it is in mid-term elections?”
How Is This Related to That?
Of course, we are not just concerned with distinct events. We are interested in political, social and economic relationships in all their multiple dimensions. How is this event related to that one? How is this politician related to that decision? How are underlying characteristics such as gender, race, or class related to key economic or political outcomes? How is low voter turnout related to whether certain issues are discussed, let alone how they are resolved? Often, the answer to our question will be that there is no relationship, or at least that there is insufficient evidence to support the conclusion that there is a relationship. In many other cases, though, we can be confident in our claims about relationships. By asking, “How is this related to that?” we can open another door in our search for ways in which to make sense of our world. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/01%3A_Thinking_Like_a_Political_Scientist/1.08%3A_Chapter_8-_Six_Very_Powerful_Questions.txt |
“Reflection is a systematic, rigorous, disciplined way of thinking.”
–Carol Rogers (1)
Political scientists share with other social scientists—indeed, with all well-educated people—a talent for critical reading. Doing so requires a great deal of practice. Critical reading involves developing certain intellectual and behavioral habits. If you apply a systematic approach to reading texts, you will achieve deeper understanding than if you just read superficially. The critical reading guidelines below constitute a blend of the advice offered by Salisbury University, the University of MinnesotaHarvard University, and Empire State College. You should use these guidelines in this course and in other situations where you encounter texts. Texts might be articles, primary source documents, speeches, etc.—in which the author attempts to explain a political situation, to convince the audience to reach a conclusion, or to take a specific action.
What Should You Do When You Encounter a Text?
Set the Context—It is important for you to be clear about the key components of a rhetorical context: An author puts forth a text—a form of communication with a specific purpose in mind that can be written or verbal—to an audience. For any text, you should be able to answer these questions:
• Who is the author?
• What is the author’s purpose? Who is the primary, secondary, and tertiary audience?
• How does the audience shape the author’s messaging and word choice?
• What is the occasion or situation for the communication?
• What qualifies the author to speak or write on the topic?
• From what political perspective does the author approach the topic? What is the context in which the author writes? What has happened in the past—and what has been happening recently—with respect to the topic?
• Why is the author communicating now, in this manner? What is the author hoping will happen as a result of his communication? Who benefits if their perspective is widely adopted?
Can you answer all these questions just by looking at the text itself? Probably not. You will need to research the author’s background and the topic to answer them.
Annotate—There are certain notes you should make as you read the text. If you have a hard copy, you can make annotations directly on the page. Follow a standard form of annotation, or come up with your own short-hand notation: an asterisk (*) in the margin might indicate the author’s thesis; a check mark (√) might indicate an effective phrase; a question mark (?) might mean a word or phrase you don’t understand, etc. It is often helpful to make a few written notes in the margin to remind yourself later what exactly you wanted to remember about that section. Otherwise, you can read the text online and make notations on a separate form or piece of paper. After reading the text a few times, you should highlight the following:
The text’s thesis or main point. The text’s title will hint at the thesis or main point, but that is not always the case. Sometimes, the thesis or main point is encapsulated in one sentence early in the piece, and sometimes it is more difficult to identify because its full expression might come later. In some cases, it might be spread out over several sentences that are not connected.
The evidence and/or reasoning that support the thesis or main point. This is easy enough to identify in short texts like opinion pieces or blog posts, as the support tends to stand out prominently. Often in longer texts, the evidence is a bit overwhelming. One good strategy is to highlight individual sentences that contain the most effective supporting evidence or reasoning.
Particularly powerful or illustrative phrases. Note when the author says or writes something that resonates with you or that you imagine must resonate with their primary audience. Note also phrases that illustrate a particular style or rhetorical appeal (see appeals below).
Words and phrases that you don’t understand. Authors often use words or phrases with which readers are not familiar. Circle them or rewrite them on a separate page and find out what they mean. Sometimes, learning these new words will expand your vocabulary to include words that educated people use, but sometimes—particularly with primary source documents—it means learning a phrase or specialized lingo that was popular during a given historical period or that refers to a certain subculture to which the author belongs.
Outline and Summarize—This is an interesting challenge. In your own words, boil down the text into one paragraph. Alternatively, distill the text into an outline that fits on one page. You should be able to perform one of these tasks with any text. Doing so helps you develop an overall picture of the author’s purpose.
Describe the Text’s Rhetorical Appeals—Either consciously or unconsciously, authors employ the rhetorical appeals ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos in the text. These appeals help the audience understand the author’s perspective. Note that texts often use multiple appeals. As you read a text, try to identify sentences or sections—or even the text’s whole character—that might apply to one of the following appeals:
• Ethos—This rhetorical appeal centers around the author’s credibility or trustworthiness. Such credibility—or lack thereof—can be vested inside the words the author uses; this is called intrinsic ethos and refers to the author’s character and integrity. You’ve all met or seen people who enjoy credibility with their audiences because they speak with a sophisticated vocabulary and fluency. The same goes for written arguments. Extrinsic ethos refers to credibility that resides outside the author’s text, and usually centers around the author’s credentials, reputation, or history with the subject, but can also depend on the author’s vested interest in the subject. For example, if a climatologist comes from a knowledgeable scientific community in which peers review each other’s work for appropriate methodology and evidentiary support, this scientist has considerably more extrinsic ethos than does someone who doesn’t write for peer-reviewed publications and/or who is being paid by the fossil fuel industry to create arguments favoring that industry.
• Logos—The appeal to logos has to do with the logic, evidence, or factual data that is used to persuade the audience. The first thing to look for here is whether the author is using fallacious arguments. Are they employing the straw man fallacy to make her point? Are they engaged in an ad hominem attack? After examining the text’s logic, the next thing you should do is look at the overall relationship between the author’s thesis/argument and the evidence they are using to support that point. Does the evidence support the thesis, or is the evidence tangential material that doesn’t really lead one to the conclusion the author would like you to reach? Finally, check the evidence itself. Is it actually evidence or just an unsubstantiated assertion? Does the evidence come from a credible source? Is the author excluding obvious contradictory evidence?
• Pathos—The English Department at the University of Missouri—Kansas City refers to pathos as the author’s appeal to the “audience’s sense of identity, their self-interest, and their emotions.” Speakers and writers employ many techniques to create a bond with their readers. For example, authors may refer to “everyman” tropes about working hard, providing for one’s children, going to church, and so on. They also appeal to their audience’s self-interest. For example, an author might tell an audience that they should care about the environmental destruction because it is the world in which their children or grandchildren must live. Appeals to pathos are most commonly thought of as appeals to emotion. Authors can stir up fear or patriotism or hope or any emotion to bring the audience around to their perspective. Be on the lookout for ways in which authors attempt to appeal to their audience’s sense of identity, their self-interest, or their emotions.
• Kairos–The Writing Commons describes kairos as “taking advantage of or even creating a perfect moment to deliver a particular message,” in the sense of “saying (or writing) the right thing at the right time.” For example, addressing disaster preparedness at an annual meeting of the city council is a different situation than addressing the same topic to a crowd of angry, cold, wet, and recently homeless people who have just survived the failure of an old dam that the local city council failed to fix. If I’m rhetorically sophisticated, I will tailor my language and tone to best match the differing audiences and circumstances. I also have an ethical responsibility to my audience and the situation. I can, for example, achieve my aims by manipulating or deceiving or preying upon people’s irrational fears, but this is at the expense of ever objectively and appropriately reaching kairos. As you encounter a text, examine the author’s modality and language. Does it fit or not fit the given situation? Is the author treating their audience fairly?
Reflect—If you’ve read through a text several times to annotate it and understand its rhetorical appeals, and if you’ve done some background research to establish its context, you’re now in a good place to reflect upon it. Examine your own thinking as you consider the piece.
• Did it challenge your assumptions or expand your understanding?
• Has your thinking been stretched by encountering this text?
• How does the text connect to other things you’ve read, to the broader world, or to your own situation?
• How would you describe the piece’s impact in a way that would excite other people to experience it as well?
Write about any or all of those things—and for goodness sake, don’t be afraid to be vulnerable or to elaborate!
Reflective Writing
Reflective writing is different than academic writing. Let me illustrate and be a little vulnerable myself by sharing two reflections that I wrote when I led a London study abroad trip. I completed the same broad assignment that I gave to students, which was to create a reflective ePortfolio that documented the political, historical, and cultural venues we visited. One ePortfolio assignment was dedicated to artwork that the students found particularly impactful. I advised students to choose their own art topic on which to reflect and urged them to think of each art piece as a text.
Here are two examples of reflection from my ePortfolio. I’ve annotated my responses [in blue brackets] to call attention to what I’m doing. Note how I answer some of my own questions from the previous paragraph.
Richard Long is a living British artist (b. 1945) whose work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. This particular piece—a large set of five concentric circles made of small white stones, arranged on the concrete floor of the Tate Modern Art Museum—doesn’t really do justice to his other work (more about that later) and gives rise to a common reaction to modern art: “My kid could do that!” [Note that I’m setting the context here—where I am, what I’m looking at, and my initial reaction.]
Pretentious. Facile. Ridiculous. Those were some of the adjectives that went through my head when I first saw what looked like a target made of pebbles. “Come on,” I said aloud. “That’s not art.” According to Long, his work is “a balance between patterns of nature and the formalism of human abstract ideas, like lines and circles.” When I read this explanation on the information plaque, I tried to change my point of view to understand the piece as it might have been intended. When I shifted my perspective, it occurred to me that the piece might represent a stylized set of waves—as though a single white pebble had been dropped into a pool of liquid concrete. From that perspective, it looked like the industrialization of ripples in a mountain pond. [This paragraph shows how my assumptions were challenged by Long’s piece.]
The evening after our visit to the Tate Modern, I googled Richard Long and looked at his official site. I found that, in my opinion, his best work consists of natural installations set out in the wilderness. Check out this piece in Scotland, or this one in the mountains of California, or this one in India. “That’s more like it. These kinds of installations really appeal to me,” I thought. What do I see when I look at them? I see mankind’s primordial markings on the natural landscape. At some point in our evolution, we began to make lasting marks on the earth, tentative at first, but more substantial with time—such as the mysterious monument at Stonehenge that we visited. Eventually, our marks became highways, buildings, canals, and even alterations to the world’s atmospheric chemistry. Long’s works strike me as an attempt to visualize the beginnings of this tragic transformation from man-in-nature to man-apart-from-nature. At least, that’s what I take away from them, whether he intended so or not. These works, more than the piece I saw in the Tate Modern, speak to me. They are like warning beacons come too late. [I’m making connections here—first to other pieces by Long, and then to the larger issue of mankind’s impact of on the natural world. I’m coming to a new understanding that’s different and more sophisticated than my initial gut reaction to Long’s work.]
What’s the difference between art and pornography? That’s the question that flashed through my mind when I saw Seated Nude by Erich Heckel in the Courtauld Gallery. Is “acceptable nudity” considered art while “unacceptable nudity” is just porn? According to the information plaque at the Courtauld, Heckel’s portrait of a nude adolescent girl “was a deliberate attack on the moral and artistic taboos” of his era. I can certainly imagine that the painting was absolutely scandalous in 1909. Even today, most Americans would dismiss it as perverted and without merit. If Heckel’s intent was to use the painting as a social critique on the holdovers of Victorian morality, that political bent to the piece would clearly put it outside the Supreme Court’s definition of “obscenity.” But is that enough to justify the painting’s place in a prestigious London art museum? Surely, the painting signifies the kind of objectification that one associates with prurience. [Again, I’ve set the context—where I am, what I’m looking at—and I lead off with a question to the reader and to myself.]
The painting doesn’t strike me as intentionally sexual per se, but the girl’s pose— isolated on a bed, facing the viewer with her legs parted—looks like exploitative kiddie porn. In fact, I got a little self-conscious just as I was snapping a picture of the painting, wondering if other people in the room were glancing at the perv with the camera. Then, instead of continuing to look at the painting itself, I parked myself across the room and watched people as they approached the piece. As a rule, men gave it a side glance and moved on quickly, probably trying to not be seen as too interested in the painting. Women tended to look at it more intently. Maybe they were asking themselves the same art/porn question that had gone through my mind. [Deeper reflection and analysis here. I’m thinking about my thinking and asking whether I am the only one who is troubled by the piece.]
The painting’s ability to make people uncomfortable 100 years after it was created strikes me as a testament to the piece’s ability to challenge our puritanical impulses. It’s as though Heckel is saying, “Get over it, already!” He’s placing the burden of our discomfort squarely on our own shoulders, because the girl is going to continue gazing back at us whether we are blushing or not. [I’m challenging my initial assumption: Maybe the piece isn’t about the girl in the painting, but about the viewers.]
References
1. Carol Rogers, “Defining Reflection: Another Look at John Dewey and Reflective Thinking,” Teachers College Record, 104(4). Page 845. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/01%3A_Thinking_Like_a_Political_Scientist/1.09%3A_Chapter_9-_Critical_Reading_and_Reflection.txt |
“I want to point out that people who seem to have no power, whether working people, people of color, or women—once they organize and protest and create movements—have a voice no government can suppress.”
–Howard Zinn (1)
Just as you should familiarize yourself with a text’s context before you can fully understand it, the same applies to our examination of the U. S. political system. This context is the water that our political system drinks and the air that it breathes. The contextual features we want to highlight are basic historical facts that might be uncomfortable to acknowledge but that have impacted American politics for centuries and continue to do so. Put another way, any student who wants to understand the American political system would be well served if they acknowledge the following four contextual features that define much of the landscape in which our political system operates.
Troubled Race Relations
America’s race relations have been marked by slavery, theft, discrimination, segregation, violence, and inequality. (2) Notwithstanding the many fine personal, familial, and work relationships ordinary Americans develop across racial and ethnic lines, American society has always been fraught with racial and ethnic bigotry, racialized politics, and racialized economic opportunities. Of course, the entire American Experiment is built on land from which indigenous peoples were removed by disease, conflict, trickery, and force. America is the artifact of the British colonial empire that, in turn, continued the colonization until there was nothing left of indigenous peoples but marginal land and population remnants.
Try thinking of all the generic means by which one group of people can assault and dehumanize another group of people, and then consider that they have probably been done by some Americans to other Americans. We can start with the foundational sins: the near extermination of Native American peoples and 250 years of institutionalized slavery inflicted upon people abducted from Africa and their decedents. The mind reels at the challenge of adding up the stolen potential and the transferred wealth inherent in these sins. If we go beyond the foundational sins, the list of barbarisms is remarkable. Consider America’s many race riots in which Whites targeted Blacks, (3) or the number of violent uprisings caused by brutality and ill treatment of Blacks by police and local authorities. (4) Ponder the 120,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated in concentration camps during World War II. (5) Keep in mind the decades of lynchings that killed thousands of mostly African Americans and that served to “police” the behavior of all those who were not directly affected. (6) Think of church burnings, voter suppression, segregation, and militarized police violence that falls disproportionately on people of color. Consider America’s incarceration culture. Imagine a cross burned on your front lawn by an organization that for decades could freely march down the streets of any city in America without censure or repercussion.
The legacy of racial violence and ill will continues to reverberate through American society. It takes the form of disparities between Whites and Blacks on fundamental indicators such as income, wealth, educational attainment, and health. It also poisons our politics. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first African American president. For his entire presidency, he endured allegations that he wasn’t an American citizen and that he had allegiances to radical Islamic terrorists, which is a pretty good indication of how a portion of American society sees Blacks as illegitimate political actors. And while majorities of Whites and Blacks both acknowledge America’s troubled race relations, strong majorities of Blacks think that America has not gone far enough to ensure equal rights, while strong majorities of Whites think it has. (7) These feelings are remarkably resistant to change and may remain politically relevant long into the future, manifesting themselves in different ways in different contexts.
Crushing Inequality Marked by Attempts to Moderate It
While it is certainly true that the American colonies were blessed with relative economic equality and class fluidity compared to aristocratic European countries of the time—at least among free Whites—the United States has been marked by enormous income and wealth gaps through most of its history. Starting from relative equality in the colonial period, economists have found that “a long steep rise in US inequality took place between 1800 and 1860.” (8) In antebellum America—that is, pre-Civil War— public records document considerable wealth disparity of land, goods, and slaves. (9) The situation only got worse after the Civil War when we entered a long period of robber baron capitalism, and American inequality peaked in the late 1920s just before the stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression. In response to the Great Depression, New Deal policies encouraged unions, regulated the financial sector, provided Social Security and other safety net programs, and put people to work on government projects. Those policies combined with the economic stimulation from World War II to create what is known as the Great Compression—the period from 1937 to the early 1970s when middle- and lower-income people gained more from economic growth than did the rich. The Great Compression essentially made the United States into a broadly middle-class society. However, corporations and the wealthy fought to eradicate the domestic policies that benefited the middle and lower classes. In foreign policy, globalization and “free trade” agreements put American workers in direct competition with their poorly paid counterparts in countries that lacked America’s union protections, worker-safety regulations, and environmental regulations.
Beginning in the 1960s and accelerating thereafter, Democrats and Republicans alike pursued policies designed to make the rich even more comfortable. Corporate tax rates and the marginal tax rates on wealthy individuals dropped like a stone. Most of the New Deal’s financial regulations were dropped in favor of deregulating financial institutions and the confusing “products” they developed, such as collateralized debt obligations. Ordinary Americans, in an attempt to maintain their lifestyle despite stagnant wages, job offshoring, less state support for education, and generally fewer economic opportunities, floated an increasing amount of debt: house mortgages with nothing down, student loans, credit cards, increasingly longer-term car loans, etc. In turn, this financialization of the economy made bankers and financiers even more wealthy. The 2008 Great Recession was the inevitable result. America’s political system responded—not by helping ordinary Americans—but by bailing out the bankers and the con artists who crashed the system with their irresponsibility. This is one of the most salient facts about the context of contemporary American politics, especially given that inequality has reached a new peak to rival the one that existed in the 1920s. The middle class in America has been hollowed out by wage stagnation, increased debt, and federal policies that benefit upper income families and corporations. The richest 1 percent of families in America possess more wealth than the entire middle class combined. (10)
Economic inequality is not simply a fact about the economy, for economic power translates into political power. Money buys legitimacy for ideas that otherwise would not be popular. Money pre-selects viable politicians before voters ever get a chance to weigh in. Money structures the media in ways so that some issues and policy options receive more coverage than do others. Money buys direct access to politicians and decision makers. As Lawrence Lessig once said, speaking of elected politicians, “A world where you have to spend half your time raising money means there’s this small number of people on whom you’re dependent and they have a huge influence.” (11)
America is an Immigrant Society that Often Vilifies Its Immigrants
The United States is an immigrant society. North and South America were initially settled by nomadic peoples who crossed from the Eurasian continent when sea levels were low during the last Ice Age. Following “discovery” by Europeans, North America was colonized by the British, French, Spanish, and other people from Western Europe. In 1619, they brought slaves to what later became Virginia, and probably earlier to Spanish Florida. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the United States continued to attract immigrants, especially from Ireland, Germany, various places in eastern and southern Europe, China, and Japan. In the 1920s, the United States placed national origin quotas on immigration that benefited immigrants from northern and western Europe. These quotas were dropped in 1965. According to the Census Bureau, the number of foreign-born Americans peaked at 14.8 percent of the total population in 1890, dropped to a low of 4.7 percent in 1970, and reached a mini-peak of 12.9 percent in 2010.
Americans often pride themselves on their immigrant ancestors and on immigration’s role in American identity. We see ourselves defined by our common belief in American ideals of liberty, equality, and democracy rather than by our ethnicity or national origin. We see ourselves as a melting pot. Indeed, consider the Statue of Liberty, which features poet and immigrant-activist Emma Lazarus’ ode to America’s immigrants:
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
—Emma Lazarus, 1883
At the same time, America has witnessed tremendous conflict over immigration, and immigrants have been targeted by nativist and xenophobic groups throughout much of American history. Xenophobia is a fear of foreigners, while nativism is a more organized political philosophy opposed to immigration; it favors limiting the power of and opportunities for immigrants. In the 1850s, an entire U.S. political party—the nativist American Party, more popularly known as the Know Nothing Party—took over the state legislature in Massachusetts, elected the mayor of Chicago, captured 40 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania, and had short-term successes elsewhere. The Know Nothings directed their hatred particularly at Catholic immigrants. The party fragmented over slavery, with the pro-slavery Know Nothings tending to end up in the Democratic party and the anti-slavery Know Nothings aligning with the Republicans.
The spirit of the Know Nothings lived on, however, in various movements such as the anti-Catholic American Protective Association and the Ku Klux Klan. Nativists argue for strict limits or bans on immigration and limits on immigrants’ ability to become citizens, vote, or hold office. American immigration laws have been shaped by nativist sentiment. In 1882, for example, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act that banned immigration from China. In the 1920s, the resurgent Ku Klux Klan targeted Jews and Catholic immigrants as well as blacks. John F. Kennedy’s bid for the presidency in 1960 stimulated some anti-Catholic agitation, but not enough to derail his candidacy. President Donald Trump, when announcing his bid for the White House in 2015, denounced Mexicans crossing the U. S. border as “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Nativism today has more to do with whites fearing brown immigrants than the nativism of years past when Protestant whites feared other whites such as Catholic Irish, Catholic and Jewish Germans, and Catholic and Eastern Orthodox people from eastern and southern Europe. But nativism is not a philosophy reserved for Whites; it can also be found among people of color who fear that immigration will create unwanted economic competition or associative stigma.
Corporate Personhood and Privilege
“Corporations are people, my friend,” said Mitt Romney to a heckler when he was running for president in 2012. “No, they’re not!” shouted someone else from the crowd. (12) That small exchange illustrates not only a fault line in American politics, but a defining feature of it. When the founders began the United States Constitution with “We the people of the United States,” they were talking about living, breathing, mortal human beings gathering together to create “a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” They had no idea that corporations and other artificial entities would, over time and with the help of politicians and judges, establish themselves as people in our political system.
Corporations are artificial legal entities sanctioned by governments to accomplish specific economic tasks. Over the history of the American republic, corporations have come to be regarded by courts and the law as persons, and they have taken on many of the political rights once reserved only for human beings. Corporations even hijacked the Fourteenth Amendment’s language that “no state shall. . .deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” That language was originally intended to protect actual people—particularly African Americans in the wake of slavery’s demise—from abuse by state authorities, but has since been used by conservatives and business lawyers to expand corporate rights. According to James Nelson, a retired Montana state supreme court justice, the idea “that corporations are constitutional persons is the Supreme Court’s bastard child that can never prove its legitimacy.” (13)
While corporations cannot cast ballots on election day, the list of corporate rights is breathtaking. Corporate charters are contracts that cannot be altered by governments. Corporations have due process and equal protection via the Fourteenth Amendment. Corporations have Fifth Amendment protections against being deprived of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” just compensation for private property loss, and protection against double jeopardy. Corporations are covered by the Fourth Amendment’s protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” They have the right to jury trials in criminal and civil cases. Corporations have First Amendment freedom of speech protections for their commercial speech, and they can spend unlimited amounts of money advocating political causes and supporting candidates as an exercise of their freedom of speech. And private corporations have religious freedom protections, meaning they can limit employees’ privileges based on the corporation owner’s religious convictions. (14) And they have a megaphone like none other in American politics. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse described it this way: “Never in my life have I seen such a complex web of front groups sowing deliberate deceit to create public confusion about issues that should be clear. The corporate propaganda machinery is of unprecedented size and sophistication.” (15)
Not only are corporations considered people under the American political system, they are more vocal, more tenacious, longer lived, and possess better access to political decision makers than do ordinary individuals. This is an inherently corrosive situation for a democratic republic, because corporations are, by definition, amoral entities that pathologically pursue profit and growth with little heed for democracy. (16) Large corporations—and that’s really what we’re talking about here rather than mom and pop operations and other small businesses—have the resources and the persistence to shape public policies to create monopoly power, suppress wages, and put up barriers to competition. This fact, combined with the power of wealthy individuals, may be one of the main reasons why most ordinary people have little faith in the way democracy works in America. (17) For instance, economist Thomas Philippon wrote that “The real labor income of the typical worker has grown by less than one-third of 1 percent per year for nearly two decades. This explains in part why much of the middle-class distrusts politicians, believes the economic system is rigged, and even rejects capitalism altogether.” (18)
Conclusion
These, then, are the four contextual landmarks that help define the American political system. It is not anti-American or unpatriotic to acknowledge them. Think about this chapter in these terms: For individuals, a mark of maturity is the ability to acknowledge one’s mistakes, learn from them, and move forward. The contextual landmarks described here are mistakes that America has made and continues to make. They deeply affect the nature of our politics. Not only do they help us understand our political system, they are markers for whether we can become a mature political system that faces up to its past, learns from its mistakes, and moves forward in ways that improve the lives of ordinary Americans.
Acknowledging these mistakes does not lead us to specific policy recommendations. To see the current peak of inequality in America does not mean that we must advocate strict equality for everyone. We can accept that a certain amount of inequality may be healthy for a society, even if we reject the clearly unhealthy level of inequality now. Progressive policies to reduce inequality may very well be called for. To see the obvious legacies of slavery and the colonization of North America, as well as contemporary injustices, does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that formal reparations are required–although one might easily argue for them. However, past and present injustices do demand policies that promote social justice and truly equal opportunity that rewards merit and effort. A mature democracy can address difficult issues like these by using imagination and building consensus. An attenuated democracy cannot.
What if . . . ?
What if you were writing this textbook? The four contextual features discussed above—race relations, inequality, immigration, and corporate personhood—aren’t the only prominent landmarks that define American politics. If you were writing this book, what other contextual features would you want to highlight? Why? How do they affect politics in the United States?
References and Notes
1. Howard Zinn, “Introduction,” in Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004. Page 28.
2. That’s a heavy charge, but it’s probably the first thing space alien scientists would note about the United States. If you are doubtful, here’s a short reading list: Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York: Nation Books, 2016. Edward E. Baptist, The Half has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014. Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books, 2009. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2014. David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. New York: Back Bay Books, 2008.
3. A partial list of white-black conflict includes the New York City Draft Riots in 1863 and the racial turn they took; New Orleans in 1866; Wilmington in 1898; Atlanta in 1906; Omaha in 1919; Chicago in 1919; Tulsa in 1921.
4. A partial list of riots and uprisings includes Detroit in 1967; Newark in 1967; Miami in 1980; Los Angeles in 1992; Cincinnati in 2001; Ferguson in 2014; Baltimore in 2015.
5. Richard Reeves, Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese Internment in World War II. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2015. Lawson Fusao Inada, editor, Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience. Berkley, CA: Heyday Books, 2000.
6. Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. New York: Random House, 2002. Ralph Ginzburg, 100 Years of Lynchings. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1962.
7. Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Anna Brown, and Kiana Cox, “Race in America 2019,” The Pew Research Center. April 9, 2019.
8. Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson, “Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality Since 1700,” CEPR Policy Portal. June 16, 2016.
9. Gloria L. Main, “Inequality in Early America: The Evidence from Probate Records of Massachusetts and Maryland,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 7(4): Spring 1977. Pages 559-581.
10. Anne Helen Petersen, “America’s Hollow Middle Class,” Vox. December 15, 2020. Dani Alexis Ryskamp, “The Life in The Simpsons is No Longer Attainable.” The Atlantic. December 29, 2020. Wealth figures come from the Federal Reserve, Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. Since 1989. Updated October 1, 2021.
11. Quoted in Maggie Koerth-Baker, “Everyone Knows Money Influences Politics … Except Scientists,” fivethirtyeight.com.June 4, 2019.
12. Philip Rucker, “Mitt Romney Says ‘Corporations are People’,” The Washington Post.August 11, 2011.
13. The history of how corporations became vested with the political rights intended for natural persons (i.e., actual human beings) is too long and detailed to present here. See Adam Winkler, We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2018. Jeffrey D. Clements, Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2012. Doug Hammerstrom, The Hijacking of the Fourteenth Amendment. Published by ReclaimDemocracy.org. Adam Winkler “‘Corporations Are People’ is Built on an Incredible 19th Century Lie,” The Atlantic. March 5, 2018. James C. Nelson, “There’s No More Activist Court Than the US Supreme Court,” Counterpunch. February 3, 2022.
14. Aside from the sources cited above, see also Jan Edwards, et al., Timeline of Personhood Rights and Powers created by Move to Amend. William Meyers, The Santa Clara Blues: Corporate Personhood Versus DemocracyIII Publishing, 2000. Alex Park, “10 Supreme Court Rulings—Before Hobby Lobby—That Turned Corporations into People,” Mother Jones. July 10, 2014.
15. Sheldon Whitehouse, Captured: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy. New York: The New Press, 2021. Page xviii.
16. Joel Baken, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. New York: Free Press, 2004. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007.
17. David Kent, “The Countries Where People are Most Dissatisfied with how Democracy is Working,” The Pew Research Center. May 31, 2019.
18. Thomas Philippon, “The U. S. Only Pretends to Have Free Markets,” The Atlantic. October 29, 2019. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/01%3A_Thinking_Like_a_Political_Scientist/1.10%3A_Chapter_10-_The_Context_of_U._S._Government_and_Politics.txt |
“Nature is none other than God in things.”
“God…is everywhere in all things, not above, not outside, but present, not a being outside or above being, not a nature outside of nature, not a goodness outside of good.”
—Giordano Bruno [1548-1600] (1)
“Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.”
—Thomas Jefferson (2)
Deism
Materialism is a category of ancient Greek thinking that held that nothing exists except matter, its movements, and modifications—matter is all that there is in the universe. Matter is composed of atoms that have always existed. It cannot be destroyed but is continually transformed and recycled into different forms throughout an infinite universe. Democritus (c.460–c.370 BC) is most commonly referred to as an early proponent of philosophical atomism and materialism. Similarly, the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BCE) espoused atomism, materialism, and an understanding of the gods that differed from the established view. If you’ve ever read ancient Greek myths, you know that traditionally they thought of the gods as directly intervening in human existence—tricking people, fathering children with people, and so forth. Seeing the material universe as infinite, Epicurus understood the gods to be detached from the experiences of humans. He also taught that man can attain the greatest good and a tranquil state, free from fear and pain, through reasoned and virtuous action.
Why is materialism important? Materialism contrasts with Spiritualism, which is the belief that a spiritual realm exists and is distinct from matter. Spiritualists argue that the spiritual world governs the material and is essentially unknowable except through faith and revelation—which means that the material world does not really follow any laws that humans can discern through their own reason. Philosophical spiritualism forms the impetus behind all the Western religions, and it should be fairly clear that philosophical materialism necessarily challenges any religion predicated on revealed truth from the spiritual realm.
What does the ancient Greek schism between philosophical materialism and spiritualism have to do with the American Declaration of Independence? The short answer is that during the centuries between Epicurus and Thomas Jefferson, materialism gave rise to Deism. You may have read that many—but certainly not all—of the American founders were Deists. Indeed, eighteenth century Deism strikes one as an updated version of Epicurus’ heretical understanding of the Greek gods. Deism is the belief in a supreme being or creator—Nature’s God—who does not intervene in the universe or interact with humankind, but who disappears into the natural rules that govern all matter. Just as Epicurus thought that the Greek gods did not intervene in human affairs, Deists saw the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god as similarly removed from human experience—a state of affairs that requires humans to develop workable ethical and political codes themselves rather than receive them through revelation.
The American philosopher Matthew Stewart referred to this legacy when he coined the phrase Epicurus’s dangerous idea to refer to the notion attributed to Epicurus that talking about nature and talking about God are just two ways of talking about the same thing. This conclusion has tremendous theological and political implications. If the universe is infinite and has always existed, there is no role for an entity outside of matter and causation to play the role of a prime mover. No need for God in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic sense. Indeed, many people in the Epicurean-materialist tradition were persecuted and/or killed by Christian authorities for being atheists or for being Deists. Even the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza was banned from the Amsterdam synagogue in 1656 for this kind of naturalistic view of God. Note the references in the Declaration of Independence to “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” and to “their Creator.” (3) These all fit with a Deist’s understanding of the universe. Atheist and Deist approaches differ from Spiritualism, which sees a distinction between the material world and the spiritual one. People like Jefferson recoiled at that notion of spiritualism. Instead, they embraced secularism, Deism, and the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason.
The Indigenous Critique
The intellectual line from Epicurus’ materialism to Thomas Jefferson’s Deism is an important precondition for the ideas of the Declaration of Independence to flower in the late eighteenth century. Let’s talk about another important intellectual tradition—one with which you are probably even less familiar. First, a bit of history.
From 1534 to 1763, France explored and colonized what is now northeastern Canada and the American Great Lakes region. French colonial leaders and Jesuit missionaries had many conversations and debates with leaders from the Huron and Iroquoian nations around the Great Lakes and northeastern Canada. Some of these conversations took place in France, while most took place in the Americas. We have some notes of these conversations from the Jesuit missionaries. The most famous of these conversations was with a Wendat (Huron) statesman named Kandiaronk (1649-1701), a famed debater and orator who spoke in Paris and who also debated Hector de Callière, the Governor of Montreal, in the Americas. The Jesuit historian, Charlevoix, said no Native American he had met “ever possessed greater merit, a finer mind, more valor, prudence or discernment in understanding those with whom he had to deal.” (4) Much of what we know about Kandiaronk comes from the journals of Baron Louis-Armand Lahontan (1666-1716), which were published in 1703 as New Voyages to North America.
The Indigenous Critique refers to the stance of indigenous people like Kandiaronk—and others whose names are unfortunately lost to history—with respect to how best to organize a society and a political system. The Huron and Iroquoian intellectuals developed a sophisticated understanding of European society and did not like what they saw. They saw European society characterized by competitiveness, greed, selfishness, gross inequality, and hostility to true freedom. The Montagnais-Nskapi people of Labrador thought most French people were slaves because of their constant fear of violent punishment by their superiors. The Native Americans also noted the inequality of the sexes in Europe and the lack of sexual freedom.
Meanwhile, the Jesuit missionaries and the colonial leaders who gained an understanding of indigenous societies were similarly shocked. They could not understand the communitarian societies they encountered, replete with sexual freedom, relative equality of the sexes, leaders who gained their positions through respect rather than violence or inheritance, no incarceration for lawbreaking, no corporal punishment for children, and no real way for people to translate differences in individual wealth into political power. The indigenous people they encountered were vastly freer than almost all Europeans.
The contrasts between the freedom of indigenous people in North America and the lack of freedom in Europe was intellectually explosive. The anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow, in their book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, make a compelling case that the Indigenous Critique had a tremendous impact on what we call the European Enlightenment. It stimulated thoughts about “the state of nature” and the “natural rights” people might have had prior to mankind getting “stuck” with bureaucratic government, wage labor, despotic rulers, and economic and political hierarchies. (5)
Natural Rights
Let’s talk about the third intellectual tradition that comes together with Deism and the Indigenous Critique to form the basis for the Declaration of Independence. The Enlightenment overtook Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and constituted the intellectual fertilizer in which American independence grew. Responding to both the Indigenous Critique and Epicurus’ dangerous idea, Enlightenment thinkers argued that the laws of nature were subject to discovery, and the human condition could be improved through reason. In the area of political philosophy, people like Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704) were known as social contract theorists. They imagined how people might live in a state of nature that would allow mankind absolute freedom, where there is no authority to limit individual behavior. Not having seen indigenous societies for themselves, they envisioned the state of nature as essentially an anarchical condition in which there was no government, and thus no authority to limit individual behavior. While anarchy is appealing to some philosophers, it definitely was not to Hobbes and Locke. Hobbes argued in Leviathan that the state of nature would result in a war of all against all, and that people’s lives would be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” He concluded that a strong state—the Leviathan—was necessary to provide order and at least a measure of freedom. (6) Locke did not have as pessimistic view, but he was worried that people would continually get into disputes with each other with no state or laws (as he understood them from his European point of view) to regulate conflicts. Another European philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), saw the state of nature as a paradise, but one that we can never get back to because civilization and property resulted in our downfall and resulted in us being “in chains.” Rousseau’s best hope for us was to construct a governing system in which “the general will” would prevail.
What these philosophers had in common was the idea that we could escape from the state of nature, with its unlimited freedoms that give rise to all sorts of conflicts, by setting up a government through a social contract, where the people agree to certain government-enforced restrictions on their liberties in exchange for a measure of security. Consequently, one is not entirely free in a civil society to do as one pleases with respect to others. George Washington put it eloquently in his letter transmitting the proposed Constitution to the Confederation Congress: “Individuals entering into society, must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest…. It is at all times difficult to draw with precision the line between those rights which must be surrendered, and those which may be reserved.” (7)
One way to draw the line to which Washington referred is to say that people retain their natural rights under the social contract. Natural rights are those rights that stem from the state of nature, and thus pre-date the government established by the social contract. Philosophers have tended to say that natural rights are granted by nature’s God, or by virtue of being born. The important thing to remember is that government does not give you your natural rights, as when it establishes a bill of rights. The bill of rights merely recognizes, and perhaps specifies, your preexisting natural rights. Locke’s classic statement of natural rights went as follows: “…the state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions: for men being the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker…” (8)
A contemporary listing of natural rights follows Locke’s lead and includes equality, life, liberty, and property. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, acting as a scribe for the committee whose most vocal members were John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, substituted “pursuit of happiness” for “property,” which is an intriguing turn of phrase that appears to have its proximate origin in Locke and its ultimate origin in Epicurus. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke wrote that “the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness,” and we know how closely Jefferson read Locke. We also know that Jefferson ascribed to Epicurean philosophy which—aside from its materialism—held that it is only through reasoned and virtuous action that man can achieve true happiness. Perhaps the immediate source of the Declaration’s reference to the pursuit of happiness was his colleague John Adams, who wrote in his Thoughts on Government (1776) that “the form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or, in one word, happiness, to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best.”
Those who believed in natural rights came to a conclusion that frightened monarchs throughout Europe: that if government is not upholding the natural rights of citizens, and instead is consistently undermining them, the people are entirely justified in taking up arms against their rulers. American revolutionaries had exactly this so-called right-of-revolution in mind as they expressed their growing dissatisfaction with British rule after the end of the French and Indian War in 1763. Therefore, when you read the Declaration of Independence, keep in mind that it is not only a ringing statement of natural rights philosophy—“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal…”—but is also a careful dissolution of the social contract between Americans and the British Crown. The American revolutionaries felt that being taxed without representation, having troops violate people’s property without warrants, and being subject to arbitrary and capricious governance over a period of time were grievances sufficient to warrant a revolution. Indeed, in the words of the Declaration, it is the “duty” of the people under those circumstances, “to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” The goal of the revolution was not to go back to the state of nature, but to reconstitute the social contract in a form more amenable to Americans preserving their natural rights, safety, and collective happiness.
It’s a long road from Epicurus through Kandiaronk and the Enlightenment philosophers to the Declaration of Independence. Ideas are indeed important, for they can help us get unstuck from the arrangements that oppress us. In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow remind us that people throughout human history and pre-history have tried in numerous ways to live freely, to envision societies without oppression, to prevent the wealthy from translating their wealth into political power, and to avoid having “to surrender their basic freedoms and submit to the rule of faceless administrators, stern priests, paternalistic kings, or warrior-politicians.” (9) Few of these attempts at emancipation are as celebrated as is the American Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration of Independence
In Congress, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
References
1. Quoted in Matthew Stewart, Nature’s God. The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2014. Page 151.
2. Thomas Jefferson writing to his nephew Peter Carr on August 10, 1787.
3. Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence was so secular it had no references to the Creator, God, or the Supreme Judge of the World. Those were all added in the editing process done by the Continental Congress. A good description of this editing process is in Danielle Allen, Our Declaration. A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014. Pages 72-78.
4. Dan Allosso, U.S. History and Primary Source Anthology, Volume 1Chapter 48 on Kandiaronk.
5. David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2021. See especially pages 5-95 and 473-525.
6. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651). Chapter 13.
7. Quoted in Thomas G. West, “The Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights,” in Scott Douglas Gerber, editor, The Declaration of Independence. Origins and Impact. Washington, DC: CQ Press. 2002. Page 72.
8. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, (1690). Chapter 2, No. 6.
9. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything. Page 515. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/02%3A_Constitutional_Foundations/2.01%3A_Chapter_11-_Natural_Rights_and_the_Declaration_of_Independence.txt |
“The Articles of Confederation, if one considers the circumstances of the times, were a remarkable creation.”
–Rowland L. Young (1)
Many Americans do not realize that the United States has had more than one constitution in its history. They take pride in the current U.S. Constitution written in 1787 but forget the Articles of Confederation written in 1776 and 1777. However, there is much to be learned from our first constitution. Before we look at the details, let us make sure we familiarize ourselves with confederal government and how it differs from other forms. This is especially important given our history: when the Southern states seceded from the Union beginning in 1860, they formed themselves into a confederacy, so there must be something attractive about the confederal form to Americans.
Confederal, Federal, and Unitary Governments
Political scientists often classify governmental systems into one of three types: confederal, federal, and unitary. Governments are placed into one of these categories based on the relative power distribution between the central government and whatever the subordinate governments are called. We call these subunits states, while other countries might refer to them as provinces, cantons, departments, laender, or something else. In a confederal system, the states are very powerful relative to the weak central government. Indeed, the central government usually only carries out those functions that the states deem can be more efficiently run from one point. The states retain all other powers. Currently, there are no individual countries that have confederal governments. Some people see the European Union, a collection of European countries, as some form of confederacy, but it is a collection of sovereign nation-states. Historically, confederacies tend not to survive—either because they are defeated by external enemies or because they fragment internally. A unitary system is the opposite of a confederal system, in that the central government is very powerful relative to the states. Often, the states exist merely as central government administrative units with little autonomy to conduct their own policies. The majority of the world’s governments are unitary. England, France, Israel, Sweden, and Japan are countries with unitary governments. In a federal system there is more of a power balance between the central government and the states, although in practice, the balance is often tilted in favor of the center. Under our current Constitution, the United States is one of several federal governments around the world: Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Germany, India, and Nigeria come to mind. As a rule, large diverse countries tend to have federal governments.
The Articles of Confederation
The idea of unifying the American colonies is older than most people imagine. In 1697, William Penn proposed just such a union. In 1754, Benjamin Franklin put forward his Albany Plan of Union, which proposed a national legislature to raise a military when needed, to make decisions on war and peace in North America, to deal with disputed western lands, and to levy taxes on the colonies. Franklin’s proposal was not accepted. When Franklin joined the Second Continental Congress in 1775, he put forward yet another proposal for an Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, which was not taken up. After the Declaration of Independence, however, Congress appointed a committee to draft a document for a confederation and chose John Dickinson to lead it. Dickinson would later become known as “the penman of the Revolution.” That committee used Franklin’s proposal as a starting point but produced a document that gave the states much more power than Franklin had originally proposed. (2)
Dickinson’s committee wrote the Articles of Confederation on the assumption that the best way to preserve individual liberty was to fragment political power among the thirteen states. Congress submitted the Articles to the states to ratify in 1777, but disputes over western land claims delayed it being formally adopted. Finally, in 1781, Maryland became the thirteenth state to ratify it. These Articles remained in effect until superseded by the Constitution in 1789.
At the national level, the government under the Articles of Confederation had no president or supreme court, as we understand them today. The central institution was a unicameral—one chambered—Congress in which each state had one vote. Nine of the thirteen states needed to consent for most congressional actions, and amendments to the Articles required unanimous approval in Congress.
Under the Articles of Confederation, the central government’s limited power and weakness caused many problems for the new country, which is perhaps the most important thing to know about the U.S. under the Articles. Specifically, Congress could not perform the following:
Tax people directly—Under a requisition system, the central government relied on the states to collect taxes and forward the money to Congress. The requisition system did not work. The states gave Congress less than one-third of the tax revenue they were obligated to pay. This revenue deficiency required Congress to keep floating more debt, which adversely affected Congress’s ability to pay off those debts. By 1786, according to lawyer and historian George William Van Cleeve, “the Confederation’s financial position was unsustainable.” (3)
Raise a sufficient military force—The Confederation’s financial situation naturally impacted its ability to fight the Revolutionary War. About one-third of all free men served in the Continental army or the state militias. In addition, about 5,000 African Americans served—free and slave. And Van Cleeve noted that “at least twenty-thousand women worked to support the Continental army.” The central government was constantly short of money to pay for the Continental Army. The war itself caused economic disruption, causing the states to be even more reluctant to fulfill their fiscal responsibilities to the national government. Soldiers received “virtually nothing” in compensation during 1781-82, instead, receiving IOU’s. Farmers who supplied the military were in the same situation.
Regulate interstate or foreign commerce—The United States could not formulate a consistent trade policy with other countries. In 1784, Spain closed the Mississippi River to American craft. France stopped allowing American wheat and flour to be imported to the French Caribbean. Pirates actively raided American ships. Domestically, the situation was no better. In order to raise revenue and protect domestic business interests, states started taxing goods coming from other states and from British shippers. They also sometimes banned importing specific goods outright. Massachusetts banned fifty-eight items. Pennsylvania instituted protections for its refined iron, ship building, and joinery industries. During this time, there were several proposals to increase Congress’ power to regulate trade, but they were all defeated. Congress called the Annapolis Convention in 1786 to further discuss trade issues, but those at the meeting could only agree to call for a convention in Philadelphia in 1787.
Establish a sound money system—Ostensibly, Congress could regulate coinage. However, there were so many different foreign coins circulating that it was practically impossible to regulate their value. Furthermore, each state was free to print its own money, which they did at different rates. The paper money that both Congress and the individual states issued depreciated rapidly during the Confederacy.
Enforce treaties—Without enforcement power, the central government could not require states to abide by national treaties. For example, the 1783 Treaty of Peace between the United States and Britain required that America not restrict the British from collecting private prewar debts that Americans owed to them. However, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia did just that, and there was no way for Congress to force Americans to repay their debts to the British.
The Impact of the Confederal System
Under the Articles of Confederation, the national government’s main legislative accomplishment was the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The Northwest Ordinance concerned the territories located in the Old Northwest—what is today north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River. It allowed territories to enter the Union as states on the same equal legal footing as the original thirteen states. In the territories that became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, the Northwest Ordinance also prohibited slavery and provided public education.
Following the Revolutionary War, the United States was in a very precarious economic, social, and diplomatic position. The government was unable to pay off war debts, such as loans from other countries, war bonds, and even IOU’s given to soldiers in lieu of pay. Trade was being choked off by state tariffs, and the money system was a mess. Farmers were especially hard hit by excess taxes, interstate tariffs, and generally lacked confidence in the money supply. Consequently, many were losing their farms at bankruptcy auctions. Ultimately, farmers’ rebellions broke out up and down the Atlantic seaboard.
The largest such rebellion was Shays’ Rebellion (1786-87) in Massachusetts. Unable to make payments on their property and bitter that they were faced with increased taxes and scarce money due to the state legislature’s policies in Boston, farmers did what they were supposed to in a republic: they peacefully petitioned the state legislature for redress. After the legislature refused to respond to their petitions, the farmers turned to mob violence in the summer of 1786 to prevent debt hearings and their property being seized for non-payment. The governor sent out a state militia, and Daniel Shays, who had been a captain in the Revolutionary War, organized a rebellion that was not put down until February of the following year. Shays’ Rebellion was important not only because it was the biggest of these farmers’ rebellions, but for two other reasons as well. It seemed to point out many of the deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation, and it was the topic of the day as a convention convened in Philadelphia. Unfortunately for the rebels, their actions ended up promoting the very thing they opposed. As historian Joseph Ellis has written, “The ultimate irony of Shays’ Rebellion is that what began as a rural protest against centralized government actually ended up strengthening the advocates for a new U.S. Constitution, which consolidated political power at the federal level, in precisely the fashion that the rebels regarded as a betrayal of the American Revolution.” (4)
The Constitutional Convention
Largely due to the efforts of people like Alexander Hamilton and James Madison—and because of the turmoil under the Articles of Confederation—Congress called on the states to send delegates to Philadelphia in May 1787. The delegates were to gather there “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.” Every state except Rhode Island sent delegates to what we now know as the Constitutional Convention. Madison and Hamilton attended, as did George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert Morris, Charles Pinckney, and others. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams did not attend, because they were representing the United States in Paris and London, respectively. Patrick Henry did not participate because he “smelt a rat,” and opposed the Constitution once it was written. (5)
Of the original seventy-four delegates picked by the states, fifty-five actually attended the convention in Philadelphia. Some stayed away due to conscience, others because they were busy with other matters. By September 17, 1787, when the final draft was approved, only forty-two delegates were left. Three of those—Edmund RandolphGeorge Mason, and Elbridge Gerry—could not bring themselves to sign the Constitution. In the end, thirty-nine delegates signed what is now the current U.S. Constitution.
References
1. Rowland L. Young, “The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union,” American Bar Association Journal. November, 1977. Page 1575.
2. Thomas Wendel, “The Articles of Confederation,” National Review. July 10, 1981. Page 769.
3. George William Van Cleve, We Have Not a Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Page 54. All details in the next four paragraphs come from this source.
4. Joseph J. Ellis, “Dispelling the Myths Surrounding Shays Rebellion,” Commonwealth: Nonprofit Journal of Politics, Ideas, & Civic Life. December 1, 2002.
5. Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier, Decision in Philadelphia. New York: Ballantine Books, 1986. P. 74. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/02%3A_Constitutional_Foundations/2.02%3A_Chapter_12-_Articles_of_Confederation_Shays%27_Rebellion_and_the_Road_to_the_Constitution.txt |
“A government of our own is our natural right: And when a man seriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs, he will become convinced, that it is infinitely wiser and safer, to form a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner, while we have it in our power, than to trust such an interesting event to time and chance.”
–Thomas Paine (1)
“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
–Samuel Johnson (2)
Unless you happen to be one of those lawyers or political scientists who specialize in constitutional interpretation, you are not expected to know all the details of the U.S. Constitution. However, every citizen and resident of America should be familiar with the key features described in this section.
Balancing Large and Small States
One of the initial disputes among delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia involved the relative weight of the individual states in the new government. Two competing proposals, the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan, agreed on the need for a stronger central government but differed on how the states would be represented. The Virginia Plan proposed that the more populous states would have more seats in Congress than the smaller states. The New Jersey Plan proposed that they retain the scheme represented in the Articles of Confederation, with each state having one vote in Congress regardless of the state’s population. Another notable difference between the two plans: The Virginia Plan proposed a bicameral legislature—a Congress with two chambers—while the New Jersey Plan proposed a unicameral legislature. This dispute was contentious enough that it threatened to bring the convention to an end. James Madison was especially interested in creating a strong central government, which he felt could not legitimately be done if each state was represented equally without regard to its population. “In all cases,” he said, “where the General Government is to act on the people, let the people be represented and the votes be proportional” to state population. (3) However, delegates from small states were not happy unless their states got equal representation, which threatened to derail the Constitutional Convention.
On July 5, 1787, a committee dedicated to the state representation issue led by Roger Sherman of Connecticut proposed a solution that is now known as the Connecticut or Great Compromise. The Compromise called for a bicameral legislature and a different representational scheme for each chamber. In the House of Representatives, each state would have seats proportional to its population. The original formula was one representative for every 30,000 people. The Senate would have two senators from each state, regardless of population. Representatives would be elected by popular vote, while senators would be chosen by state legislatures. The Compromise narrowly passed the convention on July 16. It was a monumental decision that solved the dispute at hand, but with its passage, delegates sacrificed the basic democratic notion that one vote should weigh as much as another. The Connecticut compromise gave disproportionate power to smaller, rural, and less populous states, particularly after the Seventeenth Amendment passed when senators became elected directly by the people.
The Infamous Three-Fifths Compromise
A second dispute occurred related to state representation: If a state’s population determined its seats in the House of Representatives, the question whether to count slaves or not became an important issue. While slavery was dying in most Northern states, the Southern economy was becoming increasingly dependent on slaves, and counting them in the census would add to Southern political power. The Northern states objected, and the convention settled the dispute via a mechanism eventually called the infamous Three-fifths Compromise, which resolved the dispute to the South’s advantage. Essentially, one slave would be counted as three-fifths of a person. Article I, section 2 of the Constitution states, “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other Persons.” This is one of several places where slaves are mentioned in euphemistic ways in the Constitution. The terms “slave” and “slavery” do not actually appear in the document.
By counting three-fifths of the slave population in the census, Southern states were allocated additional seats in the House of Representatives—twenty-five more than they deserved in 1833, for instance—and additional electors in the Electoral College. This extra representation had enormous consequences. As Paul Finkelman, law and public policy professor at Albany Law School, put it: “Southerners were able to block federal legislation hostile to slavery and get the House to pass numerous laws that protected slavery. The three-fifths clause allowed the extra pro-slavery representatives in the House to pass the following laws: the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which brought Missouri in as a slave state; Texas was annexed in 1845, which was described at the time as an ’empire for slavery’; the Fugitive Slave Act passed in 1850; the law allowing slavery in Utah and New Mexico passed; and the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed in 1854, which opened the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain territories to slavery. None of these laws could have been passed without the additional twenty-five pro-slavery representatives that were created by counting slaves under the three-fifths clause.” (4) The Three-fifths Compromise, as it applied to slaves, was nullified when post-Civil War Amendments to the Constitution were passed.
Power to the Central Government
Compared to the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution’s central government maintains more power than the states. Central government’s legislative power is vested in the legislative branch. The Founding Fathers drew on a burgeoning philosophical tradition that held that the government’s legislative aspect is the most important. In his Second Treatise on Government, John Locke argued that the legislative was “the supreme power in every commonwealth.” In Federalist #51, James Madison wrote, “In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.” You should be familiar with the major powers given to Congress in Article I, section 8 of the Constitution. These include the power to tax, borrow money, raise armies and navies, establish lower federal courts, regulate the money supply, regulate interstate and foreign commerce, and declare war. These are called the enumerated powers of Congress because they are formally listed in the Constitution. When Congress exercises enumerated powers, they are relatively undisputed, although arguments have erupted over the years about definitional boundaries—like what activities fall under the phrase “interstate commerce”? We should be clear, however, that even when Congress is attempting to exercise an enumerated power, it cannot do so while violating another part of the Constitution. For example, law professor Kim Wehle notes that while Congress has the power to tax, it would violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause if it tried to tax only white people. (5)
At the end of these enumerated powers is the Necessary and Proper or Elastic Clause, which states that Congress has the power, “To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.” This has historically been a very important phrase in the Constitution because it has allowed the national government to expand its powers into a variety of areas that were not anticipated by the founders. For instance, Congress has forbidden child labor, set maximum-hour laws, and established a minimum wage—none of which are explicitly mentioned in the Constitution. All these measures have been justified with the Elastic Clause, combined with the enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce. When Congress does expand its powers, it justifies its new role by saying that it is only “carrying into execution” one of its enumerated powers. Following the precedent of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), the federal courts have usually agreed with Congress.
Constraining the States
The Constitution clearly reduces the power of the states. For example, in Article I, section 10, the states would no longer have the kind of autonomy they enjoyed under the Articles of Confederation. They could not conduct their own foreign policy, coin money, tax each other, impair contracts, or pass ex post facto laws. If there were any doubts that the power balance in the new federal system would be tilted in the central government’s favor, one need only to read the supremacy clause in Article VI: “This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.” Using this clause and the precedent-setting McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), the Supreme Court has repeatedly struck down state laws that conflicted with federal laws, treaties, or the Constitution. In such disputes between a state law and a federal law, the state’s only real chance of winning is to show that the federal law violates the U.S. Constitution. A current example that has not yet erupted into a legal battle centers on state initiatives that allow doctors to prescribe or recommend marijuana to their patients. These state laws are in direct violation of federal laws that consider marijuana so dangerous that doctors could not prescribe it, or even—for many years—study whether it was medicinally useful. Could states prove in court that such federal laws are unconstitutional? This and many other issues hint at the “messiness” of federal systems, which can cause people a great deal of confusion because issues are often decided in multiple political venues.
Since we’ve mentioned the importance of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) twice now, perhaps we should pause a minute and make sure we understand that important early Supreme Court case. In 1816, the federal government chartered the Second Bank of the United States. The states did not like the Bank of the United States competing with state-chartered banks. So, the state government of Maryland placed a prohibitive tax on “any bank not chartered within the state” in an attempt to drive the Bank of the United States out since it was the only bank operating in Maryland that had not been chartered there. Instructed by his superiors, James McCulloch, Bank of the United States Baltimore branch cashier, refused to pay the tax. Maryland brought the case to tax to a state court and won—and even won on appeal—but lost when McCulloch appealed those lower decisions up to the Supreme Court. Two important issues were contested in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819):
1. Since “establish a national bank” is not one of the enumerated powers in the Constitution, does Congress even have the ability to do that?
2. Can a state tax an activity of the U. S. government?
Regarding McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), Chief Justice John Marshall, clarified for a unanimous Court the Necessary and Proper Clause’s meaning and its relationship to the enumerated powers. He wrote “let the ends be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adopted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consistent with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional.” In other words, if Congress can legitimately tie its new exercise of power to one of the enumerated powers and if the new exercise of power is not expressly forbidden in the Constitution, then it is constitutional. Thus, it was constitutional for Congress to establish a Bank of the United States. Then Marshall went on to write that the “power to tax is the power to destroy,” and that the Supremacy Clause meant that the states could not nullify and destroy legitimate exercise of federal authority. Maryland lost, and both the Necessary and Proper Clause and the Supremacy Clause were clarified in ways that expanded the central government vis-a-vis the states.
Separation of Powers and Checks and Balances
One can hardly fail to notice that the Constitution is organized according to a principle known as the separation of powersJohn Locke argued for the separation of the legislative and executive powers. In The Spirit of the Laws (1748), legal theorist Baron de Montesquieu similarly argued that governmental power could be divided into three types and that they ought to be separate:
1. Legislativethe power to make law: the Congress
2. Executive—the power to enforce law: the Presidency
3. Judicial—the power to interpret law, both generally and in particular cases: the Supreme Court and lower federal courts
Note that the Constitution does not set up a hierarchy with the president at the top, nor does it give a president “the right to do whatever I want,” as President Trump once famously claimed. (6) The Congress, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court are coequal branches of the federal government. A central tenet of good governance is to structure the political institutions so that different people from different constituencies would perform the legislative, executive, and judicial functions. The American founders expressly agreed with this approach to governance. On November 15, 1775, John Adams wrote this to Richard Henry Lee: “A Legislative, an Executive and a Judicial power, comprehend [encompass] the whole of what is meant and understood by Government. It is by balancing each one of these Powers against the other two, that the Effort in human Nature towards Tyranny can alone be checked and restrained and any degree of Freedom preserved in the Constitution.” (7)
According to its advocates, separation of powers provides two benefitsFirst, it tends to slow legislation down, because of the squabbling between the naturally egotistic people who occupy legislative, executive, and judicial positions. Democracy requires time for deliberation, argumentation, and compromise. Legislative speed is a virtue only in rare crisis situations. The second advantage of separation of powers is that it helps avoid tyranny. Much like R.M.S. Titanic, which was supposed to be unsinkable due to its compartmentalization, a government of separated powers can stay afloat even though tyrannical leaders take over one branch. Presumably, the other two institutions would stand up for liberty. Of course, as the Titanic’s maiden voyage demonstrated, any ship will sink if you poke enough holes in it. Moreover, the United States has only three compartments, and they are functionally related. A dictator wannabe as president is bad enough, but presumably they would have partisan supporters in Congress and would be able to lace the federal courts with judges who are keen to secure and expand his tyrannical powers.
Separation of powers is not without its detractors. In fact, most other economically developed countries that purport to be democracies have rejected separation of powers in favor of parliamentary systems that dispense with bicameral legislatures and meld executive and legislative powers. This typically takes the form of a prime minister who is simultaneously a sitting member of the legislature and also head of what we in the United States would call the executive branch. As political scientist Douglas Amy argues effectively, the main problem with separation of powers is the frequency of paralyzing gridlock that undermines the power of ordinary people and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy who want to block government initiatives. (8) Even when gridlock can be overcome, the resulting policies are inevitably compromises that are weaker more fragmented than they should be. Professor Amy suggests that America’s fragmented and weak anti-poverty measures are a classic example of separation of powers at work. We might also add America’s convoluted and overly expensive healthcare system as a casualty of separation of powers.
Not only does the Constitution separate governmental powers, but it adds a twist in the form of checks and balances. The three separate government institutions are allowed to meddle in each other’s business. The term “checks and balances” does not appear in the Constitution, but the practice is woven throughout the document in a very intentional and strategic fashion. Key checks and balances include the following:
• Congress passes legislation, but the president can veto it.
• Congress can override the president’s veto with a super majority in both chambers.
• Legislation passed by Congress and signed by the president can be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
• Presidential or executive branch actions can be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
• Supreme Court decisions can be undone if Congress and the states pass a constitutional amendment.
• Presidential appointments to the judicial and executive branches require Senate approval.
• Treaties signed by the president require Senate approval.
• The president can pardon those convicted by the federal courts.
• Congress can impeach and remove executive officials and federal judges from office who violate the law.
Finally, we should note that as a check on the president’s commander-in-chief power, the Constitution mandates that only Congress can declare war. This is one check that has not worked particularly well. Congress has not declared war since World War II, even though presidents have directed the massive use of military force on numerous occasions including Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf War, and the invasion of Iraq. After the 9-11 attacks, Congress passed a very broad Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) against terrorists and nation-states that might be aiding them. The AUMF, which has no reporting requirement to Congress, was so broad and open-ended that it was used by the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations to justify the using military force in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia decades after it was passed.
What if . . . ?
What if you were transported back in time as a “consultant from the future” to the attendees at the Constitutional Convention? What would you tell them about American history that could better inform them as they write the Constitution? What events would you highlight for them? Why?
References
1. Thomas Paine, Common Sense. 1776.
2. Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress. 1775.
3. David Brian Robertson, The Original Compromise: What the Constitution’s Framers Were Really Thinking. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Page 104.
4. Gary Wills, “Negro President.” Jefferson and Slave Power. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. pages 1-13. Paul Finkelman, “Three-Fifths Clause: Why Its Taint Persists,” The Root. February 26, 2013.
5. Kim Wehle, How to Read the Constitution and Why. New York: HarperCollins, 2019. Page 64.
6. Christina Zhao, “’Article 2’ Trends after Trump Falsely Claims It Grants Him Unlimited Powers as President: I can ‘Do Whatever I Want’,” Newsweek. August 24, 2019.
7. Quoted in Danielle Allen, Our Declaration. A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014. Page 58. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/02%3A_Constitutional_Foundations/2.03%3A_Chapter_13-_Key_Features_of_the_U._S._Constitution.txt |
“The Bill of Rights we have is…different in many ways from the one the Constitution’s critics wanted. It says nothing about ‘no taxation without representation’ and ‘no standing armies in time of peace.’”
—Pauline Maier (1)
“No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.”
–Virginia Declaration of Rights, 1776
Nine States to Ratify
The delegates to the Constitutional Convention finished their work on September 17, 1787. Knowing that neither the Congress nor the state legislatures would approve the new Constitution, they created a ratification process in which each state would hold a special convention on the Constitution. The delegates agreed that if nine out of the thirteen states voted to ratify, that would be sufficient to implement the Constitution. The new Constitution was presented to Congress. But first, Congress debated for two days whether to censure the delegates for having gone beyond their mandate. Congress chose not to censure, instead, it directed state legislatures to hold elections for state ratifying conventions, as called for in Article VII of the new document.
The period from 1787 to 1790 was a unique one in world political history because the people of the United States engaged in a serious debate about the best form of government for a free people. Delaware was the first state to ratify the Constitution on December 7, 1787. Rhode Island initially rejected the Constitution in a popular referendum in March of 1788. New Hampshire became the necessary ninth state to ratify the Constitution in June of that year, but it was vitally important that the large states of New York and Virginia join the project. They both narrowly did so later that summer. North Carolina ratified the Constitution after Congress proposed a Bill of Rights in 1789, and Rhode Island held a ratifying convention in 1790 to unanimously approve the new government.
Federalists and Anti-Federalists
Those who supported the Constitution called themselves Federalists, while opponents have come to be known as Anti-Federalists—although that was a label put on them. It was a bitter and acrimonious debate. Their arguments took the form of newspaper editorials, pamphlets, letters, disagreements in pubs and churches, and debates at ratification conventions. The most famous documents in this debate came out of New York, where Alexander Hamilton recruited James Madison and John Jay to help him write a series of eighty-five essays from 1787 into 1788 in favor of the Constitution. These essays, published serially in newspapers under the pseudonym Publius, have since been published together as the Federalist Papers. They do constitute a brilliant defense of the Constitution, but keep in mind that many Federalists in other parts of the country were also writing their own works, and the Federalist Papers didn’t achieve their fame and influence until well after the Battle for Ratification was over. (2)
We tend to forget that many prominent people opposed the Constitution, including Samuel Adams, Richard Henry Lee, George Mason, Robert Yates, Patrick Henry, Elbridge Gerry, Edmund Randolph, James Monroe, and George Clinton. The Anti-Federalists worried that the new government would be too powerful, resulting in a tyranny the states would be powerless to stop. (3) The Anti-Federalists had a large list of Constitutional features to which they objected. They saw the “necessary and proper” clause as giving the central government too much power. They saw the vice president as giving too much power to the state from which he hailed. They feared the president’s pardon power. They were suspicious of the president and the Senate’s ability to coordinate together to negotiate and ratify treaties that might damage particular states or regions because neither were elected by the people. They feared the supremacy clause.
The Anti-Federalists supported stronger state governments and a weaker national one because they feared that a national government would become tyrannical. An anonymous Anti-Federalist writing in the Virginia press under the name Philanthropus concluded that “The new constitution in its present form is calculated to produce despotism, thraldom [a state of subjugation or bondage] and confusion, and if the United States do swallow it, they will find it a bolus [drug], that will create convulsions to their utmost extremities.” (4)
The Bill of Rights
Even though they ultimately lost the argument, and the Constitution was ratified, the Anti-Federalists made an important contribution by stressing the Constitution’s major deficit: it lacked a Bill of Rights to protect the people. It is clear that their agitation in the ratifying conventions contributed to winning the argument to add a list of rights to the Constitution. (5) Interestingly, the Bill of Rights is said to have been fathered by two men—one Federalist and one Anti-Federalist. Anti-Federalist George Mason is sometimes called the father of the Bill of Rights because he wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights in 1776 and constantly criticized the U.S. Constitution for omitting this important feature. In his “Objections to the Constitution,” published on November 19, 1787, in the Virginia Journal and the Alexandria Advertiser, Mason decried the fact that “there is no declaration of rights,” and that the federal government’s supremacy over the states would mean that “the declarations of rights in the separate States are no security” for the people’s freedom. He was not the only Anti-Federalist to protest the lack of a Bill of Rights. After the Pennsylvania convention approved the Constitution, twenty-one delegates who voted against it published a dissent in the Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, December 18, 1787, arguing that the “omission of a Bill of Rights” jeopardized “those unalienable and personal rights of men, without the full, free, and secure enjoyment of which there can be no liberty.” (6)
Largely as a result of pressure in several ratifying conventions, the Federalists promised to add a Bill of Rights to the Constitution. Rhode Island and North Carolina even refused to approve the Constitution until they saw the Bill of Rights in place. Federalist James Madison is considered to be the second father of the Bill of Rights. He came reluctantly to the task, because he originally thought such a listing of liberties was unnecessary—he called them “parchment barriers” to government tyranny in a letter to Thomas Jefferson. (7) Nevertheless, when he ran for Congress, he promised his constituents that he would support a Bill of Rights, and he came to realize that adding the Bill of Rights was the best way to tamp down opposition to the Constitution. Madison originally wanted to weave the various protections into the language of the Constitution, but Congress instead decided to add them to the end of the document. (8) On September 25, 1789, the first Congress under the new Constitution jointly resolved to consider adding twelve amendments in the Bill of Rights.
All twelve amendments passed Congress, but the states only ratified ten by 1791. The two amendments that weren’t ratified at that time sought to prevent establishing a political aristocracy—a key Anti-Federalist concern—and aimed to better connect the national legislators with the people. One amendment said that Congress can vote to raise its pay, but the raise doesn’t take effect until after an election. It was finally ratified in 1992 as the Twenty-seventh Amendment. The other was a rather complicated amendment that attempted to keep the number of Congressional representatives in proportion to the number of state residents. It fell one state short of ratification. (9)
Source Material for the Bill of Rights
What were the sources of the Bill of Rights? That’s a good question. Some of the sources for the Bill of Rights were proximate to the time period when it was written, but others pre-date the document by hundreds of years. The American Bill of Rights clearly is a great, great, great—many times removed—grandchild of similar historical British assertions of rights. We can go back to the Magna Carta Libertatum—the Great Charter of Liberties, or Simply the Magna Cartaa settlement in 1215 between England’s King John and his barons. The Magna Carta was not a statement of liberties for ordinary people, but it was nevertheless historically significant for firmly establishing due process for free men. In all, four specific rights in the American Bill of Rights can be traced to the Magna Carta: due process, jury trials, prohibiting unlawful seizures, and prohibiting excessive fines.
Additionally, in the 1628 Petition of Right against Charles I, Parliament prohibited quartering soldiers in civilian households against the civilian’s will. The English Bill of Rights of 1689—a document forced upon William and Mary as they were invited to replace James II after the Glorious Revolution—first addressed the right of subjects to petition the King and stated that “Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.” In all, seven specific protections in the U.S. Bill of Rights trace their heritage to English precedents. The majority of the Bill of Rights language—free speech, free exercise of religion, prohibitions against illegal searches, freedom of assembly, the right to counsel, etc.—came from the American colonial context. There are two possible sources to note: delegates at state ratifying conventions proposed amendments and assertions of rights that had already been written into state constitutions. The assertions of rights were particularly important. As political theorist Donald Lutz has clearly documented, “The states’ constitutions and their respective bills of rights, not the amendments proposed by state ratifying conventions, are the immediate source from which Madison derived what became the U.S. Bill of Rights.” (10) Interestingly, in those early state constitutions, the assertions of rights were included as prefaces that began those documents, whereas the U. S. Bill of Rights was appended at the end of the U. S. Constitution. For example, the Virginia state constitution of 1776 began this way: (11)
Virginia Declaration of Rights
I That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.
II That all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people; that magistrates are their trustees and servants, and at all times amenable to them.
III That government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation or community; of all the various modes and forms of government that is best, which is capable of producing the greatest degree of happiness and safety and is most effectually secured against the danger of maladministration; and that, whenever any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community hath an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform, alter or abolish it, in such manner as shall be judged most conducive to the public weal.
IVThat no man, or set of men, are entitled to exclusive or separate emoluments or privileges from the community, but in consideration of public services; which, not being descendible, neither ought the offices of magistrate, legislator, or judge be hereditary.
V That the legislative and executive powers of the state should be separate and distinct from the judicative; and, that the members of the two first may be restrained from oppression by feeling and participating the burthens of the people, they should, at fixed periods, be reduced to a private station, return into that body from which they were originally taken, and the vacancies be supplied by frequent, certain, and regular elections in which all, or any part of the former members, to be again eligible, or ineligible, as the laws shall direct.
VI That elections of members to serve as representatives of the people in assembly ought to be free; and that all men, having sufficient evidence of permanent common interest with, and attachment to, the community have the right of suffrage and cannot be taxed or deprived of their property for public uses without their own consent or that of their representatives so elected, nor bound by any law to which they have not, in like manner, assented, for the public good.
VII That all power of suspending laws, or the execution of laws, by any authority without consent of the representatives of the people is injurious to their rights and ought not to be exercised.
VIII That in all capital or criminal prosecutions a man hath a right to demand the cause and nature of his accusation to be confronted with the accusers and witnesses, to call for evidence in his favor, and to a speedy trial by an impartial jury of his vicinage, without whose unanimous consent he cannot be found guilty, nor can he be compelled to give evidence against himself; that no man be deprived of his liberty except by the law of the land or the judgement of his peers.
IX That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed; nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
X That general warrants, whereby any officer or messenger may be commanded to search suspected places without evidence of a fact committed, or to seize any person or persons not named, or whose offense is not particularly described and supported by evidence, are grievous and oppressive and ought not to be granted.
XI That in controversies respecting property and in suits between man and man, the ancient trial by jury is preferable to any other and ought to be held sacred.
XII That the freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.
XIII That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and be governed by, the civil power.
XIV That the people have a right to uniform government; and therefore, that no government separate from, or independent of, the government of Virginia, ought to be erected or established within the limits thereof.
XV That no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.
XVI That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore, all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other.
–Adopted unanimously June 12, 1776 Virginia Convention of Delegates. Drafted by Mr. George Mason
Important Features of the Bill of Rights
We should highlight several features of the Bill of Rights. First, as noted above, unlike several state constitutions of the day, the federal Constitution does not begin with a declaration of rights. Instead, the first ten amendments—and subsequent amendments over the years—are grafted onto the end of the Constitution to modify or add to the original text. The next thing to note is how absolute the guarantees are in the Bill of Rights compared to its historical and contemporary antecedents. With respect to individual liberties, previous documents often used words like “ought” and “should.” For example, note how in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the right to trial by jury “ought to be held sacred,” and excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishments “ought” not to be imposed. The Bill of Rights is much more direct and prohibitive, using language like “shall make no law” and “shall not be violated” and “shall be preserved.” In other words, the Bill of Rights went further than any previous document had in vigorously articulating individual liberties and freedom from an oppressive government. In that sense, the Bill of Rights is a ringing pronouncement that abstract concepts like natural rights have real meaning in our lives and that government needs to respect them.
Having said that, however, we should also note that the liberties enunciated in the Bill of Rights are not, in fact, absolute. It is fair to say that all these liberties are subject to legislation. A person cannot threaten to assassinate a political leader and hide behind the First Amendment’s freedom of speech. Your neighbors cannot start a toxic waste dump in their back yard and hide behind the Fifth Amendment’s property rights. A person’s right not to be searched does not protect them against lawfully issued warrants, and it does not protect them in situations where authorities do not have a warrant but have probable cause that a crime has been committed. You may not start a religion that sacrifices a virgin to your god on the summer solstice and claim that such an atrocity is ok because you are freely exercising your religion.
Here is the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments—passed by Congress, ratified by the states, and appended to the U. S. Constitution:
The Bill of Rights
Amendment I Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Amendment II A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Amendment III No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
Amendment IV The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Amendment V No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Amendment VI In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.
Amendment VII In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
Amendment VIII Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Amendment IX The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
References
1. Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010. Page 467.
2. Pauline Maier, Ratification. Pages 84-85.
3. For a short, readable treatment of the Anti-Federalists, see Herbert J. Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1981.
4. Philanthropos, “Adoption of the Constitution Will Lead to Civil War,” The Virginia Journal and Alexandria Advertiser, December 6, 1787. Archived on the Constitution Society site at constitution.org.
5. Carol Berkin, The Bill of Rights: The Fight to Secure America’s Liberties. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015. Gerard N. Magliocca, The Heart of the Constitution: How the Bill of Rights Became the Bill of Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pages 23-36.
6. “The Address and Reasons of Dissent of the Minority of the Convention of Pennsylvania to their Constituents,” in Ralph Ketcham, editor, The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates. New York: New American Library, 1986. Page 247.
7. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson on October 17,1788.
8. Paul Finkelman, “James Madison and the Bill of Rights: A Reluctant Paternity.” The Supreme Court Review. 1990. Pages 301-347.
9. Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights. New Haven: Yale University, 1998. Pages 3-19.
10. Donald S. Lutz, “The State Constitutional Pedigree of the U. S. Bill of Rights.” Publius. 22(2): Spring, 1992. Page 29.
11. The Avalon Project of The Yale Law School. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/02%3A_Constitutional_Foundations/2.04%3A_Chapter_14-_The_Battle_for_Ratification_and_the_Bill_of_Rights.txt |
“Over time, federalism forces politicians on both sides of the aisle to do what they are supposed to do— politick, find common ground, and negotiate a compromise that no one likes but everyone can tolerate.”
–Heather K. Gerkin (1)
A Federal Republic is Fairly Uncommon
The American political system is a federal republic. Let’s tackle the last part of that phrase first. A republic is a political system in which supreme authority rests with the people, who elect representatives to make decisions. Thus, a republic differs from a monarchy in which authority rests with a king or queen. Most of the world’s political systems are republics, at least in name. Those in which a single party or very small group of people are actually in charge might still call themselves republics, but only those that vest sovereignty with the people are true republics.
Federalism is not a common governing system. Of the nearly 200 countries in the world, only about two dozen divide power and sovereignty between a central government and subordinate governments. In addition to the United States, other federal systems include Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, India, and Germany. A rule of thumb is that large geographically and culturally diverse countries are more likely to have federal systems, but most countries do not. The vast majority of countries rely on a unitary system of governance, in which the central government is much more powerful than the subordinate (state) governments.
Struggles Over Federalism at the Constitutional Convention
The U.S. Constitution created the first modern federal system. Up until 1787, the political philosophy of shared sovereignty—the federal ideal that states and the central government would share authority over the same territory—hadn’t really been considered. And, even if they had wanted to, it wasn’t practical or politically feasible for the Constitution’s writers to make the move from the Articles of Confederation all the way to a unitary system with the central government as the sole sovereign. For one thing, the transportation and communication systems of 1787 were simply inadequate to support a unitary political system that stretched from Maine to Georgia. And regional differences were too great, anyway, for one set of laws to fit all matters affecting so large a territory. Moreover, there was no support among the delegates or the population to drastically reduce state power and create a unitary government. As we saw from the ratification debates, the Constitution as written was viewed by the Anti-Federalists—no small part of the population—as a document that went too far in centralizing power.
The delegates at the Constitutional Convention may not have wanted to establish a unitary system, but they agreed that the weak central government under the Articles of Confederation needed to be strengthened. Almost all the delegates to the convention ended up being federalists—that is, they supported the Constitution—but they differed on how much power to give to the central government. Political scientist David Brian Robertson distinguishes between the narrow nationalists and the broad nationalists. Narrow nationalists included people like Roger Sherman, Oliver Ellsworth and most of the delegates from the small states like Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey. They wanted to give the national government limited and well-defined powers. Broad nationalists like James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, James Wilson, and Gouverneur Morris wanted to give the national government more expansive powers. (2) For example, Madison and the broad nationalists proposed that the national government have a legislative veto over state laws. This would mean that majority votes in Congress would allow the national government to nullify state public policies—not because they were unconstitutional, per se, but because the national legislators thought them unwise. That proposal was defeated. In the end, the broad and the narrow nationalists compromised on modern federalism: shared sovereignty between the central government and the states, central government’s enumerated powers, powers reserved to the states, limits on state power, and the Supremacy Clause combined with the Supreme Court, which implied that state laws could be struck down on constitutional rather than policy grounds.
Balancing Federal and State Power
Ever since 1787, the states and the central government have struggled over a proper balance of power. The Anti-Federalists may have lost the debate over ratification, but echoes of the Federalist/Anti-Federalist argument can be heard all the time in contemporary American politics as clashes over power continue. And what is even more interesting, the arguments often defy ideological categories. One would think that conservatives would consistently oppose central government’s power while progressives—aka liberals—would consistently support it. This has often been the case. For example, in response to the 1950s and 60s civil rights movement, both Democrat and Republican conservatives—don’t get hung up on party labels, because conservatism has a place in both parties—opposed the central government exerting authority, while progressives embraced it. On the other hand, conservatives have moved to increase the central government’s power to tap phone calls and internet activity, to dictate educational policy, and to define the terms of marriage, a power that had always been a state responsibility. Of course, the Supreme Court struck down the conservative-inspired federal definition of marriage that discriminated against gay couples. Moreover, conservatives have wanted to empower states to control environmental regulations, knowing that large multi-national corporations can more easily sway most state legislatures into setting lower standards. Sometimes that backfires, such as when California led several states to evade the Trump administration’s attempt to weaken automobile emission standards. (3)
The Supreme Court case McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) was a tremendously important case because it set the stage for central government to expand power. Much of what the central government does is tied to its ability to use the Necessary and Proper Clause to extend the reach of one of its enumerated powers. This is especially true in government regulation, justified under Congress’ power to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” Thanks to McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), Congress has often used the Commerce Clause in conjunction with the Necessary and Proper Clause to expand central government power. Recently, however, the Supreme Court has been unwilling to extend federal power tied to the Commerce Clause. For instance, the Court struck down the Violence Against Women Act in 2000 because the majority felt that the central government was unjustifiably intruding into the states’ prerogatives and that the Commerce Clause did not entitle the federal government to allow women to sue in federal court for gender related violence. (4) We are likely to see similar future rulings because the Court’s conservative majority is more likely to endorse limiting central government’s authority regarding social welfare or environmental regulation.
How States Interact under the Constitution
An important part of our federal system is the way in which the Constitution manages how states interact with each other. Four provisions of the Constitution are important here, although one became irrelevant when slavery was abolished.
Article IV, section 1 contains the Full Faith and Credit Clause: “Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.” This appears straightforward but opens the door to all sorts of interesting possibilities. Consider the days before the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, which allowed states to refuse to acknowledge gay marriages performed in other states. Gay couples who married in permissive states and who moved to states that banned gay marriage were suddenly no longer married, despite what the full faith and credit clause said.
Privileges and Immunities—Article IV, section 2 reads: “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.” This clause meant that as free men and women traveled out of their state, other states were obligated not to discriminate against them with respect to civil rights. But the nondiscrimination terms were set by the state being visited. As Ahkil Amar has put it, “If a free black man from Massachusetts went to Virginia, he could be held to whatever rules Virginia applied to its own free black adult males. Out-of-state women would get the civil rights of in-state women; so, too, with children.” (5) When determining whether to protect citizenship privileges across state lines, the Supreme Court looks at whether the privilege is “sufficiently basic to the livelihood of the Nation,” and then at whether a limitation of that privilege is related to a substantial interest the state is asserting. For example, the Court has held that states may restrict Freedom of Information requests to its own citizens. (6)
Extradition—Article IV, section 2 goes on to say that “A person charged in any State with Treason, Felony or other Crime, who shall flee from Justice, and be found in another State, shall on Demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having jurisdiction of the Crime.” This is fairly straightforward and prevents people from fleeing justice across state lines. It allows interstate extradition.
Runaway Slaves—Finally, Article IV, section 2 says that “No person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to who such Service or Labour may be due.” This is one of three places in the Constitution that refers to slaves and slavery without using those exact words. This clause not only forbid Northern states from freeing a slave who had fled from the South, it pledged to give the slave back to his/her master if the master came to claim the slave.
The Advantages of Federalism
Federalism is reputed to have several advantages. One of the most famous is the laboratories of democracy idea put forth by Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis in 1932. He wrote that “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”(7) States have experimented with welfare policies, pollution control policies, laws against child labor, laws allowing doctor-assisted euthanasia, legalizing marijuana, capital punishment, and so forth. Many states and local governments have begun to act on climate change because of what they see as Washington obstructing this issue. Some of these state experiments eventually get translated into national policy, such as Wisconsin’s 1932 initiative on unemployment compensation, three years before the national government implemented it. The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated how different states responded to the public health challenge and the possibilities for re-opening their economies following the quarantines that most had put in place.
In a related idea, federalism also allows for regional differences in a country as large and diverse as the United States. Without federalism, policies in Connecticut, Louisiana, and Kansas would essentially be the same. Large, diverse nation-states tend to find federalism attractive precisely because it allows regional political subcultures to develop that reflect the local population’s desires. One state may want to execute murderers, while another may not. One state might want to make access to abortion very difficult, while another might not.
Another possible advantage of federalism is that the states often serve as training grounds for national-level politicians. Many representatives, senators, and presidents develop expertise and networks at the state level before moving on to federal government positions. Because the states have dual sovereignty with the central government, state and local politicians don’t just implement policies decided by Washington. Thus, they often bring a wealth of experience with respect to how central government policies impact states.
Finally, federalism brings government closer to the people and gives them ample opportunities to participate. Important decisions get made at the state and local levels, which are often more accessible and responsive to local pressure groups. New parties have an easier time starting at the local level. Reformers who want to take existing parties in new directions can also begin that process at the local level.
The Disadvantages of Federalism
Despite the above advantages, federalism is also problematic. Chief among the disadvantages is how politics fragment in a federal system. When you count the total number of discrete governments in this country—including the central government, states, cities and towns, counties, school districts, and a myriad of special districts—there are nearly 88,000 of them! Critics rightly ask, Who is responsible for what in this mess? How can any citizen keep up with issues at multiple levels? Can they cast informed votes in presidential, congressional, gubernatorial, state legislative, city, county, school district, and water district elections? This doesn’t even count those places where judges are elected, which adds a whole different twist to the confusion.
In federal systems, state and local governments’ purported closeness and accessibility is often a mirage. For one thing—perhaps due to the issue just raised above—turnout rates in state and local elections are often considerably lower than in national races. State and local governments also tend to listen intently to local economic interests that may or may not have local people’s interests in mind. And because state and local politics gets very little media attention, policies are more likely to be passed there without being properly scrutinized and considered. This is especially true in states that have partisan gerrymandering that guarantees many safe seats in the state legislature.
Political scientists are finding that Louis Brandeis’ vision of states as laboratories of democracy is often inaccurate. David Pepper, a professor of election law and former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party, argues that federalism has devolved into a situation where states are laboratories of autocracy. When he looks across the country, Pepper sees state legislatures that “have atrophied as broadly representative bodies and become easily captive to narrow interests,” which means they respond to “twisted, perverse incentives that reward serving private, often corrupt, ends while undermining public outcomes.” (8) Similarly, political scientist Jacob Grumbach refers to many states as laboratories against democracy. Grumbach’s work is fascinating. He created a state democracy index with over 60 indicators such as restrictions on voter registration drives, gerrymandering, voter registrations rejected, and whether a state allows no-fault absentee voting. Applying the state democracy index over the 2000-2018 time period he found no real change in democratic performance in Democratically led states or states where control of state government was relatively split between the parties. However, he came to a “remarkably clear” conclusion that “Republican control of state government reduces democratic performance. The magnitude of democratic contraction from Republican control is surprisingly large.” (9)
The federal nature of the U.S. system also allows large economic interests to play states off against each other. Very often, corporations will announce that they plan to build a new factory somewhere in the United States. They invite states to compete against each other, then states offer the company incentive packages that may include reduced taxes, free land, or developed infrastructure. The company chooses the best offer, which means that the “winning” state pays dearly for whatever new jobs are created. It’s often a fool’s bargain because taxes are increased or services are cut on ordinary people to keep the corporations happy. (9)
Finally, federalism has sometimes allowed a few states to block initiatives that had majority support. Take the case of education equality. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional, but because education is—even more so then than now—primarily a local responsibility, Southern school districts defied the Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Even ten years after the case was decided, most school districts in the South were still racially segregated.
Federal Grants and Mandates
The federal government (10) provides a tremendous amount of money to state and local governments. According to 2021 official records, this amount totaled over \$1.2 trillion. (11) Federal money comes to states in two basic forms.
1. Categorical grants, as the name implies, provide money to states and local governments to spend on specific delineated categories or purposes. Aside from requiring that the money be spent for specific purposes, categorical grants come with certain strings. For instance, states or local governments receiving the grants must abide by federal nondiscrimination laws, and they may have to pay wages at certain levels. There are two types of categorical grants.
1. Project grants are open on a competitive basis and require an often elaborate application process. Indeed, many entities such as state governments, city governments, and colleges employ people to draft grant applications.
2. Formula grants are pots of money that get distributed to state and local governments based on some pre-established formula, which might entail giving money based on population, per capita income, chance of being hit by terrorists, or some other such reasonable criteria.
2. Block grants are the second form of federal money that state and local governments receive. Block grants are looser than categorical grants. They grant states money to use for a broad public policy area, such as the welfare block grants that replaced existing federal welfare programs in the mid-1990s. State governors and legislators tend to like block grants because they prefer the accompanying freedom to design their own solutions to social problems.
By giving money to states and local governments, the federal government gains leverage over some aspects of state policies. In the 1980s, for example, the federal government made it clear that highway construction and repair money would be contingent on states raising their minimum drinking age to twenty-one. Needless to say, the minimum age for purchasing alcohol is twenty-one across the land. The federal government also places requirements on states in the form of federal mandateswhich command that states undertake certain public policies or enforce certain restrictions. Very often, states cry that these requirements are unfunded mandates, meaning that states must pick up the bill for what is essentially a decision made in Washington, D.C. A great example is the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which enforced new performance standards on individual schools and school districts. States complained that the federal government did not provide nearly enough money to restructure curricula, target struggling students, administer tests, and hire qualified teachers. Unfunded mandates also affect private companies. For example, the Clean Air Act requires energy companies to buy expensive equipment to mitigate pollution. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/02%3A_Constitutional_Foundations/2.05%3A_Chapter_15-_A_Federal_Republic.txt |
After a third of a century of power flowing from the people and the states to Washington, it is time for a New Federalism in which power, funds, and responsibility will flow from Washington to the states and to the people.”
—President Richard Nixon (1)
The Definitional Period of American Federalism
A truism about federal systems around the world is that political power is never equally balanced between the central government and the states. The central government ends up being stronger than the states. This generalization is true in the United States as well. However, as the first modern federal governing system, the United States has experimented inordinately with federalism and has gone through several historical stages.
The first stage doesn’t have an official name, but it was marked by states challenging federal authority, which ultimately gave way to officially recognizing federal supremacy. Let’s call it the Definitional Period of American Federalism. The country went through wrenching—and ultimately deadly—struggles over federal versus state power. This period is easy to date—from 1789 to 1865. We can think of this period in another way: states went from sovereign powers under the Articles of Confederation to subordinate units under the Constitution practically overnight, and then it took 76 years for that fact to sink in. This period was marked by several key struggles, all of which resolved in favor of central government power.
McCulloch v. Maryland (1819)—We’ve already talked about this case. States objected to establishing the second Bank of the United States. The Supreme Court ruled that states could not tax federal operations and that Congress had broad implied powers when its enumerated powers were combined with the Necessary and Proper Clause.
Gibbons v. Ogden (1824)—This case centered on interpreting Congress’ power to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes,” which is also known as the commerce clause. In the early nineteenth century, New York state gave Robert Fulton and Robert Livingston a monopoly on steam navigation, which they in turn licensed out to Aaron Ogden to operate steam powered ferries between New York and New Jersey. At the same time, the federal government gave Thomas Gibbons a license to operate ferries in interstate waters. Gibbons’ route competed with Ogden’s route. Ogden sued Gibbons. Ogden won the suit in the New York state courts, but Gibbons appealed up to the Supreme Court and won. The Court made several important decisions. First, it defined “commerce” broadly to include not just the literal shipment of goods, but any “commercial intercourse” between states. The Court said that while Congress could not regulate business activity that solely took place within a state’s boundaries, it could regulate commerce if part transcended state boundaries. Finally, the Court said that the federal law granting Gibbons a commercial license trumped New York’s attempt to give Ogden exclusive right to carry goods and people between New York and New Jersey.
The Nullification Crises—The perilous and unsettled nature of federal and state relations during this era was exemplified by state attempts to nullify federal laws. States effectively said, “We do not recognize this federal law as operable on us.” In 1798, Congress passed, and President John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts. Kentucky and Virginia both passed resolutions nullifying the law in their states and asserted the right to disregard the federal laws with which they disagreed. The Kentucky resolution, secretly written by Thomas Jefferson, said that since the Constitution was created by the states, each state has “the unquestionable right to judge of its infraction,” which is a way to say that Kentuckians get to determine whether a law is unconstitutional. (2) This nullification crisis didn’t boil over because the Democratic-Republican/Jeffersonian victory in the 1800 election resulted in states repealing the offending federal legislation.
A more serious nullification crisis happened in the 1830s when southern states, which exported agricultural products like cotton, objected to a federal tariff law that they felt unduly punished the South and favored protecting northern manufacturers. The charge was led by John C. Calhoun, who resigned the Vice Presidency in 1832 so he could run for Senate from his native South Carolina and better lead the fight against the tariffs on the South’s agricultural goods. South Carolina passed a resolution nullifying the federal tariff in the state and prepared to militarily resist the federal government should it insist on enforcing the tariff. Congress passed a Force Bill authorizing the president to use the military against South Carolina, so the United States was on the verge of civil war. The situation was relieved when Congress passed a new tariff bill in 1833 that gave concessions to Southern interests, and South Carolina repealed its nullification resolution. (3)
The Civil War—As you learned in your history class, the North and the South became increasingly divided over the slavery issue and the political question of whether additional states would be admitted to the United States as slave or free—thereby determining the political balance in Congress. There is no space here to recount America’s slide into the meat grinder that was the Civil War, but Republican Abraham Lincoln’s presidential election was the final straw for white southerners who benefitted economically, culturally, and psychologically from slavery. Even though Lincoln asserted on many occasions that he did not believe in the inherent equality of blacks and whites, he did say things like, “There is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” (4) South Carolina repealed its ratification of the Constitution on December 20, 1860 and six states met in Montgomery, Alabama, on February 4, 1861 to form the Confederate States of America. Ultimately, eleven states joined the Confederacy, and the war between them and the Union killed at least 670,000 soldiers and civilians, freed 3.5 million people from slavery, and crushed the most serious challenge to federal authority in American history.
The Civil War was also a decisive victory for those who held that while the official name of this country is The United States of America, the states are merely administrative units of the people in whose name government operates. The Constitution begins with “We the People,” not “We the states.” Chief Justice Marshall, writing in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), said the “government of the Union. . . is, emphatically and truly, a government of the people.” During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address to dedicate a cemetery on the site of a great battle between North and South in Pennsylvania. Students in elementary schools across America learn it by heart, but often they recite the final line like this: “that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” In light of our conversation about federalism here, that passage is best articulated in a way that emphasizes that government is for people and not states: “that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Dual Federalism
Following the Civil War, the United States entered a period that political scientists call Dual Federalism, which is commonly called Layer Cake Federalism. Both names inadequately characterize what was happening. This period runs from 1865 to the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. Despite the outcome of the Civil War, states continued to assert their prerogatives to govern exclusively in important public policy areas, and they were aided by Supreme Court rulings to that effect. The idea of dual federalism is that there are public policies over which the federal government predominates, such as foreign policy, tariffs, monetary policy, national defense, interstate commerce, and the mail. States took the lead in other areas of governmental responsibility like public safety, education, elections, business licensing, family and morals policy, inheritance and property laws, and commerce within state boundaries, including wages and working conditions. Note that state responsibilities more directly impinged on how people lived their day-to-day lives.
The legacy of the dual federalism era is not a pretty one for people who advocate for human dignity, and it is an embarrassing era even for those who argue today for states’ rights. The notion that vast swaths of public policy directly affecting people’s lives were off limits to federal intervention meant that during America’s industrial explosion, state legislatures could empower corporations at the expense of people and could embolden white supremacists and nativists just when whole new former slave and immigrant populations were struggling to establish themselves as equals in America. This was the era of state Jim Crow legislation limiting political and economic freedom for African Americans, the era of unregulated child labor, the era of unchecked corporate malfeasance, and the era of morals legislation used to keep women in their place.
Let’s highlight one example—the issue of child labor. Congress passed the Keating-Owen Act in 1916, regulating commerce involving goods produced by children. It was mild legislation from our perspective. It banned interstate sale of goods made by children under the age of fourteen and by children under sixteen if they were working more than sixty hours a week. However, in the case of Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), the Supreme Court struck down the federal law as unconstitutional. Writing for the Court, Justice William Day said that manufacturing itself was not interstate commerce. Since the children were only involved in manufacturing—in this case, cotton—but not involved in transporting the goods once they were manufactured, the federal government had no power to legislate. The Tenth Amendment, said Day, reserved states’ powers, and that among these was the power to regulate manufacturing, even if the goods were intended to be shipped across state lines. (5) Thus, the federal government was powerless to ban or regulate child labor. It was the same story with federal actions to break up monopolies—U.S. v. E.C. Knight Co. (1895); federal laws to protect Blacks against violence—U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876)and federal laws to provide for full and equal access to public accommodations regardless of race—The Civil Rights Cases (1883). In all these cases, the Court said essentially that the Constitution was off the table as a possible help to make people’s lives better. The Supreme Court’s restriction on federal power also extended to states whenever they tried to limit business’ power to operate freely. For instance, in Lochner v. New York (1905), the Court struck down a New York state law that limited baker’s hours to sixty per week. The majority argued that state infringement on the right-of-contract between the bakers and their employer violated the individual’s liberty to engage in commerce. Corporations, in other words, should be free to exploit workers because said workers were free to go find another job.
Cooperative Federalism
Dual federalism gave way in the 1930s to what is known as Cooperative Federalism, which lasted until the late 1960s. Again, this is not a particularly good name. The twin disruptions of the Great Depression and World War II—and the response led by Democratic presidents—created an era that was marked by increased federal power. The Democrats in Congress combined with the Roosevelt administration and passed economic regulations and instituted social welfare policies that had never been seen at the U.S. national level. Under the New Dealthe national government regulated the banking industry, supported agricultural prices, set the first federal minimum wage, created unemployment insurance, established social security for the elderly, supported the right of workers to unionize and collectively bargain, and put people to work building schools, hospitals, and roads.
This period of Cooperative Federalism was marked by two important developments. First, and this is really the origin of the name, the federal government and the states became partners as they solved problems associated with the Great Depression, World War II, and then the Cold War. Many programs were entirely or predominantly financed by the federal government and administered jointly by the federal and state governments or solely by the latter. For example, unemployment insurance, which is part of the Social Security Act of 1935, continues to be administered by states. The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956 provided federal funding predominantly for interstate highways, while states had significant roles in planning and construction. Some people call mixing federal and state powers “marble cake” federalism.
The second important development in this period is that the Supreme Court finally acceded to government regulating the economy and protecting civil rights and liberties. Initially, the Court struck down Roosevelt’s initiatives such as the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act. Roosevelt grew so frustrated that he proposed a court packing plan that would allow him to nominate new justices and expand the total number of justices on the Court. (6) Beginning in 1937, the Court abandoned its weird interstate commerce ruling found in Hammer v Dagenhart (1918) and began to treat America’s economic system as a truly national one. No longer would the law differentiate commerce into manufacturing regulated by states because it takes place within a state’s boundaries, or shipping regulated by the federal government because it was interstate commerce, or distribution regulated by states because it takes place within a state’s boundaries. Now, it’s all interstate commerce. A person digging coal in Kentucky is engaged in interstate commerce, even if they have never left the state, because the coal is likely headed to power plants in other states.
New Federalism
Beginning in the late 1960s, American federalism entered a New Federalism period, which is also sometimes called the Era of Devolution because of the ways that governmental power seems—in part—to have devolved back on to states. It’s confusing, if only because these different periods are clouded by so many contradictory events. A defining factor in the modern period is that in the thirteen presidential elections held between 1968 and 2016, Republicans have “won” eight of them. Two of those victories—Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016—were solely the result of the electoral college giving the presidency to the popular vote loser. Nevertheless, the disproportionate number of Republican presidents in this period have been able to load up the Supreme Court and the federal courts with a disproportionate number of appointees who would be very comfortable if the United States were to go back to days of dual federalism and have the national government be powerless to act in many areas of public policy—particularly economic, worker safety, and environmental regulation. For example, four Supreme Court justices were ready to strike down the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate as an unconstitutional extension of Congressional power, and it was only Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision–uncharacteristic for a conservative–not to join them that saved the law in 2012. (7) Earlier, in 1995, the Court ruled that the interstate commerce clause could not be stretched far enough by the elastic clause to constitutionally cover Congress’ attempt to pass a Gun Free Schools Act and ban handguns near schools. (8)
Republican presidents like Nixon, Reagan, and the two Bushes joined Democratic presidents Clinton and Obama in devolving federal powers to states where they could. Under president Nixon, the federal government began offering block grants so that it could support housing and community development while allowing states to figure out how best to spend the money. President Reagan proposed to eliminate the Departments of Education and Energy and transfer most of their functions to the states. He was unsuccessful. He was more successful in shifting federal support from categorical to block grants in areas beyond housing, thereby giving states more freedom. In the 1996 welfare reform law, President Clinton presided over the federal government transferring welfare power to the states. It was the largest transfer since federal welfare began. The Obama administration allowed California to set its own air pollution regulations. There are, of course, exceptions to this pattern. For example, under President George W. Bush, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 consolidated federal power over education.
Conclusion
The United States has a conflicted history of political power in part because of the federal structure built into the Constitution. Struggles over the overall balance of power will continue, as will fights about specific legislation and whether it vests decision-making power with the federal government or the states. Keeping in mind the theme of this textbook, you should look at struggles over federalism as arenas for conflict between corporations and the rich and the broader population’s desire to have effective government regardless of which level provides it. The corporate and financial elite may prefer some policies to be administered by the federal government and others by the states, depending on the benefits they can derive or the regulations they can avoid. The public’s need for good governance, regardless of level, is ever-present.
References and Notes
1. Quoted in Bruce Katz, “Nixon’s New Federalism 45 Years Later,” Brookings. August 11, 2014.
2. The Kentucky Resolution. Approved December 3, 1798. Archive in the Library of Congress as part of the Thomas Jefferson Papers, Series 1: General Correspondence.
3. Interestingly, nullification was not an exclusively Southern phenomenon. In 1854, the state of Wisconsin nullified the Fugitive Slave Act that Congress passed in 1850, which required free states to return slaves who fled to free states back to their owners. The Supreme Court struck down Wisconsin’s action as unconstitutional, an action which Wisconsin officially refused to recognize.
4. Abraham Lincoln in a debate with Stephen Douglas in Ottawa, Illinois on August 21, 1858. Quoted in Jill Lepore, These Truths. A History of the United States. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Pages 277-278.
5. Hugh D. Hindman, Child Labor: An American History. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002. Pages 64-70.
6. Officially, the court packing plan took the form of the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, which would allow the president to appoint a new justice for every existing justice who was over the age of 70 and who had 10 years of federal judicial service.
7. National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012).
8. United States v. Lopez (1995). | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/02%3A_Constitutional_Foundations/2.06%3A_Chapter_16-_Federalism%27s_Historical_Development.txt |
“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are 20 gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
–Thomas Jefferson (1)
“Granting a citizen the right to think anything she wants is the preamble to other privacies.”
–Jacques Berlinerblau (2)
What is a Secular Republic?
Many Americans are familiar with the federal system established by the Constitution. What is less familiar is the extent to which the founders went to create a secular republic as well as a federal one. Indeed, one could argue that the United States was the world’s first secular republic. Secularism is a misunderstood word, especially by people with strong religious opinions who assume it means “opposition to religion.” Part of this misunderstanding is reasonable, as some secularists have expressed their opposition to religion, but we ought not to let that distract us from the real issue here. Just because some Republicans advocate polygamy doesn’t mean we should conclude that such advocacy is a key feature of the Republican party’s belief system.
A secular republic is one that is characterized by a separation between government and religion. Above all, it means to avoid the trappings of theocracy in all its variations. (3) In a secular republic, people are free to practice religion or non-religion in peace; church and state are separated; people of differing faiths are treated equally before the law; and religious tests and oaths are not required to vote or hold office.
The European Roots of American Secularism
The Constitution was firmly rooted in the Enlightenment’s secular philosophy. In his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), English philosopher John Locke argued in favor of religious toleration and tried to “distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion, and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other.” The American Revolution and the writing of the Constitution happened during the same period as a fight in England against what were called the Test and Corporation Acts, which prohibited Catholics from holding office there. The American founders were sympathetic with the arguments of Joseph Priestly, co-discoverer of oxygen and a founder of Unitarianism, and James Burgh, a Scottish minister and political writer, who both wanted the Test and Corporation Acts to be repealed. Burgh wrote, “Away with all foolish distinctions about religious opinions. Those with different religious views are both equally fit for being employed in the service of our country.” (4)
The Constitution reflected the Enlightenment views of many of the leading lights of the founding generation. They were, as the author Susan Jacoby has described them, some of the first in a long line of freethinkers with respect to religion in public life. (5) This personal characteristic made them revolutionaries in more than one sense. Thomas Jefferson was most proud of three of his accomplishments: The Declaration of Independence, founding the University of Virginia, and writing and passing the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty in 1786. Under his design, the University of Virginia did not have a church on school grounds, and he forbade teaching theology. When the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty passed, Jefferson declared that there would be “freedom for the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammeden, the Hindu and infidel of every denomination.” (6) James Madison thought that the presence of chaplains in Congress or the army was unconstitutional and warned against “the danger of a direct mixture of Religion and Civil Government.” (7) John Adams had contempt for any priests commingling with governmental affairs. “Nothing is more dreaded,” he wrote in 1812, “than the national government meddling with religion.” (8) George Washington, too, was steeped in Enlightenment Deism, and declined to ask for an Episcopal clergyman at his deathbed. He wrote thousands of letters that rarely mention Jesus Christ or Christianity, instead, preferring Deist phrases such as Providence, the Supreme Being, and the Great Ruler of Events. He attended church about once a month and conspicuously left before communion. (9) Dr. Thomas Young, one of Boston’s leading revolutionaries and the man who first publicly advocated throwing the British East India Company’s tea into the harbor in 1773, was a life-long Deist. At the age of twenty-five, Young was tried and convicted for the charge that he “did. . . speak and publish these Wicked false and Blasphemous Words concerning the said Christian religion (to wit) Jesus Christ was a knave and a fool.” (10)
Secularism in the U.S. Constitution
Secular features are manifest throughout the U.S. Constitution. The American Constitution’s authors learned well from Britain’s bitter experience with respect to religion and the state. Religious tests are explicitly banned in Article VI: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Apparently, this provision passed through the Constitutional Convention with very little debate, which was remarkable given that eleven of the thirteen states had religious tests for public office. In Delaware, for example, office holders were required to affirm their “faith in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ His only son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God blessed forevermore.” (11)
Aside from banning religious tests, the Constitution also distinctively failed to invoke God. This again departed from most state constitutions of the day. The Articles of Confederation referred to “the Great Governor of the World,” and the Declaration of Independence made its Deist reference to “the Creator,” by which it meant a God ensconced in Nature and subject to natural laws. But the Constitution explicitly and intentionally failed to mention God, the Creator, the Great Governor, the Supreme Being, or any other such reference. Before entering office, the president is required to make an oath or affirmation pledging to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, but the oath does not have to be on a Bible, nor is “so help me God” a part of the affirmation.
When the Constitutional Convention’s work became publicly known, the document’s secular character elicited widespread criticism from those who felt it was a godless Constitution. At the Massachusetts ratifying convention, one critic said that without a religious test for the president, “a Turk, a Jew, a Roman Catholic, and what is worse than all, a Universalist, may be President of the United States.” On March 7, 1788, a writer for the Massachusetts Gazette criticized the Constitution for failing to invoke God, by writing that “it is more difficult to build an elegant house without tools to work with, than it is to establish a durable government without the publick protection of religion.” (12) In the North Carolina ratification debate, Reverend David Caldwell disapprovingly said that the secular nature of the Constitution was “an invitation for Jews and pagans of every kind to come among us. At some future period this might endanger the character of the United States.” (13) This criticism contrasted markedly with the Federalists’ defenses of the Constitution. When political philosopher Donald Lutz examined the sources the Federalists drew upon in their writings, he found that exactly zero percent of them came from the Bible. He concluded that “the Federalists’ inclination to Enlightenment rationalism is most evident here in their failure to consider the Bible relevant” in defending the Constitution. (14)
During the ratification debates, critics made numerous attempts to amend the Constitution to add religious tests and/or to add references to God. One such attempt came in Connecticut’s ratifying convention, where delegate William Williams proposed to replace the Constitution’s preamble with his longer version below:
The Constitution’s preamble
“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Williams’ suggested preamble:
“We the people of the United States in a firm belief of the being and perfection of the one living and true God, the creator and supreme Governor of the World, in His universal providence and the authority of His laws: that He will require of all moral agents an account of their conduct, that all rightful powers among men are ordained of, and mediately derived from God, therefore in a dependence on His blessing and acknowledgment of His efficient protection in establishing our Independence, whereby it is become necessary to agree upon and settle a Constitution of federal government for ourselves, and in order to form a more perfect union, etc., as it is expressed in the present introduction, do ordain, etc.”
The Connecticut delegates voted it down. In Virginia, an attempt was made to replace the “no religious test” language of Article VI with “no other religious test shall ever be required than a belief in the one and only true God, who is the rewarder of the good, and the punisher of evil.” That wasn’t accepted at the Virginia convention. In fact, all attempts to inject God and religious tests into the Constitution were defeated. (15)
During the Civil War, Protestant fundamentalists and other religiously-minded people created the National Reform Association, which pushed for a Constitutional Amendment to reword the preamble to the Constitution as follows:
“Recognizing Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, and acknowledging the Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among the nations, His revealed will as the supreme law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government. . .”
President Abraham Lincoln—who spoke frequently of “God’s purpose” even though he was never a member of any church and was outspoken in his religious skepticism in his 20’s—offered no support for the amendment. Similarly, Congress made no serious effort to pass the amendment. We should note, however, that in 1864 Congress added the motto “In God We Trust” to U.S. currency. The National Reform Association continued to advocate in vain for the Christian amendment until the organization dissolved in 1945. (16)
The Cold War saw additional attempts to undercut secularism in America. Despite the fact that President Truman was a lifelong Baptist, an additional attempt to pass a Christian amendment to the Constitution during his presidency was, according to scholar Dianne Kirby, “easily defeated.” (17) With President Eisenhower’s encouragement, in 1954 Congress added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance—clearly a product of the McCarthy-era’s fear of godless communism. Note that the motto “In God We Trust” and the phrase “under God” were added to money and the Pledge of Allegiance, respectively, and are not part of America’s secular Constitution. Note, also, that America’s first unofficial motto—E pluribus unum, or “Out of many, one”—is still on the Great Seal of the United States and more properly reflects the religious and ethnic diversity of the American experiment even though it originally referred to the unity of the 13 diverse colonies.
The Advantages of Secularism
Why a secular republic? Several advantages of secularism come to mind. Secularism promotes order and peace between different religions, because of what Jacques Berlinerblau refers to as the secular compact, which is the understanding that the state guarantees people freedom to believe or not believe whatever they want in an orderly society, and in exchange, all citizens agree to limit their religious practices to those that do not violate the law or disrupt society. In essence, one can believe whatever one wants but can only act on those beliefs that don’t hurt others or destabilize society.
Another advantage is that religion, atheism, and agnosticism all tend to thrive in secular republics, perhaps because secularism separates state authority from not only the dominant religion, but from all sects equally. As Berlinerblau put it, “Secularism is a fierce and principled defender of religious liberty—perhaps civilization’s best defender of it.” (18) Secularism defends freedom of conscience, which is a bedrock of democracy. A society in which individuals cannot articulate spiritual truths for themselves is not likely to allow people much freedom to publicize and advocate for any of their worldly beliefs either—especially if they differ from those who hold the reins of power.
References and Notes
1. Quoted in Robert W. Tracinski, “America: The Secular Republic,” Capitalism Magazine. July 1, 2002.
2. James Madison to Edward Livingston, July 10, 1822. The Writings of James MadisonNational Archives Founders Online.
3. A theocracy is rule by religious authorities and divine guidance.
4. Quoted in Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution. A Moral Defense of the Secular State. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. Page 83.
5. Susan Jacoby,Freethinkers. A History of American Secularism. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2004. Notice that this is different than saying they were anti-religious. Many were quite religious, others were Diests, and a few like Paine were distinctly anti-clerical.
6. Quoted by Brooke Allen, “Our Godless Constitution,” The Nation, February 25, 2005. Online edition.
7. See Robin Morgan, “Fighting Words for a Secular America,” in Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians, What We Do Now. Hoboken, NJ: Melville House Publishing, 2004. Page 127.
8. Kramnick and Moore, The Godless Constitution. Page 102.
9. David L. Holmes, Faiths of the Founding Fathers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pages 59-71.
10. Matthew Stuart, Nature’s God. The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014. Page 56.
11. Kramnick and Moore, The Godless Constitution. Page 29-30.
12. Jacoby, Freethinkers. Pages 29-30.
13. Morton Borden, “The Christian Amendment,” Civil War History. Volume 25 (2). June 1979. Page 157.
14. Donald S. Lutz, “The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought,” The American Political Science Review. Vol. 78, No. 1. March, 1984. Pages 189-197. Quote from 194.
15. See Kramnick and Moore, The Godless Constitution. Pages 34-37.
16. Morton Borden, “The Christian Amendment,” Civil War History. Volume 25 (2). June 1979. Pages 156-167.
17. Dianne Kirby, “The Cold War and American Religion,” Oxford Research Encyclopedias. May 24, 2017. Page 8 of 29. Retrieved July 19, 2021.
18. Jacques Berlinerblau, How to Be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012. Page 17. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/02%3A_Constitutional_Foundations/2.07%3A_Chapter_17-_A_Secular_Republic.txt |
“If we take seriously the democratic principle of ratification that the phrase ‘We the People’ suggests, then nothing can make another generation’s fundamental law count as ours except our consenting to it. In American constitutional law, silence—the fact that we have not amended the Constitution—counts as consent. But because amending the Constitution is nearly impossible, our silence is compelled, then laundered into consent.”
–Law Professor Jedediah Britton-Purdy (1)
The Comparative Difficulty of Amending the Constitution
Article V provides several possibilities to amend the Constitution. The American founders were far-sighted in this regard, for it makes eminent sense that a foundational document might need to be updated as the decades—now centuries—pass and society changes. Since the American founding, it is commonplace that written constitutions around the world have provisions whereby they can be amended. However, the U.S. Constitution stands apart from other written constitutions in one important regard: It is particularly difficult to amend. Law professor Richard Albert has established that “The United States Constitution is extraordinarily difficult to formally amend, in contrast to most other less-rigid democratic constitutions.” (2) Since 1789, America has amended the Constitution only twenty-seven times, even though there have been over eleven thousand amendments proposed in our history. By contrast, the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany has been amended more than fifty-five times since it went into effect in 1949. Similarly, France has amended its constitution two dozen times since 1958. Between 1982 and 2015, Canada amended its constitution eleven times. Moreover, amending the U.S. Constitution appears to have become politically more difficult over time—so much so that Albert wrote that the Constitution almost seems to be “amendable in theory alone.” (3) The last time the Constitution was amended was in 1992, when the 27th Amendment passed that affects compensation for Representatives and Senators. The last consequential amendment affecting the lives of ordinary Americans was in 1971 (!) when the 26th Amendment set the national voting age at 18 years.
There are several ways to think about the U.S. Constitution’s resistance to alteration. It’s entirely possible that the founders essentially “got it right” when they wrote the document, meaning that there hasn’t really been much need for change. The eleven thousand plus amendment proposals suggest that this is not the case. Obviously, people from a wide variety of political perspectives have thought that the Constitution needed updating. Another way to think about it is that there may have been an extraordinary number of ill-advised proposals to amend the Constitution, and these proposals were justly defeated. That’s a matter of political perspective. What isn’t really debatable is that the difficulty in amending the Constitution puts the United States in the unenviable position of being stuck with a founding document that reflects pre-modern understandings of how to organize a society. Even if we ascribe genius to the founders, they were still people who did not have our modern understandings of democracy and equal rights. That’s a problem. A final perspective to consider is that, by being so bloody difficult to amend, the Constitution stands as an obstacle to improving the lives of ordinary Americans.
Amending the Constitution
The process for amending the Constitution puts up many obstacles. Basically, there are four amendment possibilities situated in two pathways, all of which are spelled out in Article V of the Constitution. One pathway starts in the Congress and the other with the states. Both pathways need sufficient states to ratify the amendment for it to go into effect.
Congressional Initiation
1. The House and the Senate both must pass the amendment by a two-thirds majority vote. If that happens, then the amendment needs to pass by a simple majority of 50 percent, plus one vote, in three-quarters or thirty-eight of the state legislatures to go into effect.
2. The House and the Senate both must pass the amendment by a two-thirds majority vote. If that happens, then the amendment needs to be accepted at state-level conventions in three-quarters or thirty-eight state conventions to go into effect.
State Initiation
1. Two-thirds of the states (34 of the 50 states) petition Congress to call for a national convention, which passes the amendment. If that happens, then the amendment needs to pass by a simple majority of 50 percent, plus one vote, in three-quarters of the state legislatures (38 of the 50 state legislatures) for it to go into effect.
2. Two-thirds of the states (34 of the 50 states) petition Congress to call for a national convention, which passes the amendment. If that happens, then the amendment needs to be accepted at state-level conventions in three-quarters (38 of the 50 state conventions) to go into effect.
If we look at the history of amending the Constitution, we see that the first pathway is by far the most common. All but one amendment has traveled that path. One amendment—the Twenty-first Amendment, which repealed Prohibition—was accomplished with pathway #2 above. Pathways #3 and #4 have never been used to pass an amendment, and it’s not for lack of trying. From 1789 to 1993 there were almost 400 proposals from some states for Congress to call a convention to amend the Constitution. (4) In 2018, conservative interests came within six states of successfully calling for a constitutional convention that they hoped would constitutionally enshrine their values. These efforts were funded and pushed by wealthy people such as the Mercer family and the Koch brothers. (5) Progressives have had less success pushing the same kind of agenda. Legal scholars and jurists from both the Left and the Right worry about a second constitutional convention running amok and radically altering America’s constitutional order. As University of Maryland law professor Richard Boldt put it, “The lack of clear rules of the road, either in the text of the Constitution itself or in historical or legal precedent, makes the selection of the convention mechanism a choice whose risks dramatically outweigh any potential benefits.” (6)
Looking at the four pathways above, it is now clear why the U.S. Constitution has not been amended much. It is very difficult to get an amendment to pass both the House and Senate with a two-thirds majority, and then there is the high hurdle of getting thirty-eight states to approve it. Consider the fate of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which was initially proposed in 1923. It finally passed Congress in 1972, only to fall three states short of ratification. Then, many years later, Nevada ratified the ERA, followed by Illinois in 2018. After Democrats took over Virginia’s state government in 2019, Virginia became the necessary thirty-eighth state to ratify the amendment. One might think that would be the end of the story. However, the text of the amendment passed by Congress in 1972 had language saying that it had to be ratified by March 22, 1979–a date that was later extended to June 30, 1982. The Democrats have passed bills in the House to remove the ratification deadline altogether, but Republicans in the Senate have let such bills die without debate. In 2020, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion that, because Virginia’s ratification came well after the deadline, the amendment could not be added to the Constitution. The United States Archivist is following that advice, so the Equal Rights Amendment has not been successful. (7) That’s a heck of a long time and much effort in an ultimately futile attempt to codify the equal rights of women. This story illustrates the frustration people have that “the system” can serve ordinary people. Still, ordinary people’s ability to organize and press for a Constitutional amendment is what has enabled women (19th Amendment) and people of color (15th Amendment) to vote, and holds the promise of steering the ship of state in more humane and democratic directions in the future.
Jedediah Britton-Purdy, law professor at Duke University, argued for changing Article V itself. “There is something to be said,” he wrote, “for an open, fully democratic effort to put a change to Article V directly onto a national ballot, to stand or fall with the choice of the living majority.” He suggested that Article V be amended to require a “constitutional convention every generation, staffed by a blend of specially elected delegates, senior public officials, and, perhaps, citizens selected jury-style to represent everyday experiences.” After all, he wrote, “the Constitution doesn’t have to be something we merely inherit; it could be something we can change ourselves—starting with rewriting the too-stringent rules for making such changes.” (8)
What if . . . ?
What if you led an organization that was proposing a new amendment to the Constitution? What amendment would you propose? Why? What positive results would you hope to achieve with it? What if you were charged with making the Constitution easier to amend? What procedure would you put in place? | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/02%3A_Constitutional_Foundations/2.08%3A_Chapter_18-_Amending_the_Constitution.txt |
“The Constitution was a compromise between slaveholding interests of the South and moneyed interests of the North.”
–Howard Zinn (1)
“Wise as the Framers were, they were necessarily limited by their profound ignorance.”
–Robert Dahl (2)
The question How democratic is the Constitution? is more complicated than it initially appears. Are we talking about the Constitution as it was written prior to any amendments? Or, are we talking about the Constitution we have now? Are we talking about the authors of the Constitution and what their understanding was of democracy? Are we talking about the Constitution as a document of its own time? Or, are we going to judge it by contemporary standards of democracy? What do we mean by the word democratic anyway? If we define democracy as rule by the people—either directly or via elected representatives—and if the definition of the people has expanded over time, how are we to fairly judge the Constitution on that ground? Not so easy, is it?
The Constitution in Broad Perspective
Let’s start with the Constitution and the first ten amendments—treating them as one document even though we know that’s not quite true—and judge them from the point of view of the late eighteenth century. Conduct a mental exercise and transport yourself back to the period between 1787 when the Constitutional Convention opened in Philadelphia and 1791 when the Bill of Rights was officially added to the Constitution. Float around the United States eastern seaboard and get a feel for the nature of the government that was being created there. Then, allow yourself to roam around the rest of the world, examining the governments of all the countries, kingdoms, principalities, empires, and tribal societies that existed at the time. From this perspective, author Catherine Drinker Bowen was on to something when she titled her book on the Constitutional Convention Miracle at Philadelphia. (3) As she pointed out, the founders themselves thought it was a miracle. We should not let go of that sense of the miraculous. The men who wrote the Constitution were remarkably steeped in cutting-edge political philosophy and displayed a thoughtful kind of genius with respect to laying out—for the first time, mind you—a written constitution for a large republic based on popular rule. One can hardly overstate how important a step forward the U.S. Constitution was for all of humankind. There was nothing like it anywhere. Given the social norms of the time, it is difficult to imagine how the founders could have produced a document that was more democratic than the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Still, the founders were not angels. Nor were they divinely inspired. Nor could they divorce themselves from the time in which they lived. They were flesh and blood people with several obvious and relevant characteristics, and they represented interests not widely shared by the rest of the population. We can start with the fact that all the founders were men. Further, they shared a world view in which women’s interests were only channeled into the public sphere through husbands, fathers, and brothers. The founders were also White and were not concerned about the interests of slaves, free Blacks, Native Americans, or other people not White. As propertied men, the founders did not represent the interests of even the majority of White men—those who did not have enough property to vote or hold office.
In 1913, the historian Charles Beard wrote one of the most famous and contentious books on the Constitution called An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. He asserted that the founders consisted overwhelmingly of merchants, people who had money on loan to others, and people who owned public bonds, and that they pushed the Constitution at the expense of farmers and debtors. Subsequent research revealed some limitations of Beard’s book, but his work forever changed the way we understand the American founding. (4) No longer would we ignore the obvious fact that the small group of men who wrote the Constitution had economic interests and that they preferred a central government strong enough to protect those interests, but not one empowered by popular majority to carry out radical economic policies that would damage their own elite interests.
The Founders’ Understanding of Democracy
For most students coming to college straight out of high school, it is somewhat of a shock to realize that the American founders were not fond of democracy, a term they understood to mean direct democracy unmediated by representative bodies. Indeed, they equated the term democracy with mob rule. As the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote of the founders, “In their minds, liberty was linked not to democracy but to property.” And when we talk of property, we are talking about people who owned a great deal of it. Further, Hofstadter argued that the founders were interested in negative liberties—the freedom of propertied interests from “fiscal uncertainty and irregularities in the currency, from trade wars among the states, from economic discrimination by more powerful foreign governments, from attacks on the creditor class or on property, from popular insurrection.” (5) It’s easy to see from the founder’s own words that this was the case. James Madison argued that “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention,” and that they are incompatible with “the rights of property.” Indeed, he was concerned that those “without property” and “debtors,” which constitute the majority of the population, would use their power to “kindle a flame” for “wicked projects” like “abolition of debts” and “an equal division of property.” (6) Similarly, Alexander Hamilton looked down his nose at “the idea of an actual representation of all classes of people,” and instead argued that the merchant class should be “more equal” than the others. (7)
Instead of a “democracy,” most founders wanted to establish “popular government” or a “republican” form of government. (8) They wanted government to be founded on the will of the people but to be mediated by social customs and elite-dominated representative institutions that would ensure that their interests would not be jeopardized. Women’s interests would be represented by their brothers, fathers, and husbands. Poor White men’s interests would be represented by their betters in the merchant and creditor classes. Slaves’ interests were not really considered separate from those of their owners. Madison wrote—again, in Federalist #10—that “The public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves.” Moreover, the “wisdom” of these leaders would “best discern the true interest of their country, and [because of their] patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” This is nonsense, of course, for we know definitively from American history that representatives, senators, presidents, and Supreme Court justices have repeatedly demonstrated a self-interested understanding of justice and an unwillingness to act in the public interest unless faced with organized majorities of ordinary people demanding that they do the right thing.
What are we to conclude about the founders and democracy? They abhorred the idea of direct democracy. They wanted to establish a republic, which is what we would call a representative democracy—although their understanding of whose voices should count was necessarily much more limited than ours. Still, the founders supported the idea that the will of the majority should be regularly translated into public policy as long as the rights of the minority were not trampled in the process. James Wilson, a prominent member of the Constitutional Convention and later a Supreme Court justice, wrote that “the majority of the people wherever found ought in all questions to govern the minority.” When James Madison referred in Federalist #10 to “the republican principle,” he was referring to the majority overruling the minority when the latter was attempting to go against the public good or violate the rights of the people. And in a letter to Madison, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “It is my principle that the will of the majority should always prevail.” (9) These sentiments are important to remember, for if the founders were alive today and had our broad understanding of who gets to count as members of the body politic, they would argue that our attenuated democracy needs to be strengthened. And yet we still live with the results of their privileged position in 1787 and their fears of direct democracy, both of which are used by contemporary interests who want to limit the voices of ordinary people. An interesting paradox, no?
Constitutional Features Limiting Popular Rule
The Constitution is full of features designed to limit direct popular rule. The House of Representatives was the only popularly elected body. The franchise (10) to elect representatives was left to the states and was very limited as we’ll see later in this textbook. So, from our perspective in time, we can say that the House was a somewhat democratic feature of the Constitution. The rest of the document is a minefield of features designed to thwart majority will and to protect the interests of elites. Consider the following:
Separation of Powers—The separation of powers slows government down and makes it structurally unresponsive to large, sudden changes in popular will. Under the original, un-amended Constitution, such public mood swings need to be sustained over a long time to elect enough representatives to the House and to ensure that enough senators get selected by states to serve in Congress. There is the added burden of needing a president who would agree with the policy the people support. Finally, the whole project could be shot down by Supreme Court justices when the new policy is challenged in court. In addition to this separation-of-powers problem, it is undemocratic in the sense that it hinders the peoples’ ability to hold leaders accountable—even after constitutional amendments designed to make the U.S. more of a democracy. Political scientist William Hudson has written that “The logic of separation of powers—shared responsibility for policy making, combined with accountability through separate elections—makes holding officials accountable for policy failure extremely difficult.” (11)
The Senate—In the original Constitution, senators were not popularly elected. Instead, the founders wanted senators chosen by their respective state legislatures. Thus, the Senate was doubly insulated from the popular will. This defect was remedied in 1913 when the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified, which said that senators would henceforth be “elected by the people” of each state. Even now, however, the Senate is a profoundly undemocratic body. We’ll talk more about this later, but keep in mind that each state is allotted two senators, regardless of the state’s population. This empowers voters in smaller, rural states, which happen to be whiter than the overall U.S. population and hobbles the influence of people living in larger, more populous, more diverse states. Even worse, as noted by Noah Feldman, “The Constitution was designed precisely so that no one would be able to do anything about the undemocratic Senate.” (12)
The President—The American president is not elected by the people. Instead, presidents are elected by the Electoral College. Again, we’ll talk more about this later in the text. Even though we have tied the electors’ choice to popular vote in each state—or in particular districts in the case of Nebraska and Maine—the basic fact is that popular vote does not determine who sits in the White House. The Electoral College vote is determinative, not that of the people. This is why George W. Bush became president in 2001 even though Al Gore received about 544,000 more votes nationwide, and this is why Donald Trump became president in 2017 even though Hillary Clinton received about 2,900,000 more votes nationwide. It is difficult to call a country’s political system fully “democratic” when majority vote does not select the president.
The Supreme Court—Justices who sit on the Supreme Court and make enormously significant decisions about the constitutionality of state and federal laws and regulations are insulated from the popular will. They are nominated by the president—who may or may not be in office due to the will of the people—and are approved by the undemocratic Senate. Further, they hold their seats for life, meaning that they can influence the character of the country long after they have fallen out of touch with the lives of ordinary Americans. They also usually come from upper-class backgrounds and attend elite colleges. The common Supreme Court defense of the lack of democratic accountability is that justices should be impartial. However, as we’ll see later in the text, Supreme Court justices are anything but impartial. For most—but not all—of American history, a majority of conservative justices has implemented conservative ideology through their rulings, empowering corporations and putting their finger on the scales of justice in favor of a particular set of interests.
No Positive Right to Vote—The original Constitution never articulated an affirmative right to vote to anyone, and instead left the vote-granting privileges to states. Initially, of course, states granted voting privileges to the minority of property-owning White men. Through amendments to the Constitution, we have extended the “right to vote” to people of color, to women, and to people who are eighteen years and older. However, as Garrett Epps has written, our courts still see voting as a privilege: “The ‘privilege’ over the years has been made dependent on literacy, or long residency in a community, or ability to prove identity, or lack of a criminal past. None of these conditions would be allowed to restrict free speech, or freedom from ‘unreasonable’ searches, or the right to counsel,” but they have been used to keep people from voting. (13) A truly democratic constitution would positively assert the right of all adult citizens to vote and place the burden of registering people to vote on the government rather than the individual.
The Amendment Process—We’ve just talked about this, so we don’t need to belabor the point here. Suffice it to say that the Constitution is remarkably difficult to amend. Thomas Jefferson once wrote to James Madison that “The earth belongs…to the living…the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” (14) And yet, because the Constitution is so difficult to amend, we are governed by a slightly modified document written by a small number of slave-owning, wealthy White men who did not have the benefit of all we know about the world nor the appreciation we have for the dignity of all people.
The political scientist Robert Dahl, whose quote leads off this chapter, looked carefully at this question of how democratic the Constitution was and is. Two things stand out in his review of the subject. First, the Constitution we have is a creature of its time—and its time was not a particularly democratic one from our perspective over two centuries later. Had the Constitution been written in the 1830s or the 1960s or yesterday, it would undoubtedly be far more democratic in nature. It would have had, in other words, an expanded understanding of “the people” on whose authority government rests, and it would have placed fewer barriers to translating majority opinion into public policy. The second takeaway from Dahl’s work is that the Constitution should be more democratic. He wrote, “For my part, I believe that the legitimacy of the constitution ought to derive solely from its utility as an instrument of democratic government—nothing more, nothing less.” (15)
What if . . . ?
What if you were invited to a constitutional convention today to write a new Constitution? How would you convince your colleagues that the new U.S. Constitution needs to be more structurally democratic? What features would you insist be a part of the new Constitution?
References and Notes
1. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States 1492-Present. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Page 98.
2. Robert A. Dahl, How Democratic is the American Constitution? 2ndedition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Page 7.
3. Catherine Drinker Bowen, Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention May to September 1787. Boston: Little Brown, 1986. Originally published in 1966.
4. Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. New York: The Free Press, 2012. Originally published in 1913. Robert E. Brown, Charles Beard and the Constitution. A Critical Analysis of “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution.”Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956.
5. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It. New York: Vintage Books, 1948. Pages 10 and 11.
6. James Madison, Federalist #10.
7. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist #35.
8. One could argue that Jefferson, who was not present at the Constitutional Convention, would have argued for more trust in the people.
9. Adam Jentleson, Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2021. Page 22.
10. The franchise refers to the eligibility to vote.
11. William E. Hudson, American Democracy in Peril. 6thedition. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2010. Page 42.
12. Noah Feldman, “Revamping the Senate is a Fantasy,” Bloomberg. October 10, 2018.
13. Garrett Epps, “What Does the Constitution Actually Say About Voting Rights?” The Atlantic.August 19, 2013.
14. Quoted in William E. Hudson, American Democracy in Peril. 6thedition. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2010. Page 86.
15. Robert A. Dahl, How Democratic is the American Constitution? 2ndedition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Page 39. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/02%3A_Constitutional_Foundations/2.09%3A_Chapter_19-_How_Democratic_is_the_U._S._Constitution.txt |
“Poverty is the feeling that your government is against you, not for you; that your country was designed to serve other people and that you are fated to be managed and processed, roughed up and handcuffed.”
— Matthew Desmond (1)
“Plutocracy—rule for the rich by the rich—prevails in Congress for the most part.”
–Michael Parenti (2)
Who Are Our Members of Congress?
The United States Congress is composed of 435 representatives and 100 senators. The representatives are elected to two-year terms, and the entire body is up for re-election every two years. Senators have six-year terms, with one-third of them up for re-election every two years. Under the original Constitution, senators were chosen by state legislatures rather than by popular vote, but they have been popularly elected since the Seventeenth Amendment passed in 1913. There are no term limits for either representatives or senators. It almost goes without saying that House districts are more uniformly populated than are the states—except in cases like Wyoming where the House district is also the state boundary. The average House district has between 700,000 and 800,000 residents, but states range in population, for example, about 40 million for California to less than 600,000 for Wyoming. Note that the least populous states, like Wyoming, are guaranteed one representative and two senators regardless of their population.
We have, then, 535 people whose job ostensibly is to represent the people of the United States —or do they just represent the voters? In 1776, when states were writing new constitutions to replace state charters, John Adams wrote a treatise that he hoped would guide their efforts. In it, he wrote that a legislature “should be in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason, and act like them.” (3) How does our Congress measure up to this standard? It is clear that congressional members, in several respects, do not represent average Americans. Note the following discrepancies between congressional members and the American population:
Occupation—Lawyers constitute .6 percent of the American workforce—and even less of the overall population—yet over 40 percent of congressmen were lawyers before entering Congress. Around another 22 percent of congressmen list business/banking as their occupation prior to Congress.
Sex—Approximately 51 percent of the U.S. population is female, while women constitute only 27 percent of the representatives and senators. Note that this is the largest percentage of women ever in Congress. As recently as the 1970s, less than 4 percent of congressional seats were held by women. From the beginning of the republic to 2020, only 2.9 percent of all members of Congress were women.
Race—Whites comprise 63 percent of the U.S. population, but 76 percent of Congress and 94 percent of the Republicans in Congress are White. Note that the current Congress is the most diverse it has ever been. For example, in 1945 people of color accounted for 1 percent of Congress while they account for 24 percent now.
Age—The median age of Americans is slightly over thirty-eight years. The median age of House members is fifty-eight years and for senators it is sixty-one years.
Education—Around 96 percent of congressmen have at least a four-year college degree, while only 34 percent of American adults possess a bachelor’s degree.
Income—The median family income in 2018 was about \$62,000, while the base pay for representatives and senators was \$174,000.
Wealth—This is more difficult to know because members of Congress don’t have to disclose their wealth in exact terms. We do know that twelve members have a net worth of over \$50 million; 34 have a net worth of \$10-50 million; 157 have a net worth of \$1-10 million; and 155 have a net worth of \$100,000-1 million. The median net worth of Americans aged 55-64 is about \$164,000. Thus, we can confidently say that the majority of the 535 congressional members possess considerably more wealth than the average American.
Religiosity—In the general public, 23 percent of people identify as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular.” In fact, nonreligious is the fastest growing group of people in the United States. In Congress, however, virtually all representatives and senators claim to belong to a church, and 88 percent belong to a Christian denomination. (4)
Now that we know these disparities between Congress and the American people, we are better prepared to ask some probing questions about how our representatives and senators should be representing us. Our questions can be grouped under two conceptually distinct ways to understand how we are represented, which are called descriptive representation and substantive representation.
Whom Do Members of Congress Represent?
Descriptive representation—The statistics above directly address what political scientists call descriptive representationwhich concerns “the extent to which a representative resembles those being represented.” (5) Collectively, we would ask: to what extent do our representatives resemble the population being represented, and does it matter if they don’t? Historically speaking, Congress has been very good at descriptively representing wealthy, educated, White males. It is, however, slowly becoming more diverse with respect to race and gender, but not with respect to wealth and education. Is a legislature populated disproportionately by men qualified to legislate on women’s access to abortion and reproductive health services? What are we to think about a legislature deliberating health insurance policy when the overwhelming majority of its members have never gone a day without health insurance? Ditto for a legislature full of wealthy individuals debating whether or not to increase the minimum wage. What are people of color to think about a predominantly White legislature’s ability to fully address civil rights?
These are important questions. Surely, men can understand and empathize with women’s perspectives. One does not have to be African American, Asian American, or Latinx to argue against criminal justice discrimination or against voting discrimination. One does not have to be of a particular religious denomination to uphold freedom of conscience for believers and non-believers alike. Still, there’s something disconcerting about a legislature whose members do not descriptively represent the population’s diversity, because representative democracy is about the whole population turning over decision-making power to a smaller group. It is inherently uncomfortable to turn over important decisions to a group that doesn’t look like you or doesn’t share your circumstances. Discuss with your friends, family, and classmates the issue of descriptive representation.
Substantive Representation—We can also ask questions about what political scientists call substantive representation, which concerns whether representatives “advance the policy preferences that serve the interests of the represented.” (6) Again, representation turns the collective’s decision-making powers over to a subset of people who are supposed to make wise, far-seeing decisions in the interests of those they represent. In this textbook, we are particularly concerned that the interests of ordinary Americans are served by Congress, the presidency, the executive branch agencies, and the Supreme Court. In many ways, Congress is the beginning point, for it can fulfill its function to represent ordinary Americans only if it passes legislation that the public wants and that serves the public’s broad interest in promoting the general welfare, facilitating justice, and securing the blessings of liberty. As political scientists Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens wrote, “It seems obvious to us that in a democracy, the government should pay attention to what policies its citizens want.” (7)
Congress’ substantive representation track record is not very good. Looking back on the chapter about how democratic the U.S. Constitution is, we note that this may very well be a design flaw built into the system. Consider the following policy options, public support for each, and the legislative outcome. (8)
Policy Option Public Support Outcome So Far
Background checks for guns 89% No law passed
Paid maternity leave 84% No law passed
Overturn Citizens United decision 75% No law passed
Government support for childcare 75% No law passed
Medicare option for health insurance 70% No law passed
Federally regulated drug prices 67% Limited law passed
For the People Act (National voter access standards) 67% No law passed
Pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants 64% No law passed
Green jobs and infrastructure 63% Limited law passed
Increase taxes on incomes over \$1 million 62% No law passed
Increase minimum wage 60% No law passed
Medicare for all 54% No law passed
2017 tax cut mostly for businesses and the rich 33% Law passed
2008 Wall Street bailout 20% Law passed
The table above seems to indicate that the majority of Americans would like Congress to pass laws that address specific issues affecting broad swaths of the populace. They would like, in other words, to have Congress use our collective resources to make the lives of ordinary Americans better. Congress seems unable to substantively represent the interests of ordinary Americans, but does appear able to deliver on the wishes of corporations and the rich. For example, in the 2008 Great Recession, Congress bailed out banks and other financial institutions without providing corresponding help for the millions of people who lost their homes. In another example, Congress passed a tax reform act in 2017. Analyses of the change indicate that by 2027, 83 percent of the tax reduction benefits will go to the top 1 percent of wage earners. (9) Even worse, the tax cut ballooned the federal deficit and did not stimulate the economy as promised. This begs the question: What is the purpose of Congress if it typically does not act in accord with public opinion? And another: Could the lack of substantive representation be a key reason why Congress’ public-approval rate typically hovers between only 20 and 25 percent? Discuss among your classmates, friends, and family.
Congress has acted in the interests of ordinary Americans and will do so in the future only if enough representatives and senators are sufficiently afraid of the one real source of power that people have—their votes. For example, outside of the South, solid majority support for civil rights legislation combined with various legal, public relations, and civil disobedience strategies by civil rights groups put enough pressure on Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964—even though a majority of Whites was still uncomfortable with integration then. (10) Similarly, growing environmentalism among the public and the first Earth Day celebration were instrumental in convincing President Nixon and enough representatives and senators to establish the Environmental Protection Agency, to pass the Clean Water Act, and to enhance the Clean Air Act.
What if . . . ?
What if we did away with elections for Congressional members? What if we chose representatives and senators by lottery—representatives for one six-year, non-renewable term and senators for one nine-year, non-renewable term? What would be the advantages and disadvantages of selecting our legislators this way? Would you put qualifications in place regarding who is eligible for the congressional lottery? What if we did a lottery for nominations, and picked two people for each congressional election, who would then debate each other, put out platforms, and face the voters? Would that better preserve popular choice?
References
1. Matthew Desmond, Poverty, By America. New York: Crown Publishing. 2023. Page 19.
2. Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few. 9thedition. Boston: Wadsworth. Page 198.
3. Quoted in Michael Waldman, The Fight to Vote. New York: Simon and Schuster. 2016. Page 11.
4. A. W. Geiger, Kristen Bialik, and John Gramlich, “The Changing Face of Congress in 6 Charts,” Pew Research Center. February 15, 2019. Will Tucker, “Personal wealth: a nation of extremes, and a Congress, too,” Opensecrets.org. November 17, 2015. Aleksandra Sandstrom, “5 Facts About the Religious Makeup of the 116thCongress,” Pew Research Center. January 3, 2019. Randy Leonard and Paul V. Fontelo, “Every Member of Congress’ Wealth in One Chart,” Roll Call. March 2, 2018. Jim Wang, “How Does Your Net Worth Compare to the Average American?” Wallethacks. May 21, 2019. Carrie Blazina and Drew Desilver, “A Record Number of Women are Serving in the 117th Congress,” Pew Research Center. January 15, 2021. Katherine Schaeffer, “Racial, Ethnic Diversity Increases Yet Again With the 117th Congress,” Pew Research Center. January 28, 2021.
5. Suzanne Dovi, “Political Representation,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. August 29, 2018.
6. Suzanne Dovi, “Political Representation,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. August 29, 2018.
7. Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Page 53.
8. Kenneth R. Peres, “These 7 Charts Show How Legalized Political Corruption is so Much Bigger Than Trump,” Alternet. October 16, 2019. Steve Liesman, “Majority of Americans Support Progressive Policies Such as Higher Minimum Wage, Free College,” CNBC. March 27, 2019. No author, “New SPLC Poll: Two-Thirds of Voters Support the ‘For the People Act'” Southern Poverty Law Center. May 6, 2021.
9. Tax Policy Center, “Distributional Analysis of the Conference Agreement for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.” December 18, 2017.
10. Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, “Public Opinion on Civil Rights: Reflections on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” July 2, 2014. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/03%3A_Congress/3.01%3A_Chapter_20-_Who_are_Our_Members_of_Congress_and_Whom_Do_They_Represent.txt |
“This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.”
–Will Rogers (1)
Legislation
Being a senator or representative is a complicated job; they fulfill several roles at the same time. One obvious role is legislativeor law writing. Congress is typically fairly active in this regard, notwithstanding protestations of a “do-nothing Congress.” People who track Congress’ productivity make a distinction between substantive laws and ceremonial laws. Substantive laws are those that make a change in federal law or that authorize spending taxpayer dollars. Ceremonial laws are those that do relatively trivial things like rename federal buildings, award medals, or designate special days. In the past twenty years, Congress has passed between 200-450 substantive laws per session and between 50 and 250 ceremonial laws per session. (2) Sitting congressmen run for reelection based on their legislative records: What “good” bills did they push, and what “bad” bills did they oppose? They campaign on their legislative abilities, and local media report on the status of a candidate’s important legislation. The theory of representative democracy rests on the rather large assumption that voters assess legislation and reward those politicians who have voted “correctly” on the issues that matter to voters.
Representation
Representation is closely related to the legislative role. Congressmen are elected to represent their constituents’ interests. This is not as straightforward as it sounds. Elections often do not convey the voters’ wishes clearly to the politician. If a politician wins with 53 percent of the vote, they cannot be certain from those results what the voters want them to do. That is why politicians are fond of polls and focus groups conducted by survey-research organizations. In addition, congressmen can access other information sources by reading local newspapers, conversing with lobbyists, talking to elites in the district, and soliciting constituent views during town meetings. Also, the representative’s role is to decide what kind of representation is best. Should the politician be a delegate, who is bound to vote the way constituents want? We saw before in our substantive representation discussion that ordinary people want Congress to act in their interest. But what if constituents advocate a policy that their representative or their senator considers unwise? The other possibility is to be a trustee, a representative who is directed by their own judgment rather than their constituents’ views. This can be politically risky if the politician votes in direct opposition to what the majority of his or her constituents want. But this is what James Madison was counting on when, in Federalist #10, he endorsed representation in a large republic. He wrote that such representatives “may best discern the true interest of their country,” and that their “patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” What do you think? Should a member of Congress be a delegate or a trustee? Who is more likely to assume the delegate roll—representatives or senators?
Constituent Service
Another important congressional role is to perform constituent service, which is often referred to as casework. Are your veteran’s benefits caught up in red tape? Did you fail to receive the cost-of-living adjustment in your social security check? Did your community theater federal grant application get lost? Call your senator or representative’s office—staff people are there to help you if they can. Constituent service is a way for a congressman to garner good favor and positive news coverage in their district. Also, casework can serve to educate congressmen, particularly with respect to legislation and oversight. As one member of Congress put it: “You learn more about the job by doing constituent service work than anything else. . .It tells you whether or not the legislation is doing what it is supposed to do.” (3) Constituent service can also become controversial, however, especially when politicians are seen to be doing the bidding of well-heeled citizens or corporations, both of whom donate money to congressional campaigns and seem to have better access to congressmen than do ordinary citizens.
Oversight
A final important congressional role is performing executive-agency oversight. Congress is interested to see how programs and regulations are actually working and what impacts federal laws have once they go into effect. So, standing committees and their subcommittees hold hearings to inquire into the operations of those executive agencies. Congressmen sometimes have an interest in serving the American public by exposing waste, fraud, and abuse in the executive branch. Often, those agencies’ heads are called to testify before a committee or subcommittee, and experts from the General Accounting Office—which is the investigative arm of Congress—testify about their investigations into a particular agency.
It is important to understand the perilous state of congressional oversight. Presidents from both parties as well as the intelligence agencies have resisted Congress’ efforts to get the information it needs. With respect to presidents and other executive officials, there is a clear tension between congressional oversight and what is known as executive privilege. Although executive privilege is never explicitly mentioned in the constitution, presidents have long held that they are entitled to withhold from Congress certain executive branch documents and the transcripts of deliberations within executive agencies. They also say that executive privilege allows them to defy congressional subpoenas to testify before oversight committees. We’ll talk more about executive privilege when we get to the presidency section of the text. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/03%3A_Congress/3.02%3A_Chapter_21-_Congressional_Roles.txt |
“[T]he theoretical process of how an idea becomes law is drastically more complicated when one attempts to put the theory into practice.”
–Trevor Corning, et al (1)
“Legislation intended to assist the needy moves along the slow lane.”
–Michael Parenti (2)
What follows is the textbook version of how a bill becomes a law. Please keep in mind that not only is this a simplified view of the process, but there are many occasions when important decisions affecting your life are made in a fashion that does not resemble the idealized version below. Indeed, the process is often so convoluted that political scientist Michael Parenti referred to it as “the legislative labyrinth.”
Party Leadership
Before we get to the actual bill-passing process, we should note that in each chamber, party leadership shapes the whole legislative labyrinth. The party with the most seats in each chamber gains considerable power—not just from their numerical majority—but also from their ability to select the leadership positions in each chamber. In the House of Representatives, the Speaker of the House is the preeminent leadership position. The Speaker of the House is elected by the majority party and serves as both the House’s partisan and administrative leader. Even though the Speaker typically does not vote, engage in debate, or sit on standing committees, it is the House’s most powerful position. The Speaker articulates and pushes the majority party’s political agenda. They manage the House’s floor business and makes parliamentary decisions—typically to the majority party’s advantage. They are also the House’s business manager, handling everything from procurement to calendaring. The Senate Majority Leader is elected by the majority party and schedules and manages all the Senate’s business. These leadership positions are very powerful, which is why parties are so keen to gain the most votes in each chamber. In addition to having majority votes to pass legislation, if all the members hang together, they get to elect the Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader who can use their powers to their party’s advantage.
The leadership positions described above represent the top of party leadership in the House and Senate, but there are other important positions as well. In the House of Representatives, the majority party selects a Majority Leader and a Majority Whip, and the minority party selects a Minority Leader and a Minority Whip. These positions serve as floor leadership and try to ensure party unity on important upcoming votes. Parties in the Senate also have Whip positions—both majority and minority whips—that serve similar roles as their House counterparts, and the minority party is led by a Minority Leader.
Standing Committees
House and Senate members propose bills in their respective chambers. A clerk assigns the bills a number, for example, HR 1205 or S 683. Only the House can initiate bills that increase federal government revenue, but other bills may originate in either chamber, or they may simultaneously work their way through both chambers. The Speaker of the House refers the bills to standing committees in that chamber. In the Senate the majority and minority leaders negotiate between themselves to decide who refers the bill to a standing committee.
Standing committees—so called because they persist over time—do much work in Congress. The House of Representatives has twenty standing committees, and the Senate has sixteen. In addition, there are about a dozen joint committees in both chambers, such as the Joint Taxation Committee, or there are select committees, such as the Select Intelligence Committee. Most standing committees are organized around topics such as agriculture, defense, foreign relations, taxation, and so on. Committees, in turn, are divided into subcommittees. A bill having to do with gas pricing might be referred to the committee on energy, or to the committee on transportation, or to the committee on foreign relations, or to all three. In the House, the Ways and Means Committee deals with taxing, and the Appropriations Committee handles discretionary spending. In the Senate, the corresponding committees are the Finance Committee and the Appropriations Committee.
Generally speaking, when writing legislation, standing committees go through three stages:
1. Hearings— The committee or subcommittee chairman invites interested individuals to testify. People who commonly testify are executive department heads, technical experts and scholars, and interest-group representatives.
2. Mark-up Sessions—During several meetings, committee members edit the bill’s language. In pre-computer days, congressmen literally marked-up paper bills with pens. Mark-ups often attract lobbyists whose clients pay them to favorably influence the legislation’s wording.
3. Reporting Out—If the committee votes to approve the bill, it is reported out to the main chamber along with a report describing the bill and its rationale. The bill’s supporters and opponents can include their views in the report.
Before getting too far along in describing the legislation process, we should stop here and talk a little bit about getting seats on these standing committees. Congressional members have two main priorities with respect to committee assignments: Generally speaking, they want to be on the more powerful and visible committees, but they also have an interest in being on committees that are most relevant to their states or districts. If a military base is in their district, it would be in a congressman’s interest to be on the House Armed Services Committee or the Defense Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee. The taxation, appropriations, and budget committees are all-purpose powerful committees. But it costs to get a plumb committee assignment. Joseph Califano, former Defense Department lawyer, as well as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, notes that both the Democratic and the Republican congressional leadership essentially charge “dues” to their congressional members to get committee assignments—the better the assignment, the more money the congressman needs to raise for their respective party re-election committee—the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee or the National Republican Congressional Committee. Members are advised to spend four hours per day on the phone to raise money to pay these committee-assignment party dues, as well as for their own re-election efforts. (3)
Most bills introduced in Congress die somewhere in the committee process. If a bill does make it through the standing committees, each chamber will debate it on the floor. The overall Rules of the House is a document passed in a new congressional term’s first week that expresses how the majority party wants to conduct business. Often, the incoming majority either adopts or makes slight changes to the existing Rules of the House. For instance, during the Trump impeachment imbroglio, House Republicans complained bitterly about the Oversight, Intelligence, and Judiciary Committee’s closed-door hearings, but Republicans are the ones who originally passed the rules allowing such meetings in 2015 when they had the majority. Indeed, they used the same kind of closed-door meetings to investigate events surrounding the attack in Benghazi, Libya.
House Rules Committee
When a bill comes out of the House committee, the bill must first make a stop at the House Rules Committee, which has been called “the majority leadership’s traffic manager” for floor debate. (4) Like other committees, the majority party has the most seats on the Rules Committee, and these members are very likely to have the trust of party leadership. The Rules Committee attaches a special rule to each bill that specifies the debate’s nature: The rule indicates how much debate-time is allowed and how many amendments can be introduced, and the rule might indicate that only certain portions of the bill can be amended. The Rules Committee can also waive points-of-order against a bill, meaning that procedural challenges against the bill cannot halt its progress. There are four types of special rules:
• Open—allows any congressional member to offer an amendment to the bill on the floor so long as the amendment is germane to the bill’s topic. Appropriations bills are usually considered under open rules, but the amendments offered are restricted to changing funding levels.
• Modified Open—allows any congressional member to offer an amendment to the bill on the floor so long as the amendment is preprinted in the Congressional Record ahead of time. This gives the majority party time to strategize over how best to handle minority-party amendments.
• Structured—allows only certain amendments of which must be approved by the Rules Committee and written into the rule itself. The amendments approved for floor debate are given a certain time-limit during which they can be debated.
• Closed—allows no amendments to the bill on the floor.
You can imagine that the majority party tends to use structured and closed rules on legislation in which it is heavily invested and wants to see pass. This is a tremendous advantage for the majority party. When the bill reaches the House floor, each party is given time to debate it, and each party’s leadership divides up their time-block among the representatives who are best positioned to speak on the bill.
The Senate Floor
While the Senate does have a Rules Committee, it is not really comparable to the House Rules Committee, so both parties’ Senate leadership may try to achieve a result similar to a rule by drafting a unanimous consent agreement for the bill. This agreement would set a debate time, a debate time-limit, and may limit the amendments allowed. To be accepted, however, a unanimous consent agreement requires all 100 senators to agree to those debate rules—and that might not happen.
If the Senate does not pass a unanimous consent agreement to limit the debate, some senators might filibuster a bill to kill it or to gain concessions. A filibuster prevents a bill from passing by dragging out the debate—if the debate does not end, there can be no vote, and without a vote, the bill cannot pass. The filibuster can be when a senator continuously speaks, although this is rare now. The record for a single filibuster is held by South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, who filibustered the 1957 Civil Rights Act for twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes. A filibuster can also be stopped by a motion of cloture, which is a motion to place a time limit on the filibuster. At least sixty senators must agree to the cloture, and then debate ends and a vote happens on the bill.
Due to filibuster reforms in the 1970s as well as later changes in Senate processes, cloture motions–and thus, filibusters–became routine in the Senate. (5) In the 1940s and 50s, each Congress experienced about five filibusters in a two-year term. But a 2002 study indicated that by that time “roughly half of all major bills encounter[ed] filibuster difficulties, often resulting in either defeat or substantial concessions.” (6) As political scientist Sara Binder stated before the Senate, “From roughly 1920 to 1970, filibusters averaged one a year. In stark contrast, in 2005-2006, there were an average of thirty-four cloture motions filed to end filibusters, and in the 2007-08 Congress there were 139 cloture motions filed, roughly seventy a year.” (7) Now, the mere threat of a filibuster can derail a bill or stymie a presidential nomination. Indeed, legal scholar Josh Chafetz, who argues that the filibuster is unconstitutional, points out how undemocratic the situation has become by writing that “a measure that cannot command the support of sixty Senators is unlikely even to be introduced onto the Senate floor.” (8)
Early in the 113th Congress (2013-14), Democratic senators Tom Harkin, Jeff Merkley, and Tom Udall attempted—but failed—to push through significant filibuster reforms that would have limited the minorities’ ability to stop the will of the Senate majority. (9) In 2013, after Republicans refused to allow President Obama to fill empty seats on the D.C. Circuit Court, Democrats pushed through an end to the filibuster for lower federal court nominations. Then, in 2017, after Democrats filibustered President Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to fill a Supreme Court seat that Republicans had earlier refused to allow President Obama to fill, Republicans killed the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations as well. As of this writing, the filibuster continues to be a tool of the minority party in the Senate to impede the will of the majority.
Conference Committees
After debate has ended, each chamber takes a floor vote. At this point, an interesting problem can develop. If the House’s version of the bill differs from the Senate’s version, the bill cannot be sent to the president. One of three things can happen: 1) One chamber can just agree to adopt the version of the bill that passed in the other chamber. 2) The two chambers can send the different versions to each other to attempt to get to a compromise. 3) The two bill versions can be melded into one in a conference committee called specifically for that purpose. Conference committees—so important that they are sometimes called the third house of Congress—are composed of both representatives and senators who are chosen by the bill mark-up committee(s) chair and senior leader of the minority party. Conference committees have ranged in size from seven to over 250 members, and there does not have to be an equal number of representatives and senators. If the conference-committee members cannot compromise with each other, the bill is stuck. If a majority can agree, then the conference report, as it is known, is voted on directly in the House and the Senate, with no floor amendments allowed from either chamber. If the conference report fails to pass both chambers, the conference committee can be reconvened. Once both chambers accept the conference report, it can be sent on to the president.
References
1. Trevor Corning, Reema Dodin, and Kyle Nevins, Inside Congress: A Guide for Navigating the Politics of the House and Senate Floors. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2017. Page 11.
2. Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few. 9thedition. Boston: Wadsworth, 2011. Page 210.
3. Joseph A. Califano, Jr., Our Damaged Democracy. New York: Touchstone, 2018. Pages 52-56.
4. This discussion of the Rules Committee draws from Trevor Corning, Reema Dodin, and Kyle Nevins, Inside Congress: A Guide for Navigating the Politics of the House and Senate Floors. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2017. Pages 24-30.
5. In the early 1970s Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield introduced “tracks” in the Senate, allowing a filibuster to stop only the bill in question, not all of the Senate’s business. Then in 1975 motions of cloture were dropped from 67 to 60 votes, and requirements to physically speak and occupy the floor were dropped as well.
6. The study is Barbara Sinclair, “The ’60-vote Senate,’” in Bruce I. Oppenheimer, ed., U.S. Senate Exceptionalism. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2002. This is cited in Eric Schickler, “Institutional Development of Congress,” in Paul J. Quirk and Sarah A. Binder, eds., The Legislative Branch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Page 55.
7. Testimony of Sarah Binder, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution, before the Committee on Rules, U.S. Senate, April 22, 2010. Available here: http://www.citizensforethics.org/pol...ibuster-reform.
8. Josh Chafetz, “The Unconstitutionality of the Filibuster,” Connecticut Law Review. 43(4): May 2011. Available here.
9. David A. Graham, “How Senate Graybeards Killed Real Filibuster Reform,” The Atlantic. January 24, 2013. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/03%3A_Congress/3.03%3A_Chapter_22-_How_Congress_Passes_Legislation.txt |
“Toward the end of an age, more and more people lose faith in their institutions and finally they abandon their belief that these institutions might still be reformed from within.”
–Historian John Lukacs (1)
The legislative process is much more detailed than described in the previous chapter. The process is susceptible to several pathologies, meaning that it can be manipulated in ways that grossly distort the textbook version of how a bill becomes a law.
Log Rolling
Nineteenth century German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck once remarked that laws had something in common with sausages: “It’s better for your stomach not to watch either one of them being made.” The legislative process, unfortunately, more resembles interested minorities clashing than rationally deliberating the public good. One legislative practice that Bismarck may have had in mind is logrolling, or trading votes for something desired: A congressman votes on something they don’t really care about, in exchange for something in return. For example, although a congressman would never admit it, they might vote for a bill to build a defense project in another state, knowing it’s a waste federal money. In exchange, the congressman who wanted the defense project votes to support a road project in another district.
Pork Barrel Spending
Those same congressmen will pat themselves on the back for “bringing home the bacon” on the road project, while decrying wasteful government spending. That phrase, “bringing home the bacon,” is related to pork barrel spending. There are multiple stories about the phrase’s origin. One has it that the name comes from the pre-Civil War practice of distributing salted pork to slaves from large barrels. Another story says that pork barrels were a common staple in nineteenth century rural kitchens. The barrel’s pork level was a sign of the family’s prosperity. In any case, the practice of congressmen dipping into the national treasury to fund local projects came to be known as them dipping into the pork barrel—and the name and the practice have continued ever since.
According to the watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), in 2022 Congress spent \$18.9 billion on what it defines as pork barrel projects. The organization’s Pork Hall of Shame documents the worst abuses, including funding for local museums and recreation facilities, upgrades to military equipment that the Pentagon didn’t request, and targeted research funds that go to particular universities. (2) Critics say that these projects do not serve the national interest and therefore should not be funded by national taxpayer dollars.
Pork barrel spending is largely accomplished through inserting earmarks into congressional bills. An earmark is typically a small paragraph of very specific language inserted into a budget appropriation bill directing an agency to fund a project. CAGW typically identifies hundreds of earmarks every year. These earmarks are often the result of congressmen bowing to lobbying pressures and campaign contributions from organized interests. Not all earmarks are pork, but if an earmark meets one of the following criteria, CAGW defines it as pork: Only one congressional chamber requested it; not specifically authorized; not competitively awarded; not requested by the president; greatly exceeds the president’s budget; not the subject of congressional hearings; serves only a local or special interest. Many projects meet more than one of those criteria.
Corruption
The legislative process is also occasionally subject to outright corruption and illegal behavior. This sometimes takes the form of bribery, in which special interests provide tangible benefits for congressmen in exchange for congressmen providing favors. Other forms of corruption are more mundane. In 1994, Representative Dan Rostenkowski (D-IL) lost his seat and later served fifteen months in federal prison for misusing payroll and office expense money. In 2002, Representative James Traficant (D-OH) was convicted of racketeering, tax evasion, and bribery. He was one of the House’s few members to be formally expelled by his colleagues. In 2005, Representative Randall “Duke” Cunningham (R-CA) pled guilty to a variety of offenses including bribery and mail fraud involving his relationship with defense contractors Mitchell Wade and Brent Wilkes and co-conspirators. In exchange for earmarks, government contracts, and other favors, the contractors provided Cunningham with a yacht on which to live and bought a California house from him for \$700,000 above market value, among other favors. In 2009, Representative William Jefferson (D-LA) was convicted of bribery and money laundering. The FBI raided Jefferson’s home and discovered \$90,000 in cash stashed in the freezer. The money was part of a bribe Jefferson received in exchange for help with a Nigerian business deal. A number of congressmen—Representative Tom DeLay (R-TX), Senator Conrad Burns (R-MT), Representative Roy Blunt (R-MO), Representative Bob Ney (R-OH), and others—were implicated in the corrupt web surrounding the disgraced and convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Representative Ney pled guilty to taking money and gifts in exchange for doing work on behalf of Abramoff, and then Ney resigned from Congress in October 2006. The scandal resulted in two Bush administration White House officials and congressional staff members going to jail. In 2019 Representative Duncan Hunter (R-CA) pleaded guilty to misusing hundreds of thousands of dollars of campaign donations. He was sentenced to prison and served a few months when President Donald Trump pardoned him.
Another form of corruption that sometimes ensnares congressional members is insider tradingIt is against federal law to use information not available to the public when executing securities trades. This used to be more common among congressional members before the STOCK Act passed in 2012, which explicitly said that representatives, senators, and their staff, “are not exempt from the insider trading prohibitions arising under the securities laws.” But cases still do arise. In 2019, Representative Chris Collins (R-NY), one of Congress’ wealthiest members at the time, pleaded guilty to insider trading and conspiracy—part of which involved a phone call to his son Cameron Collins made from the White House lawn to give him inside information on a biotech company’s failed drug trial. (3) President Donald Trump pardoned Collins. In 2020, several members of Congress were accused of dumping stocks after they found out via classified briefings that the coronavirus pandemic was going to be severe. (4)
Gridlock
Perhaps the legislative processes’ biggest pathology—gridlock—is the ability to stop something that the American people desire. There are a thousand and one ways for this to happen in Congress. Most bills get bottled up in committee and never come to a floor vote. This happens frequently when the bill is attempting something that organized interests’ lobbyists don’t want to see happen. Some bills get poison pill amendments attached to them to render the bill useless or to damage its chances of passing. The Senate filibuster kills some bills. When one chamber is controlled by one party and the other chamber is controlled by the other, frequently bills will pass one of the chambers only to be defeated—or not even considered—in the other. This is a function of the bicameral legislature plus the chamber’s divided political control.
References
1. Quoted in Andrew J. Bacevitch, “America Has Passed a Point of No Return,” Truthdig. July 24, 2019.
2. See the organization’s Pig Bookand the Pork Hall of Shame at www.cagw.org.
3. Devin Breuninger, “Former GOP Rep. Chris Collins Pleads Guilty in Insider Trading Case,” CNBC.October 1, 2019.
4. Jack Kelly, “Senators Accused of Insider Trading, Dumping Stocks After Coronavirus Briefing,” Forbes. March 20, 2020. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/03%3A_Congress/3.04%3A_Chapter_23-_Pathologies_of_Congressional_Behavior.txt |
“We should keep in mind that the original one-state, two-senators rule was written and ratified by property-owning white men, almost half of whom owned slaves…”
–Eric Orts (1)
The Senate as an Affront to Democratic Principles
Any proper understanding of the United States legislative branch must deal with an issue that doesn’t get as much attention as it should: The United States Senate is not an especially democratic representative body. Indeed, journalist and former congressional candidate Norman Solomon wrote that “today, the U.S. Senate is the most undemocratic elected body in the nation.” (2) Of course, the Senate was never designed to be a democratic body—remember that the Senate was initially chosen by state legislators rather than the people. Journalist and author George Packer puts it this way:
The Senate was designed, as part of the separation of powers, to check the impulses of the House and the popular will. For some Federalists, it also had an aristocratic purpose: to collect knowledge and experience, and to guard against a leveling spirit that might overtake the majority. (3)
In 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment changed the Senate selection process by having the people directly elect senators. That change certainly made senators more responsive to the democratic will within their respective states, but the basic problem is structural and has to do with how senators are apportioned. Senate seats are apportioned equally between the states, with each state getting two senators regardless of population. This enormously distorts the democratic principle of one-man, one-vote. Consider that the 7 million residents of Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming elect sixteen senators; meanwhile, the 147 million Americans living in California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas elect only fourteen senators.
In the 1964 case Wesberry v. Sanders, the Supreme Court ruled that unequal House election districts were an unconstitutional violation of the “one-man, one-vote” standard for legislative districts. House districts are sized accordingly and are roughly equal in population, with the important caveat that each state gets at least one representative. (4) Unfortunately, this logic cannot penetrate the U.S. Senate because the Constitution’s language enshrines that body’s undemocratic structure. From the strictly mathematical view, any constitutional amendment to remedy the situation would have to garner a two-thirds vote in the House of Representatives and also in the Senate itself. Besides, when talking about amendments, Article V of the Constitution stipulates that “no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.” Thus, fixing the senators’ apportionment would require that most senators agree to the change, but would also require the small states to agree to give up the disproportionate power they now have.
The Senate’s unrepresentative structure—being based on states rather than on population—has real-world political consequences. For one thing, the senators from the twenty-six smallest states hold the most Senate seats even though they represent only 17 percent of the U.S. population. They can refuse to pass legislation desired by the majority of the population, the House, and the president. Small states and rural interests gain disproportionate power in this scheme. So do Whites: the list of states with the least population correlates fairly well with the list of states with greatest percentage of White people.
The founders saw the Senate as a bulwark against unruly democratic majorities. Criminology and criminal justice professor Richard Rosenfeld summed up the situation, “The United States Senate stands today as a grotesque monument to that antidemocratic legacy; it remains largely a preserve of wealthy white male aristocrats drawn from an entirely different economic class than the people they purport to represent.” (5) Today, however, the situation is even worse. For example, in 1787 the most populous state, Virginia, had ten times more people than Delaware, the least populous state. Now, California is the most populous state and Wyoming is the least populous. California has sixty-nine times more people than Wyoming—and yet Wyoming has the same number of U.S. Senate seats as does California. The 117th Congress perfectly illustrated the partisan fallout of this undemocratic apportionment. Following the 2020 election, the Senate was split evenly, with 50 seats held by Republicans and 50 seats held by 48 Democrats and 2 Independents who caucused with the Democrats. Collectively, the 50 Republican senators represented nearly 42 million fewer people than did the 50 Democratic/Independent senators. (6)
The Senate apportionment problem is compounded by the filibuster, for it only takes forty-one senators to defeat a cloture motion and prevent a bill from being voted on. If the forty-one senators sustaining a filibuster happened to come from the least populous states, it would mean that the senators representing less than 12 percent of the population are inhibiting legislation that the vast majority of the population wants. The situation is so obviously undemocratic, that many people have argued that the filibuster is unconstitutional. The group Common Cause even tried to sue to get a federal court to declare the filibuster unconstitutional, but the suit was thrown out because the judge said the group didn’t have standing to sue. Adam Winkler, responding to Senator Rand Paul’s thirteen-hour filibuster to protest the Obama administration’s unconstitutional drone attacks, notes that the filibuster is not mentioned in the Constitution and that the first filibuster didn’t take place until 1841. The Constitution requires only a simple majority vote to pass legislation, and it carefully spells out the few situations that require a different rule—for example, a two-thirds Senate vote to remove someone who has been impeached by the House or a two-thirds Senate vote to support a treaty. (7)
While both parties routinely use the filibuster, it is clear that it has more often been used to frustrate progressive changes endorsed by the majority of Americans. Southern Democrats used the filibuster for decades to block civil rights legislation. More recently, Republicans and conservative Democrats have used the filibuster to block a paycheck protection bill to equalize pay between men and women, the DREAM Act for the children of undocumented immigrants, campaign finance bills that would force the disclosure of dark money, a bill that would close corporate tax loopholes that incentivize sending jobs overseas, an expansion of Social Security benefits, and the For the People Act, which would have set national standards for voting, taken steps to reduce partisan gerrymandering, and better ensured the security of elections. Additionally, victims of the filibuster also include a public option in the Affordable Care Act and a cap-and-trade bill intended to fight climate change. (8) All were blocked by filibuster or the threat of filibuster.
What Could be Done About the Undemocratic Senate?
The U.S. Senate’s undemocratic nature has become so odious that people often entertain possible ways to fix the problem. One way would be to leave the apportionment system alone but break up large states so that each new state would have its own two senators. California, for instance, could be broken up into six or eight states. (9) This is actually a modest proposal, given that the city of Los Angeles has nearly seven times the population of the entire state of Wyoming. John Dingell, one of the longest serving Representatives in U.S. history, argued that the Senate’s apportionment imbalance “has become the primary cause of our national legislative paralysis.” His solution is that we should simply abolish the Senate by constitutional amendment. (10) Wharton legal studies professor Eric Orts has argued that we should expand the Senate to 110 seats, give one seat to each state, and then give additional seats to states according to population. Wyoming would end up with one senator while California would have twelve. Moreover, he argued that such a move would only require legislation rather than a Constitutional amendment. Why? Because in cases like Reynolds v Sims (1964) and even Bush v. Gore (2000), the Supreme Court has already firmly established the constitutional principle of one-man one-vote, and the Congress is already empowered through amendments like the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and the Nineteenth to uphold American citizens’ privileges and immunities—of which voting is one. (11)
What if . . . ?
What would you do about this undemocratic institution sitting firmly in the middle of our republic? Would you vote to support splitting up large states? What if you were a resident of one of the less populous states? Would you vote to abolish the Senate altogether? What does it say about our democracy when we seem so unable to address such an obviously undemocratic anachronism?
References
1. Eric W. Orts, “The Path to Give California 12 Senators and Vermont Just One,” The Atlantic. January 12, 2019.
2. Norman Solomon, “All Eyes are on the Senate—But What is It?” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. December 30, 1998.
3. George Packer, “The Empty Chamber,” The New Yorker. August 9, 2010.
4. Reynolds v. Sims (1964).
5. Richard N. Rosenfeld, “What Democracy? The Case for Abolishing the United States Senate,” Harper’s Magazine. May, 2004.
6. Ian Millhiser, “America’s Undemocratic Senate, By the Numbers,” Vox. November 6, 2020.
7. Adam Winkler, “Is the Filibuster Unconstitutional?” The New Republic. March 7, 2013.
8. Adam Jentleson, Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy. New York: W. W. Norton and Co. 2021. Pages 244-45. Devan Cole, Aileen Graef, and Daniella Diaz, “Manchin Defends Bucking Voting Rights Bill and Digs In Against Eliminating the Filibuster,” CNN. June 7, 2021.
9. Burt Neuborne, “Divide States to Democratize the Senate,” Wall Street Journal. November 19, 2018. David Faris, It’s Time to Fight Dirty. New York: Melville House Publishing, 2018.
10. John D. Dingell, “I Served in the Congress Longer Than Anyone. Here’s How to Fix It,” The Atlantic. December 4, 2018.
11. Eric W. Orts, “The Path to Give California 12 Senators and Vermont Just One,” The Atlantic. January 12, 2019. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/03%3A_Congress/3.05%3A_Chapter_24-_The_Undemocratic_Senate.txt |
“[Woodrow] Wilson’s administration was not overwhelmingly popular among intellectuals in its first few years—especially among those who thought that the Progressive movement should go beyond the effort to realize the old competitive ideals of small businessmen and do something about child labor, the position of Negroes, the condition of workingmen, and the demand for women’s suffrage.”
—Richard Hofstadter (1)
“Unelected bureaucrats and cabinet appointees were never going to steer Donald Trump in the right direction in the long run, or refine his malignant management style. He is who he is.”
—Anonymous (2)
The presidency is two things: a person—the president—who has prevailed in an electoral struggle to attain the White House, and the presidency is an institution—an infrastructure—that has developed over time to support and enable each president’s policies. That infrastructure—the institutional presidency—has largely been built up since the Great Depression and World War II. It is staffed by presidential appointees, some of whom require the Senate’s “advice and consent” and some of whom do not.
The President as Person
Fewer people have served as President of the United States as have served in any given year in the United States Senate. Presidents serve a four-year term and can be re-elected for one more term before they must leave office. The original Constitution placed no limits on the number of consecutive terms a president could serve. Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944. In 1951, the Twenty-second Amendment came into effect. It states that “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.” Thomas Jefferson would have liked the Twenty-second Amendment, for he wrote to James Madison from Paris after reading a copy of the Constitution and complained that it lacked what he called “rotation in office, and most particularly in the case of the President.” He worried that if we didn’t have term limits for the president, other nations would interfere in our political processes to keep someone in the presidency who served their interests rather than those of the American people. (3)
As of this writing, all American presidents have been men. Hillary Clinton came close to becoming the first female president in 2016, when she won the popular vote but lost the electoral college tally. All American presidents except Barack Obama have been White. Common occupations before becoming president include lawyer, U.S. senator, vice president, and state governor. About half of U.S. presidents have served in the military at some point in their life. Donald Trump was the only modern president never to have either served in the military or held any elected or appointed office before becoming president. Woodrow Wilson was the only political scientist professor ever to have been elected president.
When referring to the president, the Constitution uses “he” throughout and places few requirements on who can serve. At the time the Constitution was adopted, it said the president must be “a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States”; the president must have been a resident of the United States for at least fourteen years before assuming office; and the president must be at least thirty-five-years-old. When William McKinley was assassinated, Theodore Roosevelt became the youngest president at only forty-two-years-old, and John F. Kennedy was the youngest elected president at forty-three-years-old.
The Institutional Presidency
The president is a person, but the presidency is an institution—one of three co-equal branches of government. Think of the institution as all the bureaucracy surrounding the president to help them do their job. The presidency’s physical institution is the White House and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, located just west of the White House. The people, entities, and agencies who help the president—who make up that bureaucracy—are called the president’s cabinet and the Executive Office of the President.
The Cabinet
At the 1787 Constitutional Convention and during the ratification debates, George Mason advocated that the president be ensconced in what he called “a constitutional council” composed of the president, two members from New England, two from the mid-Atlantic states, and two from the Southern states. (4) Mason’s proposal did not make it into the document. Instead, the Constitution says that the president “may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments.” From that prerogative, the cabinet evolved, the main role of which is to advise the president. Originally, the cabinet was composed of the Secretary of War, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Attorney General. Think of the cabinet as the major executive agencies’ leaders and anyone else designated by the president to sit with that group. With the exception of the Vice President, cabinet members are approved by the Senate. In modern times, presidents typically do not gather all of their cabinet members at once and have real deliberations over policy—photo ops, maybe, but not true deliberations. Instead, presidents will gather some cabinet members as needed to discuss particular policy issues. As of this writing, the cabinet consists of the following offices:
Secretary of Agriculture Secretary of Health & Human Services Secretary of State
Attorney General Secretary of Homeland Security Secretary of Transportation
Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Secretary of the Treasury
Secretary of Commerce Secretary of the Interior U. S. Trade Representative
Secretary of Defense Secretary of Labor Secretary of Veterans Affairs
Secretary of Education Director of the Office of Management & Budget Vice President
Secretary of Energy Director of National Intelligence White House Chief of Staff
Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator of the Small Business Administration
The Executive Office of the President
The Executive Office of the President was created by Congress during the Franklin Roosevelt administration when the demands of modern government made it clear that the presidency needed a more extensive organization. The Executive Office of the President employs several thousand people. It comprises staff and agencies that directly support the president. As of this writing, the following are key components of the Executive Office of the President:
The White House Staff—The Chief of Staff manages the White House staff operations and often controls access to the president. The White House staff comprises key aides and support personnel who do not require Senate approval. Among these are the president’s secretarial staff, who are responsible for correspondence and calendaring; the White House Legal Counsel, who advises the president on what he can and cannot do with respect to constitutional and statutory powers; the White House Press Secretary, who is responsible for all communications with the news media; the National Security Advisor, who coordinates security policy and the various agencies involved with those matters; the Office of Legislative Affairs, which is concerned with getting the president’s agenda through Congress; plus a variety of other offices dedicated to presidential trips, intergovernmental affairs, communication, economic policy, domestic policy, and so forth. Presidents typically have not had family members play roles on the White House staff, but there have been exceptions. President Clinton had his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, chair the National Commission on Health Care Reform. President Trump added his daughter, Ivanka Trump, to his staff as an Advisor to the President and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as an Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor. Neither were paid a salary for their services. The couple were reportedly “exasperated” with John Kelly, President Trump’s second Chief of Staff, and they both may have played a role in his leaving the administration. (5)
Important Support Agencies—The Executive Office of the President also contains a number of important support agencies. We won’t mention them all, but the following are most likely to be in the news:
• Office of Management and Budget. Originally created in 1921 as the Bureau of the Budget in the Treasury Department, President Franklin Roosevelt moved it into the White House in 1939, and President Richard Nixon reorganized it and renamed it the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in 1970. The OMB is a powerful agency within the executive branch. According to the White House, the OMB assists the president with the following:
• Developing and executing the budget.
• Managing agency performance and oversight, human capital, federal procurement, financial management, and information technology.
• Coordinating and reviewing all significant executive agencies’ federal regulations policy.
• Coordinating the Legislative branch and providing them clearance.
• Coordinating Executive Orders and Presidential Memoranda. (6)
• National Security Council. The National Security Council (NSC) was established in 1947 by the National Security Act. Its responsibility is to advise the president and coordinate American security and foreign policy. Its disposition reflects the highly militarized way in which the United States views its foreign policy. In addition to the President, Vice President, and the National Security Advisor, the NSC’s principle members are the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the military, the Secretary of State, the Director of National Intelligence, the Secretary of Energy, and the Secretary of the Treasury.
• Council of Economic Advisors. Established by Congress in the Employment Act of 1946, the Council of Economic Advisors is charged with providing the president helpful domestic and international economic policy analysis and guidance. The Council is composed of three prominent presidential appointed economists, one of whom is designated as the chairman, and a variety of other consulting economists who specialize in fields like international economics, housing economics, or healthcare economics. The people appointed to the Council of Economic Advisors share the president’s approach to economics and are often used by presidents to justify their actions regarding domestic and international economic policy.
• Office of the United States Trade Representative. Established by Congress with the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, the Office of the United States Trade Representative is responsible for coordinating U.S. trade policy and negotiating international trade agreements. In its role, the U.S. Trade Representative has pursued a heavily pro-corporate agenda, opening up foreign markets to American capital, negotiating agreements that open up American markets to imports, promoting offshoring American jobs, and putting American workers in direct competition with lower-paid international workers who have fewer rights to organize and who typically don’t have as robust safety and environmental protections as U.S. workers. (7)
What if . . . ?
The Constitution doesn’t allow immigrants to become president. What if we changed that? Would you support or oppose such a change? If you support it, what limitations would you put on the practice?
References
1. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Vintage Books, 1962. Page 211.
2. Anonymous, A Warning. Quoted in Lauren Frias, “Newly Released Excerpts from ‘A Warning’ Written by an Anonymous White House Official Paint a Wild Picture of the Trump Presidency,” Business Insider. November 7, 2019.
3. Thomas Jefferson letter to James Madison. December 20, 1787. The National Archives.
4. George Mason, Objections to the Constitution. In the Virginia Journaland the Alexandria Advertiser. November 19, 1787. Library of Virginia.
5. Jessica Kwong, “Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner Must ‘Be Dealt With,’ John Kelly Says While Praising Melania Trump as a ‘Wonderful Person,’” Newsweek. May 8, 2019.
6. The White House website.
7. For an understanding of this perspective on globalization and the role of U.S. policy, see Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018. Ian Bremmer, Us Versus Them: The Failure of Globalization. New York: Penguin, 2018. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/04%3A_The_Presidency/4.01%3A_Chapter_25-_The_President_as_Person_and_Institution.txt |
“Hence also sprung that unnecessary & dangerous Officer the Vice President; who for want of other Employment, is made President of the Senate; thereby dangerously blending the executive & legislative Powers; besides always giving to some one of the States an unnecessary & unjust Pre-eminence over the others.”
–George Mason (1)
The Vice President
Today, presidents and vice presidents run on a ticket together. The Twelfth Amendment altered the way electors cast ballots for the two offices. In the original Constitution, electors cast two ballots, and the person who got the most votes became president while the person with the next most votes became the vice president. That procedure resulted in two potential issues, both of which manifested themselves early on. In the 1796 election, the electors chose Federalist John Adams for president and Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson for vice president, which created all sorts of problems. In the 1800 election, the electoral college votes tied for Jefferson and Aaron Burr, both of whom were from the same party. That election was thrown into the House of Representatives, which took thirty-six ballots to finally elect Jefferson as president. Now, with the Twelfth Amendment, the electors cast separate ballots for president and vice president and we avoid both of those problems.
George Mason’s concerns about the dangers of the vice president have not come to pass. With the exception of Dick Cheney in the George W. Bush administration, most vice presidents have not been especially powerful—although some, such as Lyndon Johnson in the John F. Kennedy administration, were fairly useful to the president’s agenda. Vice presidents don’t have many formal powers. One, as Mason mentioned above, is President of the Senate, but that is mostly a formality, and the vice president isn’t even allowed to participate in Senate debates. As President of the Senate, vice presidents only have two formal Senate roles that are meaningful. Vice presidents preside over the electoral college vote-counting, which takes place in a joint session of Congress. The vice president also has the ability to cast a tie-breaking vote if one is needed in the Senate. During the Obama administration, Vice President Joe Biden cast zero tie-breaking votes. During the first year of the Clinton administration, Vice President Al Gore cast the tie-breaking vote on a budget that set the U.S. back on the course of balanced budgets after the deficit-ridden Reagan and George W. Bush years. Early in the Trump administration, Vice President Mike Pence cast a tie-breaking vote to ensure that nominee Betsy DeVos became Secretary of Education—a controversial choice, as DeVos never attended a public school, never worked at one, did not send her children to public schools, and never served on a public board of education. With an evenly divided Senate in the first half of the Biden presidency, Vice President Kamala Harris was called upon to cast a number of tie-breaking votes, including voting to pass the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, COVID economic relief in 2021, and numerous votes to confirm President Biden’s appointments.
Beyond their few formal powers, vice presidents are nevertheless important in American politics. They are often chosen by presidential candidates to “balance the ticket” either geographically or politically. In 1960, Massachusetts liberal John F. Kennedy needed someone like Texan Lyndon Johnson to help him win the presidency. In 2012, Mitt Romney—who had expressed pro-choice values and had pushed RomneyCare through in Massachusetts—needed someone with strong conservative credentials like Paul Ryan from Wisconsin. In 2016, the irreligious and by all accounts debauched New Yorker Donald Trump needed someone pious and influential with white Christians like Mike Pence from Indiana. Once in office, vice presidents are used by presidents in many ways. They might be relied upon for political advice. They might be put in charge of special initiatives. They often represent the president at ceremonies and functions domestically and around the world.
Presidential Succession
If the president resigns or dies in office, they are succeeded by the vice president. In 1841 William Henry Harrison died thirty-one days into his first term, and John Tyler became the first vice president to succeed to the presidency. Tyler asserted himself as president—not acting president—and established the precedent that when a Vice President becomes President, he does so fully and without qualification. Lyndon Johnson became president in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. In 1974 Gerald Ford became president when Richard Nixon resigned due to his role in the Watergate scandalWhen a sitting vice president becomes president, they nominate someone to be vice president, and according to the Twenty-fifth Amendment, that nominee needs majority approval from both the House and the Senate.
The Twenty-fifth Amendment also has two provisions that deal with presidential incapacity. First, the president can inform the President Pro Tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House that they are unable to fulfill the powers and duties of the office. When this occurs, the vice president becomes Acting President until the president informs Congress that they are ready to resume the office. In 1985, this provision was used when Ronald Reagan had a colonoscopy, and George H. W. Bush became Acting President. Twice for the same reason, President George W. Bush temporarily transferred authority to Vice President Dick Cheney in 2002 and in 2007. In an additional section of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, the vice president and a cabinet majority can inform the President Pro Tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House that the president is unable to fulfill the powers and duties of the office, and then the vice president would become the Acting President. This has never been done, but there were persistent rumors of it being contemplated during the Trump administration. (2)
Presidential succession issues beyond Twenty-fifth Amendment provisions are covered by the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, which has been amended several times since then. This law spells out the succession order if the president and vice president are both killed or otherwise incapacitated. Any person occupying one of these positions who does not meet the eligibility requirements to become president would be skipped. Here is the succession order after the vice president:
1. Speaker of the House 10. Secretary of Labor
2. President pro Tempore of the Senate 11. Secretary of Health and Human Services
3. Secretary of State 12. Secretary of Housing and Urban Dev
4. Secretary of the Treasury 13. Secretary of Transportation
5. Secretary of Defense 14. Secretary of Energy
6. Attorney General 15. Secretary of Education
7. Secretary of the Interior 16. Secretary of Veterans Affairs
8. Secretary of Agriculture 17. Secretary of Homeland Security
9. Secretary of Commerce
There has been a long cautionary practice that ensures that someone on the succession list is safe in case some catastrophe takes out most or all of the top executive branch officials. The person identified as the designated survivor does not attend major events like the President’s State of the Union Address at which many or all of the others on the list attend.
References
1. George Mason, Objections to the Constitution. In the Virginia Journaland the Alexandria Advertiser. November 19, 1787. Library of Virginia.
2. Maureen Groppe, “What to Know About the 25thAmendment: It’s Never Been Used, But Ex-FBI Head Says Officials Thought About It,” USA Today. February 4, 2019. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/04%3A_The_Presidency/4.02%3A_Chapter_26-_The_Vice_President_and_Presidential_Succession.txt |
“It is important. . . that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another.”
–George Washington (1)
American presidents have a wide range of formal powers, but the founders were, as Garrett Epps has written, “artfully vague about the extent and limits” of those powers. (2) Put another way, “the Constitution permits either an active or a passive executive.” (3) Several factors determine the extent to which a president can successfully exercise domestic political power. These include their margin of victory, Congress’ partisan power balance, and the president’s own understanding of how to act while in office. One important situation to consider is whether we are in a divided governmentwhich is when the president and at least one congressional chamber are from different parties. Such a situation does not necessarily have to lead to gridlock, but it does make it difficult for a president to accomplish their policy goals.
If a president is politically well-positioned to act and is personally predisposed to act, they can draw upon the following key powers.
Veto Power
High on the list is the president’s ability to veto bills passed by Congress. The word “veto” is Latin for “I refuse.” The president has two kinds of veto, both of which you should know: a regular veto and a pocket veto. When Congress sends a bill to the president, they can handle it in several different ways. If they sign the bill, usually in a ceremony, the bill becomes law. If they do not sign the bill, it will become law anyway after ten working days. The president’s third option is to veto the bill by sending it back to Congress with a veto message about why they feel the bill should not become law. This is called a regular veto. Congress can override a regular veto with a two-thirds vote in both chambers, but the chances of a successful override are not good. Of the 1,517 regular vetoes issued from 1789 through the end of the Trump administration in 2021, only 111 were successfully overridden. (4) That pattern continued during the Trump administration. Of Trump’s nine vetoes, Congress only successfully overrode one. If Congress happens to adjourn in the ten-day period, the president must consider the bill. If the president does not sign the bill, this is called a pocket veto. One important difference between a regular veto and a pocket veto is that Congress cannot override a pocket veto.
Executive Orders
Another presidential power is issuing executive orders to executive branch members. By issuing an executive order, the president can direct executive branch members to do many things, so long as those actions lie within the law and so long as they do not entail appropriating new federal money. Congress can overturn an executive order if there are enough votes to do so—which would require a simple majority in both chambers, or a simple majority in the House and 60 votes to end a filibuster in the Senate if the president’s party wished to defend their use of power. An incoming president can issue an executive order countermanding an executive order issued by a previous president. Rarely do executive orders get more than a passing reference in newspapers. Presidential critics from both parties often claim that executive orders constitute a “power grab” by the president who is issuing them. However, William Howell, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, argues that “it just doesn’t match up with the facts on the ground. It’s not all power grabs. A lot of it is clearly trivial stuff.” (5) Still, it’s always a good idea to be vigilant about presidents acting on their own without legislative mandate.
Occasionally, executive orders have broader consequences or make big news. You should be familiar with some prominent executive orders.
• Executive Order #9066, issued February 1942—President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the Secretary of War “to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion…” (6) The U.S. military then detained and removed against their will over 100,000 Japanese Americans living in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona. These people, most of whom were U.S. citizens, were placed in prison camps for the war’s duration because they constituted a security risk, even though no evidence was ever presented to that effect. In 1988 Congress issued a public apology and gave \$20,000 in restitution to each of the 60,000 surviving internees.
• Executive Order #9981, issued July 1948—President Harry Truman directed “that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.” (7) This order effectively desegregated the U.S. military and officially ended a long-standing practice of assigning less desirable duties to racial minorities.
• Executive Order #13228, issued October 8, 2001—President George W. Bush created the Office of Homeland Security. This executive order directed that the new Office of Homeland Security “identify priorities and coordinate efforts for collection and analysis of information within the United States regarding threats of terrorism against the United States and activities of terrorists or terrorist groups within the United States.” (8) Rather quickly, this order transformed into legislation creating the Department of Homeland Security, charged with preventing terrorist attacks and minimizing damage from potential terrorist attacks and natural disasters.
• Executive Order #13769, issued January 2017—President Donald Trump issued an executive order very early in his first month in office called Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States. For 120 days it barred entry to any refugee waiting to resettle in the United States; it prohibited all Syrian refugees from entering the U.S.; and it banned “the citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries—Iraq, Iran, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, and Yemen—from entering the U.S. on any visa category.” (9) After some early defeats in court, the Trump administration altered the language of the ban and took the case to the Supreme Court. In a five to four decision, the Court majority ruled that the president was within his powers under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows the executive to suspend an entire “class” of people from entering the United States. The dissenters argued that the Immigration and Nationality Act also forbids the executive from discriminating based on nationality. (10)
Executive Branch Appointments
Another useful tool is the president’s ability to appoint officeholders throughout the executive branch, as they can appoint those who are politically loyal as well as capable of carrying out the president’s domestic policy agenda. (11) In fact, a president will typically appoint thousands of people to various posts in the executive branch. Presidential appointments such as cabinet-level secretaries, other executive agencies’ high officials, and ambassadors are all subject to the “advice and consent of the Senate,” which means that the Senate must approve each appointment with a simple majority vote. The Supreme court case Meyers v. United States (1926) established that presidential appointees to executive agencies can be removed by the president without Senate approval. However, the Court did rule in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935) that presidential appointees to independent regulatory commissions or agencies that have “quasi-judicial” or “quasi-legislative” functions can only be removed according to the legislative stipulations that created the agency or commission. This is important, because the federal government has many of these kinds of commissions or agencies, and conservative members of the Supreme Court would like the president to have unlimited authority over their members.
At the president’s direction, executive branch appointees use their congressionally granted statutory authority to put the president’s program into effect. Much of the statute’s language is either open to interpretation or allows executives discretion in how exactly to enforce the law. Law professor Kim Wehle points out that Article II’s provision that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the United States” still allows the president and their appointees a fair amount of discretion in applying the law. The Obama administration, for example, was within its powers to defer action on children who were brought to the United States by their undocumented parents, as was the Trump administration to end that program. (12)
The State of the Union Address and the Bully Pulpit
The constitutional provision that the president “shall from time to time give to Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient,” has given rise to the annual State of the Union Address. Before a national television audience, the president addresses a joint session of Congress in January or February, accentuates his administration’s accomplishments, and argues for measures he would like Congress to pass. Thomas Jefferson preferred to send Congress a letter, and the traditional annual personal visit to Congress to give an address did not develop until Woodrow Wilson started the trend in 1913. The State of the Union’s effectiveness depends heavily on the level of public support the president enjoys at the time. More broadly, presidents are able to use their rhetorical abilities and media attention to force the country to at least consider specific policy proposals. President Theodore Roosevelt recognized and used these abilities, coining the term bully pulpit to refer to his ability to push an agenda. Today, we generally refer to a bully pulpit to mean any position which gives the holder the positional and rhetorical context with which to strongly advocate a position. Note that the word “bully” in this context doesn’t mean to bully people. Instead, President Roosevelt simply meant that his office was a “wonderful” or “awesome” pulpit from which to preach his views.
Pardons and Reprieves
The Constitution gives presidents the power to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” Note the two limitations on the pardon power: presidents can only pardon people who have been charged with federal (not state) crimes, and presidents cannot pardon someone in the executive or judicial branches who Congress has impeached. The president can issue a full pardon, which restores the recipient’s full rights so they can run for office, serve on juries and purchase firearms, or a conditional pardon, which restores partial rights. Pardons do not imply that the person is innocent, nor do they expunge the original conviction. The president can also commute a sentence which typically allows a person to leave federal prison before completing their full sentence, but they maintain the other impacts of their federal conviction. Most presidential pardons and commutations are not controversial. The Department of Justice’s Office of Pardon Attorney has a process to handle petitions from people convicted of federal crimes, and it periodically presents presidents with lists of people who could be pardoned if the president so chooses. Most of the time, exercising presidential pardon power is not a particularly newsworthy event.
However, you should be familiar with the controversial presidential pardons that have occurred in modern historyNote that the presidential pardon power is absolute in the sense that neither Congress nor the Supreme Court can countermand a presidential pardon. If, however, a president was to use their pardon power in a way that abused their office, they could be subject to impeachment and removed.
• In 1974, President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for any crimes committed while in office. Nixon therefore avoided prison, even though people who carried out his orders ended up in jail. This action may have caused Ford to lose the 1976 election.
• In 1979, President Jimmy Carter granted a blanket amnesty to all Vietnam-era draft evaders. Carter intended to help the nation heal its Vietnam wounds, but the result was to momentarily re-animate the acrimonious debate about that war.
• In 1992, President George H. W. Bush issued controversial pardons to several high Reagan administration officials who had been involved in the Iran-Contra Scandal where they circumvented Congress and sold arms to Iran, using the proceeds to illegally fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Bush pardoned Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, who allegedly lied to the independent counsel investigating the scandal, and six others who were involved in the scheme. Perhaps most significantly, Bush pardoned Weinberger before his trial, at which President Bush was expected to be called as a witness.
• In 2001, President Bill Clinton pardoned billionaire financier Marc Rich, who fled the country in 1983 before he was indicted for allegedly evading taxes, committing fraud, and illegally participating in oil deals with Iran. While he was out of the country, Marc Rich’s ex-wife, Denise, donated roughly \$1 million to the Democratic Party and gave money to Hillary Clinton’s successful Senate campaign. (13)
• In 2017, President Barack Obama created controversy when he used the pardon power to commute Chelsea Manning’s remaining sentence. Manning, an American activist, whistle blower, and former U.S. Army soldier, had served seven of 35 years for stealing and releasing to the media diplomatic and military cables that proved embarrassing to the United States.
• President Donald Trump issued more controversial pardons than any president. In his first use of this power, Trump pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had been found guilty of defying a judge’s order to stop detaining and harassing Latinx residents of Maricopa County, Arizona. (14) In 2019, Trump pardoned an Army officer and a Navy SEAL who had been convicted of committing war crimes—one for murder and obstruction of justice and the other for posing with the corpse of an enemy combatant. He also pardoned another Army officer who was awaiting trial for murdering a detainee in Afghanistan. Trump’s pardons disregarded the recommendations of the Pentagon leaders, who felt that they would undermine military leadership’s ability to maintain proper order. (15) At the end of his administration Trump pardoned Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, two people who were intimately involved in campaign’s outreach to Russia for help in the 2016 election and convicted by federal juries for crimes ranging from lying to the FBI, obstructing Congress, and threatening a witness. Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, father of his son in law Jared Kushner, who had been convicted of tax evasion, witness tampering, and illegal campaign contributions. In one of his final acts in office, Trump pardoned his former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who had been charged with defrauding donors to a We Build the Wall non-profit. (16)
Emergency Powers
President Trump declared a national emergency at the U.S. border with Mexico as a way to divert funds to support building a wall between the two countries, which Congress did not approve. Congress passed a joint resolution denouncing the move, but Trump vetoed it. Several lawsuits followed, but ultimately a 5-4 Supreme Court majority refused to stop the president. (17) This case highlights the importance of the president’s emergency powers.
When a president declares an emergency, the National Emergencies Act of 1976 and other statutory provisions open up all sorts of new presidential powers. The Brennan Center for Justice catalogued 136 emergency powers available to a president, fully ninety-six of which “require nothing more than [the president’s] signature on the emergency declaration” to go into effect. (18) And the powers available to a president in an emergency are breathtaking. For instance, the president can “shut down many kinds of electronic communications inside the United States or freeze American’s bank accounts.” Emergency declarations under the statute are supposed to last less than one year, but emergency declarations are often renewed “for years on end.” Even beyond the National Emergencies Act, “other laws permit the executive branch to take extraordinary action under specified conditions, such as war and domestic upheaval, regardless of whether a national emergency has been declared.” (19) Presidents declare national emergencies with a disturbing frequency—dozens of times since the National Emergencies Act was passed.
Many Americans incorrectly think that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 means that the U.S. military cannot undertake domestic policing functions. In fact, the law merely requires that Congress authorize such military use, which it did in the 1807 Insurrection Act. The Insurrection Act was used by President Eisenhower in 1957 to send federal troops to desegregate Little Rock High School and by President George H. W. Bush in 1992 to send the military in to quell the Los Angeles riots that erupted after Los Angeles police officers were acquitted for beating Rodney King. The Insurrection Act is impressive in its scope. Elizabeth Goitein describes it this way:
“As amended over the years, [the 1807 Insurrection Act] allows the president to deploy troops upon the request of a state’s governor or legislature to help put down an insurrection within that state. It also allows the president to deploy troops unilaterally, either because he determines that rebellious activity has made it ‘impracticable’ to enforce federal law through regular means, or because he deems it necessary to suppress ‘insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy’ (terms not defined in the statute) that hinders the rights of a class of people or ‘impedes the course of justice.’” (20)
Congress could limit or better define presidential emergency powers, but it has not done so. The Supreme Court has traditionally deferred to presidential action in emergencies. In one famous case—Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company v. Sawyer (1952)—the Court struck down President Truman’s efforts to seize steel plants during a strike to keep them running because he feared production delays would harm the Korean War effort. Interestingly, however, Truman did not invoke statutory emergency powers in that situation and instead argued that the Constitution gave him inherent power to seize the steel plants. It’s an open question how the Court might have ruled had Truman invoked emergency powers.
What if . . . ?
What if a president declared a national emergency and used law enforcement and the military to target people of a particular religion or lawful visa status to apprehend, detain, and/or deport them? What if you knew someone well who was a member of the targeted population? What would you do?
References
1. George Washington, Farewell Address. September 19, 1796. Our Documents.
2. Garrett Epps, “The Founders’ Great Mistake,” The Atlantic. January/February 2009.
3. David. J. Bodenhamer, The U. S. Constitution. A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Page 40.
4. The Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/vetoes.php
5. Quoted in Gregory Korte, “Obama’s Executive Orders You Never Hear About,” USA Today. April 11, 2016.
6. Franklin Roosevelt, Executive Order Authorizing the Secretary of War to Prescribe Military AreasOur Documents. February 18, 1942.
7. Harry Truman, Executive Order Establishing the President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed ServicesThe Harry S. Truman Library and Museum. July 26, 1948.
8. George W. Bush,Executive Order Establishing Office of Homeland SecurityThe White House. October 8, 2001.
9. Krishnadev Calamur, “What Trump’s Executive Order on Immigration Does—And Doesn’t Do,” The Atlantic. January 30, 2017.
10. Dara Lind, “Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Trump’s Travel Ban,” Vox. June 26, 2018. The case is Trump v. Hawaii(2018).
11. Of course, as we’ll see later in the text, presidents also nominate federal judges, most of whom are on the bench affecting policy long after the president is out of office. For this section, we’ll stick to talking about executive branch appointments.
12. Kim Wehle, How to Read the Constitution. And Why. New York: Harper. Pages 82-85.
13. Jonathan Rauch, “Forget the Marc Rich Pardon. Worry About the Scandal,” The Atlantic. March 1, 2001.
14. Matt Ford, “President Trump Pardons Former Sheriff Joe Arpaio,” The Atlantic. August 25, 2017.
15. Zeeshan Aleem, “Trump Just Issued Multiple War Crime Pardons. Experts Think It’s a Bad Idea,” Vox. November 16, 2019.
16. Pamela Brown, Paul LeBlanc, Katelyn Polantz, and Kevin Liptak, “Trump Issues 26 New Pardons, Including for Stone, Manafort, and Charles Kushner,” CNN. December 23, 2020. Pamela Brown, Paul LeBlanc, and Kaitlan Collins, “Trump Pardons Steve Bannon as One of his Final Acts in Office,” CNN. January 20, 2021.
17. Richard Wolf, “Supreme Court Allows Border Wall Spending in Battle Between President Donald Trump and Liberal Opponents,” USA Today. July 26, 2019.
18. The Brennan Center for Justice, A Guide to Emergency Powers and Their Use. September 4, 2019.
19. Elizabeth Goitein, “The Alarming Scope of the President’s Emergency Powers,” The Atlantic. January/February, 2019.
20. Elizabeth Goitein, “The Alarming Scope of the President’s Emergency Powers,” The Atlantic. January/February, 2019. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/04%3A_The_Presidency/4.03%3A_Chapter_27-_The_President%27s_Domestic_Powers.txt |
“My fellow Americans: As President and Commander in Chief, it is my duty to the American people to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply.”
–President Lyndon Johnson, escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam in 1964 (1)
Commander in Chief
The president is commander in chief of U.S. military forces. This means that the president is a civilian in charge of the U.S. military. Generals and admirals must take orders from the president. Indeed, recent presidents have become quite involved in managing the armed forces. You should know these examples:
• President Harry Truman, without a congressional declaration of war, ordered American troops into battle on June 30, 1950 to defend South Korea. When General Douglas MacArthur, commander of U.S. troops in Korea, made reckless statements about bombing China and spoke to congressmen about Truman’s poor strategy, Truman relieved the general of his command. This was a gutsy move, as MacArthur was very popular in the United States—he came home to a ticker-tape parade, but most people recognized the president’s constitutional right to make that decision.
• During the Vietnam War, an undeclared war from 1964 to 1973, both Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon involved themselves heavily in the day-to-day tactics of our fighting forces. In fact, both men spent considerable time discussing troop levels and bombing targets with generals.
• With congressional authorization—although not a formal declaration of war—President George H. W. Bush launched an invasion of Iraq in response to Iraq invading Kuwait. Bush also then unilaterally made the decision to halt the war’s ground phase before Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was ousted.
• Following the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush’s administration decided to invade Iraq even though that country had nothing to do with the attacks. The Bush administration had previously invaded Afghanistan, whose Taliban regime had sheltered Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network. Without a declaration of war, although with congressional support, President George W. Bush initiated a pre-emptive war on Iraq in 2003 that removed Saddam Hussein from power.
Congress has tried to restrain presidential commander in chief powers, but these efforts have not been successful. For instance, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973 over President Nixon’s veto. The Resolution stipulates that 1) presidents consult with Congress when possible before committing U.S. military forces to action, 2) forces be withdrawn after sixty days unless Congress either declares war or grants a use-of-force extension, and 3) Congress can pass a concurrent resolution ending American use-of-force at any time. All presidents of both parties have considered the resolution to be unconstitutional, but it has never come before the Supreme Court. Presidents have largely ignored the Resolution’s provisions, or at best given them lip service and went ahead and used the military however they wanted. Sometimes, these presidential dodges require ridiculously interpreting the Resolution’s language. In 2011, President Obama said his use of U.S. forces in Libya to bomb Libyan targets as part of a NATO intervention did not constitute “hostilities” and therefore the Resolution did not apply. (2) By and large, Congress has not been able to muster the political will to challenge presidents on war issues. When it does, it runs into constitutional limitations. For example, in 2019 Congress passed a bipartisan resolution to end America’s support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. President Donald Trump vetoed the resolution, and America continued to assist Saudi Arabia. (3)
Diplomatic Powers
In foreign affairs, the president has treaty power, or the ability to negotiate and sign formal agreements with other countries. President-signed treaties require ratification by a two-thirds Senate vote. Although most treaties that the president submits are ratified, there have been notable instances in which the president has failed to convince enough senators. The Treaty of Versailles, negotiated and signed by President Woodrow Wilson in 1919, officially ended World War I and created the League of Nations. The Senate refused to ratify the treaty, and Wilson suffered a stroke while trying to rally public support for it. The United States never did join the League of Nations. In 1999, President Bill Clinton could not round up enough Senate votes to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would have banned all nuclear weapons testing. The year before, Clinton also signed the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, but did not even submit it to the Senate because he knew it would not be ratified.
Because the formal treaty process is so onerous, presidents have more frequently turned to creating executive agreements, which are agreements with at least one other country’s head of state. While they are in effect, executive agreements have the same force as treaties. They do not require Senate approval, but an incoming president can stop honoring or can renegotiate executive agreements entered into by previous presidents. For example, in 2019 President Donald Trump formally announced that the U.S. was withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, whose goal was to limit global temperature increases to below 2 degrees Celsius from the preindustrial average. Overall, both congressional houses are actually more involved in executive agreements, although with simple majority approval. As political science professors Glen Krutz and Jeffrey Peake put it, “In most cases, an executive agreement is pursuant to a statutory grant of power to the president or requires ex post congressional approval (through joint resolution) before the agreement enters into force.” (4) The North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, the United States, and Mexico is another famous example of an executive agreement. As commander in chief, the president often negotiates status of force agreements—a type of executive agreement—with other heads of state in countries where the U.S. has stationed military personnel.
Another foreign policy power is the president’s ability, spelled out in the Constitution, to “receive ambassadors and other public ministers.” This means that the president, acting without Congress’ approval, has diplomatic-recognition power. When the United States “receives” the ambassador from Germany, and our ambassador presents themself to Germany’s president, then in international-law parlance, Germany and the United States have diplomatically recognized each other. The United States diplomatically recognizes most countries of the world. President Clinton re-established diplomatic relations with the People’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1995 and sent Pete Peterson, a former North Vietnam POW, as our first ambassador. After Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, the United States withheld diplomatic recognition from 1961 to 2015. The United States does not diplomatically recognize North Korea, although the two countries have been negotiating for years over Korean peninsula security matters. The United States does not diplomatically recognize Bhutan, which has a long-running border dispute with the People’s Republic of China.
References
1. Lyndon Johnson speechto the nation. August 4, 1965.
2. Charlie Savage, “2 Top Lawyers Lost to Obama in Libya War Policy Debate,” New York Times. June 17, 2011.
3. Ed Pilkington, “Dismay as Trump Vetoes Bill to End US Support for War in Yemen,” The Guardian. April 17, 2019.
4. Glen S. Krutz and Jeffrey S. Peake, Treaty Politics and the Rise of Executive Agreements. International Commitments in a System of Shared PowersThe University of Michigan Press, 2009. Page 30. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/04%3A_The_Presidency/4.04%3A_Chapter_28-_The_President%27s_Foreign_Policy_Powers.txt |
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
–James Madison in Federalist #47
The Problem of Executive Power
The Constitution performs a delicate balancing act between empowering and constraining the presidency. It is no surprise, then, that American political history has witnessed numerous controversies about presidents exercising power. Some presidents have pushed the envelope, while others have not. However, the long-term trend is clear: over time, presidential power has increased considerably.
Executive power is always a tricky political problem. The founders were especially cognizant of what history had to teach about checking executive power. Democratic republics are fragile, as the demise of Athenian democracy and the Roman republic demonstrate. It was a long time before anything resembling popular democracy returned to the West. In 1215, King John of England—after disastrous foreign policy mistakes and domestic power abuses—was forced to accept the Magna Carta, or Great Charter. The Magna Carta limited the king’s power vis a vis the nobility and the clergy. Later, in 1649, Parliament executed Charles I. During his rule, he levied taxes without Parliament’s approval, disbanded Parliament for eleven years, forced people to loan money to the government, and sent an armed force into Parliament to arrest members. After a Commonwealth period in which Oliver Cromwell ruled a fractious England as “Lord Protector,” the monarchy was restored in 1660 when Charles II, son of Charles I, was invited to be king. A later king, James II, was forced from power in the Glorious Revolution when Anglicans feared that his son’s birth would establish a Catholic dynasty in England. Instead, they asked his Protestant daughter, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange, to rule. William and Mary were forced to accept the 1689 Bill of Rights, which guaranteed, among other things, the right not to be taxed without Parliament’s approval, the right to petition the King, the right for Protestants to bear arms for self-defense, freedom from cruel and unusual punishments, freedom from excessive bail, freedom of speech in Parliament, and guarantees of a trial before having to pay fines. This background and the American colonists’ belief that both Parliament and King George III denied to them the “rights of Englishmen” underscores our own struggles with executive power.
Informed citizens should be familiar with four key issues regarding executive power in the United States. Keep in mind that the issues are all interrelated, even though they are treated separately here.
Executive Privilege
Since the American republic’s beginning, presidents have exerted a right to executive privilege, even though this right is nowhere mentioned explicitly in the Constitution. Aside from not being in the Constitution, the problem with executive privilege is that its definition rests almost entirely on the collective judgments of courts over the years. As constitutional law professor Jonathan Shaub puts it, “the term executive privilege has no legal content. There is no law governing executive privilege.” (1) Basically, executive privilege asserts that the separation of powers built into the Constitution gives presidents a certain amount of discretion when responding to the legislative and judicial branches’ orders and information requests. (2) Specifically, presidents have argued that they are entitled to withhold from Congress, the courts, and the public certain executive branch documents and the transcripts of deliberations within executive agencies. Executive privilege is not absolute. This is contested ground, of course, because unitary executive theory advocates would say that there should be no limits (described below). However, mainstream opinion among scholars and lawyers is that this particular presidential prerogative is limited. The consensus is that executive privilege cannot do the following:
• Protect the president when he is acting in his personal capacity.
• Shield information related to presidential decisions once they have been made.
• Hide communications related to committing a crime.
• Block information Congress requires in an impeachment proceeding.
• Protect communications that the president or his office never received.
• Provide absolute immunity to congressional subpoenas.
• Be exerted by a former president over the objections of the sitting president. (3)
George Washington was the first president to assert executive privilege, but the stakes have become more significant in recent cases. Presidents of both parties have tried to push the envelope and get around the limitations that courts have placed on executive privilege. During the Watergate scandal, President Nixon invoked executive privilege and refused to turn over White House tape recordings and written documents to special prosecutor Leon Jaworski. The Supreme Court ruled against Nixon—a decision that sealed his presidency’s fate because the tapes were damning—but it also appeared to give some credence to the executive-privilege idea. In its opinion in United States v. Nixon (1974), the Court recognized “the valid need for protection of communications between high Government officials and those who advise and assist them in the performance of their manifold duties,” and that “human experience teaches that those who expect public dissemination of their remarks may well temper candor with a concern for appearances and for their own interests to the detriment of the decision making process.”
President Bill Clinton’s administration invoked executive privilege on thirteen occasions, a record up to that time. Clinton’s special counsel Lloyd Cutler wrote a memo indicating that “Executive privilege will be asserted only after careful review demonstrates that assertion of the privilege is necessary to protect Executive Branch prerogatives,” and that “Executive privilege belongs to the President, not individual departments or agencies.” (4) Clinton asserted executive privilege on its least defensible issue—the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He used it to conceal information about their affair and how his White House personnel handled it. As with the Watergate scandal, the dispute between the White House and Congress eventually went to the courts. In this case—and relying on the precedent in United States v. Nixon (1974)—Federal Judge Norma Holloway Johnson again seemed to embrace executive privilege but ruled against the president on the merits of that particular case. (5)
President George W. Bush invoked executive privilege six times. His administration asserted executive privilege on various issues such as energy policy, Pat Tillman’s death, firing federal prosecutors, and allegedly misusing organized crime informants. Barack Obama invoked executive privilege one time to prevent Congress from having access to certain documents related to Operation Fast and Furious, which was a weapons-trafficking sting that was poorly conceived and poorly executed. Federal agents lost track of many weapons that they sold to suspected Mexican gun traffickers. (6) Republicans in Congress held Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, in contempt for refusing to turn over documents, but the Obama administration successfully ran out the clock and withheld the documents throughout Obama’s term.
President Donald Trump exerted executive privilege over releasing the full Mueller Report regarding Russian ties to Trump’s 2016 campaign and to Trump’s attempts to obstruct investigating those ties. Trump then attempted to completely deny Congress’ ability to investigate anything having to do with his administration. He would not allow the IRS to turn over his tax returns to a congressional committee even though a federal law explicitly says the IRS “shall” do so upon request, and then he would not let the IRS director or the Treasury Secretary testify to Congress about the issue. When the issue of Trump’s taxes was litigated in New York state, his lawyers asserted what the prosecutor in the case described as “blanket immunity” from “any routine, lawful grand jury request for information.” (7) Note that President Trump’s tax returns were not made public until two years after he left office. Trump also exerted executive privilege over documents related to his administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the full census. When the House began impeachment proceedings against Trump for bribery, abuse of office, and obstruction of justice, Trump refused to allow key figures like Chief of Staff Mulvaney, Attorney General Barr, and Vice President Pence to testify. After encouraging his supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell” to keep him in office after he lost the 2020 election, Trump attempted unsuccessfully to use executive privilege to keep records of his attempt to overturn the election from Congressional investigators. In Trump v. Thompson (2022), the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that Trump could not exert executive privilege to shield the relevant documents.
Unitary Executive Theory
Republican administration members and their supporters have been the strongest proponents of what is known as the unitary executive theory. This theory has been circulating among conservative legal scholars for years, but it finally reached the public consciousness when it became known that George W. Bush had relied on this theory to authorize the National Security Agency to wiretap phone calls in the United States without a warrant as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Even before that, however, the Bush administration relied on the unitary executive theory in its War on Terror. Bush and his defenders asserted that the unitary executive idea allowed the executive branch to hold what it called “enemy combatants” in a state of legal limbo where they were not criminal defendants, nor prisoners of war, nor covered by the Geneva Convention, nor able to talk with lawyers, nor able to see any of the evidence against them. (8)
The unitary executive theory argues that the White House’s occupant has broad inherent powers that are implied by the Constitution’s executive authority vestment with the presidency. The president, these theorists argue, can act without legislative authorization and is virtually without check in the realm of national security. The theory also holds that the president can go beyond merely executing the law, and execute it as they interpret it. Here, the issue concerns presidential signing statements, written statements that presidents have issued when they sign a bill into law. They aren’t new, but President George W. Bush used them extensively and wrote them in ways that suggest great latitude in enforcing the law. In the country’s history up through the Clinton administration, all presidents combined issued a total of 322 signing statements. President Bush issued 435 of them in his first term alone. (9) For example Congress, spurred on by Republican Senator John McCain, passed the McCain Anti-Torture Law to push back against the executive branch’s excesses during the War on Terror. President Bush signed the bill, but issued the following signing statement:
“The executive branch shall construe Title X in Division A of the Act, relating to detainees, in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power, which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President…of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.” (10)
It is not yet clear what kind of credence the Supreme Court will give to signing statements when it comes time to interpret the laws. If the Constitution requires that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” and if the Supreme Court allows the president to “construe” the very laws he is supposed to be enforcing, it brings into question whether the president would become more like a monarch than the leader of a democratic republic. In any case, it would further shift the balance of power away from Congress and toward the president. A 2006 report by the American Bar Association condemned Bush for abusing signing statements, saying that it was “contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional system of separation of powers.” (11)
Candidate Obama roundly criticized President Bush for abusing signing statements. President Obama did not issue nearly as many signing statements as his predecessor, but even those remained controversial. The American Bar Association was sufficiently concerned with Obama’s signing statements that it issued a public letter “restating its objection to the practice and urging him to instead veto bills if he thinks sections are unconstitutional.” (12) President Donald Trump continued with the practice of issuing signing statements—most famously indicating that he considered numerous provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act unconstitutional infringements on his executive authority. (13)
The unitary executive theory has important implications for the rule of law in the United States. The rule of law refers to the related ideas that no one is above the law, that all of us are equally subject to the laws that we collectively make together, and that decisions are reached by following pre-established procedures. During Donald Trump’s presidency, the president and his Attorney General William Barr, acted together to ensure that the law fell lightly on the president’s friends and heavily on the president’s detractors. (14)
The National Security State
Much of the growth in the president’s power can be attributed to what scholars and critics refer to as the rise of the national security state. This concept suggests that the exigencies of protecting the United States from real or imagined external enemies inflates the power of the military, the intelligence agencies, and the internal security agencies—all of which are directed by the president. The founders feared this sort of development because it inevitably eroded democracy and the civil liberties they cherished, and they continually warned against a large standing army in peacetime. James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1798 that “perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretend, from abroad.” (15)
World War II was clearly a watershed event in expanding the United States’ national security apparatus. Before that conflict, the country’s peacetime armed forces were relatively small—in 1896, there were only 41,680 active-duty military personnel. Indeed, on the eve of World War I, Belgium’s tiny army was larger than the United States Army. Since 1945, however, the United States armed forces have never comprised fewer than 1.3 million people and have often included more than twice that figure, which doesn’t count reservists and guardsmen. During World War II, the Pentagon—still the largest office building in the world—was created to coordinate military efforts against the axis powers. It has become the national security state’s focal point. (16) The United States spending priorities shifted to favor military spending after World War II when the Cold War standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union consumed our foreign policy. During the Cold War (1948-1991), the United States spent tens of trillions of inflation-adjusted dollars on its military. If we had spent only half that much on the military, we could have funded numerous domestic policy priorities. (17) Military spending goes through cycles of ups and downs, but always at a very high level. The United States spends about the same on its military as the other top twenty countries combined, many of which are U.S. allies. The United States and its allies spend approximately six times more on their armed forces than Russia, China, Sudan, Cuba, Libya, North Korea, Iraq, Syria, and Iran all together. (18)
In 1947 the National Security Act passed, which consolidated the Department of War and the Navy Department into the Department of Defense—notice the rhetorical shift from War to Defense—it’s easier to support large expenditures year after year for “defense” rather than “war.” The Act created the National Security Council to advise the president on foreign affairs and security. The Act also created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was designed to gather intelligence and engage in covert operations around the world. Over the years, the CIA has led or participated in overthrowing foreign leaders and unsuccessfully attempting to overthrow others; the CIA has experimented with mind-altering drugs on Americans and illegally spied on Americans. Later, the United States established the National Security Agency (NSA), which is charged with gathering information from electronic intercepts and satellite imagery.
In his famous 1961 farewell addressPresident Dwight Eisenhower—who spent his career in the military before becoming president—warned against the power of what he called the military-industrial complex. It is worth quoting him at length:
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. (19)
This is no less true today, say critics of the national security state, because of the War on Terror declared by President George W. Bush following the events of September 11, 2001. Spending on the military and other security operations increased, intelligence and law enforcement operations of the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI became more aggressive, and President Bush asserted broad executive authority in the name of national security.
President Obama continued to do so by expanding the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and ramping up drone attacks and raids in neighboring Pakistan. Eric Holder, Obama’s Attorney General, said in 2013 that in some “extraordinary circumstances” his opinion was that the president would be legally allowed to direct a drone strike on American citizens on U.S. soil. Presumably, the permitted circumstances would be if said Americans were about to carry out a terrorist attack. (20) President Trump and a compliant Congress increased military spending by hundreds of billions of dollars per year. (21)
Imperial Presidency
In his classic book, The Imperial PresidencyArthur Schlesinger, Jr., warned that the growth of presidential power—particularly in response to national security concerns—threatened to warp the country’s constitutional fabric. The book was especially timely given the Nixon administration’s abuses, but its theme has continued to resonate to the present. Gene Healy of the Cato Institute condemned William Clinton’s presidency saying that he “has adopted a view of his executive power that is positively Nixonian in its breadth and audacity,” and that “the imperial presidency is as unconstrained and as menacing as it has been at any time since the Vietnam War.” (22) The presidencies of George Bush and Barack Obama have also been condemned from the left and the right for their imperial character, and the president appears in case after case to act outside of—or at the margins of—the rule of law. When such actions are revealed in the media, the administration goes on a public relations blitz justifying its actions as necessary and thereby undercutting the political will of Congress to stand up. Writing in Newsweek, Jonathan Alter feared that because of the Bush years manifesting the imperial presidency, “we are in danger of scrapping our checks and balances—not just for a few years as was done during the Civil War, but for good.” (23) During the Trump administration—with its seizure of money and diverting it to build a wall against Congress’ wishes and his use of his office to attack his political rivals, Attorney General William Barr was such an advocate for the unified executive theory and the imperial presidency that even conservative commentators recoiled at the notion of an unfettered chief executive. (24)
What if . . . ?
Can you articulate a one-paragraph vision for the president’s proper role in the American republic? In other words, if you could define for the country, what would be the presidential role when it comes to enforcing laws passed by Congress and signed by the president? What should and should not the president be doing? What amount of discretion and leeway should she have?
References
1. Jonathan Shaub, “Executive Privilege is Lawless,” The Atlantic. January 20, 2022.
2. Michael C. Dorf, “A Brief History of Executive Privilege, From George Washington Through Dick Cheney,” Findlaw Legal News and Commentary. February 6, 2002.
3. Katrina Mulligan and Aminata Diallo, “Executive Privilege is Far From Absolute,” . October 16, 2019. Jonathan Shaub, “Executive Privilege Should Have No Power When It Comes to Impeachment,” The Atlantic. November 15, 2019. Center for American Progress. October 16, 2019. Jonathan Shaub, “Executive Privilege Should Have No Power When It Comes to Impeachment,” The Atlantic. November 15, 2019. Trump v. Thompson (2022).
4. Quoted in Mark J. Rozell, “Something to Hide: Clinton’s Misuse of Executive Privilege,” PS: Political Science and Politics, 32(3). September, 1999, pp. 550-553.
5. David Willman and Tom Schultz, “Judge Blocks Clinton Use of Executive Privilege,” Los Angeles Times. May 6, 1998.
6. Conor Friedersdorf, “Obama Discovers the Convenience of Executive Privilege,” The Atlantic. June 21, 2012.
7. Adam Kasfeld, “No Tax Return Privilege or Blanket Immunity, DA Tells Trump,” Courthousenews.com. September 23, 2019.
8. The Supreme Court eventually moved to require that enemy combatants have access to lawyers and be covered by parts of the Geneva Convention. The Court mandated in the summer of 2006 that the Congress needed to authorize whatever legal proceedings used in the disposition of the enemy combatants. Congress did so in September of that year, giving further power to the President to define enemy combatants and suspend habeus corpus.
9. Jennifer Van Bergen, “The Unitary Executive: Is the Doctrine Behind the Bush Presidency Consistent with a Democratic State?” Findlaw Legal News and Commentary. January 9, 2006.
10. President’s Statement on Signing of H. R. 2863, the “Department of Defense, Emergency Supplemental Appropriations to Address Hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, and Pandemic Influenza Act, 2006,” as posted on www.whitehouse.gov.
11. Robert Pear, “Legal Group Says Bush Undermines Law by Ignoring Select Parts of Bills,” New York Times. July 24, 2006. Page A12.
12. Charlie Savage, “Obama Disputes Limits on Detainee Transfers Imposed in Defense Bill,” New York Times, January 3, 2013.
13. Scott R. Anderson, “What to Make of Trump’s NDAA Signing Statement,” Lawfare. August 23, 2018.
14. Ian Millhiser, “How Justice Scalia Paved the Way for Trump’s Assault on the Rule of Law,” Vox. February 14, 2014. Savannah Behrmann and Kristine Phillips, “More Than 1,100 Ex-DOJ Employees Call for Attorney General Barr’s Resignation,” USA Today. February 16, 2020.
15. “From James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, 13 May 1798,” Founders Online, National Archives.
16. See James Carroll, House of War. The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power. Houghton-Mifflin, 2006.
17. Scott Reimer, “Butter, Not Guns,” Common Dreams. August 24, 2018. See also the National Priorities Project.
18. John W. Schoen, “Here’s How U. S. Defense Spending Stacks Up Against the Rest of the World,” CNBC. May 2, 2017. Melvin Goodman, “The Great Cost and Myth of U. S. Defense Spending,” Counterpunch. August 30, 2019.
19. Transcript of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell SpeechThe National Archives.
20. Guy Benson, “Holder: In ‘Extraordinary’ Circumstances, the President has the Authority to Order the Killing of Americans on US Soil.” Townhall. March 6, 2013.
21. Robert Reich, “Trump Increased Military Spending by Over \$200 Billion. Here’s How That Money Could be Spent,” Newsweek. June 19, 2018.
22. Gene Healy, Arrogance of Power Reborn: The Imperial Presidency and Foreign Policy in the Clinton Years. Cato Institute Policy Analysis #389.
23. Jonathan Alter, “A Power Outage on Capitol Hill,” Newsweek. January 23, 2006. Page 36.
24. Andrew Napolitano, “The Dangers of an Imperial Presidency,” Newsmax. December 27, 2019. Benjamin Parker, “William Barr’s Dangerous Affection for the Imperial Presidency,” The Bulwark. April 23, 2019.
Media Attributions
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“No point is of more importance than that the right of impeachment should be continued. Shall any man be above Justice? Above all shall that man be above it, who can commit the most extensive injustice? . . . Shall the man who has practiced corruption & by that means procured his appointment [election] in the first instance, be suffered to escape punishment, by repeating his guilt?”
–George Mason (1)
Before we begin talking about the process of impeaching and removing a sitting president, please keep in mind that other executive and judicial branch officials can be impeached and removed in a similar fashion. Executive branch officials who get into trouble tend to resign, or the president removes them from office, which has led to very few of them being impeached. (2) In 1804, the House impeached sitting Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, but he survived the trial in the Senate. In 1969, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas resigned under threat of impeachment for financial improprieties. Eight federal judges have been impeached and removed from office. An additional three federal judges have been impeached and resigned before they completed their Senate trials. The charges against these judges ranged from sexual assault to bribery and perjury. (3) But it is the prospect of a president being impeached and removed that is the most interesting and historically significant possibility that we will examine here. The founders were aware that neither ancient Grecian or Roman societies had figured out how to peacefully remove a chief executive who was abusing their office—often assassination or uprisings were the only remedy. Thus far, no American president has been impeached by the House and removed by the Senate.
Impeachment Power
The founders were very familiar with impeachment in British and Colonial American history. Beginning in 1376, the House of Commons “prosecuted powerful offenders before the House of Lords.” (4) Frequently, this process—called impeachment, a term with which American colonists were very familiar—involved executive ministers and was a way for Parliament members to exert influence over the Crown by proxy. Even though the British monarch could not be impeached, the House of Commons proclaimed that impeachment was a principal instrument to hold royal power accountable. In the American colonies—particularly after 1755 and then intensifying in the 1770s—colonial assemblies “came to see impeachment as the mechanism by which the people could begin the process of ousting official wrongdoers, understood as those who betrayed republican principles, above all by abusing their authority through corruption or misusing power.” (5) After independence, several states put impeachment provisions in their state constitutions.
The founders created an impeachment provision in the U.S. Constitution and were anxious that it be applied to any future president who had, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, “rendered himself obnoxious” to the Constitutional order and the rule of law. The president, vice president, and other civil U.S. officers can be removed from office by Congress if they are found guilty of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” While the definitions of treason and bribery are clear, the phrase “other high crimes and misdemeanors” sometimes confuses people. However, the founders were quite clear about what they meant. George Mason originally proposed that the House be able to impeach in cases of treason, bribery, or “maladministration,” but that was deemed to be too broad a term. Instead, they chose the phrase “or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” which had precedent in English law going back to 1642. What did they mean by that odd phrase? They were particularly concerned about presidents who fraudulently achieved office, who might be under the influence of—or conspire with—foreign powers, who improperly enriched themselves, who undermined the rule of law, or who became incapacitated. (6) As put by constitutional scholars Lawrence Tribe and Joshua Matz, “In creating the impeachment power, the Framers worried most of all about election fraud, bribery, traitorous acts, and foreign intrusion. Willful conspiracy with a hostile foreign power to influence the outcome of a presidential election directly evokes all of these concerns.” (7) It is clear that the president’s offenses need not be law violations and could instead be technically legal assaults against the common good or the public trust. For example, Alan Hirsch argues that it is perfectly legal for a president to pardon all members of his own party for any federal offenses, but such action would be reasonable grounds to impeach and remove that president. (8)
The impeachment process is a fairly straightforward one, albeit one full of political dangers for everyone involved. At its most basic, constitutionally removing a president is a two-step process: The House impeaches and the Senate holds a trial to either remove the president or allow them to stay in office. Let’s suppose the president is accused of committing a criminal act, abusing their office, or undermining the rule of law. The impeachment process begins in the House of Representatives, where one or more members introduces a bill to impeach. This bill will be referred to the House Judiciary Committee, which will hold hearings and vote whether to report out articles of impeachment to the full House. Other relevant House committees may hold hearings as well. Articles of impeachment are essentially the specific charges against the president. The full House debates the articles of impeachment and votes; a successful majority vote on one of the charges means that the president has been impeached. Then the process moves to the Senate, where the president is put on trial and the senators determine whether the president is “guilty” of the offenses spelled out in the articles of impeachment. Members of the House Judiciary Committee come over to the Senate to present the case against the president, while the president’s lawyers mount a defense. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court comes into the Senate to preside over the trial. The Constitution requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate to convict and remove the president.
Congress has never gone through the whole process and successfully removed a sitting president. However, there have been four notable cases in American history that you should know:
Andrew Johnson
In the 1864 presidential election, Republican Abraham Lincoln chose Tennessean and Democrat Andrew Johnson as his running mate in an effort to reach out to Democrats who supported the Union’s war effort. The Lincoln-Johnson ticket won. John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln on April 14, 1865, and Lincoln died the next morning. Andrew Johnson became president at a time when members of the Republican Party’s radical wing were adamant that the defeated Southern states be “reconstructed” into loyal Union members and that African Americans be guaranteed political rights and full participation. Johnson was more inclined to be lenient with the former Confederate states, which included his home state of Tennessee. Indeed, he did not believe that Blacks were capable of democratic governance and said in 1865 that “White men alone must manage the South.” (9) He vetoed the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Freedmen’s Bureau bill, which was designed to enlarge and solidify the powers of the already existing Freedmen’s Bureau to protect the civil rights and liberties of newly freed slaves and refugees. This angered the Radical Republicans, and Congress overrode his vetoes. Johnson also opposed passing the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted former slaves citizenship. It passed anyway.
To limit Johnson’s power, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act in 1867which said that the president could not remove the holders of any appointed positions unless the Senate concurred. When Johnson removed Secretary of War Edwin Stanton without the Senate’s approval and replaced him with Lorenzo Thomas, the House voted to impeach him for the clear violation of the Tenure of Office Act. They also impeached him for very derogatory statements he made about Congress, specifically that he “did attempt to bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach to the Congress of the United States.” That’s not a crime, although they impeached him for it anyway. After a three-month trial in 1868, President Johnson’s opponents came one vote short of a two-thirds majority to remove him from office. He served out the remainder of his term. Interestingly, the Tenure of Office Act was repealed in 1887, and then the Supreme Court definitively ruled in Meyers v. United States (1926) that the president does not need Senate approval to fire executive branch officials.
Richard Nixon
On June 17, 1972, agents of President Richard Nixon’s Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CREEP) were caught breaking into the Democratic Headquarters in the Watergate office and residential complex. Nixon immediately tried to cover up the incident by ordering hush money payments and telling the Federal Bureau of Investigation to not look into it. The cover-up ultimately did not work, and the revelations that followed constituted a shock to the American public that reverberated for decades. Nixon did everything he could to forestall the inevitable. In the famous Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Archibald Cox, who was serving as the independent special prosecutor in the case. Richardson resigned rather than carry out the order. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus also refused to do it and resigned instead. Then Nixon asked Solicitor General Robert Bork to fire Cox, and Bork complied.
The scandal that started with the Watergate break-in expanded to reveal shocking corruption in the Nixon administration. Nixon and his subordinates were responsible for, among other things, extorting money from rich individuals and corporations; spying on American citizens because they disagreed with the president’s policies; trying to use the Internal Revenue Service to destroy “enemies” of the president; selling government favors in exchange for campaign contributions; seriously contemplating the murder of a journalist; and breaking into psychiatrists’ offices looking for dirt on opponents. (10)
Nixon had a taping system in the White House that recorded his conversations with everyone who came into his office. Nixon refused to turn over the tapes in the face of a congressional subpoena until forced by a unanimous Supreme Court decision. The case, The United States v. Nixon (1974), established that while the president had the right to confidentially record conversations with his advisors, executive privilege did not extend to refusing to turn over records pertinent to a criminal proceeding. Apparently, Nixon contemplated refusing to turn over the tapes and pardoning the burglers and those in his administration who had already been convicted and indicted, but in the end decided to comply with the Supreme Court’s order. (11) The tapes revealed the cover-up’s “smoking gun”: Nixon suggested to his chief of staff that the FBI be told by the CIA to stay out of the Watergate investigation because it dealt with national security issues—an assertion that was not true and that clearly indicated obstruction of justice. Nixon resigned the presidency on August 9, 1974, just before the full House had a chance to vote on accepting three articles of impeachment. By resigning before he was actually impeached by the House, Nixon was then eligible to be pardoned by Gerald Ford, who assumed the presidency after Nixon’s resignation.
Bill Clinton
The House of Representatives voted along party lines in 1998 to impeach President Bill Clinton in what is surely the most sensational sexual, political scandal ever to hit the American presidency. The complicated story can be distilled as follows: While he was still governor of Arkansas, Clinton allegedly dropped his pants and propositioned an Arkansas state employee named Paula Jones in a Little Rock hotel. With support from conservatives, including lawyer Kenneth Starr, Jones pursued a sexual harassment lawsuit against now President Clinton. Kenneth Starr later became the independent counsel charged with investigating a variety of non-sexual allegations against Clinton and his wife. Starr eventually failed to find enough evidence that the Clinton’s ever did anything impeachable in their finances or in running the White House.
However, during depositions in the Paula Jones case designed to demonstrate Clinton’s pattern of sexual harassment, the president was asked whether he had had “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern. She was asked a similar question. Clinton and Miss Lewinsky both said in their depositions that they had not had sexual relations, when in fact they had. Independent Counsel Starr heard about this from Paula Jones’ lawyers and went to Attorney General Janet Reno to get his investigative mandate extended to cover this salacious affair. The Attorney General agreed to grant Starr’s request, although Starr allegedly hid from Reno the fact that he had an obvious conflict of interest in this case. (12) Both Clinton and Lewinsky were brought before Starr’s grand jury to testify, and they again stated that they did not have sexual relations. In the meantime, the president’s secretary recovered gifts Clinton had given Lewinsky, and the president repeated his lies to his associates, knowing that they would restate them in their testimony before the grand jury. The Independent Counsel’s report indicated that Clinton and Lewinsky had ten “sexual encounters” short of actual intercourse. (13)
The House passed two articles of impeachment against Clinton that centered on his perjury under oath and his obstruction of justice by encouraging others to perjure and conceal evidence. The case’s facts were not really in dispute: Clinton did what the House alleged. When the impeachment case reached the Senate, Clinton survived by a comfortable margin, with only fifty of the required sixty-seven senators voting to convict. Very few people outside of the president’s staunchest political allies argued that Clinton’s testimony did not constitute perjury—he clearly gave false statements under oath in a federal caseThe debate in the Clinton impeachment revolved around two issues: 1) Did lying under oath in court about an embarrassing extramarital affair constitute a serious enough offense to remove the president? and 2) How much damage did the Clinton scandal—with its salacious details—do to the presidency’s moral authority? In the end, the broad national consensus was that Republican efforts to impeach and remove Clinton amounted to an overly moralistic and politically opportunistic overreaction to a scandal that in no way threatened the Constitutional order.
Donald Trump
In hindsight, it should not have surprised anyone that Donald Trump became the third president to be impeached by the House of Representatives. As a businessman who inherited wealth from a father who flouted the law, Trump’s conduct before taking up his position in the White House allegedly included tax fraud, running a fraudulent foundation, running a fraudulent university, bilking subcontractors, posing as a publicist and praising himself to a reporter, and engaging in sexual harassment and assault. (14) During the 2016 campaign, Trump flouted post-Nixon custom and refused to release his tax returns. He also paid off at least two women to keep their adulterous sex stories out of the news during the campaign.
Once in office, President Trump engaged in numerous potentially impeachable offenses that included violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause by accepting money from foreign governments; obstructing justice by firing FBI Director James Comey when he opened up an investigation into Russian ties to the Trump campaign; obstructing justice with respect to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russian ties to the Trump campaign investigation; violating his duty to see that laws are executed by advocating violence perpetrated by various supporters and law enforcement personnel; abusing his pardon power in the cases of Joe Arpaio and the pardons for war crimes, thereby undermining the rule of law; committing crimes against humanity for separating children from their parents at the U.S. border, placing them in inhumane conditions and having no plan to reunite them when their cases were adjudicated; and violating campaign finance laws while he was president by reimbursing his personal lawyer Michael Cohen and by discussing sexual-affair hush money payments in the Oval Office. (15) Trump was not impeached for any of those possible offenses.
In late 2019, the House of Representatives impeached President Trump on a party-line vote because a whistle-blower came forward with a claim: Trump’s months-long conspiracy to use his office and taxpayer resources for his personal political benefit to get Ukraine to announce that it sought to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Trump compounded his troubles by refusing to release any relevant documents—except a summary of two calls between Trump and the Ukrainian president—or to allow any administration personnel to testify to the House Intelligence Committee about the matter. Several people involved in or knowledgeable of the conspiracy came forward and testified anyway, but principals including the president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget Mick Mulvaney, former National Security Advisor John Bolton, Vice President Michael Pence, Attorney General William Barr, and several other staff followed Trump’s direction and refused to come forward during the House investigation.
Ultimately, the House passed two articles of impeachment:
• Abuse of power by soliciting foreign interference in the 2020 election and compromising the national security of the United States, and
• Obstruction of Congress by the categorical and indiscriminate defiance of lawful Congressional subpoenas for information and testimony in an impeachment investigation.
Donald Trump’s Senate trial was a true low point in American political history. Republican senators blocked all attempts to request relevant documents and interview eyewitnesses to Trump’s alleged abuse of power. It was the first impeachment trial that heard from no witnesses and introduced no documents into the record. As far as the Republican senators were concerned, “facts and evidence—reality—were viewed as grave threats, which is why they had to be buried.” (16) Many aspects of the trial lent a kangaroo court character to the proceedings. Trump’s defense team didn’t attempt to present counter evidence—instead, they sought to rationalize the president’s actions—and Republican senators acknowledged that the president did what was alleged in the articles of impeachment. (17) One Republican senator attempted to get Chief Justice John Roberts to reveal the name of the whistleblower, but Roberts refused. While the trial was going on, new information came out in the media from one participant in the scheme—Lev Parnas—and one opponent of it—National Security Advisor John Bolton—who tried to shut it down because he knew it was illegal, but such evidence was not allowed to be heard in the trial. The Government Accountability Office confirmed during the trial that the president’s actions violated the Impoundment Control Act. (18) During the trial, Bolton’s upcoming book manuscript alleged that Pat Cipollone, the White House Counsel and part of Trump’s legal team, participated in the criminal conspiracy. (19) In the end, all Republicans except for Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) voted “not guilty” on both articles of impeachment, and all Democrats voted “guilty” on both articles of impeachment—a result that fell far short of the two-thirds vote needed to remove Trump from office. Senator Romney voted “yes” on the abuse of power charge and “no” on the obstruction of Congress charge.
Two legacies of Trump’s first impeachment are likely to have long-term consequences. The first centers on the Trump administration getting away with blanket obstruction of a congressional inquiry. Republican senators seemed not to care about Congress’ institutional need to have Trump or any future president honor its subpoenas for documents and testimony. An executive whose actions cannot be investigated by Congress and who has a compliant Justice Department is more like an all-powerful monarch than an American president. That’s a frightening precedent for the Senate to set. The second concerns an especially pernicious legal argument put forward by Trump’s defense. Alan Dershowitz, one of Trump’s lawyers, said on the floor of the Senate that “Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest. If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.” This was an astounding argument that lacked any support in the scholarly or judicial record. (20) According to this line of thinking, a president could exercise his legal authority to declassify national security secrets for another country in exchange for that country’s help with his re-election. It is a way of thinking that subsumes the national interest of the United States underneath the personal political interest of the president.
Donald Trump’s Second Impeachment
At the close of President Trump’s first impeachment trial, Representative Adam Schiff made the following prophetic warning to the Senate: “He has not changed. He will not change. A man without character or ethical compass will never find his way. He has done it before and he will do it again. What are the odds if he is left in office that he will continue to try to cheat? I will tell you: 100%. He will continue to try to cheat in the election until he succeeds. Then what shall you say?” (21) Less than one year later, the U.S. House of Representatives was forced to impeach Trump for “incitement of insurrection,” which “followed his prior efforts to subvert and obstruct the certification of the results of the 2020 Presidential election.” (22)
The precipitating event for this second impeachment of Trump was the January 6, 2021 insurrection in which Trump supporters and allied domestic terrorists invaded the U.S. Capitol while Congress and the Vice President were gathered to carry out their Constitutional duty to certify the official Electoral College vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris—the Democratic ticket that won the popular vote by 7 million votes and the Electoral College vote by 306 to 232. The insurrectionists overwhelmed the outnumbered police forces that were protecting the Capitol and beat one of those police officers to death and injured at least 70 others. (23) They also appeared to be intent on capturing and possibly assassinating members of Congress and the Vice President. The rioters damaged parts of the building, defecated in its public spaces, and stole laptops and other material from Congressional offices. The January 6 insurrection marked the first violent presidential transition of power since the American Civil War that resulted from the secession of Southern states following the election of Abraham Lincoln.
Normally, politicians are not held accountable for the rash acts of their supporters. Trump, however, was not a normal politician and bore direct responsibility for this outrage. Consider the following sequence:
• Trump endorsed violence throughout his political life and often excused or ignored violence committed by his supporters. (24) He stirred up people in Michigan to “liberate” their state from duly elected officials, and then watched passively as armed citizens disrupted the state legislature. Nor did he issue a condemnation when a group of Michiganders were caught plotting to kidnap the state’s governor. In fact, he tweeted that the governor had done a “terrible job” and that she insufficiently thanked him for his non-existent role in catching the domestic terrorists. (25) When he discovered that some of his followers harassed a Biden campaign bus while it was traveling on an interstate highway in Texas, Trump tweeted “I love Texas!” (26) During a debate, when pressed about his support from domestic terrorist groups like the Proud Boys, Trump told groups like them to “stand back and stand by.” Members of those groups later participated in the January 6 insurrection.
• Trump was the first American president to declare before an election (twice, in fact, for 2016 and 2020) that he would not accept the results unless he won. If he didn’t win, that would be evidence in his mind—and in the minds of many of his supporters—that the process was rigged. (27)
• Months before the 2020 election, Trump claimed without evidence that it was going to be fraudulent and that mail-in ballots in particular were problematic. In fact, the 2020 election was the cleanest and most secure in modern American history. This fact was upheld by cyber-security analysts as well as (predominantly Republican) state and local officials and (predominantly Republican appointed) state and federal judges. (28)
• After the election, Trump and his associates pressured state and local officials in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia to find ways to either decertify the election results or change those results. In the case of Georgia, Trump told the Georgia Secretary of State, “Look, all I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 votes.” Trump had lost the popular vote in that state by 11,779 votes, so if the Secretary of State could actually “find” 11,779 + 1 extra Trump votes in that state, all of Georgia’s electors would have gone to Trump. (29)
• Long after the election had been called for Biden and Harris by all major news outlets including Fox News, Trump and his associates promulgated The Big Lie that he had won a “landslide” victory that the Democrats “stole” from him. He repeated The Big Lie and told his followers to come to Washington on January 6 to “fight like hell” and “fight to the death” or “you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He promised it would be “wild.” During the January 6 rally–when Trump already knew that attendees were armed and could not make it through the metal detectors surrounding his podium–he directed the crowd toward the Capitol building, saying they needed to “fight much harder,” “stop the steal,” and “take back our country.” (30) He also said that he would join the marchers, attempted to do so, but was not allowed to by his Secret Service detail.
• After the melee began on the Capitol steps, after the battering of the Capitol police, after the forced suspension of Congressional work, and after knowing that the chants of “hang Mike Pence” by the insurrectionists forced the Vice President’s security detail to rush him from the building, President Trump did not tweet to his followers to stop the violence. Instead, he tweeted “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” Nor did he proactively call out the D.C. National Guard, which reports to the president. (31)
During the Senate trial, Trump’s lawyers largely did not dispute the facts of the case but made two substantial arguments and several minor ones. We’ll focus on the substantial ones. (32) Their first argument was that it was unconstitutional for the Senate to try Trump now that he was out of office, since the point of impeachment and trial is to remove the offender from office. In fact, the Constitution provides for an additional penalty upon conviction after an impeachment: “disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.” The argument that an impeachment trial cannot proceed once the alleged offender has left office would, if accepted, give presidents a free pass to violate the public trust in their final months in office. In fact, constitutional scholars overwhelmingly rejected Trump’s lawyers’ argument and argued that the Founders wanted the Senate to hold a trial in exactly these circumstances. (33)
The second argument put forward by Trump’s lawyers was that the president’s words and actions were protected by the First Amendment’s freedom of speech. They relied on Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), in which the Supreme Court said Clarence Brandenburg could not be prosecuted for incitement to riot for his inflammatory speech given at a Ku Klux Klan rally. Again, constitutional scholars roundly rejected this defense for a sitting president stoking up his followers with lies, telling them they must act outside the law, and aiming them at the Congress and his own vice president. On the face of it, Trump’s lawyers made an important point: a president can tell Blacks to “go back to Africa” (akin to one of Brandenburg’s statements), or burn a flag at a rally, or deny the Holocaust while marching past a synagogue. Despicable as they are, all of these are technically protected forms of political speech, but that does not prevent Congress from impeaching and removing from office such a president for gross dereliction of duty, abuse of his office, and failure to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. The First Amendment, in other words, might protect Trump in any criminal or civil cases he faced as a result of his actions, but they do not restrain Congress when it comes to impeachment. (34) Remember, an impeachment article need not strictly be a violation of federal law.
Despite Trump’s weak defense in the Senate trial, he was quickly acquitted. It was the most bipartisan vote in presidential impeachment history, with seven Republican senators voting to convict. Still, the 57-43 majority vote was insufficient to meet the 2/3 threshold for conviction. In a head-scratching coda to the trial, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who voted to acquit the president, also made this clear statement: “Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the Vice President. They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth — because he was angry he’d lost an election. Former President Trump’s actions preceding the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty.” (35)
In terms of its overall impact for an attenuated democracy like ours, Trump’s acquittal on his second impeachment confirmed the lessons of his first acquittal and served as yet another warning that politicians and institutions lose all credibility when they don’t stand up to tyranny. It’s interesting to step outside the realm of partisan politics and listen to the voices of principled conservatives on this one. Charles Sykes, a commentator with impeccable conservative credentials, argued that under Trump’s leadership the Republican party had shown a “willingness to accept—or at least ignore—lies, racism, and xenophobia. But now [following the impeachment vote] it is a party that is also willing to acquiesce to sedition, extremism, and anti-democratic authoritarianism.” (36) Focusing his attention on the institutional failure of the Senate, conservative writer Jim Swift said the majority of its Republicans let the country down through sheer “partisan cowardice”: “Donald Trump incited an insurrection; the case against him was not refuted; and history will look back upon his acquittal with confusion and shame.” (37)
References
1. As recorded in James Madison’s notes on July 20, 1787. Yale Law School’s Avalon Project.
2. Keith Whittington, “The Power to Impeach Executive Officers,” Lawfare. August 4, 2017.
3. Elizabeth Nix, “Has a U.S. Supreme Court justice ever been impeached?” History.com. December 2, 2016.
4. Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz, To End a Presidency. The Power of Impeachment. New York: Basic Books, 2018. Page 2. The Benjamin Franklin quote comes from page 1.
5. Cass R. Sunstein, Impeachment. A Citizen’s Guide. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2017. Page 39.
6. Note that the 25th Amendment later set up a formal process outside of impeachment to remove a president who is incapacitated.
7. Tribe and Matz, To End a Presidency. Page 59.
8. Alan Hirsch, Impeaching the President: Past, Present, and Future. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2018. Page 23.
9. Jon Meacham, “Andrew Johnson,” in Jeffrey Engel, Jon Meacham, Timothy Naftali, and Peter Baker, Impeachment. An American History. New York: Modern Library, 2018. Page 49.
10. Jerry Zeifman, Without Honor: Crimes of Camelot and the Impeachment of Richard Nixon. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1996. Fred Emery, Watergate: The Corruption of American Politics and the Fall of Richard Nixon. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
11. Timothy Naftali, “Richard Nixon,” in Jeffrey Engel, Jon Meacham, Timothy Naftali, and Peter Baker, Impeachment. An American History. New York: Modern Library, 2018. Pages 144-145.
12. Eric Lichtblau and Allan C. Miller, “House Democrats Push for an Investigation of Starr’s Office,” Los Angeles Times. February 11, 1999.
13. Washington Post, The Starr Report: The Findings of Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr on President Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky Affair. Public Affairs Reports, 1998.
14. David Cay Johnston, The Making of Donald Trump. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2017. Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, Trump Revealed. The Definitive Biography of the 45thPresident. New York: Scribner, 2017. Steve Reilly, “Hundreds Allege Donald Trump Doesn’t Pay His Bills,” USA Today. June 9, 2016.
15. Ron Fein, John Bonifaz, and Ben Clementz, The Legal Case for a Congressional Investigation on Whether to Impeach President Donald J. TrumpFree Speech for People. December 6, 2017. Trump’s 10 Impeachable OffensesNeed to Impeach.
16. Peter Wehner, “The Downfall of the Republican Party,” The Atlantic. February 2, 2019.
17. Christal Hayes, “’He Shouldn’t Have Done It.’ GOP Senator Who Scolded Trump on Ukraine Explains Why He Backs Acquittal.” USA Today. February 1, 2020. Chris Cillizza, “Marco Rubio’s Mind-Blowing Explanation of His Impeachment Vote,” CNN. February 1, 2020.
18. Dareh Gregorian, ”Trump Administration Violated the Law by Withholding Ukraine Aid, Government Accountability Office Says,” CBS News. January 16, 2020.
19. Travis Gettys, “’Holy Crap!’ Bolton ‘Directly Implicated’ Pat Cipollone as a ‘Fact Witness’ in Trump Impeachment Trial,” Rawstory. January 31, 2020.
20. Dershowitz quoted by Allan Lichtman in “What Will the History Books Say About This Impeachment?” Politico. February 5, 2020.
21. Adam Schiff quoted in Tom McCarthy, “Trump Impeachment Trial: Democrats Warn that Trump ‘Will Do It Again’ if Acquitted,” The Guardian. February 3, 2020.
22. Res. 24 of the 117th Congress. January 13, 2021.
23. Jacob Fenston, “’January 6 Forever Changed This Department,’ Capitol Police Chief Says, One Month After Attack,” DCist.com. February 6, 2021.
24. Fabiola Cineas, “Donald Trump is the Accelerant,” Vox. January 29, 2021.
25. Craig Mauger, “President Trump Tweets on Kidnap Plot, Criticizes Gov. Whitmer,” The Detroit News. October 8, 2020.
26. Kate McGee and Jeremy Schwartz, “President Trump Tweets I LOVE TEXAS! Along With Video of Trucks Surrounding Biden Bus,” CBSAustin. November 1, 2020.
27. Jeremy Diamond, “Donald Trump: ‘I Will Totally Accept’ Election Results ‘If I Win,’” CNN. October 20, 2016. Sanya Mansoor, “’I Have to See.’ President Trump Refuses to Say If He Will Accept the 2020 Election Results,” Time. July 19, 2020.
28. No author, “It’s Official: The Election Was Secure,” The Brennan Center for Justice. December 11, 2020.
29. Jamie Raskin, et al., Trial Memorandum of the U.S. House of Representatives in the Impeachment Trial of Donald J. Trump. February 2, 2021.
30. Josh Wingrove and Margaret Newkirk, “Trump Urged Georgia Officials to Find Votes, Flip State to Him,” Bloomberg. January 3, 2021. Anita Kumar and Gabby Orr, “Inside Trump’s Pressure Campaign to Overturn the Election,” Politico. December 21, 2020.
31. Robert Farley, “Timeline of National Guard Deployment to Capitol,” FactCheck.org. January 13, 2021.
32. Dana Farrington, “Trump’s Impeachment Defense Brief,” NPR. February 8, 2021.
33. Multi-authored public statement, Constitutional Law Scholars on Impeaching Former Officers. January 21, 2021. Jed Handelsman Shugerman, “Impeach an Ex-President? The Founders Were Clear: That’s How They Wanted It,” Politico. February 11, 2021. Stephen Vladeck, “Why Trump Can Be Convicted Even as an Ex-President,” New York Times. January 14, 2021. Keith Whittington, “Can a Former President Be Impeached and Convicted?” Lawfare. January 15, 2021.
34. Peter Keisler and Richard D. Bernstein, “Freedom of Speech Doesn’t Mean What Trump’s Lawyers Want it to Mean,” The Atlantic. February 8, 2021. Ian Millhiser, “Trump’s False Claim That Impeachment Violates the First Amendment, Explained,” Vox. February 12, 2021.
35. No author, “Read McConnell’s Remarks on the Senate Floor Following Trump’s Acquittal,” CNN. February 13, 2021.
36. Charlie Sykes, “Trump’s Party, But Worse: Acquitted But Not Exonerated,” The Bulwark. February 15, 2021.
37. Jim Swift, “Trump’s Acquittal is an Ignominious Failure,” The Bulwark. February 13, 2021. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/04%3A_The_Presidency/4.06%3A_Chapter_30-_Impeachment_and_Removal_of_the_President.txt |
“Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive, that, in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution.”
–Alexander Hamilton (1)
“The Founders created the Supreme Court as a critical, presidentially appointed-for-life check on the popular will.”
–Paul Street (2)
The Supreme Court—Unbiased Umpire or Crooked Referee?
In the quotes above, Alexander Hamilton and Paul Street come to dramatically different conclusions about the federal judiciary’s power and impact. In Federalist #78, Hamilton argued that the legislative branch was powerful because it “commands the purse,” meaning that it taxes and spends. He also wrote that the legislative passes laws whereby it “prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated.” The executive branch enforces law, which Hamilton metaphorically describes as “hold[ing] the sword of the community.” The judicial branch, on the other hand, was to be less feared because it “has no influence over either the sword or the purse,” but merely has judgment. Street would say that Hamilton vastly underestimated the federal judiciary’s power—especially the Supreme Court—to use the Constitution to recognize rights for some and deny them to others. Moreover, Hamilton seems to be saying that the Court is just like an unbiased baseball umpire who calls balls and strikes, while Street would say that the Court acts like a biased basketball referee who, by calling fouls, unfairly decides who wins the game.
Given the Supreme Court’s conservative bias (see chapter 35), one would think that only progressives would complain that the Supreme Court is an all-powerful, crooked referee. However, conservatives have at times also bitterly resented particular Court decisions. Indeed, complaining about Supreme Court decisions has long been a national pastime for both conservatives and progressives alike. Still, things feel differently now. With frequent gridlock between Congress and the President and strong popular support for the kinds of progressive economic and social policies enjoyed by other wealthy democracies but not in the United States, Supreme Court has positioned itself as the unelected arbiter of rights, privileges, immunities, and political success or failure. The conservative constitutional scholar Kimberly Wehle best summarized the situation: “By its own maneuvering, the modern Supreme Court has made itself the most powerful branch of government. Superior to Congress. Superior to the president. Superior to the states. Superior to precedent, procedure, and norms. In effect, superior to the people.” (3)
What are we to make of these different interpretations of the Supreme Court’s power and political role? Before we explore that question, let’s set some context by discussing the Court’s purpose and establishing some basics about how it operates.
Purpose of the Supreme Court
The United States strives to be a country governed by the rule of law, and this goal, ultimately, requires an arbiter who can review legal decisions as objectively as is humanly possible. As this arbiter, the Supreme Court serves two purposes. One is to serve as the final court of appeal for lower courts—there is no appeal if someone loses in the Supreme Court. The second function is to exercise judicial review, which refers to examining the actions of Congress, the executive branch, and the states to determine whether or not they are constitutional. But early in our government’s history, there was some controversy about judicial review. While the supremacy clause implies that the Supreme Court can strike down state actions, the Constitution never explicitly stated whether congressional and executive branch actions could be ruled unconstitutional as well. This matter was settled by Marbury v. Madison (1803), wherein for the first time, the Supreme Court voided a congressional law. (4)
Marbury v. Madison (1803) is an important case that you should know because of its role in establishing judicial review. The 1800 presidential election was a particularly important one in American history, because it marked our first peaceful power shift when Democratic-Republican candidate Thomas Jefferson defeated the incumbent Federalist, President John Adams. With Jefferson’s win, the Federalists also lost their congressional majority. In those days, the new administration started the March after the election, instead of January after the election, as they do now. During the four lame-duck months between November and March, the Federalists, who were still in charge of Congress, passed a Judiciary Act that President Adams signed into law in February 1801. The Judiciary Act created twenty-six new federal district and circuit court judgeships. The Adams administration then rushed to name Federalists to all those new positions, and the Federalist Senate rushed to confirm them all. Of course, the Democratic-Republicans decried the Federalist attempt to pack the federal courts with “midnight judges” of the Federalist persuasion. Remarkably, Secretary of State John Marshall failed to deliver the official commissions to all the judges before Jefferson was sworn in as president on March 4, 1801. Jefferson ordered his new Secretary of State, James Madison, to deliver only some of the commissions that were still on Marshall’s desk.
One of the undelivered judgeship commissions was addressed to William Marbury, who filed suit straight in the Supreme Court and asked it to issue a writ of mandamus—basically an order to Secretary of State Madison to deliver the commission so he could take his place as a federal judge. It took two years before the Supreme Court took the case, and guess what? The same John Marshall, who had failed to deliver the commissions, had been appointed by President Adams to be Supreme Court Chief Justice! It would appear that Marbury had a good case—he was nominated by Adams and confirmed by the Senate. His judicial commission was properly signed by the Secretary of State—it just wasn’t delivered. Writs of mandamus were well established in English common law, allowing courts to order government officials to do their jobs. Moreover, section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 specifically gave the Supreme Court the ability to issue such writs. However, the last thing the Democratic-Republicans wanted was to have the federal courts packed with additional Federalist judges. Marshall was in a jam. If he ruled in Marbury’s favor, he risked having the Jefferson administration ignore the ruling, thereby permanently weakening the Supreme Court.
To get out of his jam, Marshall resorted to legalistic sleight-of-hand. Article III of the Constitution gave the Supreme Court original jurisdiction (more about this in the next section of the text) over a limited set of circumstances, and issuing writs of mandamus wasn’t on that list. This would mean that Marbury made a mistake bringing his case straight to the Supreme Court instead of appealing from a lower court. Thus, Marshall said that due to this legal technicality, he couldn’t help Marbury. But Marshall went further and declared that section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 violated the Constitution and therefore was void. This was exactly the remedy the Democratic-Republicans wanted, so they went along with Marshall in exerting Supreme Court power to strike down congressional legislation that had been passed and signed into law by the president. Marshall, a Federalist, thought the decision would set the Court up to be a check on future Democratic-Republican policies. In his majority opinion, Marshall wrote that “it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is,” and that arguments that “courts must close their eyes on the Constitution, and see only the law would subvert the very foundation of all written constitutions.” Marbury v. Madison (1803) is considered one of the most important Supreme Court cases because since it was decided, no one has seriously questioned the Court’s power of judicial review. (5)
The Supreme Court’s power stems from the way our legal system is structured. Even though the Supreme Court decides relatively few cases per year, those decisions carry weight due to the principle of stare decisis, which literally means “to stand by that which is decided.” Courts—particularly those lower than the Supreme Court—must make decisions that are consistent with past decisions on similar cases. Garrett Epps, University of Baltimore constitutional law professor, very aptly described stare decisis this way: “cases, once decided, are not to be overturned simply because new judges come on the Court, or new parties win elections, or newly tenured law professors think they were wrong; the radical step of voiding precedent is saved for cases that have been proven unworkable or unjust in the years since they were decided.” (6) The pressure of stare decisis is exerted downward from the Supreme Court to lower courts. In other words, when the Supreme Court makes a definitive ruling on a matter of law, that decision sets a precedent for other courts to follow in subsequent cases.
Two caveats apply to the power of precedent in lower court decisions: 1) The case at hand must be similar enough to the one that set the precedent. 2) A later Supreme Court can always decide to change precedent by overturning a previous Supreme Court’s decision. Sometimes, it takes decades for the Court’s membership or societal changes to allow it to overturn precedent, and other times it happens fairly quickly. Here’s a good example of a midrange precedent change: In Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), the Court upheld a Georgia law that banned oral and anal sex between consenting adults. Then, only seventeen years later, the Court decided Lawrence v. Texas (2003), reversing its precedent set previously in Bowers. In addition, when the Court decided Lawrence, it struck down a similar Texas law that specifically targeted same-sex partners. A future Court, if given the right case and a sufficiently conservative membership, could decide to overturn Lawrence and take the country back to the days when the right to privacy did not include consensual sexual acts between same sex or heterosexual partners. Of course, such a decision would have tremendous ramifications for all sorts of other matters of law. The Supreme Court rarely overturns its own precedents. David Schultz, a professor Political Science at Hamline University, has done the research and found that in the history of the Court, “it has only overturned its own constitutional precedents 145 times—this is barely one-half of one-percent of all its decisions.” (7) One of the most important recent examples of the Supreme Court overturning precedent occurred in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) case, where the Court stripped from women the Constitutional right to choose to terminate a pregnancy as articulated in the Roe v. Wade decision from 1973.
Operation of the Supreme Court
Most Supreme Court cases come on appeal, but the Court is under no obligation to hear all appealed cases. In fact, the Court refuses to hear the vast majority of the thousands of appeals that it receives. What happens then? The next lower court’s decision stands. For example, widower Walter Daniel, whose wife died while giving birth in a military hospital, tried to get the Supreme Court to carve out an exception to Feres v. United States (1950). In this precedent-setting case, the Court said that military personnel cannot sue the United States “for injuries to members of the armed forces arising from activities incident to military service.” Daniel argued that even though his wife was in the military, her labor and delivery were far removed from the battlefield or even her position’s duties, and thus his wife’s case ought not to be covered by Feres. Daniels wanted to sue for malpractice damages, holding the negligent military hospital responsible for his wife’s death. Daniel lost in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which followed the Feres precedent, and the Supreme Court refused to take the case. Therefore, Walter Daniel was left with the Ninth Circuit’s decision against him. (8)
The most common way to appeal to the Supreme Court is to petition for a writ of certiorari, which is a formal request to review a lower court’s decision. Such petitions are governed by an informal rule of four, whereby four or more justices must agree to take the case. If the rule of four condition is met, then the Supreme Court issues a writ of certiorari—an order to the lower court to send up the case’s records and an announcement that the Court is taking a case. Since certiorari is difficult to pronounce, people normally say or write that “cert has been granted,” or “cert has been denied” by the Court. Normally, a petitioner must pay a fee and meet paperwork requirements to petition for a writ of certiorari, but indigent petitioners can file in forma pauperis, which waves the fee and many of the paperwork requirements.
The people or groups involved in a case are called the litigants. The petitioner brings the case or the appeal, and the respondent answers. Despite whether the U.S. government is the petitioner or the respondent, the solicitor general handles the case; this is a Justice Department position dedicated to this function. The petitioner’s name is written first in the case’s title. Thus, in a case named Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), we know that Plessy is the petitioner bringing the case to the Court. This also tells us that Plessy lost in the lower court, hence the appeal to the Supreme Court. When the Supreme Court accepts a case, the litigant’s lawyers file legal briefs for the justices to examine. Legal briefs are written legal documents arguing why precedent supports their client’s case and potential victory. At this time, other individuals or groups who are not litigants, but nevertheless interested in the case’s outcome, may file what are known as amicus curiae briefs. Amicus curiae means “Friend of the Court.” Amicus curiae briefs are additional legal arguments filed by outside individuals or groups attempting to influence the Court’s justices. It is not uncommon in a significant Supreme Court case to have dozens of amicus curiae briefs filed. In what kinds of cases do you think the National Rifle Association would file amicus curiae briefs? What about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce? What about individual states or groups of states?
After briefs have been filed, the Court picks an oral argument date. Oral argument takes place in public sessions on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays from October to May, and there is a public gallery, so visitors can watch the Supreme Court work. Normally, petitioner and respondent’s lawyers are each allowed thirty minutes to present their case to the assembled justices, but the Roberts Court has often been allowing the litigants’ lawyers more time. Some justices interrupt the lawyers often to ask questions that occurred to them while they were reading briefs. Others listen quietly to the presentations. Often, justices want lawyers to discuss the case’s broader implications regarding the Court’s possible decisions one way or another. If the U.S. government is one of the litigants, the solicitor general will likely handle the case’s oral argument.
Oral arguments can be found online. Here is the oral argument in Trump v. Vance (2020), in which President Trump’s lawyers argued that the sitting president could not be criminally investigated. The president’s lawyers go first, followed by the respondent’s lawyers. Listen to how the justices ask questions.
An audio element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can listen to it online here: https://slcc.pressbooks.pub/attenuateddemocracy/?p=209
Shortly after a case’s oral argument, the Chief Justice presides over the justices in a conference meeting where they reach a preliminary decision on the case. The Chief Justice speaks first, followed by the other justices in the order of their seniority on the Court. This conference meeting is very private, with only the justices allowed in the room. The justice with the least seniority “acts as ‘doorkeeper,’ sending for reference material, for instance, and receiving it at the door.” (9) Their deliberation’s outcome is made public, but their conversations are private and largely the subject of speculation.
The Supreme Court operates by majority vote, so decisions can be 9-0, 8-1, 7-2, 6-3, or 5-4. The decision’s legal validity does not depend on the margin of victory, but the political weight of the decision is affected by it. Politically, a there is a world of difference between a 5-4 decision and a 9-0 decision. Someone in the winning majority writes a majority opinion, which explains the Court’s decision in terms of its compelling legal precedent. If the Chief Justice is in the majority, they will assign who writes it; if the Chief Justice is not in the majority, the most senior justice voting with the majority will assign the majority opinion. Someone in the minority writes a dissenting opinion, which explains why the minority feels the majority erred in applying precedent or constitutional principle. Assigning the dissenting opinion operates just like that of the majority opinion. Majority opinions carry legal weight in the form of precedent, and they also instruct legislators about how acceptable the proposed legislation is. Dissenting opinions do neither of those things, but they do become important if the Supreme Court decides later to reverse itself. Perhaps because they lack legal importance, dissenting opinions are usually more fun to read than majority opinions. Sometimes, justices agree with each other enough to create a majority vote but may do so for different legal reasons. In this case, a justice may write a concurring opinion explaining their unique legal reasoning for voting with the majority.
This has been a very quick tour of the Supreme Court’s purpose and operation. The Court has taken on immense significance in American life. It has, at times, validated horrific policies like slavery and segregation. On other occasions, it has confirmed shifts in public opinion, such as its decision to strike down bans against same-sex marriages. While Alexander Hamilton was correct that the Court possesses neither the “sword or the purse,” it is far from being a lesser branch of government.
What if . . . ?
If you could articulate a purpose for the Supreme Court that was different from what it is now, what would it be? Could you add to, subtract from, or modify its role in ways that would be a net positive for the United States?
References
1. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers #78.
2. Paul Street, “The Real Constitutional Crisis: The Constitution,” Counterpunch. November 8, 2019.
3. Kimberly Wehle, “The Supreme Court Just Keeps Deciding It Should Be Even More Powerful,” The Atlantic. March 13, 2023.
4. Joel B. Grossman and Richard S. Wells, Constitutional Law and Judicial Policy Making, Second edition. New York: Wiley and Sons, 1980. Page 87. The authors of this classic text note briefly that in 1851, scholars discovered an unreported opinion from 1794 in which the Court had declared a federal law unconstitutional. Thus, Marbury remains the first case of any political importance.
5. This entire discussion of Marbury v. Madison (1803) draws on the recounting in Peter Irons, A People’s History of the Supreme Court. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. Pages 103-107.
6. Garrett Epps, “When the Supreme Court Doesn’t Care About Facts,” The Atlantic. February 27, 2018.
7. David Schultz, “The Supreme Court and the Coming End of Abortion Rights,” Counterpunch. October 1, 2021.
8. James Clark, “Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Yet Another Challenge to the Controversial Feres Doctrine on Military Medical Malpractice,” Task & Purpose. May 20, 2019.
9. No Author, “The Justice’s Conference,” The Supreme Court Historical Society. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/05%3A_The_Supreme_Court/5.01%3A_Chapter_31-_Purpose_and_Operation_of_the_Supreme_Court.txt |
“The judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.”
–U.S. Constitution, Article III
Federalism in America’s Court System
Since the United States is a large federal republic, it has a fairly complicated court system. The phrase judicial federalism refers to the dual court systems—federal and state—operating in the United States. State courts handle most United States’ criminal and civil cases, while federal courts handle federal criminal and civil statutes, regulations, and constitutional provisions. Below is a simplified diagram of judicial federalism.
Paths to the Supreme Court
Let’s flesh out three important things about the diagram. First, note that the three boxes on the right represent the state court system where most U.S. cases occur—e.g., people on trial for murder, rape, robbery, burglary, embezzlement, fraud, civil lawsuits, and so on. Cases can go straight through the state court system and on to the Supreme Court, but that is not a common path. The diagram is a little bit deceptive in this sense: the lightly shaded boxes on the right represent a large amount of work overall but represent a comparatively smaller source of Supreme Court cases.
Second, note the diagram’s two boxes in the middle with thick arrows. Most Supreme Court cases come up through the federal district courts and then through one of the twelve federal circuit courts of appeals. Other federal cases such as military cases and trade cases, etc. have their own paths, but again, the main route is depicted with the thick arrows.
The third thing we should note is that cases handled in state courts can sometimes raise questions that need to be adjudicated in federal courts. If a state defendant has exhausted their state options, they may seek a writ of habeus corpus from a federal court. Habeus corpus literally means “you have the body,” and refers to the court ordering state or federal authorities to bring a detained person to the court and show cause for the detention or incarcerationObviously, the person is hoping the court will release them because of some violation of their federal rights. For example, the defendant may argue that their Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure were violated, or perhaps their Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment due process protections were violated.
Supreme Court Jurisdiction
The paths to the Supreme Court are conditioned by its jurisdiction. Jurisdiction refers to the scope or mandate of a court. What kinds of cases can it hear, and how does it hear them? The Supreme Court has the broadest jurisdiction of any federal court, but its mandate is divided into its original and appellate jurisdictions. Original jurisdiction refers to those cases that are heard first in the Supreme Court. According to Article III of the Constitution and federal statute, the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction in the following kinds of cases:
• Controversies between states.
• All actions or proceedings to which ambassadors, other public ministers, consuls, or vice consuls of foreign states are parties.
• All controversies between the United States and a state.
• All actions or proceedings by a state against the citizens of another state or against aliens. (1)
The Supreme Court must take these cases when they arise but will often appoint a “special master” to hear the dispute and recommend a solution. Original jurisdiction cases are rare, but when they do occur, the Supreme Court behaves more like a trial court, collecting evidence, hearing testimony, and establishing facts.
The Supreme Court’s second jurisdiction is its appellate jurisdiction—that is, cases on appeal from lower federal or state courts. Most of the Supreme Court’s caseload falls here. When exercising its appellate jurisdiction, the Supreme Court does not act like a trial court, but instead reviews lower court rulings and either upholds them as correct or reverses them. The Court is under no obligation to take cases on appeal. Every year, thousands of cases land on the Supreme Court’s doorstep, of which typically less than 100 are argued before the justices. The rest are denied cert, or the justices decided without plenary review. Within the court’s appellate jurisdiction there is a split between those cases that work their way through the federal courts and those that began in state courts. In a given year, about two-thirds of the Supreme Court’s caseload comes on appeal through the federal courts, and about one-third comes from state courts, with few to no original jurisdiction cases.
The federal court system’s lowest rung is composed of the ninety-four federal district courts. For the less populous states like Utah, the federal district court’s jurisdictional boundaries follow the state boundaries. Large states contain several district courts within their boundaries. Federal district courts are trial courts in cases involving federal criminal statutes, applicable civil lawsuits, and suits against federal agencies. Usually, one federal judge presides over each case at the district court level. Hundreds of thousands of criminal and civil cases are initiated in federal district courts around the country, most of which never make it to trial. (2)
The district courts are grouped into twelve circuit courts of appeal, plus there is a court of appeals for the federal circuit that handles appeals from the U.S. Claims Court, the U.S. Court of International Trade, and other national-level courts. As you can see in the map, (3) cases arising out of federal district courts in Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, and Oklahoma are appealed to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, located in Denver, Colorado. There, a panel of three judges hear cases. The circuit courts are appellate courts—judges review the district courts’ decisions rather than develop new evidence or testimony. They are called “circuit” courts, by the way, because in earlier times, judges literally rode circuit via horseback or stage to remote areas to hear court appeals.
References
1. Article III of the Constitution and the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute.
2. Specific caseloads can be found at the U.S. Courts website.
3. Map taken from the websiteof the Federal Bar Association. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/05%3A_The_Supreme_Court/5.02%3A_Chapter_32-_Paths_to_the_Supreme_Court.txt |
“[Federal judges] have become the most consequential policymakers in the country. They have gutted America’s campaign finance law and dismantled much of the Voting Rights Act. They have allowed states to deny health coverage to millions of Americans. They’ve held that religion can be wielded as a sword to cut away the rights of others. They’ve drastically watered down the federal ban on sexual harassment. And that barely scratches the surface.”
–Ian Millhiser (1)
“The authors of America’s constitution created the Supreme Court to provide a check on the danger that political evolution might lead Congress to pass laws threatening oligarchic rule.”
—Michael Hudson (2)
The Supreme Court Justices
The U.S. Supreme Court currently has nine justices. The Constitution does not specify the number. In the Judiciary Act of 1789, Congress initially established a six-member Supreme Court, with a Chief Justice and five associate justices. Between then and the Civil War, Congress gradually expanded the number of justices to ten. Then, in an attempt to limit President Johnson’s powers, Congress reduced the number of justices through retirement down to seven. In 1869, Congress raised the number of justices to nine, where it has stayed ever since. In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed to expand the number of justices by adding one for every sitting justice who was seventy- and one-half-years-old and who didn’t retire. Potentially, this move could have increased the number of justices to fifteen. Roosevelt was frustrated that the Court was thwarting his New Deal policies, which were targeted at ameliorating the effects of the Great Depression. His court packing plan was not approved by Congress, but the Court nevertheless became more amenable to an activist federal government. (3) When the Court changed and begin endorsing Roosevelt’s policies, it became popularly known as “the switch in time that saved nine.”
Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution says that the president appoints Supreme Court justices with the Senate’s advice and consent. The same procedure applies to seating all federal judges. The president’s nominee needs at least fifty-one votes in the Senate to take their seat on the bench. The Constitution does not list qualifications to be a Supreme Court justice or other federal judge. Senate Judiciary Committee members interview district and circuit court seat nominees, scrutinizing the nominee’s stances on previous cases or their approach to making decisions. The magnitude of this scrutiny is significantly greater for Supreme Court nominees. In 2017, the Senate Republican majority enforced new rules to disallow filibustering Supreme Court nominees.
Who are our current Supreme Court justices? Although few Americans can name them, you should know who they are and something about their perspectives. You can always check the Supreme Court’s website for the current membership. Talk about the Supreme Court justices with your professor, classmates, family, and friends. What do you know about who appointed them and their ideological perspectives? Here are some interesting facts about the history of justices who sit on the Supreme Court. Up through mid-2020, 114 people have served as Supreme Court justices. More than 97 percent have been White, and more than 96 percent have been men. (4) Of all the Supreme Court justices who have served since the Civil War, more than 65 percent have been nominated by Republican presidents.
Controversies Surrounding Some Court Nominations
Nominating a Supreme Court justice is a very politically consequential act. Because that person is likely to serve on the Court for decades—there is no term or age limit for justices—they affect public policy and the lives of ordinary Americans long after the president is out of office. The Supreme Court has decided whether schools can be racially segregated, whether couples can access contraception, whether your local police must possess a warrant to search your house or car, and whether federal agencies can regulate child labor and air pollution. Given the stakes, some Court nominations have proven to be very controversial. As the Senate deliberates and makes new appointments, you should be aware of the following controversies because they either will, or probably have, been mentioned in the news:
Robert Bork—In 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. In nominating Bork, Reagan was seeking to replace retiring centrist Justice Lewis Powell Jr., with an activist conservative justice. The Senate defeated Bork’s nomination 58-42. As far as most Democrats and a few moderate Republican senators were concerned, Bork had two strikes against him. First, Robert Bork was the Justice Department official who carried out President Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre.” Nixon had ordered his Attorney General to fire the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal. The Attorney General refused and resigned instead. So did the Deputy Attorney General. Bork, who was third in command at the Justice Department, carried out Nixon’s order and fired the special prosecutor. Second, Bork’s legal opinions put him far to the right of mainstream legal thinking. He opposed the Court’s actions to ensure one-man-one vote; he opposed civil rights Court decisions; he opposed the right to privacy. After Bork’s nomination was defeated, Reagan tried another appointment but had to rescind it. Then, he settled on Anthony Kennedy, who served for thirty years on the Court as a swing vote. Kennedy was approved by a 97-0 vote. (5)
Clarence Thomas—In 1991, President George H. W. Bush appointed Clarence Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall, who had retired from the Supreme Court due to his failing health. An important point to note is that while both justices are African-American, Marshall was a prominent liberal with an historically long progressive interpretation of the Constitution. Thomas was an up and coming conservative originalist. Thomas’ Senate confirmation hearings became a national television event. Anita Hill, who had worked for Thomas when he led the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), accused him of pestering her for dates, sexually harassing her, and creating a hostile workplace environment replete with crude references to sex and pornography. Keep in mind that the EEOC is charged with investing federal sexual harassment cases. In one of his worst public acts, Senator Joe Biden, Democratic chair of the all-male, all-white Senate Judiciary Committee that was holding the hearings, allowed Thomas to testify before and after Hill and refused to bring in other witnesses who would have corroborated Hill’s account of Thomas’ behavior. The Republican Senators who went after Hill in the hearing—Arlen Specter, Orrin Hatch, Strom Thurmond, Alan Simpson, and John Danforth are a few who stand out—showed how out of touch they were on sexual harassment issues. Thomas was approved by a 52-48 vote. Perhaps the only good things to come out of this tragedy is that a few more women were subsequently elected to the Senate, and EEOC workplace sexual harassment reports more than doubled. (6)
Merrick Garland—In February of 2016, sitting Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly. President Barack Obama nominated centrist Merrick Garland to fill that Court seatGarland had served for twenty years as chief judge of the D.C. Circuit Court and had never had one of his decisions overturned by the Supreme Court. Flouting Constitutional norms, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republican senators said they would not meet with Garland, hold confirmation hearings, or hold a vote. The Republicans argued that they did not have to hold hearings or a vote on a president’s nominee and that the voters should speak in the 2016 presidential election before the seat was filled. So, the Republicans kept the seat vacant for over a year. When President Trump won the election, McConnell and his colleagues promptly approved Trump’s nominee, a conservative originalist named Neal Gorsuch, to fill the empty seat. McConnell later made clear that if a seat were to come open during 2020, he would hold hearings and a vote rather than wait until the presidential election that fall. Democrats are unlikely to forget the Republican Supreme Court seat theft. (7)
Brett Kavanaugh—When justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement in 2018, it afforded President Trump an opportunity to replace a swing-voting centrist with a solid conservative, thus tilting the court even more to the right. Trump appointed conservative Brett Kavanaugh. During the confirmation process, Kavanaugh’s high school classmate Christine Blasey Ford came forward with sexual assault allegations that had allegedly happened when the two were in school together. Blasey Ford was, by all accounts, a credible witness. Kavanaugh vehemently denied the allegations and launched partisan invective at the Democratic senators on the Judiciary Committee. Classmates who knew Kavanaugh at Yale University made similar allegations, but they were not heard at the hearings, and the FBI did a superficial job of investigating them. (8) Moreover, Kavanaugh’s opponents raised credible allegations during the confirmation process that he had perjured himself on multiple topics. (9) Nevertheless, the Republicans were not of a mind to seriously probe those allegations. Kavanaugh was approved by a vote of 50-48.
Amy Coney Barrett—Remember Merrick Garland from 2016? At the time, Republicans said that President Obama should not be able to seat a new Supreme Court justice in an election year. That was February of 2016, a full eight months before the election. When justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September of 2020, less than two months before the election, the Republicans set aside their earlier stand and rushed through the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to sit on the Court. Hypocrisy aside, this move swapped a progressive voice like Ginsburg for a conservative one like Barrett. Every Democratic senator voted against Barrett’s nomination, but it was passed 52-48. Barrett’s confirmation solidified a 6-3 conservative majority on the Court that appears to be committed to weakening the voices of ordinary Americans through its endorsement of gerrymandering, barriers to voting, and unfettered money in the electoral process. (10)
Staffing the Rest of the Federal Judiciary
Before we leave the topic of appointing and confirming Supreme Court justices, we should also take a look at recent developments regarding other federal judgeships. Speaking plainly, the federal judiciary has become politicized to a remarkable degree. This has occurred in the past as well, but you should know about politicized partisanship: we are in a highly politicized time with respect to the federal judiciary. Congressional partisanship has not only led to contested nominations, but it has spilled over into the judiciary, such that battles lost in Congress manifest themselves as wars in the federal courts. It is also clear that Republicans have been particularly aggressive and successful in packing the courts with conservative judges. How have they accomplished this? Via the following three mechanisms:
Creating a conservative judicial strategy—In recent decades Republicans have been far more unified and strategic with their approach to the federal judiciary than have DemocratsThey saw in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s that a centrist federal court system was amenable to civil rights, female bodily integrity, economic regulations, and environmental regulations. They developed a strategy to turn that tide. The Federalist Society has been key to that strategy. Founded in 1982, the Federalist Society supports and cultivates conservative law students and jurists. It has been funded with tens of millions of dollars by a who’s who of deep-pocketed conservatives, including the Koch brothers—oil, chemicals, commodities, fertilizer; the Scaife family—oil, aluminum, banking; the Templeton Foundation—Wall Street investments; the Searle Foundation—pharmaceuticals; Exxon—oil; Chevron—oil; Google—Internet search and advertising; Verizon—telecommunications; and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—business interests. (11) The Federalist Society “educates” law students and early career jurists to cut federal regulations, take an originalist approach to Constitutional interpretation, defend corporate personhood, and embrace a social-Darwinian approach to the question of whether government policies should help improve ordinary peoples’ lives. Young lawyers know that the best way to advance their career is to tow the Federalist Society line. The Federalist Society is comfortable enough in its role that it regularly hosts fundraisers in which big donors have access to Supreme Court justices like Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito. (12) The liberal alternative to the Federalist Society is the American Constitutional Society, which doesn’t have nearly as large a stable of billionaire and corporate donors. Moreover, Democratic presidents have thus far not been particularly strategic in their federal judiciary nominations.
Stalling judicial nominations during the Obama administration—When Barack Obama became president following the 2008 elections, Senate Republicans were determined to deny as many of his judicial appointments as possible. We’ve already mentioned the Merrick Garland Supreme Court nomination that they blocked altogether, but their obstruction extended to lower federal bench seats as well. While Republicans were in the minority, they used the filibuster, requiring a cloture motion to end it. According to the nonprofit, PolitiFact, “cloture was filed on thirty-six judicial nominations during the first five years of Obama’s presidency, the same total as the previous forty years combined.” (13) Frustrated by the obstruction, Democrats changed the Senate rules to no longer allow lower court nominations to be filibustered. When Republicans regained the majority in the Senate following the 2014 elections, they were in a position to significantly hamper Obama’s nominations, which they certainly did. Consider that majority Democrats approved 68 of Republican George W. Bush’s court nominees in the final two years of his presidency, while the majority Republicans approved just twenty of Democrat Barack Obama’s nominees. As a result, Obama left office with an astonishing 107 federal court seat vacancies—twice as many as when Bush left office. (14)
Rushing nominations through during the Trump administration—Once President Trump took office, Senator McConnell and his fellow Republicans ramped up the judicial approval process to get as many young conservatives on the federal bench as possible. Their fevered pace was such that McConnell bragged at a campaign rally that he and Trump were “changing the federal courts forever.” (15) Of Trump’s first eighty-seven judicial nominations, 92 percent were white, and the Trump administration placed a strong emphasis on getting originalists and textualists on the federal judiciary. (16) Equally disturbing, more than twenty of Trump’s appointees refused to say whether the unanimous Brown v Board of Education (1954) decision against segregated schools was correctly decided. (17) The Trump administration essentially turned over its vetting federal judicial nominations to the Federalist Society. According to Amanda Hollis-Brusky, author of Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution, “When you look at [Trump’s] list of judges and the people that he’s put on the bench, it’s been entirely controlled by the Federalist Society.” (18)
From a strictly political science point of view, it will be interesting to see how the most recent phase of judiciary politicization will play out. Control of the Senate is key, and the Biden administration maintained Democratic control of the Senate throughout his first term. A federal judiciary that hews to originalism, textualism, and conservative values will undercut the ability of progressives to implement the kinds of federal programs that they argue would benefit ordinary people. More about those values in upcoming chapters.
What if . . . ?
Part of the reason judicial nominations are so high stakes is that nominees hold their positions for life. What if we placed term limits on Supreme Court justice positions and other federal judgeships? What would be the advantages and disadvantages of doing so?
References
1. Ian Millhiser, “What Trump has Done to the Courts, Explained,” Vox. December 9, 2019.
2. Michael Hudson, “Should There Be a Supreme Court? Its Role has Always Been Anti-Democratic.” Counterpunch. July 7, 2023.
3. Lesley Kennedy, “This is How FDR Tried to Pack the Supreme Court,” History.com. October 28, 2018.
4. Only Thurgood Marshall, Clarence Thomas, and Sonia Sotomayor are people of color. Only Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan are female.
5. Sarah Pruitt, “How Robert Bork’s Failed Nomination Led to a Changed Court,” History.com. October 28, 2018.
6. David A. Kaplan, “Anatomy of a Debacle,” Newsweek. October 20, 1991. Julia Carpenter, “How Anita Hill Forever Changed the Way We Talk About Sexual Harassment,” CNN Money. November 9, 2017. See also various videos herehere, and here.
7. Rebecca J. Rosen, “Neal Katyal: Senate’s Obstruction of Merrick Garland ‘Was Unforgivable,’” The Atlantic. June 27, 2017. Ron Elving, “What Happened with Merrick Garland in 2016 and Why It Matters Now,” NPR. June 29, 2018.
8. Mimi Rocah, “Confirmed: Powerful Men Ignored Women in Short-Circuited Brett Kavanaugh Investigation,” USA Today. September 17, 2019. Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation. New York: Penguin, 2019.
9. Tara Golshan, “Did Brett Kavanaugh Perjure Himself? The Debate, Explained,” Vox. October 2, 2018.
10. Jane Chong, “The Amy Coney Barrett Hearings Were a Failure,” The Atlantic. October 16, 2020.
11. See Sourcewatch, and Polluterwatch.
12. Stephen Spaulding, “Federalist Society Big Donors Land Very Special Place at Justice Thomas’ Table,” Common Cause. December 5, 2013.
13. Allison Graves, “Did Senate Republicans Filibuster Obama Court Nominees More Than All Others Combined?” PolitiFact. April 9, 2017.
14. David G. Savage, “This Congress Filled the Fewest Judgeships Since 1952. That Leaves a Big Opening for Trump.” Los Angeles Times. December 31, 2016.
15. Jake Johnson, “McConnell Brags He and Trump are ‘Changing the Federal Courts Forever’ With Extreme Right-Wing Judges,” Common Dreams. November 5, 2019.
16. Richard Wolf, “Trump’s 87 Picks to be Federal Judges are 92% White With Just One Black and One Hispanic Nominee,” USA Today. February 13, 2018.
17. “Trump Judicial Nominees and Brown V. Board of Education,” Weekend Edition SundayNPR. May 19, 2019.
18. “What is the Federalist Society and How Does it Affect Supreme Court Picks?” All Things ConsideredNPR. June 28, 2018. Amanda Hollis-Brusky, Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/05%3A_The_Supreme_Court/5.03%3A_Chapter_33-_Appointing_and_Confirming_Supreme_Court_Justices.txt |
“The text of the document and the original intention of those who framed it would be the judicial standard in giving effect to the Constitution.”
–Edwin Meese (1)
“Conservative justices use originalism when it justifies conservative decisions, but they become non-originalist when doing so serves their ideological agenda. This undermines any claim that originalism actually constrains judging and suggests instead that it is not a theory of judging at all but only a rhetorical ploy to make it appear that decisions are based on something other than political ideology.”
–Erwin Chemerinsky (2)
The Supreme Court sits at the apex of the U.S. judicial system. As we’ve mentioned before, it rarely acts as a fact finder. That role typically belongs to the first court to hear a case. Instead, the Supreme Court is an appellate court; it hears lower-court cases on appeal. The issues that reach the Court require the justices to interpret the meaning of laws and governmental actions. This interpretive function falls into two broad categories: Statutory interpretation and constitutional interpretation. (3) Each justice approaches their interpretive work in their own unique way, but it’s rather easy to see broad patterns emerge if one steps back and asks, “Of what is this particular case an example?” Thus, the first distinction we make is between those instances when the Court interprets the meaning of words in federal laws and those instances when it interprets the meaning of constitutional passages.
Statutory Interpretation
When Congress passes a bill and the president signs it into law, it enters into the U.S. Code as either a free-standing statute or an update to an existing statute. Often, disputes arise as to the meaning of words or phrases in federal statutes, and the Supreme Court has the ultimate say in how such words and phrases are to be interpreted. As American public law specialist Larry Eig wrote for the Congressional Research Service, “The exercise of the judicial power of the United States often requires that courts construe statutes so enacted to apply them in concrete cases and controversies.” (4) This is what we mean by statutory interpretation: when the Supreme Court authoritatively defines ambiguous words and phrases in federal laws as they apply to specific controversies between litigants. Once the Court has defined such a word or phrase, that interpretation becomes binding on all lower courts should future disputes arise.
How do justices go about interpreting federal statutes? There are several rules or conventions that justices apply as they interpret federal statutes, but we’ll focus on just two. They compete with as well as complement each other. One of them is called textualism. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once famously wrote that “We do not inquire what the legislature meant; we ask only what the statute means.” (5) Textualism refers to the desire to rely on the plain meaning of words when interpreting federal law. Textualism puts a burden on the legislature to be clear when writing bills so that there will be no ambiguity when that statute is actually applied by the executive branch. Textualism is attractive to a justice, for it allows them to say that they are just acting like a baseball umpire, calling balls and strikes, using the statute’s plain language. The justices apply what is known as the plain meaning rule, which is simply to say that if the statutory language is plain and unambiguous, it must be followed and applied to the case at hand. (6)
Another convention of statutory interpretation is intentionalism, which attempts to take into consideration the broad intent of the legislation. Justice Billings Learned Hand once wrote: “There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally . . . As nearly as we can, we must put ourselves in the place of those who uttered the words, and try to divine how they would have dealt with the unforeseen situation; and, although their words are by far the most decisive of what they would have done, they are by no means final.” (7) Intentionalism can be used as an alternative to textualism but is primarily employed as a supplement when the plain meaning rule doesn’t apply. A justice wanting to rely on intentionalism would want to consider the congressional deliberations that occurred when the bill was debated, its legislative history, and the broad goal or goals that Congress was trying to achieve.
How does statutory interpretation operate in the real world? Let’s look at two examples.
When Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, it empowered the brand-new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate air “pollutants,” by which it meant things like particulates and sulfur dioxide coming out of tail pipes and smokestacks. What is a pollutant? Something that pollutes. And what does that mean? According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, to pollute means “to make air, water, or earth dirty or harmful to people, animals, and plants, especially by adding harmful chemicals or waste.” (8) In 1970, congressional members were not thinking about the climate emergency, so the statute did not have carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gasses in mind when it charged the EPA with regulating pollutants. Under the Obama administration, the EPA began to regulate greenhouse gases as part of the United States response to the climate emergency. Now, imagine yourself as a Supreme Court justice, and litigants like the Chamber of Commerce, the state of Texas, and the American Chemistry Council are challenging the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide. What was the legislative intent? What is the plain meaning of the word pollutant? In a series of complicated decisions along ideological lines, the Court has ruled that the EPA does, indeed, have authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act provisions, but the Court does not agree that the EPA has unlimited freedom to act. (9)
Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act forbids an employer from discriminating “against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” Originally passed in 1964, the Civil Rights Act’s reference to “sex” was limited to differences between men and women, particularly with respect to women’s ability to become pregnant and deliver children. Nevertheless, the Court interpreted the meaning of ‘sex’ broadly enough to encompass sexual harassment. Thus, both broad categories of sexual harassment—quid pro quo and hostile workplace environment—are violations of the victim’s civil rights, regardless of whether the victim is male or female. More recently, the Court was called upon once again to interpret the meaning of “sex” in cases involving gay and transgender individuals. Gerald Bostock came out as gay and was fired from his child welfare coordinator job with Clayton County, Georgia. Aimee Stephens, after working for six years as a male funeral director, informed her employer that she was transgender and would thenceforth be coming to work as a woman. She was fired. In 2019, Bostock and Stephens both sued, hanging their cases on a broad interpretation of sex discrimination. During the case’s oral argument, conservative justices fell back on textualism and expressed their concern that in 1964, congressional members did not intend to protect gay and transgender employees. Progressive justices, on the other hand, asked questions in oral argument that indicated their comfort with a broad interpretation because the intent of the Civil Rights Act was to prevent invidious discrimination. (10) In the end, the Trump administration reversed the Obama administration’s position and argued against the LGBTQ employees in the Supreme Court, but the Court ruled 6-3 in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) that the Civil Rights Act’s reference to “sex” protected gay and transgendered employees.
Constitutional Interpretation
As with statutory interpretation, each individual justice has their own way to approach interpreting constitutional passages. The issues of constitutional interpretation mirror those of statutory interpretation. Some text in the Constitution is easy to understand and apply, while other passages are ambiguous. Therefore, justices have developed conventions that they employ when the passage’s meaning is unclear.
One interpretive convention is called originalism, and it tends to be loudly trumpeted by conservative media figures, politicians, and justices. Originalism is the interpretive convention that the Constitution should mean now what it meant to the people who wrote it. Writing for the Court in South Carolina v. United States (1905), justice David Brewer wrote that “The Constitution is a written instrument. As such, its meaning does not alter. That which it meant when adopted, it means now.” (11) Before his death in 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia was probably the Court’s strongest advocate for originalism. He argued that originalism ought to be “the normal, natural approach to understanding anything that has been said or written in the past.” (12) With Scalia’s passing, other conservative justices such as Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, and Amy Coney Barrett took up the Court’s mantle of originalism.
What are the purported advantages of originalism as an interpretive framework? For one thing—and this is a big appeal for conservatives—originalism fixes the meaning of constitutional language in the eighteenth century, unless there are subsequent constitutional amendments passed specifically to update that language. Conservatives argue that originalism provides stability to the structure of the legal system. Another argument made in favor of originalism is that it keeps the judicial branch out of the business of legislating from the bench. According to this view, the Court’s role is simply to interpret current laws in light of constitutional meanings that were fixed in 1787, not to legislate from the bench. Finally, originalism’s advocates say that it keeps current judges from imposing their values on the law.
Originalism’s critics point to numerous flaws. First, the Constitution’s language is often unclear, calling into question the entire project of following the founders’ “original intent.” In fact, many phrases in the Constitution were intentionally broadly written, because a narrowly written document would not serve any republic for long. As Chief Justice Marshall wrote in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), “We must never forget that it is a Constitution we are expounding,” a Constitution “meant to be adapted and endure for ages to come.” The founders themselves disagreed on many small and large matters before, during, and immediately after the Philadelphia Convention. Consider George Mason, who stayed for the entire convention and became a fierce opponent of the Constitution–because of its lack of a bill of rights, of the way the executive branch was constituted, of the pardon power, of the elastic clause, of the supremacy clause, and other provisions. (13)
We might add that important words used in the Constitution have dramatically changed their meaning in the intervening centuries. Are we locked into the meaning of “cruel and unusual punishment” from 1787? What about “equality?” What would the founders have thought about “unreasonable” searches if they had known about GPS trackers, infrared cameras, and other enhanced means of gathering information about a person? Given what we know about how tremendously difficult it is to formally amend the Constitution, an originalist’s approach to constitutional interpretation effectively ties the political system’s hands as it tries to adapt to ever-changing social norms and economic conditions.
An additional argument against originalism is that even its advocates only apply it selectively. Originalist justices have turned the Second Amendment into an almost unfettered individual right for anyone to own massively destructive weapons, when most jurists and historians believe it was intended to be a collective right to preserve state militias from federal encroachment. Originalist justices have also granted corporations—which aren’t even mentioned in the Constitution—the right to free speech, and they have defined free speech such that it allows corporations to support political candidates. There is no support in the text of the Constitution or the historical record that the founders wanted huge corporations funding our politicians. Originalism, then, has become a convenient fiction that conservative justices employ when it is useful, but disregard when it is not.
Given the difficulty of knowing what certain phrases meant in 1787, the changing meaning of words over time, and the justices’ tendency to cherry pick language and historical conditions they like while ignoring those they don’t, originalism does not prevent justices from imposing their values. Indeed, originalism is largely a ruse whereby conservative justices legislate their values from the bench and pretend that they are not doing so. The implications of this are profound, as the Supreme Court and lower federal courts follow the rabbit hole of conservative originalism, which results in loss of bodily autonomy for women, the intertwining of religion and government, the inability of government to effectively protect people from environmental dangers, and the proliferation of guns throughout society. Indeed, speaking of the originalist argument on the Second Amendment, attorney and professor Madiba Dennie argues that “by its very nature, originalism threatens women and other minority groups who were disempowered at the time of the Constitution’s adoption.” (14)
A final argument against originalism comes from legal realism, which is a political science and legal school-of-thought, arguing that justices use contrivances such as originalism, textualism, intentionalism, and other interpretive methods to support their own policy preferences. As law professor and author Eric Segall put it, “justices’ decisions are driven primarily by their personal values.” (15) Originalists do not have some special power that allows them to divine the founders’ “original intent” or the “plain textual meaning” of the Constitution’s words.
If we take legal realism seriously, we have to conclude that the justices’ interpretive work is highly shaped by their political values. Value choices are inevitable when cases get to the Supreme Court. The obvious next question becomes: What values should guide a justice when interpreting the Constitution? Conveniently—and this is one of the geniuses of the document—the Constitution does a wonderful job of articulating its values. Legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky argues that the Constitution articulates five important core values. Four of these are right in the Constitution’s preamble:
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Chemerinsky argues that we should rely on the preamble to guide us toward four important values:
• Democratic government—The document rests on “we the people” who have come together to establish government in the wake of our separation from Great Britain and our failed experiment in a confederation of states.
• Effective governance—We the people seek to establish “a more perfect union” and “insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, [and] promote the general welfare.”
• Justice—We the people seek to “establish justice,” in contrast to the unjust ways the British king and parliament were treating the American colonists.
• Liberty—We the people seek to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
Chemerinsky’s fifth value was not in the preamble to the Constitution, although it was certainly articulated in the Declaration of Independence. Instead, the fifth value was added by the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868:
• Equality—We the people chose to add the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which contains the equal protection clause: No state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The Court then chose to apply that principle to the federal government as well as the states, for it makes no sense to hold the states to a standard not applicable to the federal government. (16)
By keeping these values in mind, a progressive reading of the Constitution errs on the side of expanding liberty and equality whenever disputes arise over the meaning of words like sex, race, equal, and discrimination. Similarly, when disputes arise over things like access to the ballot, gerrymandering, and suppressive voter I.D. laws, a progressive reading of the Constitution errs on the side of allowing citizens to vote and to have voters select their politicians rather than the other way around. When disputes arise as to whether the EPA can regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant even though that was not on senators and representatives’ minds when they passed the Clean Air Act, a progressive reading of the Constitution errs on the side of effectively regulating pollutants, which serves the general welfare.
References
1. Speech by Attorney General Edwin Meese III before the American Bar Association on July 9, 1985.
2. Erwin Chemerinsky, Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. Page 139.
3. The rules and conventions of statutory interpretation are similar to those used when the Court interprets regulations issued by executive branch agencies, but we’ll focus here only on statutory and constitutional interpretation.
4. Larry M. Eig, Statutory Interpretation: General Principles and Recent Trends. Congressional Research Service. September 24, 2014. Page 1.
5. Quoted in Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. Saint Paul: Thomson/West, 2012. Page 29. Original source is Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Theory of Legal Interpretation, 12 Harvard Law Review. 417, 419 (1899).
6. Larry M. Eig, Statutory Interpretation: General Principles and Recent Trends. Congressional Research Service. September 24, 2014. Page 3.
7. Quoted in James D. Zirin, Supremely Partisan. How Raw Politics Tips the Scales in the United States Supreme Court. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Page 233. Original source is Giuseppi. V. Walling, 144 F2d 608, 624 (2ndCir. 1944).
8. Cambridge English Dictionary online.
9. Erica Martinson, “SCOTUS Nibbles at EPA Powers,” Politico.com. June 23, 2014.
10. Nina Totenberg, “Supreme Court Hears Arguments on LGBTQ Employment Rights Case,” National Public Radio All Things Considered. October 8, 2019.
11. Quoted in Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. Saint Paul: Thomson/West, 2012. Page 81.
12. Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts. Saint Paul: Thomson/West, 2012. Page 82.
13. See George Mason, Objections to the Constitution of Government Formed by the Convention. September, 1787.
14. Madiba Dennie, “Originalism is Going to Get Women Killed,” The Atlantic. February 9, 2023.
15. Eric J. Segall, Originalism as Faith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Page 4.
16. Erwin Chemerinsky, We the People. A Progressive Reading of the Constitution for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Picador, 2018. Pages 53-81. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/05%3A_The_Supreme_Court/5.04%3A_Chapter_34-_The_Interpretive_Work_of_the_Supreme_Court.txt |
“In class background and political proclivity, the justices (and federal judges at other levels) have more commonly identified with the landed interests than with the landless, the slave owners rather than the slaves, the industrialists rather than the workers, the exponents of Herbert Spencer rather than of Karl Marx.”
–Michael Parenti (1)
It is clear from previous chapters that the Supreme Court—indeed, the federal judiciary broadly—is a political actor and that we are currently in a period in which the composition of the federal courts is a highly politicized issue. There is strong evidence, for example, that Court votes have increasingly split between justices appointed by Republican versus Democratic presidents. (2) In this chapter, we want to see if we can make some generalizations about the Supreme Court as an ideological actor. Litigants who come before the Court represent particular interests, and it would be helpful for us to know which interests tend to win before the Court more often than other interests. Those patterns reveal the Court’s fairly clear ideological tenor illustrated by Parenti’s quote above, although we can certainly identify exceptions to the rule.
Ideological Terminology
As this might be your first, but hopefully not only, political science course, you might be confused by the terms used to describe political ideologies. There’s a good reason for that: they’re confusing! American ideologies are, as a group of legal scholars wrote, “imperfectly overlapping.” (3) Nevertheless, we can try to group ideological terminology in somewhat coherent ways. The terms associated with the two predominant ideologies in America group together like this:
The terms conservatism, neo-liberalism, classical liberalism, and cultural conservatism all hang together even though those group’s adherents don’t necessarily agree with each other. For example, a cultural conservative might want to ban all forms of what they would call pornography, but neo-liberals don’t get up in the morning wanting to ban pornography. And classical liberals would positively recoil at a government powerful enough to dictate what materials adults could access. We should also keep in mind that the impulses of cultural conservatism, neo-liberalism, and classical liberalism can coexist inside the head of an individual conservative. Humans are complicated. Nevertheless, for our purposes here, we are going to refer to the people in this entire category as conservatives and lump all of these impulses together under the conservatism label.
The terms liberalism, progressivism, social-welfare liberalism, and democratic-socialism all hang together even though those group’s adherents don’t necessarily agree with each other. For example, there is a fairly strong wing of liberals who have no interest in promoting the kind of single-payer healthcare system that really gets progressives and democratic-socialists excited. In fact, many on the left side of this grouping would say that what they call corporate or Wall Street liberals are really just conservatives. Just as with conservatism, individuals on the left side of the American political spectrum can have liberal, progressive, and democratic-socialist impulses coexisting in their brains at the same time. For our purposes here, we are going to refer to people in this entire category as progressives and the ideology as progressivism. We should be clear, though, that this large tent of people includes democratic socialists but does not include true socialists whose aim is to dismantle capitalism.
Conservatism and Progressivism
If there is one thing that unites conservatives, it is defending existing privilege and power. Hierarchy—or a “chain of subordination,” as Edmund Burke famously put it when criticizing the French Revolution—is very important to conservatives. Conservative defenses of monarchy gave way in the wake of the French Revolution to a more principled set of arguments that adapted to the particular set of privileges and power that conservatives sought to defend. Conservatives believe that some people are fit to rule others in the political sphere as well as private spheres of families, farms, factories, and offices. Political scientist Corey Robin nicely summarizes conservatism’s primary aim: “Conservatism is the theoretical voice of . . . animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, and agency the prerogative of the elite.” (4) What does this mean in practice? Conservatives opposed granting women and minorities the right to vote; they opposed civil rights legislation designed to protect people from discrimination; they oppose workers’ ability to organize; they oppose women’s ability to control their bodies; they oppose corporation and bank regulations; they oppose national health insurance that would empower people vis a vis their employers; they oppose campaign finance regulations and disclosure laws; they support expanding police power in poor neighborhoods while limiting it for white-collar criminals. As the demands of progressive movements have changed over time, conservatism has risen to defend the prerogatives of those who stood to lose power or privilege.
If there is one thing that unites progressives, it is the belief in using government power to help people live full lives, solve social problems, and counter the power of business interests. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, progressives have made the case that the traditional political rights of voting, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, free speech, etc. only guarantee negative freedom—freedom from government intrusion—and that they ought to be supplemented by positive social and economic rights. If we can guarantee people freedom of speech, can’t we also guarantee them health care, adequate housing, and a living wage? In 1945, Franklin Roosevelt gave his last state of the union speech in which he called for a Second Bill of Rights that would have guaranteed employment with a living wage, adequate housing, medical care, social security, and a good education. Some of those provisions have been enacted at either the federal or state level, but others have not. In addition to the Social Security system, the United States added programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, subsidized school meals, taxpayer-financed public education, and a variety of social welfare programs aimed at providing people a safety net. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, it became increasingly clear to many progressives that most people had less to fear from government tyranny than they did from corporate predation. Large corporations are able to control peoples’ social and economic lives to a great extent. Progressive critics argue that corporations distort democracy in many ways. Finally, progressives have been at the forefront of ensuring equal rights for people regardless of race, sex, national origin, and religion.
The Historical Behavior of the Supreme Court
Given this quick background in political ideologies, what conclusions can we reach about the Supreme Court as an ideological actor? Perhaps the best thing for us to do is to review the Court’s actions over the course of American history with an eye toward the ideological distinctions made above. The Supreme Court’s history shows that it fits firmly in the conservative ideological tradition, although it has at times acted progressively on issues such as civil rights and the rights of the accused. As journalist and Harvard Law School graduate Adam Cohen states, “The conservative majority has been on a campaign for the past 50 years to shift the law in ways that lift up businesses and wealthy individuals and push down the middle class and the poor, and it has had great success.” (5)
Let’s look at three specific areas:
The Supreme Court as Enforcer of Corporate Hegemony
The Court reveals its ideological character most strongly in its friendship to corporate America at the expense of working people. Even though corporations are not mentioned in the Constitution, the Court has worked hard to ensure that corporate prerogatives are enshrined in the law of the land and woven throughout the very core of daily life. States began chartering corporations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As early as 1819, the Court recognized that a corporate charter—in this case one granted by the King of England before there was a United States—constituted a contract that states could not revoke or even change. (6) After the United States adopted the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 with its protections for the life, liberty, property, due process and equal protection of the laws for “persons,” the Court moved quickly to break down the long-established distinction between artificial persons—i.e., corporations and other organizations allowed to exist by state charterand natural persons—actual living, breathing human beings. The railroad companies led the charge and the Court complied: even before argument had been heard, Chief Justice Waite announced that “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.” (7) In fact, there was no legal precedent for erasing the distinction between artificial and natural persons, and it was clear from the congressional deliberations over the Fourteenth Amendment that senators and representatives were not thinking about corporations when they wrote it. Retired Montana state supreme court justice James Nelson nicely summarized the constitutional case against corporate personhood:
“If you read the original federal Constitution and Bill of Rights, you will find there are no rights given to any non-human legal entity–corporations, associations, partnerships, for example. Not a single, solitary right. Indeed, the Constitution and Bill of Rights do not even contain the word corporation. And with good reason. The Framers did not trust big business.” (8)
Thus unleashed, corporations were able to use federal and state courts to thwart democratic control, as courts struck down child labor laws, maximum hours laws, and a bevy of regulations designed to make working life bearable. For instance, the Supreme Court has ruled several times that corporate rights under the Fourth Amendment prevent authorities from random and unannounced inspections. This makes it rather difficult to enforce environmental, safety, or health regulations. (9) Similarly, corporate commercial speech has become extremely difficult to regulate because of the way the Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment in favor of corporations. The Court, for example, forbade conservation laws that banned electric utilities from promoting electricity use and struck down laws requiring that advertised health claims be backed up by scientific evidence. (10) The Court ruled in the Citizens United case (2010) that the First Amendment means that corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money on “electioneering communication.” According to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, “After Citizens United, if you are in America’s corporate elite, you have been given a super-powered voice and pocketbook to put to work in politics, on top of your own,” a power that the Founders never imagined nor would have wanted. (11)
The Court ruled in Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta (2021) that the First Amendment’s freedom of association forbids states from requiring the disclosure of wealthy donors to non-profit organizations that influence politics. In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022), the Court went out of its way in a case that had become moot to limit the EPA’s ability to regulate the energy sector. The Hobby Lobby case (2014) allowed for-profit corporations the right to exercise religious freedoms that are protected by the First Amendment. Enabled by an earlier hijacking of the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections for “persons,” Harvard Law School professor John Coates, IV, comments in a broader historical and political context on the Court using the First Amendment to empower corporations:
“The corporate takeover of the First Amendment represents a pure redistribution of power over law with no efficiency gain. . . That power is taken from ordinary individuals with identities and interests as voters, owners and employees, and transferred to corporate bureaucrats pursuing narrowly framed goals with other people’s money. This is as radical a break from Anglo-American business and legal traditions as one could find in U.S. history.” (12)
Overall, how well do business interests fare before the Supreme Court? Beginning in the late 1960s, businesses became more aggressive about pushing cases to the Supreme Court. Republican appointed justices are more pro-business than Democratic appointees, but even Democratic appointees have become more pro-business over time. According to one study, the proportion of pro-business Supreme Court decisions roughly tripled from the late 1960s to the early 2000s. According to another study, the Court ruled in favor of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s position 43 percent of the time from 1981-86, 56 percent of the time from 1986-2006, and 70 percent of the time from 2006-22.(13) According to Empirical SCOTUS, over several years the Court ruled in a pro-business fashion between 57 percent and 81 percent of the time. (14) In other words, since the early 1980’s, business interests have gone from having roughly a 50/50 shot at winning at the Supreme Court to now being the odds-on favorite to prevail.
Before we leave the issue of the Court’s privileging corporations in the American social hierarchy, we should pause to note the Court’s antipathy to workers’ interests. In Lochner v. New York (1906), the Court struck down state laws limiting the hours that employers could force employees to work, saying it was a violation of the freedom of contract. As we noted before, the Court came around after Roosevelt’s court-packing plan to endorse many regulations. However, in the modern era, justices have been on a spree when it comes to privileging corporations over their workers. They undercut public service unions in 2018 by forbidding them from making all employees pay fees to defray the costs of negotiating agreements, even if all the employees are covered by those wage and working condition agreements. (15)
The Supreme Court and Democratic Governance
Robert Kaplan, the former legal affairs editor for Newsweek, argues forcefully that America’s continual deference to “nine unaccountable judges” constitutes “a disdain for democracy.” (16) Kaplan is correct, even though the Court occasionally acts to uphold democratic principles. For instance, the Court famously struck down legislative districts that were grossly unequal in population as a violation of the one-man, one-vote principle. (17) If you live in a district with 30,000 voters, and I live in one with 100,000 voters, your vote for representative is more determinative of who wins than is mine, and your representative has fewer constituents to represent. To its credit, the Court disallowed such disparities. The Court also applied that principle when striking down conservative efforts to count only eligible voters for the purposes of drawing legislative boundaries. The Constitution is clear that legislative districts are based on the number of persons, not eligible voters. (18)
Still, the Court has acted in remarkably undemocratic ways at key moments in American history. The Court has, in the words of constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, “enforce[ed] the Constitution against the will of the majority” when it should be protecting “the rights of minorities who cannot rely on the political process and. . .uphold[ing] the Constitution in the face of any repressive desires of political majorities.” The Court has, says Chemerinsky, “often failed where and when it has been most needed.” (19) Let’s quickly review four prominent examples:
Partisan Gerrymandering—We’ll talk in more detail about gerrymandering in a later section on electoral politics. Basically, it refers to willfully drawing election district boundaries to achieve a political end. The Court has ruled that drawing such boundaries to disadvantage a particular race is unconstitutional because it violates the one-man, one-vote principle in a way that exhibits racial animus. (20) But there are other forms of gerrymandering. Once geo-mapping and big data technology became easily available to state parties and legislators, they used these technologies to engage in partisan gerrymandering, which is when the majority party in a state draws legislative districts to make it difficult for the opposition party to win seats in the state legislature or U.S. House of Representatives. As we’ll see later, such practices are obviously unfair assaults on the very nature of American democracy. However, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court declined to do anything about partisan gerrymandering, even when the results effectively disenfranchise millions of American voters. The majority said the issue was a “political question” for state legislatures to resolve. (21) Of course, it is primarily majority parties in state legislatures that are causing the problem, so the Court’s decision amounts to giving a pass to continue this particular anti-democratic practice.
The 2000 Presidential ElectionBush v. Gore (2000) illustrates the Court’s animus toward democracy and its willingness to set aside its own precedents when given a chance to hand the presidency to their preferred Republican candidate who was lagging behind in both the popular and electoral college vote. On election night, it was clear that Democrat Al Gore was ahead of Republican George W. Bush in the national popular vote as well as the electoral college vote. In Florida, however, Bush was ahead by .061 of 1 percent in the initial vote tally. As per state law, Gore asked for a recount. Florida’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, who was also Bush’s state campaign manager, abused her office by trying to shut down the recount. The Florida Supreme Court ordered the recount to continue. The U.S. Supreme Court, at Bush’s request, stepped into the case while Harris refused to extend deadlines for recounts, and the Florida Elections Canvassing Commission certified Bush as the winner with 537 more votes than Gore. On Friday, December 8, the Florida Supreme Court again ruled in Gore’s favor and ordered Florida’s Supervisor of Elections and the Canvassing Board to continue with manual vote recounts.
The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Bush v. Gore on December 7 and then again on December 11. In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court decided along ideological lines to overturn the Florida Supreme Court’s actions. Specifically, the Court said that the Florida Supreme Court’s decision failed to specify how all counties should do the recount and therefore violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, even though the Florida Supreme Court had designated a single judge to hear all disputes, thus guaranteeing a single standard. Even worse, the majority opinion specifically said that the U.S. Supreme Court’s particular interpretation of the equal protection clause was a one-off and should not be precedent setting. As the dissenting justices mentioned, the solution to the Court’s ruling was simply to remand the case back to the Florida State Supreme Court and ask it to establish clear standards for the recount. Instead, the conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the recount altogether, thus handing a 537 vote margin and the Florida victory to Bush, which allowed him to squeak by in the electoral college by one vote.
Constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, who does not believe the five conservative justices acted in a partisan way, nevertheless puts Bush v Gore “among the worst decisions in history.” The Court stepped into a case that “it had no business hearing and deciding.” For one thing, there was an established state process for resolving the issue, and the Court should never have taken the case. For another, the Court assumed prematurely that Bush had already suffered a wrong that it could address, when in fact it was unknown whether Bush or Gore would have prevailed in the recount. (22)
The Voting Rights Act—One section of the Voting Rights Act that was passed in 1965 required that states with a documented history of voting discrimination—mostly Southern states that had worked overtime for nearly a century to deny voting rights to African Americans—receive “preclearance” from the Justice Department or the United States District Court in Washington, DC, before implementing changes to their election laws. The purpose of preclearance was to ensure that states would not revert to election practices that overtly discriminated or that had discriminatory effects. The Voting Rights Act has been tremendously successful. In 1956, Black turnout was about fifty percentage points below that for Whites, whereas now, voting rates are roughly equal for both Whites and Blacks. Further, in 1965, there were only about 1,000 African Americans in elected office around the country, whereas by 2015, that number surpassed 10,000 office holders. (23)
In 2006, Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act, including the preclearance provision, for an additional twenty-five years. It passed unanimously in the Senate and with only thirty-three “nay” votes in the House. Between 1982 and 2006, the Justice Department had blocked over 700 voting changes, which is an indication that the preclearance states were still inclined to pass discriminatory voting practices. (24) Shelby County, Alabama, sued the U.S. Attorney General, arguing that the preclearance provision was unconstitutional. In a 5-4 decision, the conservative justices on the Court agreed with Shelby County in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and said that the preclearance provision was out of date and unconstitutional. Combined with the Court’s disinterest in the negative effects of restrictive state voting laws, Shelby County has signaled that the Court will allow a variety of attempts to reduce the number of minorities, college students, and poor people from exercising their voting privileges. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that states that had previously been required to preclear their changes to voting law, purged voters off their election rolls at a significantly higher rate than other states in the wake of the Shelby County decision. (25) In 2016, for the first time in twenty years, the Black voter-turnout rate dropped in a presidential election, which may have been caused by voter suppression but might also have been due to Obama not being on the ballot. (26)
During the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic, the Court repeatedly acted to make it more difficult for people to vote. In the Wisconsin primary that year, the conservative majority blocked a lower court order that extended the period to return absentee ballots. This forced voters to stand in long lines during a pandemic to ensure that their votes counted. The conservative majority also blocked a lower court order in Alabama that would have made it easier for Alabamians to use absentee ballots rather than stand in lines. The Court refused to hear a challenge to a Texas law that makes it easy for older voters to use absentee ballots, but not those under the age of 65. (27)
Most recently, the conservative majority on the Court overturned a district court finding that two Arizona laws violated section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits state election practice that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right. . .to vote on account of race or color.” One of the Arizona laws forbade anyone but family members or a postal worker from collecting ballots from voters to deliver to polling places—a provision that disproportionately affects Native American living in tribal lands that do not have reliable mail services and that are far removed from polling places. The second Arizona law invalidated the entire ballot of anyone who accidentally votes in the wrong precinct, even though votes for governor, U.S. senator, and president aren’t specific to precincts. Since Arizona officials tend to frequently change precinct boundaries, the lower court accepted that this would have a disproportionate impact on voters of color. The Supreme Court thought otherwise and sustained the Arizona laws, sending a strong signal to conservative state legislators that they can pass a range of election laws whose impact is to make the voting process more difficult for targeted populations. (28) In so doing, the Court further weakened the Voting Rights Act as a tool to promote democratic equality.
The most telling feature of the Court’s approach to democratic governance is its willingness to violate basic principles to accomplish what appears to be a goal of limiting the voice of ordinary people. It refrains from acting in some cases like the Rucho one on gerrymandering, citing its unwillingness to decide a “political question.” However, in other cases like Shelby County and Brnovich on the Voting Rights Act, the Court goes out of its way to gut the obvious intent of Congress to prevent voting discrimination by states–and does so using standards that are not in the Voting Rights Act. As the Campaign Legal Center concluded, because “it is difficult to pinpoint any principled and legitimate through-line in these decisions,” the Court’s decisions “have done, and continue to do, damage to voters, American democracy generally, and to the legitimacy of the Supreme Court itself.” (29)
The Major Questions Doctrine—Once firmly established in the majority on the Court, conservatives invented what they call the major question doctrine and have used it to undermine the will of the majority as expressed in Congress. The major questions doctrine holds that the Court may cancel any action of a federal agency if they deem it of “vast ‘economic and political significance,’” and if they feel that Congress’s grant of authority to the federal agency was not clear and specific enough. (30) Consider the following examples of the Court short-circuiting democracy:
• During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration used the Heroes Act to forgive up to \$20,000 in student debt. It relied on the Heroes Act, which was passed unanimously by Congress in 2002 and signed by President George W. Bush. The Heroes Act allows the secretary of education to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs. . .as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency.” The pandemic was a national emergency. The legislation appears clear, but the Court ruled 6-3 in Biden v. Nebraska (2023) that such action by the Biden administration was unconstitutional.
• In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022), the Court went out of its way to use the major questions doctrine to strike down the Obama-era EPA regulations that required many electric power generators to hit emissions reductions targets by 2030. As it turns out, the power generation industry met those targets by 2019—not because of the regulations but because it was in its economic interest to close older, dirtier (and expensive) plants and shift generation to newer, cleaner, and cheaper plants. The Obama-era regulations were clearly not of “vast economic and political significance” anymore, but the conservatives wanted to lay down a marker to say that the EPA did not have full authority to fight climate change via emissions reductions.
In the words of Ian Millhiser, the major questions doctrine is “breathtaking” in its implications and “makes the Supreme Court the final word on any policy question that Congress has delegated to an executive branch agency—effectively giving the unelected justices the power to override both elected branches of the federal government.” (31) One seems on solid ground in assuming that the conservatives on the Court know that the conservatives in Congress—even if they are a minority—will be able to block specific and clear grants of authority to executive agencies to fight climate change, protect wetlands, improve workers’ lives, and regulate financial institutions. Absent specific and clear grants of authority, the Court will be in the driver’s seat when it comes to deciding what actions federal agencies can undertake to follow through on their Congressionally mandated missions.
The Supreme Court’s Treatment of Women and Racial Minorities
Through much of its history, the exclusively White and male Supreme Court justices acted as though a key part of their charge was to maintain a social order in which women and people of color were relegated to second class status. It has only been through progressive changes in the law and the evolution of social norms that the Court was forced to embrace civil rights. Even then, the Court appears ever ready to look for opportunities to restrict the full emancipation of women and people of color.
From the beginning of the American republic until the 1950s, the Supreme Court acted as a strong enforcer of White supremacy. The Court held that people of African descent were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race” and that the rights of White people were not intended to apply to Black people. (30) It overturned the civil rights conviction of White men who killed African Americans. (31) The justices allowed segregation and discrimination on the part of hotels, restaurants, theaters, and other private businesses that served the public. (32) The Court upheld state laws banning interracial marriage. (33) The Court sanctioned state-mandated train segregation, which then applied to all sorts of public facilities like public schools and swimming pools. (34) This animus was not restricted to African Americans: the justices endorsed local authorities as they prevented a Chinese American girl from attending her local Whites-only school. (35) The Court allowed the federal government to detain and put Japanese Americans–most of whom were citizens–into camps, absent any individual or collective evidence that Japanese Americans posed a security threat during World War II even though they should have had the “equal protection of the laws” afforded by the Fourteenth Amendment. (36)
Beginning in the 1950s, the Court began to support equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities. This change was caused and reinforced by societal changes and strong civil rights laws that Congress managed to pass over the objections of Southern Democrats. We’ll talk more about those laws and court cases when we get to the section of the text that talks about civil rights. Suffice it to say that society forced the Court to end segregated education, segregated housing, bans on interracial marriages, voter discrimination, and employment discrimination based on race and ethnicity. However, as recently as Abbott v. Perez (2018), the Court upheld as legal a redistricting scheme that a lower court had determined was drawn to disenfranchise Black and Hispanic citizens. And in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute (2018), the Court upheld a state voter purge law that had a disproportionate impact on people of color.
Interestingly, the Court needed to play less of a role enforcing gender hierarchy than it did for White supremacy for the simple reason that women’s second-class citizenship was so taken for granted that women had difficulty pushing their issues to the highest court. Note that women’s constitutional right to vote came fifty years after it did for Black men. Justices ruled 8-1 in 1873 that Illinois did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection or privileges and immunities clauses when it would not allow women to be licensed to practice law. The Illinois court ruling that the Supreme Court upheld, said this: “That God designed the sexes to occupy different spheres of action, and that it belonged to men to make, apply, and execute the laws, was regarded as an almost axiomatic truth.” (37) The Court allowed states to place limits on women’s working hours when the Court, three years previously, had not allowed such limits on men’s working hours. (38) The justices sanctioned the forced sterilization of women deemed to be mentally disabled. (39)
Beginning in the mid-1960s, the Court was finally forced to confront women as equals to men within the context of civil rights laws and changing social norms. To its credit, the Court endorsed access to contraception for both married and unmarried couples as well. (40) The Court legalized abortion on a progressively more restrictive trimester basis in its Roe v. Wade (1973) decision. The Court made it illegal to post job announcements that specified gender requirements. (41) It ruled that sexual harassment is a violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. (42) Recently, however, the Court withdrew from women a constitutional right for the first time. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the conservative majority said that “the Constitution does not confer a right to an abortion” because it is not explicitly enumerated in the document and because the right to an abortion is not “rooted in the nation’s history and tradition.”
We can say with a fair degree of confidence that since the 1950s, with respect to race, and since the 1960s, with respect to sex, the Supreme Court has been forced by collective action and shifting societal norms to redeem itself. Only the public’s vigilance with respect to federal statutes and a keen eye toward the kinds of justices that get appointed to the Court will ensure that the Court acts to uphold ordinary Americans’ rights. Absent that vigilance, empowered elites will be inclined to push the Court to its historical pattern, which legal scholar Ian Millhiser so deftly summarizes:
“The justices. . .have routinely committed two complementary sins against the Constitution. They’ve embraced extra-constitutional limits on the government’s ability to protect the most vulnerable Americans, while simultaneously refusing to enforce rights that are explicitly enshrined in the Constitution’s text. And they paved a trail of misery as a result. Few institutions have inflicted greater suffering on more Americans than the Supreme Court of the United States.” (43)
In their book Justice Deferred the historian Orville Burton and the civil rights lawyer Armand Derfner see the Court in a similar way. There is a dividing line on the Court, they argue, with progressive justices interpreting the Constitution and civil rights statutes “to mean the most they can mean,” while conservative justices interpreting the Constitution and civil rights statutes “to mean the least they have to mean.” The fact that conservatives have dominated the judicial branch through most of American history means that the Court has primarily acted as a conservative force in America, using its power to enforce a hierarchy in which subordinated classes and racial minorities have difficulty achieving agency and equality. (44)
What if . . . ?
What if the Supreme Court were a force for democracy and agency among ordinary people? What would be required for that to happen? Changes in the language of the Constitution? Changes in the kinds of people sitting on the Supreme Court? A revitalization of the importance of the Constitution’s preamble in the adjudication of disputes?
References
1. Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few, 9th edition. Boston: Wadsworth, 2011. Pages 249-250.
2. Lee Epstein and Eric Posner, “If the Supreme Court is Nakedly Political, Can it be Just?” New York Times. July 9, 2018.
3. Lee Epstein, William M. Landes, and Richard A. Posner, “How Business Fares in the Supreme Court.” Minnesota Law Review. 97:1431. April 16, 2013. Page 1433
4. Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pages 7-8.
5. Adam Cohen, “Justice Breyer’s Legacy-Defining Decision,” The Atlantic. June 12, 2021.
6. Dartmouth College v. Woodward(1819).
7. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company(1886). Justice Waite quoted in William Myers, The Santa Clara Blues: Corporate Personhood Versus DemocracyIII Publishing, 2000. Page 6.
8. Adam Winkler, We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2018. James C. Nelson, “There’s No More Activist Court Than the US Supreme Court,” Counterpunch. February 3, 2022.
9. William Myers, The Santa Clara Blues: Corporate Personhood Versus DemocracyIII Publishing, 2000. Page 6. Refer to See v. City of Seattle(1967) and Marshall v. Barlow’s, Inc.(1978).
10. Just two of many examples: Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp v. Public Service Commission of New York(1980) and POM Wonderful LLC v. Coca-Cola Co. (2014).
11. Sheldon Whitehouse, Captured: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy. New York: The New Press, 2021. Page 94.
12. John C. Coates, IV, Corporate Speech and the First Amendment: History, Data, and Implications. February 27, 2015. Page 31. Pdf available here.
13. Lee Epstein, William M. Landes, and Richard A. Posner, “How Business Fares in the Supreme Court.” Minnesota Law Review. 97:1431. April 16, 2013. No Author, “Corporations and the Supreme Court,” Constitutional Accountability Center. No date, but retrieved on August 15, 2022.
14. Adam Feldman, “The Big Business Court,” Empirical SCOTUS. August 8, 2018.
15. Janus v. AFSCME(2018).
16. David A. Kaplan, The Most Dangerous Branch. Inside the Supreme Court’s Assault on the Constitution. New York: Crown, 2018.
17. Reynolds v. Sims(1964).
18. Evenwel v. Abbott(2016). Richard Wolf, “Supreme Court Upholds ‘One-Person, One-Vote,’” USA Today. April 4, 2016.
19. Erwin Chemerinsky, The Case Against the Supreme Court. New York: Viking, 2014. Pages 9-11.
20. We should note, however, that the Court sometimes sets the bar very high when it comes to cases of racial gerrymandering. In Abbott v. Perez(2018) the Court upheld as legal a redistricting scheme that a lower court had established was drawn to disenfranchise black and Hispanic citizens.
21. Ariane de Vogue and Devan Cole, “Supreme Court Allows Severe Partisan Gerrymandering to Continue,” CNN. June 27, 2019.
22. Erwin Chemerinsky, The Case Against the Supreme Court. New York: Viking, 2014. Pages 234-249.
23. Niraj Chokshi, “Where Black Voters Stand 50 Years After the Voting Rights Act was Passed,” The Washington Post. March 3, 2015.
24. James D. Zirin, Supremely Partisan. How Raw Politics Tips the Scales in the United States Supreme Court. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Page 176.
25. Kevin Morris, Myrna Perez, Jonathan Brater, and Christopher Deluzio, “Purges: A Growing Threat to the Right to Vote,” The Brennan Center for Justice. July 20, 2018. See also Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute (2018)
26. Jens Manuel Krogstad and Mark Hugo Lopez, “Black Voter Turnout Fell in 2016, Even as a Record Number of Americans Cast Ballots,” The Pew Research Center. May 12, 2017.
27. Ian Millhiser, “The Supreme Court Just Handed Down Dome Truly Awful News for Voting Rights,” Vox. July 3, 2020. Josh Gerstein, “Liberals Recoil at SCOTUS’ Wisconsin Primary Decision,” Politico. April 7, 2020.
28. Ian Millhiser, “The Supreme Court Leaves the Voting Rights Act Alive—But Only Barely,” Vox. July 1, 2021. Omeed Alerasool, “A Primer on Brnovich v. DNC: The Supreme Court’s Latest Voting Rights Case,” The Equal Democracy Project at Harvard Law School. March 7, 2021.
29. No Author, The Supreme Court’s Role in Undermining U.S. DemocracyCampaign Legal Center. July 13, 2022.
30. Kate R. Bowers and Daniel J. Sheffner, The Supreme Court’s “Major Questions” Doctrine: Background and Recent DevelopmentsCongressional Research Service. May 17, 2022. Page 1.
31. Ian Millhiser, “How the Supreme Court Put Itself in Charge of the Executive Branch,” Vox. July 17, 2023.
32. Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857)
33. United States v. Cruikshank (1876)
34. The Civil Rights Cases (1883)
35. Pace v. Alabama (1883)
36. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
37. Lum v. Rice (1927)
38. Korematsu v. United States (1944)
39. Bradwell v. State of Illinois (1873)
40. Muller v. Oregon (1908)
41. Buck v. Bell (1927)
42. Griswold v. Connecticut(1965) and Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972)
43. Pittsburgh Press Co. v. Pittsburgh Commission on HumanRelations (1973)
44. Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson(1986)
45. Ian Millhiser, Injustices: The Supreme Court’s History of Comforting the Comfortable and Afflicting the Afflicted. New York: Nation Books, 2015. Page xiii.
46. Orville Vernon Burton and Armand Derfner, Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2021. Page 338. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/05%3A_The_Supreme_Court/5.05%3A_Chapter_35-_The_Supreme_Court_as_an_Ideological_Actor.txt |
Anonymous Citizen: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.”
Representative Robert Inglis (R-SC): “Actually, sir, your health care is being provided by the government.” (1)
Government and the Common Good
The idea for this chapter comes directly from Douglas J. Amy, Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College, who many years ago put together the Government is Good web project as “an unapologetic defense of a vital institution.” Please visit Amy’s site and explore his information about the war on government, why government is good, and how to revitalize democracy.
Because this textbook takes a critical approach to the topic of U.S. government and politics, you might be under the false impression that it advocates a negative view of the government. Nothing could be farther from the truth. To be sure, the federal government has done some truly awful things in our history and will probably do some despicable things in the future. Government too often caters to the needs of corporations and the wealthy elite, especially when ordinary people do not organize themselves and effectively pressure government to serve the common good. Nevertheless, the federal government is on balance a force for the good and a positive influence in our individual lives, especially when it supports and complements the cooperative work of people in their local communities and neighborhoods.
The Anti-Government Impulse
The United States contains within it a very prominent and well-funded network of people and organizations that is doing all it can to ensure that government is so small and ineffective that the broader population will just give up on it. Indeed, Grover Norquist, long-time conservative activist and president of the corporate-funded Americans for Tax Reform, is famous for once saying that his goal was to reduce government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” (2) Norquist’s statement fairly summarizes the anti-government impulse that is financed by billionaires and corporations. If government is too small and powerless to help people, that’s a good thing as far as they are concerned. If government is so gridlocked that it can’t act, that’s also good. If government policy can be made so arcane and convoluted that it frustrates people—think of our healthcare system that is so byzantine that people in other countries shake their heads in disbelief—that’s good as well. Sometimes, this impulse is housed in portions of the Democratic party and sometimes it resides in the Republican party, which is where it currently lives. The Libertarians are always on board. And in a 2020 New Yorker article, award-winning journalist Jane Mayer documents the most recent organized effort to go after government, which clearly centers around the steady feeding of dark money to Republican candidates. (3)
The anti-government impulse relies on a number of tactics to convince ordinary people that government can’t and shouldn’t help them, such as encouraging political gridlock regarding bills that serve the broader public, promoting unrestricted campaign financing, and failing to enforce campaign finance laws, but we won’t talk about these tactics here. Instead, we’ll focus on the following:
Anti-Tax Crusades—There are precious few people who enjoy paying taxes, but we all understand that taxes are the primary way that we pool our resources for the collective good. Without taxes, we don’t have public roads, schools, better regulation of financial institutions, law enforcement, national defense, Social Security, and myriad other public goods. Anti-government crusaders want to “starve the beast” by denying government the funds it needs to accomplish what the public wants from the government. It plays upon the public’s dislike of paying taxes. “It’s our money!” they shout. “We are overtaxed!” In fact, it’s very well documented that Americans have a lower tax burden than most other advanced countries’ citizens, but our tax system is one of the most complicated and frustrating. (4)
Calls to reduce taxes are almost always a bait and switch proposition. The goal is to get ordinary people to say, “Yes, we want our taxes reduced,” but then provide little tax relief to them while lavishing tax breaks and loopholes on wealthy people and corporations. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was a classic example. Candidate Donald Trump talked about cutting taxes, “especially [for] the middle class.” (5) The Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Popular Democracy, and the Economic Policy Institute documented behind-the-scenes lobbying efforts that ensued during the 2017 tax debates. Lobbyists pushed for and got larger-than-dreamed-possible tax cuts for corporations, lower taxes for rich individuals and families, and sweet deals especially for multinational corporations. The Act afforded token tax relief for middle class families, added \$1.5 trillion to the federal deficit in ten years, didn’t significantly add to economic growth, didn’t result in wage growth for workers, and didn’t boost investment. (6) People get frustrated that their situations haven’t improved. Politicians start wooing voters with a middle-class tax cut, and a whole new round of the scam starts again. Corporations and the rich make out like bandits, while the federal government is starved of revenue.
Deficit Scaremongering—Deficit scaremongering works hand in glove with anti-tax crusades. Once the federal government is shorted the tax revenue it should be getting from the wealthy and corporations, it’s time for the anti-government network to frighten people over the growing annual federal deficit and overall debt. Note that in 1950, corporate income taxes provided 26 percent of the federal government’s revenue, but by 2018 it was down to 6 percent of revenue. (7) To be sure, we have reason to be concerned about the government chronically running deficits and building up debt. Interest paid on that debt, for example, is tax money that goes to debt holders rather than serving an actual public need. Still, a clear pattern is that deficit scaremongering is most commonly heard in the corporate-owned media, when progressives are trying to do things like provide health care, shore up Social Security, and improve access to higher education. The message in opposition to social spending is always some version of, “We can’t pay for that. Look at the deficit!” Somehow, when the project is intended to pump up military spending or provide tax cuts to people and corporations who don’t really need them, one hears very little deficit scaremongering in the media.
The other interesting pattern we’ve seen since the 1970s is that Republican administrations have been the most fiscally irresponsible, adding more to the debt than Democratic administrations. Consider these facts: (8)
• The Republican Reagan and Bush administrations from 1981-1993 ran deficits every year and added considerably to the overall debt.
• The Democratic Clinton administration from 1993-2001 turned things around and actually produced budget surpluses.
• The Republican George W. Bush administration from 2001 to 2009 added more deficits.
• The Democratic Obama administration from 2009-2017 reduced deficits even while dealing with the Great Recession that started under Bush.
• The Republican Trump administration reinforced the pattern from 2017-2021 by adding significantly to the debt with ever-greater annual deficits.
Anti-Government Cynicism—Another billionaire-funded anti-government strategy is to promote anti-government cynicism. There are two basic messages here. One is that government can’t do anything right. With any enterprise as large and complex as the U.S. federal government, it’s always easy to find instances of outright incompetence. “You want a single-payer national health system? Hell, the government can’t even deliver the mail!” Notwithstanding that the U.S. Postal Service has a tremendously good record, someone always finds counterexamples and plays them up in the media. The second message is that government programs are rife with abuse, particularly those designed to help people. Recall the term “welfare queen” popularized by then-candidate Ronald Reagan who used it as a racialized dog whistle to alert White voters that social welfare programs were being abused by people of color. In fact, people who receive social welfare match the demographics of the nation, and the overwhelming majority of them do not abuse or defraud the system (9) In any case, the proper response to welfare-abuse cases would be to tighten the system to prevent additional abuse rather than to scrap or reduce the program, which does nothing but hurt people who are living on the edge. If current anti-government cynicism is strong enough, voters can be convinced that it’s largely a waste of money to entrust government with important social tasks.
The Myth of Rugged Individual Freedom—The final strategy we want to highlight here is propagating the myth of rugged individual freedom. It is especially strong in the United States, perhaps because of the mythologized and false history we tell ourselves of rugged individuals taming a vast wilderness continent, even though for thousands of years before Europeans arrived, Native Americans had already established vast communities and trading networks. To believe this myth, we have to conveniently ignore all evidence that the European colonization of the North American continent was a cooperative, often government-led operation in which people acted in groups to achieve a common goal. Some frontier towns even had strict, community-enforced gun control. (10) When the U.S. government provided free land to railroad companies, it allowed Western miners, ranchers, and farmers to get their raw materials to markets and, in turn, allowed them access to finished products.
The anti-government network of billionaire-financed libertarians and their think tanks, media outlets, and lobbying firms would like people to think of themselves as some sort of suburban Clint Eastwood, pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps with no help from any government handouts or services. Anybody violating that image must be “dependent upon government, [and] believe that they are victims,” and we’ll “never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” (11) This idea is, in one word, nonsense. As we’ll see in more detail, everyone in the country benefits from past and present government actions. Let’s take me, the author of this text, as an example: White, male, heterosexual, and middle class; I did not receive any government welfare assistance when growing up, nor have I received any as an adult. No food stamps, no assistance for needy families, no Medicaid, etc. I worked hard in school and in the various jobs I’ve held. Am I a “maker” instead of a “taker”, to use Republican Senator and presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s language? No. I am, as are all of us, a maker and a taker. While I did not receive welfare designed for poor people, I nevertheless received all sorts of government benefits. As a child, my healthcare was funded by taxpayers through my father’s military service. My public schools were generally good, paid for by taxpayers. I made full use of my local public library and earned minimum wage there in my first job. I learned to drive on locally and nationally financed roads and highways. I attended a public university where my tuition was subsidized by taxpayers. I breathed clean air and drank clean water, thanks to government regulations. I benefited from local, state, and national law enforcement agencies as well as the governmentally created legal and economic infrastructure that makes the “free market” possible.
Take a step back from the “rugged individual freedom” myth to see the broader agenda at work behind it. In any given society, the institutions historically most responsible for controlling individual behavior are churches, concentrated economic power, and government. For the past 600 years in the West, churches have gradually lost the power they once had, and governments have increased their ability to control individual behavior—sometimes for ill, but, on balance, for good. The anti-government network is really the voice of concentrated economic power, and we can think of its attack on government in two ways. If we take their argument on its own terms, we could conclude that if government were weaker, we all would have more individual freedom. Maybe, but doubtful. The other way to think about it is this: If corporations and the wealthy elite can knock the legs out from under government or otherwise dominate it, we will simply have traded one master that we can control through democratic processes for one that we cannot. If government screws up or fails to serve our interests, we have recourse by putting in new officeholders. When corporations and the wealthy run roughshod over people or kill them in pursuit of profit, they pay a tiny fine and move on the to the next exploitative or murderous adventure. We don’t get to vote on who leads the company or that it should spend a little more on worker or consumer safety and a little less on shareholder dividends.
The Federal Government Promotes the Common Good
Let’s spend a little time talking about the good that government does. There’s really too much to cover adequately here, so let’s concentrate on a few government activities from which we all have benefitted. We’re going to skip civil rights as an important category only because we’re going to talk about that in more detail in another textbook section. Suffice it to say that we all have benefitted because, through organized action by many people, the federal government is now, on balance, a force that ensures we are treated equally regardless of our race, sex, religion, and national origin. For now, though, we’ll concentrate on these three categories of federal government activity that promote the common good:
Establishing Our Economic Infrastructure—Any free market that is more sophisticated than familial or tribal barter is the result of government action. The value of money has to be regulated for a free market to work. Note that this power was given to Congress in Article I of the Constitution and that government was empowered to punish counterfeiting because that practice undermines people’s faith in the money supply. Free markets also need a legal infrastructure—laws, courts, and police powers—so that disputes can be settled peacefully, businesses can be incorporated, investors can be secure in their investments, contracts can be honored, and people can plan for the future knowing that there is an infrastructure they can count on. Without these things, a “free market” economy cannot even be established, let alone operate well.
The federal government regulates the money supply and interest rates through the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve System. The banking system is regulated—perhaps not as well as it should be—and people benefit from federal deposit insurance on their money. The United States has a well-developed legal system at both the federal and state levels that governs corporate formation, contracts, investments, and so forth. We have fairly robust laws against investor fraud. We have the Consumer Product Safety Commission that can force companies to recall defective products, and we have a court system that allows injured parties to sue for damages. The National Weather Service provides weather data and forecasting used by everyone from ski areas to commercial fishermen, from trucking companies to farmers. The Small Business Administration helps entrepreneurs start new businesses and access funding. The federal government has supplied most basic research funding for life-saving drugs, GPS devices, the Internet, medical devices, and a whole host of other economically invaluable things.
The federal government performs two other really important economic functions that we shouldn’t forget. First, its counter-cyclical spending helps lessen the negative impacts of economic downturns. When the economy declines, federal welfare and unemployment insurance payments stimulate consumer spending that would otherwise decline, thereby helping people directly and the economy generally. Secondly, the federal government has played a pivotal role in developing the physical infrastructure on which our economy depends. The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956 started one of the largest infrastructure projects in American history: the creation of the interstate highway system, benefitting individual people and commercial businesses alike. Before that, the federal government subsidized building the national railroad network, which still transports tons of freight cross country each year.
Working to Ameliorate Poverty—As Professor Amy put it, “Government programs are often one of the most effective ways that we express caring and compassion toward our fellow human beings.” (12) The Great Depression in the 1930’s taught us that church and local community-based efforts to ameliorate poverty—valuable as they are—can easily be overwhelmed when the economy stalls and they are generally not up to the scale needed to fight the ills that accompany the particular version of capitalism practiced in the United States. During the Great Depression, government programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration—the latter of which built the high school I attended—put people to work when the private sector could not.
One of America’s great past tragedies is the extent of poverty among elderly people. Poverty used to be more prevalent among America’s elderly than other population groups, but it has declined considerably since the 1930’s due to federal programs like Social Security and Medicare. America still has a problem today, with hundreds of thousands of elderly people living in poverty, but the situation is far better than it was before the federal government intervened.
The federal government works to ameliorate poverty in other ways as well. Millions of American families are aided every year by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly the Food Stamp program, which was in place temporarily during World War II and permanently since 1964. The Medicaid program has provided health care to poor people since 1965. The Supplemental Security Income program has been subsidizing disabled adults and children since 1972. Since 1972, the Women Infants and Children (WIC) program has helped treat and feed millions of pregnant women, new mothers, and young children, while the Pell Grant program has allowed millions of young people to go college. Every year since 1975, the Earned Income Tax Credit has helped millions of working poor escape poverty. Poverty is still a scourge in the United States, especially when one considers how comparatively wealthy a country it is, but life in America would be unimaginably worse without federal anti-poverty efforts. We would do well to consider alternative and better ways to fight poverty, but for now, we can know that these programs have undoubtedly made people’s lives better than they would have been had they never existed.
Promoting Quality of Life—Federal entities like the Environmental Protection Agency and laws such as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act benefit all of us every day. Since the early 1970s when these laws went into effect, and despite population growth, our waterways and air are cleaner than they would have been without them. This is a lifesaving, quality-of-life enhancing benefit to real people every day. (13) In addition, the Food and Drug Administration ensures that the food we eat is safe and that the pills we take are efficacious and safe. And the 1971 creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has helped the United States experience a dramatic decline in workplace injuries and death. (14)
Think about the public health improvements that have come as a result of the federal government. Through the National Institutes of Health and other agencies, the federal government funds basic research on everything from cancer to heart disease. Federally funded immunization drives have dramatically reduced our chances of contracting polio, measles, diphtheria, and other diseases. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) monitors domestic and international disease outbreaks from the flu to the zika virus to the corona virus, helping us prepare for and mitigate outbreaks. Of course, these institutions only work well when presidential administrations support the CDC with funding and staff pandemic early warning units, and when wearing masks is seen by the public as a public health measure rather than an infringement on personal liberty.
Federal support for education makes a real difference in our lives. Through student loans and the Pell Grant program, the federal government supports access to higher education. Title I funding from the Department of Education goes to school districts serving high numbers of students living in poverty to help provide them with equal opportunities. The federal Head Start program works with local agencies to promote school readiness for low income children.
We could go on. Have any of you enjoyed a National Park, a National Forest, or BLM lands? Have you flown on a federally funded world class national airline system or used your local mass-transit system? Have you used GPS technology to find a good restaurant or the most efficient way to get around a traffic accident? Have you benefitted from federal safety standards for automobiles and tires? Have you benefitted from federal law enforcement disrupting domestic and international terrorist groups?
The federal government, imperfect as it is—as are all human institutions—is a net positive part of our lives. Those who promote nonstop government criticism want you to forget that government has benefitted ordinary people and that it continues to do so. They want you to doubt that government could improve itself, offer new programs, and serve the general welfare. They want government to fail.
What if . . . ?
What if we replaced the Presidents’ Day holiday with a Good Government holiday? Government workers could have that day off, and the news would be filled with stories of how our government is a positive force in our lives. Kids would get that day off from school as well, but the weeks surrounding that holiday could be filled with lessons about what government does, the dedication of government employees, and field trips to see government in action. Writing in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, William Burns argued that “If America has any chance to recover, let alone rescue a semblance of unity from the rubble of our polarized politics, we have to heed the admirable examples of [government workers] and seize this moment to end the war on government, revive our institutions, and shape a new era of public service.” (15) What if we heeded Burns’ advice and revitalized a public-minded sense of service to America?
References
1. Bob Cesca, “Keep Your Goddamn Government Hands Off My Medicare!” Huffington Post. December 6, 2017.
2. Quoted in Bob Dreyfuss, “Grover Norquist: ‘Field Marshall’ of the Bush Plan,” The Nation. April 26, 2001.
3. Jane Mayer, Dark Money. The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. New York: Penguin Random House, 2017.
4. Beverly Bird, “How Do U. S. Taxes Compare to Other Countries?” The Balance. November 20, 2019. See also the information at the Tax Policy Center.
5. Jesse Byrnes, “Trump: ‘Everybody is Getting a Tax Cut,’” The Hill. May 9, 2016.
6. Peter Cary and Allan Holmes, “The Secret Saga of Trump’s Tax Cuts,” Center for Public Integrity. April 30, 2019. Maggie Corser, Josh Bivens, and Hunter Blair, Still Terrible at Two. The Trump Tax Act Delivered Big Benefits to the Rich and Corporations But Nearly None for Working FamiliesThe Center for Popular Democracy and the Economic Policy Institute. December 2019.
7. Federal figures from the Tax Policy Center.
8. Steve Benen, “Despite His Promises, Trump Pushes Deficit Past \$1 Trillion Mark,” MSNBC. September 13, 2019.
9. Gene Demby, “The Truth Behind the Lies of the Original ‘Welfare Queen,’” NPR All Things Considered. December 20, 2013.
10. Matt Jancer, “Gun Control is as Old as the Old West,” Smithsonian Magazine. February 5, 2018. Donald J. Campbell, America’s Gun Wars: A Cultural History of Gun Control in the United States. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2019. Pages 24-26.
11. Candidate Mitt Romney. John Christofferson, “Romney’s ‘47%’ Chosen as Year’s Best Quote,” USA Today. December 9, 2012.
12. Douglas J. Amy, Government is Good.
13. Paul Greenberg, “The Clean Water Act at 40: There’s Still Much Left to Do,” Yale Environment 360. May 21, 2012. Kristie Ross, James F. Chmiel, and Thomas Ferkol, “The Impact of the Clean Air Act,” The Journal of Pediatrics.Volume 161, Issue 5. November 2012. Pages 781-786.
14. United States Department of Labor data.
15. William J. Burns, “America Needs a Rebirth of Public Service,” The Atlantic.May 4, 2020. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/06%3A_The_Federal_Bureaucracy/6.01%3A_Chapter_36-_Government_is_Good.txt |
“Paleontologist Robert Gay’s quest to find the fossilized remains of an ancient phytosaur, a primitive ancestor to crocodiles, turned into something much larger last summer when he came upon a major trove of Triassic fossils on public lands recently stripped from Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument.”
–Brian Maffly (1)
“While a discovery of this magnitude certainly is a welcome surprise, protecting such resources was the very purpose of Bears Ears National Monument.”
–Scott Miller (2)
The federal government is quite large in both scope and size. It spends trillions of dollars each year. Its operations span from providing Social Security to protecting fossils and archaeological sites on public lands, from engaging with other countries diplomatically to funding mass transit projects. It wasn’t always thus. Let’s address the federal government’s scope and size to understand how and why it evolved into its present state.
Scope of the Federal Government
When we refer to the federal government’s scope, we are talking about the range of things that it does. People categorize federal government’s activities in numerous different ways. This is one way of looking at them:
Social Welfare—This government activity encompasses programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, among others. Social welfare programs are located throughout the federal bureaucracy.
War-Making—This activity, which is now under the auspices of the Department of Defense—we used to call it the Department of War—encompasses the branches of the armed services (e.g., Army, Navy, Air Force) and represents the United States’ ability to project armed destruction around the globe. It is also responsible for the more than 700 military bases that the Defense Department maintains in the United States and around the world.
Diplomacy—The Department of State is responsible for diplomacy and for carrying out America’s non-military foreign policy.
Justice and Law Enforcement—The Department of Justice handles all federal criminal prosecutions and civil suits in which the U.S. government has an interest. It also contains within it the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA); the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF); and the U.S. Marshalls Service. Also included in this category is the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the Coast Guard; Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); Customs and Border Protection; and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA); among many others.
Commerce—A number of federal agencies exist to promote commerce of one sort or another: The Commerce Department, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of the Interior are the most prominent.
Fiscal and Monetary Issues—The Treasury Department manages the federal government’s finances, manages tax collection through the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), services the federal debt, supervises financial institutions, and goes after counterfeiters. The Federal Reserve System, a quasi-public, quasi-private central banking system for the United States, is charged with stabilizing prices and maximizing employment—two functions that can be at loggerheads. It accomplishes these tasks by adjusting interest rates.
Infrastructure—The Department of Transportation promotes and regulates transportation, including the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). We can also include in this category the Department of Energy which, among other things, regulates nuclear power stations and the country’s national electricity grids. Finally, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) belongs in this category.
Human Services—The Department of Health and Human Services contains, among many others, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It administers Medicare and Medicaid. We can also put the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency in the Human Services category. We can put the Department of Veterans Affairs here as well, although some would argue that it fits better in the War-Making category because its expenses are a direct result of our war-making and our preparations for war-making. The Department of Labor deals with worker safety, compensation, and working conditions.
Another way to understand the federal government’s scope and size is through an historical lens—by looking at the year in which cabinet-level departments were created. (3)
Department Year Established
State 1789
Treasury 1789
Justice 1789
War/Defense 1789/1949
Interior 1849
Agriculture 1889
Commerce 1913
Labor 1913
Health and Human Services 1953
Housing and Urban Development 1965
Transportation 1966
Energy 1967
Environmental Protection Agency 1970 (elevated to cabinet level in 1990)
Education 1979
Veterans Affairs 1987
Homeland Security 2002
Size of the Federal Government
We can understand the size of the federal government by asking a few basic questions.
How much does the federal government spend? According to the Treasury Department, in 2021, the federal government spent about \$6.8 trillion and took in about \$4 trillion in revenue. (4) The first thing we should notice is that the annual deficit—the shortfall between revenue and spending—is more than two trillion dollars. The next thing to notice is that \$6.8 trillion dollars is a great deal of money. One way to put the federal government’s size in perspective is to see how much it spends relative to the overall size of the American economy, and also how its spending compares to that of state governments.
As you can see from the chart, since the late 1970s, federal government spending has hovered between 20-24 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—the total value of goods and services produced in the United States in one year. The year 2020 was an outlier due to massive government spending during the COVID-19 pandemic. State and local government expenditures have stayed between 10-12 percent of GDP. (5) Another way to look at this is by doing an international comparison. Looking at combined federal and state government spending as a percentage of GDP across the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) members, we can see that the United States government is relatively small as a percentage of the American economy, especially when compared to other countries’ governments.
How many people does the federal government employ? As with many such questions, the answer depends on who you want to count. According to the Office of Personnel Management, as reported by the Congressional Research Service, there are about 2.1 million federal government civilian employees. (6) There are an additional 1.3 million active duty military and Coast Guard employees. (7) Add those two figures together and we have about 3.4 million federal government employees, but that’s not the whole picture. The federal government conducts much work using private contractors—employing people as diverse as private sector soldiers engaged in war zones and janitors hired to maintain federal buildings. Paul Light, New York University public service professor, estimates that the federal government employs some 3.7 million private contractors, plus nearly 500,000 Postal Service employees who are not counted in our federal civilian employee tally. (8) Add them all up, and we can safely say that between 7 and 8 million people directly owe their livelihoods to a federal government paycheck—out of a population of over 330 million people.
What is the size and impact of federal regulations? Another way to understand the federal government’s size is to understand how many regulations it issues and what impacts they have. According to the Federal Register, the federal regulations code totaled 9,745 pages in 1950 and had grown to 185,484 pages by 2018. (9) These regulations range from the Fair Labor Standards Act requirement for companies to pay overtime for nonexempt employees who work more than forty hours per week, to the Affordable Care Act’s provision banning private health insurance companies from denying coverage to people who have pre-existing medical conditions or from charging them more.
Corporations and the spokespeople they fund inevitably argue that federal regulations are too costly and won’t provide benefits worth the costs. This argument is almost always wrong. A Pew Charitable Trusts’ analysis concluded that “Historically, compliance costs have been less and benefits greater than industry predictions, and regulation typically poses little challenge to economic competitiveness.” (10) Their analysis showed that regulation-compliance costs were always lower than the industries said they would be, for example, for fighting acid rain, mandating seat belts and air bags in cars, mandating emissions changes to cars, banning chlorofluorocarbons that were putting a hole in the earth’s ozone, and others. Further, these kinds of regulations pay enormous societal benefits. Mandatory seat belts have saved more than 7,000 lives per year, and the ban on chlorofluorocarbons led to cheaper substitutes that have saved businesses and customers billions of dollars. In a federal regulation costs and benefits review of a single decade, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) estimated that regulations cost businesses and consumers between \$74 and \$110 billion but provided between \$269 and \$872 billion worth of benefits. (11)
The U.S. tax code may be a different matter. If we consider the federal tax code as a form of regulation, we can say with confidence that this particular regulation is excessively complex and burdensome, especially when compared to other developed countries’ tax systems. The American tax code is several thousand pages long and so complex that the Internal Revenue Service Taxpayer Advocate publishes an annual tax system roadmap that is, itself, byzantine. Tax compliance is a multibillion-dollar business in the United States, compared to a country like Japan, whose government collects withholdings so precisely that most workers don’t even have to file a tax return. (12) Tax compliance costs refer to the time, accountants, software, lawyers and other expenses that individuals, families, nonprofit organizations, and businesses need to complete their taxes. Obviously, low and middle-income families who take the standard deduction aren’t spending a great deal in tax compliance costs, but wealthy families and businesses go to considerable lengths to exploit the loopholes built into the tax code. That takes time and the employment of specialists who know the code. In terms of time alone, U.S. tax-system compliance may run as high as 8 billion hours of work, even after the 2017 tax bill’s simplifications. (13)
Historical Evolution of the Federal Government
From our perspective, the federal government didn’t do much during its first eighty years. It delivered the mail. It fought wars and conducted foreign policy. It created its own bank. It taxed imports, regulated the money supply, and granted patents. It fought amongst itself over the issue of slavery and admitted new states to the union. We can say without being too facetious, that that’s about it. It didn’t have any environmental regulations. No worker safety, pay, or hours-regulations either. It didn’t promote energy efficiency or public health. It didn’t smooth out economic downturns through its social welfare programs—because it didn’t have any. For even longer than its first eighty years, its peacetime military was miniscule compared to the size of the country. It didn’t have a space program or fund inoculations. It didn’t defend people’s civil rights—again, for much longer than its first eighty years.
Pre-Civil War-era per-capita federal government spending hovered around \$30. In the years following World War I, federal government spending had risen to about \$129 per person. By 2004, it had reached \$7,100 per capita. (14) A back-of-the envelope calculation using OMB and Census information indicates that currently the federal government is spending about \$13,800 per person. The federal government generally balanced its budget during peacetime until the 1930s. A balanced budget means that spending matches tax receipts. Since the 1930s, the federal government has generally not balanced its budget—except during the Clinton administration—instead, the government finances its annual deficits by selling Treasury notes to domestic and international investors.
The federal government has grown due to four main reasons, with which you should be familiar. One impetus for government expansion has been war. Prosecuting and financing warfare were and is an important factor in government growth, from the first city states through the modern world’s great power competition. (15) Federal spending spiked during the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror. Military equipment had to be built; troops trained, paid, and veterans cared for; and oil had to be purchased so that America could project power to conflict zones—the U.S. military has long been one of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases. Government grew during wartime as it curtailed civil liberties and propagandized its own people to maintain civilian morale and to sufficiently demonize the enemy. To finance war, it had to raise taxes and sell war bonds and other financial instruments. During World War I, the United States government established the War Industries Board, the War Finance Corporation, and the National War Labor Board to coordinate industrial production and labor relations—a set of government operations that didn’t just fade away after the war ended. (16) Similar government economic regulations ramped up during World War II as well. Cold War competition with the Soviet Union stimulated everything from atomic weapons and power development to the interstate highway system, commercial airlines, GPS and weather satellites, to the internet.
Another element driving federal government expansion has been corporate demand. Many people operate under the myth that government and business are implacable enemies. One does not have to buy into the Marxist idea that government is merely the tool of the capitalist class, to realize that government and businesses are in a symbiotic relationship. While businesses chafe from time to time at “too much” government regulation, on the whole, businesses benefit from the stability and predictability afforded by government regulating the economy. Witness the way that regulation of commercial drones allowed their use in a way that was standardized, predictable, and economically viable. (17) Such was the case with electricity, automobiles, airlines, pharmaceuticals, cellular communications, and every other large, complex industry. On a more basic level, myriad businesses benefit from publicly financed infrastructure—which we can broadly define to include everything from roads and bridges to schools and sanitation systems. Indeed, note that people debilitated by illiteracy or easily preventable diseases tend not to talk on their cell phones while driving their cars to their jobs in the biotech industry. Business leaders know this basic fact, even though they may balk at paying their fair share of the taxes needed to provide the seeds of economic vitality.
Finally, we can talk about direct government intervention that props up businesses and entire industries. Where would the nuclear power industry be without federally subsidized liability insurance? Where would the automobile industry be without federally subsidized highways, access to cheap oil courtesy of the U.S. military, and auto manufacturers post-Great Recession federal bailout? Where would the airlines be without government support for airports, the security and safety provisions that make us feel reasonably safe, and the Federal Aviation Administration’s domestic airspace regulations? If the government didn’t provide these supports, businesses would quickly go bankrupt trying to fund them.
Popular demand is another significant reason for the federal government’s growth. The federal government has grown because the people have demanded that it solve real problems. Political Scientist Douglas Amy put it best:
[B]ig government is not something that has been forced on Americans by liberal elitists and power-hungry bureaucrats. We have it because we ourselves have demanded big government to deal with the many big problems we have faced in our society. We have called for big government programs when it has been obvious that there are serious problems that cannot be solved through individual effort or by the natural workings of the free market. (18)
Think about the various problems that transcend state boundaries that are too large and/or complex for community-based solutions. People have demanded national efforts to clean the water and air; to ensure that people have equal employment opportunity regardless of sex, race, religion, or national origin; to fight the scandal of old-age poverty and ill-health; to counter the monopoly power of railroads, steel companies, and internet platforms; to provide health coverage when the market finds it profitable to let poor people die untreated in the car they happen to be living in; to protect national parks and public lands; to interdict and disrupt domestic and international terrorists. Government is good when it responds to problems articulated by the general population. People can argue about the particular form that the government response takes—whether this healthcare policy is better than that or whether air pollution is best fought via specific regulations or fossil fuel taxes—but they recognize that collective action through government is the best chance we have to avoid the brutal and nasty conditions that are the calling card of anarchy, which is literally the absence of government.
In addition, in the decades after the Civil War, American capitalism grew into a particularly aggressive and socially destructive type—note that capitalism comes in a variety of flavors, some of which are much more palatable than are others—and this fact engendered public demand for action. As Matt Stoller, Open Markets Institute fellow, writes, “The people organized for their rights against these new private centralizing corporations and an unstable political economy.” (19) Americans have used government to struggle against monopolized economic power from the late nineteenth century’s Gilded Age until the Obama administration’s capitulation in the wake of the Great Recession. Thus, government took on powers to try to deal with the external aspects of America’s particular brand of capitalism—the ruined farmers, exploited workers, monopolies’ excesses, pollution, bad food, dangerous or worthless drugs, the financial speculation, and the invasions of privacy. Ordinary people simply cannot deal with the predations of America’s brand of capitalism without attempting to bring in government, which is the only comparably powerful societal force that can—potentially—stand up to concentrated economic power. In her history of capitalism, historian Joyce Appleby argued that the American founders’ preferences for limited government were “undermined” by “the new concentration of power in industrial corporations,” but it took until well after the Civil War “for the public to realize the need for a government equipped to monitor and curtail the great industrial enterprises.” (20)
The final reason government has expanded in the United States and virtually everywhere is societal density and complexity. The earliest political states organized within dense people-groupings who engaged in the radically complex, up to then, practice of growing food and domesticating animals. As political scientist James Scott writes, “The imperative of collecting people, settling them close to the core of power, holding them there, and having them produce a surplus in excess of their own needs animates much of early statecraft.” (21) In many ways, settled agricultural society was a step backwards for human freedom and health. (22) However, it certainly became increasingly complex. For thousands of years, government size has reflected the types of societies they governed: While agrarian societies were vastly more socially dense and complex than hunter-gatherer life, they pale in comparison to the scale and complexity of the industrialized and urbanized societies that developed in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In 1880, fully 50 percent of the American population worked on farms, but by 1920, only 25 percent did. Also, by 1920, the majority of Americans lived and worked in urban centers. (23) According to the Census Bureau, the American population exploded from 50 million in 1880 to 106 million in 1920.
Societal density and complexity have real consequences for governance. You’ve heard the old saying: “Your right to swing your arm ends when it meets my face.” In a society with a geographically dispersed population, people simply come into conflict with each other less often, so there is not as much need for police, courts, laws, and regulations. Complexity and social density act together to promote bigger government because of the rising number and scope of individual and group conflicts. As anthropologist Joseph Tainter made clear, complexity in society gives rise to ever more sophisticated and robust problem-solving mechanisms and processes—most of which involve government. (24) Geographer Jared Diamond reiterated Tainter’s point by writing that the “prerequisites for communal decision-making become unattainable in much larger communities,” and that “a large society must be structured and centralized if it is to reach decisions effectively.” (25)
The reasons for growth in the American government—war, corporate demands, popular demands, and social density and complexity—operate on governments all over the world, so the U.S. federal government is not unusual in this respect. To be clear, these factors operate on liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes alike.
References
1. Brian Maffly, “A Search for an Ancient Crocodile in Utah’s Bears Ears Leads to a Major Discovery of Triassic Fossils,” The Salt Lake Tribune. February 24, 2018.
2. Noel Kirkpatrick, “Ancient Fossils Found on Lands Once Part of Bears Ears National Monument,” Mother Nature Network. February 26, 2018.
3. Thomas A. Garrett and Russell M. Rhine, “On the Size and Growth of Government,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review. January/February 2006.
4. U.S. Treasury Historical Tables.
5. The Office of Management and Budget.
6. Congressional Research ServiceFederal Workforce Statistics Sources: OPM and OMB. October 24, 2019. Page 4.
7. The Department of Defense.
8. Paul C. Light, The True Size of GovernmentThe Volcker Alliance Issue Paper. October 2017. Page 3.
9. Statistics from the Federal Register.
10. Pew Charitable Trusts, Government Regulation: Costs Lower, Benefits Greater than Industry Estimates. May 2015. Page 1.
11. The Office of Management and Budget, 2016 Draft Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations and Agency Compliance with the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act.
12. Taxpayer Advocate Service Roadmap. Selena Maranjian, “You Won’t Believe How Complex Our Tax System Is—Here’s How to Make Sense of It,” The Motley Fool. July 21, 2019. Demian Brady, “U.S. Tax System Lags in International Comparison,” National Taxpayer Union Foundation. May 1, 2017.
13. Demian Brady, “Trump Tax Cuts Eased Complexity and Compliance Burden on American Taxpayers,” Townhall. April 16, 2019.
14. Thomas A Garrett and Russell M. Rhine, “On the Size and Growth of Government,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review. January/February 2006.
15. James C. Scott, Against the Grain. A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. Pages 150-182. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Random House, 1987.
16. Paul Johnson, A History of the American People. New York: Harper Collins, 1997. Pages 646-647.
17. Dave Marcontell and Steve Douglas, “Why the Use of Drones Still Faces Big Regulatory Hurdles,” Forbes. September 10, 2018. Traci Browne, “Police Drones Market Increases with FAA Rules, Test Cases,” Robotics Business Review. May 8, 2017.
18. Douglas J. Amy, “The Real Reason for Big Government,” Huffington Post. August 8, 2012.
19. Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2019. Page 9.
20. Joyce Appleby, The Relentless Revolution. A History of Capitalism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Pages 216-217.
21. James C. Scott, Against the Grain. A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. Page 151.
22. Richard Manning, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization. New York: North Point Press, 2004.
23. Jill Lepore, These Truths. A History of the United States. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. 2018. Page 375.
24. Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Note that Tainter’s thesis is that as complexity increases and resources are stretched thin, there is a diminishing marginal return on increased investments in complexity, leading to societal collapse.
25. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel. The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. Page 287.
Media Attributions
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“A characteristic principle of bureaucracy is that it is an expression of a regularized governance with abstract rules. . . [and] regularized governance springs from a desire for ‘equality before the law,’ and looks at privileges as abominations. . .”
–Max Weber (1)
“The third line of work [for the Trump administration] is deconstruction of the administrative state.”
–Steve Bannon (2)
“The real threat to democracy comes not from an imagined deep state, but from a weak state of hollowed-out institutions and battered and belittled public servants.”
–William J. Burns (3)
Bureaucrats and the Rule of Law
We have a love-hate relationship with bureaucracy and bureaucrats. We understand from reading history and sociology that bureaucracy develops along with government in response to social density and complexity. Bureaucracy is marked by predictability, rationality, expertise, structure, equal treatment, documentation, and record-keeping. As much as we dislike the impersonal and often inflexible nature of bureaucracy, we should keep in mind a particularly important advantage to bureaucracy: it promotes the rule of law. The rule of law refers to the related ideas that no one is above the law, that all of us are equally subject to the laws that we collectively make together, and that decisions are reached by following pre-established procedures. It is a cherished ideal that people around the world have struggled to achieve and one that authoritarian leaders seek to undermine. Bureaucracy insists that we all follow the rules, whether it comes to obtaining a passport or declaring a federal emergency. Bureaucrats don’t do arbitrary and they don’t play favorites—at least, they’re not supposed to treat people unequally. This is a good thing, and we should always be wary of political leaders who disparage the bureaucracy when it upholds the rule of law.
Aside from its insistence on following pre-established procedures, bureaucratic agencies promote the rule of law in two other important ways. Effective bureaucracies develop a merit system, meaning that people are hired and promoted to ever greater responsibilities due to their qualifications and their capabilities. A merit system contrasts with what is known as a spoils system, which is where the winning political party stocks the bureaucracy with their own people. The spoils system used to be commonplace in local, state, and federal bureaucracies. In 1881 President Garfield was assassinated by Charles Guiteau, who didn’t receive an expected federal spoils position after Garfield was elected. This shocking event contributed to adopting the Pendleton Civil Service Act in 1883, which set the federal government on the path to a merit system. The merit system provides protection to federal civil servants from being fired or punished when a presidential administration of one party takes power from an administration of a different party. Federal civil servants can only be fired “for cause,” meaning that they can be fired for not adequately performing their job, but not for extraneous or political reasons. The Pendleton Act also created the United States Civil Service Commission to oversee the merit system. Through a 1978 reorganization passed by Congress, the Commission’s responsibilities were devolved to the Office of Personnel Management, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and the Office of Special Counsel.
The second way that bureaucratic agencies promote the rule of law is to require that federal civil service employees be apolitical in their professional capacities. In 1939, Congress passed “An Act to Prevent Pernicious Political Activities,” otherwise known as the Hatch Act of 1939—so named for Senator Carl Hatch of New Mexico. The Hatch Act has been updated and amended several times over the ensuing decades, but we should be clear about the following two original Hatch Act provisions:
• No person may “intimidate, threaten, or coerce, or to attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce, any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of such other person to vote or to vote as he may choose, or of causing such other person to vote for, or not to vote for, any candidate for the office of President, Vice President, Presidential elector, Member of the Senate, or Member of the Houses of Representatives.”
• Federal employees are forbidden from using their “official authority for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the election or the nomination of any candidate for the office of President, Vice President, Presidential elector, Member of the Senate, or Member of the House of Representatives.” (4)
The Hatch Act prohibits coercion in federal elections. That’s a good thing and is an international standard to help determine whether elections have been conducted freely and fairly. The Hatch Act also forbids federal employees from using their “official authority”—which could be anything from one’s title, office funds, or email address—to interfere with or affect a federal election. Due to Hatch Act modifications, federal employees are free in their personal capacity to support political campaigns, but they must resign their federal position if they want to run for federal office. Federal officials run into Hatch Act violations on a fairly steady basis every year, but it doesn’t appear to be a big problem.
Organization of a Federal Cabinet Agency
Government agencies are very complicated, and their organizational structures have evolved over time to serve their unique responsibilities. Therefore, it’s difficult to generalize about them. However, we can make some useful generalizations about how cabinet-level agencies are structured. Cabinet-level agencies are headed by a Secretary—Secretary of Labor, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and so on—who is a political appointee, meaning that they are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate and that they are expected to carry out the president’s program with respect to the agency. Similarly, the top layer of the agency’s leadership’s is also composed of political appointees—with titles like Assistant Secretary, Deputy Assistant Secretary, General Counsel, and so forth. The political appointees in a federal agency form a fairly thin layer of political White House control over the agency’s work. They are able to do so subject to the laws and regulations that have already been established with respect to that agency’s work. Thus, they cannot direct civil servants to violate the law or abrogate established regulations without going through formal processes established by law.
Below the political appointees are the millions of civil servants who perform the work of the federal government. We’re referring here to civilians—i.e., not uniform military—who are not appointed by the president to their positions. It’s virtually impossible to give an adequate accounting of the wide range of people who work in the federal civil service, but imagine people such as statisticians, park rangers, geologists, epidemiologists, lawyers, tax accountants, demographers, and lead paint abatement administrators all serving to carry out the American people’s wishes as reflected in congressional legislation and executive branch regulations. Contrary to what many people may think, most federal civilian employees do not work in the Washington D.C. area. In fact, more than 80 percent of them are spread around the country from Tampa to Seattle, from Boston to San Diego, and all sorts of places in between. (5)
Federal agencies also have an Inspector General’s office, the existence of which was established by the Inspector General Act of 1978. The agency’s Inspector General is “an independent, non-partisan organization established within each executive branch agency assigned to audit the agency’s operation in order to discover and investigate cases of misconduct, waste, fraud and other abuse of government procedures occurring within the agency.” (6) For cabinet-level agencies, inspectors general are appointed by the president and approved by the Senate. They can be removed by the president. For other federal entities like Amtrak, the Postal Service, and the Federal Reserve, the agency head appoints the inspector general. Inspectors general are supposed to be independent and able to conduct the internal investigations and audits they see fit. The results of those investigations and audits are given to whomever heads the agency and also to Congress within seven daysWhile the inspectors general are not congressional employees, the Inspector General Act put them in place “to assist Congress in its oversight role.” (7)
Inspectors general often rely on whistleblowers, who are people who come forward with information about maladministration, corruption, waste, or abuse of office within the agency. The Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 forbids agency leaders from retaliating against the whistleblower or threatening retaliation. The Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998 extended similar protections to workers in the intelligence agencies, although these workers are forbidden from taking retaliation cases to court. According to Bradley Moss, an attorney who specializes in whistleblower cases, “The need for whistleblowers to be able to raise their concerns with confidentiality and anonymity is critical.” (8)
What Do Federal Agencies Do?
This is a gross oversimplification, but federal agencies perform two important functions that all citizens should know.
The first important task of federal agencies is rule-making, which refers to creating new regulations and revising existing regulations. The rule-making process is governed by the Administrative Procedure Act, which was originally passed in 1946, but which has been amended since then. Before we talk about the actual process through which regulations are created or amended, we should make clear that executive agencies are not free agents that act on their own initiative. They are creations of Congress, and no executive agency can act unsupported by statutory authority. (9) This means that Congress must first pass a law to create the executive agency and then pass additional laws—called enabling legislation—to give that agency the authority to issue particular kinds of regulations to solve defined problems. Since congressional members are not experts in air pollution or highway engineering or medical-device safety, they write laws in such a way as to allow the relevant agencies to create the specific regulations based on input from experts and the public alike.
Once an agency has been given statutory authority to regulate a given issue, the first step is usually research and data gathering. What is the current state of the problem, whether it be particulate air pollution or rear-end collisions on American highways? In the case of air pollution, what smokestack and tailpipe regulations would result in what levels of reduced pollution? What kind of scrubbers on smokestacks and emissions-control devices on automobiles will produce what levels of particulate reductions? At what cost? This research and data gathering stage of the rule-making process can take years of careful study before a sound regulation can be written.
Once the research and data gathering stage is finished, the Administrative Procedure Act requires that the following steps be taken:
• Publish planning documents. These documents are written and published as a regulatory plan so that the public and other stakeholders are alerted that the agency is writing or rewriting regulations in a particular area.
• Engage stakeholders. The agency gathers feedback regarding the regulatory plan. It does so by posting an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in the Federal Register, which is a publicly available online and printed source that documents federal government behavior. In the case of air pollution, the agency may contact companies that have factories and refineries, automobile companies, and so forth.
• Write and publish a regulatory proposal. Agency staff put together a regulation and publish in the Federal Register a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that summarizes the issue and the regulation at hand, sets a date when the public comment period will end, provides a means for public comment, and includes any other relevant information like important data the agency used and the agency’s take on why this rule or regulation will be beneficial.
• Accept public comment. During a comment period that usually lasts thirty or sixty days, anyone is allowed to comment on the proposal. The agency may revise the regulatory proposal after the public comment period. It may also repost a new version for an additional comment period.
• Publish the final rule or regulation. The agency publishes the final rule or regulation in the Federal Register and stipulates a date for when the regulation goes into effect. (10)
The second important task of federal agencies is enforcing congressional statutes as well as their own rules and regulations. It’s difficult to make useful generalizations about how federal agencies go about ensuring that laws and regulations are followed. The first thing that might come into your mind when you think about federal government enforcement is the range of agencies that police the federal criminal code. These range from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to the Coast Guard, from the Drug Enforcement Administration to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Then there are the agencies like Customs and Border Protection as well as Immigration and Customs Enforcement that carry out laws governing who can enter and remain in the United States. But enforcement also covers other agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency that can fine polluters and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that can sue financial services companies and use court orders to compensate consumers who have been harmed by fraud or other illegal activities.
When enforcing federal laws and ensuring compliance with federal regulations, agencies have a certain amount of discretion in their work. This means that federal agency leaders can make choices about which violators to pursue, what penalties to seek, and on what areas of their responsibilities they want to concentrate their efforts. Enforcement discretion is often a function of agencies being over-worked, understaffed, and operating with limited resources. Choices have to be made. For example, the early years of the Obama administration were marked by a fairly strong approach to enforcing federal laws against marijuana production, distribution, and possession. Marijuana, after all, was still a Schedule 1 drug under the federal Controlled Substances Act. However, after more and more states began to decriminalize medical and recreational marijuana use, the Obama administration eased off. Similarly, the Trump administration said it could choose to go after companies and individuals who violate federal marijuana laws as they abide by laws in liberal states, but that it chose not to—presumably because such a move would be unpopular. (11)
The really problematic aspect of federal enforcement—the aspect which fits with the attenuated democracy theme of this textbook—is the tendency to prosecute and audit ordinary Americans instead of going after corporate malfeasance and wealthy white-collar criminals. White-collar crime has been defined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) this way:
Reportedly coined in 1939, the term white-collar crime is now synonymous with the full range of frauds committed by business and government professionals. These crimes are characterized by deceit, concealment, or violation of trust and are not dependent on the application or threat of physical force or violence. The motivation behind these crimes is financial—to obtain or avoid losing money, property, or services or to secure a personal or business advantage. (12)
In an exposé for the Huffington Post, journalist Michael Hobbes and researcher Matt Giles summarized the lack of enforcement against corporate criminals by saying that we are living in the “golden age” of white-collar crime. “It is,” they wrote, “impossible to look around the country and not get the feeling that elites are slowly looting it. . . the criminal justice system has given up all pretense that the crimes of the wealthy are worth taking seriously.” Further, they argue that “an entrenched, unfettered class of superpredators is wreaking havoc on American society.” (13)
The consequence is that corporations and the wealthy are evading taxes, pushing faulty products on consumers, committing fraud, and getting their unqualified kids into elite universities in record numbers. The problem’s scale is enormous—elite law breakers are so much less likely to be punished than are ordinary Americans. For example, the Internal Revenue Service audits poor recipients of the Earned Income Tax Credit whose average income is around \$20,000 per year at twice the rate of taxpayers with income in the \$200,000 to \$500,000 range. (14) Tax evasion and corporate fraud cost the U.S. economy far more every year than all of the bank robberies and street crime. And yet, the U.S. goes after street crime with a breathtaking zeal compared to how white-collar crime is treated. In 2018, around 19,000 people were sentenced in federal courts for drug crimes, but only thirty-seven people working at big corporations were federally prosecuted for white-collar crime. (15)
There are two main reasons why the federal government falls down on the job when it comes to white-collar crime while heavily enforcing other kinds of criminal activity.
1. Resource Imbalance. Federal agencies like the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Security and Exchange Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency are outspent, outlawyered, and unable to go toe-to-toe with corporations and wealthy individuals who tie up enforcement attempts in legal knots. As a report published by the office of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) pointed out, the resource imbalance often results in the federal government accepting small settlements from corporate criminals in which they don’t even have to admit guilt. (16)
2. Higher Bar for White-Collar Criminal Liability. This is one of the worst aspects of America’s criminal justice system, because there is often a different standard of criminal liability for white-collar crimes than there is for other crimes. For instance, in federal drug crimes “prosecutors have to prove that a defendant should have known a crime was taking place,” but in white-collar criminal cases “prosecutors have to prove that the defendants knew their actions were illegal and did them anyway.” (17) Consider the implications of this. If your adult child is caught running an interstate drug ring while living in your basement, you can serve time on federal drug charges and your house can be seized—even if you didn’t know this was happening—because you should have known that criminal activity was taking place. On the other hand, if you defraud investors by collecting fees for pushing an investment that was clearly worthless, you can simply claim that you didn’t know that it was worthless and, certainly, that you had no intention of violating federal securities fraud statutes. Unless the prosecutors find an email written by you to a co-collaborator in which you admit that you knew your actions constituted a crime, you are likely to escape prosecution.
Federal agencies are charged with preventing corporations and the wealthy from cheating American families, killing people with faulty products, committing fraud, and evading taxes. The fact that they are far less likely to fulfill this charge compared with enforcing laws against bank robbery, drug trafficking, and welfare fraud indicates that the U.S. political system serves the interests of the already powerful.
References
1. Max Weber, Weber’s Rationalism and Modern Society: New Translations on Politics, Bureaucracy, and Social Stratification. Edited and Translated by Tony Waters and Dagmar Waters. Palgrave MacMillan. Page 49. Retrieved online here on February 8, 2020.
2. Quoted in Charlie Spiering, “Steve Bannon Details Trump Agenda: Deconstruction of the Administrative State,” Breitbart. February 23, 2017.
3. William J. Burns, “Trump’s Bureaucratic Arson,” The Atlantic. November 17, 2019.
4. Hatch Act Text. Retrieved on February 8, 2020 from https://employment.laws.com/hatch-act-text
5. Darla Cameron, Dan Keating, and Armand Emamdjomeh, “Where Do Federal Workers Live?” Washington Post. August 30, 2018.
6. Robert Longley, “About the US Inspectors General,” ThoughtCo. August 4, 2019.
7. Audie Cornish, “Former NSA Inspector General Comments on Whistleblower Issue,” All Things Considered on NPR. September 19, 2019.
8. Candice Norwood, “Whistleblower Protection, Explained,” PBS Newshour. October 2, 2019.
9. This basic fact undercuts the unitary executive theory notion that presidents can block all attempts at congressional oversight of executive branch functions.
10. The Federal Register, A Guide to the Rulemaking Process. Retrieved from here on February 8, 2020.
11. Sarah Trumble and Nathan Kasai, “The Past—and Future—of Federal Marijuana Enforcement,” Third Way. May 12, 2017. Tom Angell, “Trump Says He Can Ignore Medical Marijuana Protections Passed by Congress,” Forbes. December 21, 2019.
12. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
13. Michael Hobbes and Matt Giles, “The Golden Age of White Collar Crime,” Huffington Post. February 10, 2020.
14. Paul Kiel and Jesse Eisinger, “Who’s More Likely to be Audited: A Person Making \$20,000—or \$400,000?” Propublica. December 12, 2018.
15. Michael Hobbes and Matt Giles, “The Golden Age of White Collar Crime,” Huffington Post. February 10, 2020.
16. Office of Senator Elizabeth Warren, Rigged Justice: How Weak Enforcement Lets Corporate Offenders Off Easy. 2016.
17. Michael Hobbes and Matt Giles, “The Golden Age of White Collar Crime,” Huffington Post. February 10, 2020.
18. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
19. Michael Hobbes and Matt Giles, “The Golden Age of White Collar Crime,” Huffington Post. February 10, 2020.
20. Paul Kiel and Jesse Eisinger, “Who’s More Likely to be Audited: A Person Making \$20,000—or \$400,000?” Propublica. December 12, 2018.
21. Michael Hobbes and Matt Giles, “The Golden Age of White Collar Crime,” Huffington Post. February 10, 2020.
22. Office of Senator Elizabeth Warren, Rigged Justice: How Weak Enforcement Lets Corporate Offenders Off Easy. 2016.
23. Michael Hobbes and Matt Giles, “The Golden Age of White Collar Crime,” Huffington Post. February 10, 2020. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/06%3A_The_Federal_Bureaucracy/6.03%3A_Chapter_38-_The_Work_of_the_Federal_Civil_Service_and_Political_Appointees.txt |
“[H]igh-income individuals and big-profit businesses have rewritten the rules of the economy, “capturing” the regulatory system and using it to squeeze out their competition.”
–Annie Lowrey (1)
Federal government agencies are unfortunately plagued by two real dangers that blunt or undercut their ability to serve the interests of ordinary Americans. These two pathologies are related to each other, but we’ll treat them individually to make them easier to understand.
The Revolving Door
The American system of governance is characterized by the government-to-lobbyist revolving door—often just shortened to the revolving door—which is when people move from government positions in the legislative and executive branches to positions within the industries that need to be regulated for the public good. This is a problem with respect to congressional members as well as political appointees and civil servants in executive branch agencies leaving public service to lobby for wealthy industries. Why is this a problem? The consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen nicely summarized the three ways the government-to-lobbyist revolving door threatens the government’s integrity, so we’ll quote its reasons directly:
“Public officials may be influenced in official actions by the implicit or explicit promise of a lucrative job in the private sector with an entity seeking a government contract or to shape public policy.
Public officials-turned-lobbyists will have access to lawmakers that is not available to others, access that can be sold to the highest bidder among industries seeking to lobby.
The special access and inside connections to sitting government officials by former officials-turned-lobbyists comes at a hefty price tag, providing wealthy special interests that can afford hiring such revolvers with a powerful means to influence government unavailable to the rest of the public.” (2)
The practice is quite prevalent. A recent study by Public Citizen found that “nearly two-thirds of recently retired or defeated U.S. lawmakers now working outside politics have landed jobs influencing federal policy.” (3) The same is true for people who leave positions in federal agencies for lucrative positions in industry. Professors Zahra Meghani and Jennifer Kuzma point out that “high ranking ex-government workers often secure employment either in the very industries they used to regulate or at firms that provide lobbying or legal services for those businesses.” (4) Especially with respect to federal agencies, the revolving door is truly a two-way passage, with people spending a good portion of their careers moving back and forth between government work and work for the industries that those agencies are supposed to regulate. To get a flavor of how the revolving door works, some examples are in order.
One of the most potentially impactful examples of the revolving door involved White House climate change policy under President George W. Bush. Philip Cooney was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute prior to being selected to be the chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Cooney personally watered-down reports on climate change to suggest that the science on the matter was less certain than it actually was. (5) When this was revealed, Cooney resigned his position in the White House and took a job with Exxon Mobil, which has spent at least \$8 million funding groups challenging the existence of global warming. (6)
The case of Elizabeth Fowler is another poignant example. Most people don’t know that Fowler was the primary architect of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (aka, Obamacare) when she served as an important legislative staff member for Senator Max Baucus (D-MT). Prior to this, Fowler worked as Vice President for Public Affairs for Wellpoint, a very large health insurance company. The Affordable Care Act passed Congress and was signed into law in March of 2010. Fowler was then hired by the Obama administration as Special Assistant to the President for Healthcare and Economic Policy—primarily to oversee implementing the Affordable Care Act. After doing that job for approximately two years, Fowler then jumped back into the healthcare industry as a top administrator at pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson. (7) None of this is coincidental, nor is it coincidental that the Affordable Care Act was extremely friendly to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries. It broadened health coverage only by forcing Americans to buy a policy from the private health insurance industry at the same time that it prevented people from choosing a viable public health insurance option. Advocates for a single-payer healthcare system were not even allowed to testify before Senator Baucus’ committee. (8)
The Trump administration was marked by many examples of the revolving door. Eugene Scalia, who was appointed Secretary of Labor, used to do legal work for corporations seeking to limit worker benefits. For example, Scalia—son of the conservative former Supreme Court justice—”argued on behalf of Wal-Mart against a Maryland law that would have required the retail giant to spend more health care money on its employees.” (9) Andrew Wheeler, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, used to be a lobbyist for the coal, chemical, and uranium industries and has been described by a spokesperson from the Natural Resources Defense Council as “a person who has made a career out of trying to push back against common-sense safeguards to protect the air we breathe from dangerous chemicals like mercury, arsenic and others.” (10) Overall, President Trump named more lobbyists to cabinet-level posts in his first three years than did Presidents Obama and Bush in each of their eight years in office. (11)
Rules against the revolving door are fairly weak. With respect to executive branch officials, there is a lifetime ban on switching sides in a “particular matter” involving “identified parties on which the former executive branch employee had worked personally and substantially for the government.” There is a one-year “cooling off” period for senior officials from lobbying officials in their former agencies, and other restrictions. There is a cooling off period for legislative branch employees as well. (12) The limitations are easy to steer around—Public Citizen referred to revolving-door restrictions as “sorely inadequate” because the cooling off periods are too short. (13) Once the one-year probation period is over, there are no more restrictions. Indeed, former congressional members retain special access to members-only gymnasiums and restaurants. When survey researchers ask the public, they find strong majority support for a five-year cooling off period and plurality support for banning former public officials for life from lobbying. (14) Both Presidents Obama and Trump signed executive orders to try to limit executive branch revolving doors. Nevertheless, the revolving door is alive and well.
Corporate Capture of Executive Agencies
The second related issue with respect to the federal agency’s ability to fully serve the public interest is the phenomenon known as regulatory capture, which happens when wealthy corporations, industrial sectors, and financial interests are able to use their close relationships with executive agencies to get them to work for their interests rather than those of ordinary Americans. Obviously, one primary way of doing this is to get corporate lobbyists in government positions, because they will bring with them a pro-corporate ethos and perspective. The revolving door helps large economic interests in this regard. Capture is also facilitated by the fact that the industries being regulated often possess the data and the expertise that executive agencies need to do their work. Moreover, regulated industries cultivate allies in Congress who can put pressure on regulatory agencies to see the industry’s point of view on a particular regulatory issue.
What does regulatory capture look like? Here are a couple of recent examples.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). In 2019, the United States trailed forty-two other countries in deciding to ground the Boeing 737 Max, the company’s newest version of its venerable 737 passenger jet. The plane had already been involved in two crashes that had killed hundreds of people. The crashes were caused by a problem with the automated flight control system that was detected and ignored during the plane’s design and testing phases. How did this happen? Apparently, back in 2005, the FAA made an important decision to turn its safety certification responsibilities over to aircraft manufacturers, a move which was estimated to save the aviation industry \$25 billion over the next decade. To be specific, plane safety used to be determined by FAA employees, but that job was now being done by Boeing employees and reported to the FAA. (15) In this particular case, the practice ended in tragedy.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The USDA has long been an exemplar of regulatory capture. For example, the USDA’s National Organic Standard Board (NOSB) is responsible for regulating organic farming—particularly which foods get to be labeled as organic or not. Consumer and environmental advocates argue that regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge of the White House, appointments to the NSOB are “stacked” with “members from, or friendly to, corporate agribusiness interests” at the expense of small organic farmers who are more likely to hew to “true” organic practices. (16) Under the Trump administration, the Union of Concerned Scientists put forward a litany of USDA regulatory-capture instances, in which the agency deferred to the interests of agribusiness to allow the overuse of antibiotics in meat and poultry production, to loosen standards for school meals, to lessen the regulation of pesticides, to devalue the views of independent scientists over those funded by the industry, and to take the side of agribusiness giants over small farmers. (17)
Both regulatory capture and the revolving door are problems with the way the federal government operates. They undercut the government’s ability to serve ordinary Americans, and they inflate the power of concentrated economic interests. Tighter regulations could limit congressional members and executive branch officials’ ability to cash-in on their public service. Similarly, an approach to regulation that empowers federal agencies and makes them less dependent on industry-beholden experts might undercut the industry’s ability to capture the agencies designed to regulate them.
References
1. Annie Lowry summarizing the argument of Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles in her article “Who Broke the Economy?” The Atlantic. December 11, 2017.
2. Craig Holman and Caralyn Esser, Slowing the Federal Revolving Door. Washington, D.C.: Public Citizen. July 23, 2019. Page 1.
3. Alan Zibel, Revolving Congress: The Revolving Door Class of 2019 Flocks to K Street. Washington, D.C.: Public Citizen. May 30, 2029. Page 1.
4. Zahra Meghani and Jennifer Kuzma, “The ‘Revolving Door’ Between Regulatory Agencies and Industry: A Problem That Requires Conceptualizing Objectivity,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics. September 17, 2010. Page 579.
5. Andrew C. Revkin, “Bush Aide Softened Greenhouse Gas Links to Global Warming,” New York Times. June 8, 2005.
6. “Bush’s Environment Chief: From the Oil Lobby to the White House to Exxon Mobil.” Democracy Now!Radio. June 20, 2005.
7. Glenn Greenwald, “Obamacare Architect Leaves White House for Pharmaceutical Industry Job,” The Guardian. December 5, 2012.
8. Stephanie Condon, “Senate Panel Rejects Public Option,” CBS News. September 29, 2009.
9. Gabby Orr, Marianne Levine, Anita Kumar, and Ian Kullgren, “Trump Taps Scalia’s Son for Labor Secretary,” Politico. July 18, 2019.
10. Rebecca Hersher and Colin Dwyer, “Get to Know Andrew Wheeler, Ex-Coal Lobbyist with Inside Track to Lead EPA,” All Things Consideredon NPR. July 6, 2018.
11. Richard Lardner, “Trump Outpaces Obama, Bush in Naming Ex-Lobbyists to Cabinet,” The Associated Press September 17, 2019.
12. Jack Maskell, Post-Employment, “Revolving Door,” Laws for Federal Personnel. Congressional Research Service. January 7, 2014. Page 2.
13. Craig Holman and Caralyn Esser, Slowing the Federal Revolving Door. Washington, D.C.: Public Citizen. July 23, 2019. Page 3.
14. Nielsen Scarborough, “Government Reform, Wave 2 Questionnaire,” School of Public Policy, University of Maryland(Oct. 2017).
15. D. Saint Germaine, “The Boeing Debacle is the Latest Example of Regulatory Capture,” Medium. March 15, 2019. James E. Hall, “The 737 Max is Grounded, No Thanks to the F.A.A.,” The New York Times. March 13, 2019.
16. “Regulatory Capture: USDA’s Organic Governance Board Dominated by Affiliates of Industry’s Corporate Lobby,” Beyond Pesticides. January 24, 2019.
17. Betrayal at the USDA. Union of Concerned Scientists. March 30, 2018. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/06%3A_The_Federal_Bureaucracy/6.04%3A_Chapter_39-_Revolving_Doors_and_Corporate_Capture_of_Federal_Agencies.txt |
“It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.”
–Bumper Sticker
Categories of Federal Spending
We can better understand the federal bureaucracy if we understand that it is through those agencies that the United States spends its tax revenue. Where does the money go? There are numerous ways to analyze the federal budget. Perhaps the easiest to understand is to use figures from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and break federal spending down into just three categories, with some subcategories therein: (1)
Mandatory Spending—Mandatory spending refers to programmatic spending that is essentially automatic. Congress sets eligibility requirements and benefit formulas. If you meet the eligibility requirements, you are entitled to receive the benefit according to the formula. That’s why this category is also referred to as entitlement spending. Mandatory spending is the largest overall category of government spending and it has been growing due to factors such as increases in medical costs that affect the budgets for Medicare and Medicaid. Mandatory spending can be broken down into the following buckets:
• Social Security—About 24 cents of every federal dollar go to the Social Security program. It is primarily a program to fight poverty among the elderly, although it has other components such as the Supplemental Security Income program to assist the blind and disabled. Through payroll deductions, workers pay into the system to support people who are currently retired—look for something that says FICA on your paycheck. In turn, current workers will be supported by today’s children when they enter the workforce.
• Medicare—About 15 cents of every federal dollar go to the Medicare program, which provides health insurance for retired people. This is necessary because the American health insurance system primarily relies on employer-based health insurance, which people lose when they retire.
• Medicaid—About 9 cents of every federal dollar go to the Medicaid program, which provides health insurance for people who fall below certain income levels.
• Other—The United States has many other mandatory spending programs. About 13 cents of every federal dollar go to fund programs like unemployment compensation, military retirement, veterans’ benefits, food stamps, and the earned income tax credit.
Discretionary Spending—Discretionary spending refers to federal spending that changes year to year as Congress passes appropriation bills funding particular agencies. Presidents make proposals to Congress for what they’d like to see spent, and each congressional chamber has its own budget committees. However, it is widely recognized across the political spectrum that the congressional budget process has been broken for a long time, with Congress routinely passing stopgap measures and continuing resolutions to keep the government open. (2) Given that dysfunctional context, discretionary spending falls into two categories:
• Defense Spending—About 14 cents of every federal dollar go to fund the Department of Defense. Defense spending is a misleadingly low number for two reasons. First, much defense-related spending is counted as nondefense spending. For example, spending for nuclear weapons development is not counted here because it occurs under the auspices of the Department of Energy. Similarly, military veteran spending falls into the non-defense category even though it is supporting the American military superstructure. Some spending in the Department of Homeland Security is defense-like but is counted as non-defense spending. Spending on the intelligence agencies is also not counted as defense spending. The second reason that defense spending is not fully accurate is due to the fact that the United States sometimes treats its active war-fighting money as “off budget.” For example, the George W. Bush administration took most of the war spending for the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions off budget to make budget deficits look smaller than they actually were and to avoid stirring up opposition to the war. (3) This is also a good place to note that the Department of Defense has never passed an audit, which was required of all federal agencies in 1990. (4)
• Nondefense Spending—About 14 cents of every federal dollar go to non-defense spending. When we consider that some of this spending is really defense spending, we realize that non-defense discretionary spending is a surprisingly small portion of federal spending. This money goes to support all of the things that pop into people’s heads when we think of government—the National Park Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Education, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Weather Service, etc. These agencies are often given enormous regulatory and enforcement mandates without the resources they need. For example, the National Taxpayer Advocate report to Congress says that the Internal Revenue Service does not have adequate resources nor does it have the kind of modern and robust IT infrastructure it needs to do its job well. (5) To cite another example, the National Park Service budget has barely increased in the past two decades while visits to national parks have exploded, and deferred maintenance keeps piling up—even as national parks provide an estimated \$100 billion in annual benefits to the American people. (6)
Interest on the Debt—Because the federal government fails to take in enough tax revenue to cover its spending, every year we spend hundreds of billions of dollars to service our debt—that is, we pay interest to wealthy people, institutional investors, and banks who lend the U.S. government money by buying Treasury bonds. Interest on the debt accounts for nearly 10 cents of every one dollar the U.S. government spends. Interest on the debt represents an interesting and sad revenue transfer from the middle class to the wealthy. Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor and public policy professor, points out that tax rates for wealthy families and corporations used to be higher than they are today, and the government generally did not run a significant deficit. What we’ve done since the 1950s is to reduce taxes on the wealthy and on corporations and increase the annual deficit, and then we’ve turned to those very wealthy individuals and corporations to lend the government money, for which they get a safe and secure return on their investment. What’s happening, says Reich, is that “the government pays the rich interest on a swelling debt, caused largely by lower taxes on the rich.” The middle class is providing a nice subsidy to the wealthy via the interest on the federal debt. (7)
What If?
What if the government regularly published the true cost of American military and intelligence spending? Would we have different public policy debates in the United States if the public knew that defense spending was really considerably higher? What if, instead of focusing on the 14 cents of every federal dollar that officially goes to the Pentagon, we publicized the fact that the true figure for national security funding is more than double that. (8) What if, every time the budget deficit was discussed by politicians, the news media ran a banner at the bottom of the screen reminding viewers that the Pentagon is the only government agency that cannot pass an audit? What if the news media did more stories comparing the costs of military programs to other possible uses for the funding? For example, the Pentagon will spend about \$1.2 trillion developing, purchasing, and maintaining the F-35 stealth fighter over its lifetime. This fact almost never prompts a question in presidential debates about how we’re going to pay for it. The F-35 is the world’s costliest weapons program. In 2020, one F-35 costs around \$80 million for the Pentagon to buy. (9) Wouldn’t we be better off as a democracy if the public could debate the benefit of buying two F-35s compared to the presidential proposal in 2020 to cut the budget of the Centers for Disease Control by \$175 million? (10) What is the comparative benefit of buying one F-35 versus paying for medical school for doctors who pledge to become general practitioners and serve at least five years in rural areas of the country that are chronically short of physicians? Rarely are these kinds of trade-offs presented to the public. Perhaps they should be. As investigative reporter Dave Lindorff put it, “No progressive change is really possible in this country if we continue to spend upwards of \$1.3 trillion a year on wars and preparing for wars, occupation and intervention in the affairs of other nations.” (11)
References
1. Office of Management and Budget Fiscal 2019 Budget.
2. For example, Erica Werner, “Senate Passes Stopgap Spending Bill to Keep Government Open through Nov 21, Sending Measure to Trump,” Washington Post. September 26, 2019. For good diagnoses of the ills of the budget process as well as suggestions to improve it, see the material put out by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
3. Michael Boyle, “How the U.S. Public Was Defrauded by the Hidden Cost of the Iraq War,” The Guardian. March 11, 2013.
4. Courtney Bublé, “Defense Department Fails Its Second Audit, Yet is Making Progress,” Government Executive. November 18, 2019.
5. National Taxpayer Advocate, Annual Report to Congress 2019.
6. Linda J. Bilmes and John B. Loomis, editors, Valuing U.S. National Parks and Programs: America’s Best Investment. New York: Routledge, 2019.
7. Robert Reich, “The Middle Class Pay for the Government. The One Percent Profit From It,” Newsweek. February 11, 2020.
8. David Cay Johnston, “The True Cost of National Security,” Columbia Journalism Review. January 31, 2013. William Hartung and Mandy Smithburger, “Boondoggle, Inc.: Making Sense of the \$1.25 Trillion National Security State Budget,” Counterpunch. May 9, 2019.
9. Chris Salcedo, “Stop Overspending on the F-35,” Townhall. September 9, 2019. Mike Stone, “Pentagon Announces F-35 Jet Prices for Next Three Years,” U.S. News and World Report. October 29, 2019.
10. FY 2021 Budget Proposal for the Department of Health and Human Services. Budget for CDC on page 43.
11. Dave Lindorff, “Truly Remaking Social Security is the Key to Having a Livable Society in the US,” Counterpunch. February 19, 2020. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/06%3A_The_Federal_Bureaucracy/6.05%3A_Chapter_40-_American_Budget_Priorities.txt |
“I was no party man myself, and the first wish of my heart was, if parties did exist, to reconcile them.”
–George Washington (1)
The Theoretical Context of Political Parties
In 1950, a committee of the American Political Science Association (APSA) published a set of proposals to strengthen political parties in the United States. It rested on the assumption—explicitly stated, in the case of the APSA committee report—of what is known as a theory of responsible party government. This theory posits a mechanism fundamental to the operation of a democracy—namely, that public preferences are translated into governing policy and that there is a continual process for the public to hold those policy-makers accountable when their wishes are not followed. How is this to be accomplished? Most political scientists recognize that political parties play a vital role in this mechanism. The primary goal of a political party is to determine government policies by having its candidates win elections and become decision makers. The APSA committee report summed up the mechanism this way: “An effective party system requires, first, that the parties are able to bring forth programs to which they commit themselves and, second, that the parties possess sufficient internal cohesion to carry out these programs.” (2)
Let’s look at that last statement more carefully. Responsible party government needs parties that develop a political program, which is a set of policies on the variety of issues facing the country. This program should be prominent and well-publicized, because the theory suggests that voters are rational creatures who vote for the party that best advances their interests. Voters can’t do that if the parties are unclear about their political program. The party also has to be strong enough to carry out the program once it is in power. In other words, the party has to be able to control its own politicians sufficiently to guarantee that the program will be translated into bills that can pass the legislature and become policy. When parties have sufficient power and coherence to translate political programs into policy, voters can easily see which party is responsible for what policies—and this is essential information as they head into the voting booths at the next election. They will reward the politicians from the party they support and punish the politicians from the party they oppose.
The theory of responsible government runs into two important limitations. The first is divided government, which refers to the state of affairs in American politics where the national-level political institutions are controlled by different parties at the same time. For example, the Republicans might control the White House and the Senate, but the Democrats have a majority in the House of Representatives. Or a Democrat might be president, but the Senate and House are controlled by Republicans. Since the early 1970’s, divided government has been the norm. Typically, divided government refers to the elected institutions. However, given that Supreme Court control is a goal for both political parties, we can add it into the mix. The current conservative Court majority means that Democratic victories in congressional and presidential elections can be countered by the life appointments of five conservative justices. What does this mean for responsible party government? Divided government makes it very difficult for American political parties to translate their political programs into public policy. Stalemate frustrates voters’ ability to clearly reward one party and punish the other because it’s so difficult for them to know why nothing seems to get done in Washington.
The second limitation of the theory of responsible party government centers on the twin assumptions that voters are knowledgeable and rational. Voters are not particularly knowledgeable. As economist Bryan Caplan famously put it, “The people ultimately in charge—the voters—are doing brain surgery while unable to pass basic anatomy.” (3) The theory of responsible party government needs an electorate with particular characteristics. Voters need to understand American history and current public policy choices, which means they need to know fairly complicated things like what a single-payer healthcare system actually entails, how international trade works, how corporate governance is structured, how federal tax brackets and marginal tax rates operate, the complexities of sex and gender, and so forth. There’s a great deal to know! Beyond that, voters need to be rational enough to match their interests to the political party system—i.e., which political party best represents my mix of interests? Voters actually display what is known as bounded rationality, a concept political science borrowed from behavioral economics, meaning that voters are not fully rational due to the complexity of the decisions they have to reach, their own cognitive limitations, and the limited time and resources they have to devote to understanding politics. (4) Absent full knowledge, voters’ ability to actually process all the needed information–in the time needed to do so–results in rational decision-making short cuts.
When we acknowledge the theory of responsible party government and its limitations, we begin to understand a basic dilemma at the heart of politics. We want politics to operate on a rational basis in which parties put forward political programs that compete in a marketplace of ideas, and we want voters to carefully weigh those programs to reach rational decisions about which party to support. But we know that people are, in the words of political scientist Christopher Achen, “doing the best they can. They just don’t have a lot of information, and so they substitute guesses and views of the world that make them feel comfortable.” (5) This, then, is the context in which political parties operate.
What Do Political Parties Do?
Let’s remember that political parties want to have their candidates win elections so they can become the decision-makers who implement public policy. With this in mind, it’s fair to say that political parties perform three basic functions.
Recruit political candidates—The leaders of state and national party organizations use their networking skills to recruit potential candidates for local, state, and federal offices. Obviously, this is very important for offices in which the party does not have an incumbent running for reelection. There is no “perfect” candidate, although it appears from the kinds of candidates the parties typically put forward that there are several characteristics of attractive candidates. Name recognition is important, so parties try to recruit people who are already in office to run for higher office, or they recruit prominent business leaders, or people who have been active in the community. Access to money is another important characteristic, meaning candidates who can partially self-fund their campaigns or who have a plethora of connections to people who are in a position to donate to the campaign. Parties also look for candidates with a particularly appealing biography, which might include anything from being a combat veteran to being a successful entrepreneur. Candidates who get recruited by party leaders still have to face the primary or caucus nominating process, which we’ll talk about more in the textbook section that deals with elections.
Attempt to win elections—Political parties support their candidates in the election by engaging in four main activities. They engage in political advertising for specific candidates, which can involve everything from yard signs to YouTube ads, from radio spots to micro-targeted messages on social media. Parties also conduct voter registration drives by helping people from specific neighborhoods or from specific demographic groups register to vote. They also engage in increasingly sophisticated voter turnout efforts, meaning that they make sure as many of their partisans as possible actually vote in the election. This may entail organizing party workers to contact potential voters directly or to drive people to the polling stations. Finally, parties provide candidates with expertise and data, hooking them up with consultants and making mailing lists and past election results available to them.
Organize governance and opposition—Once elected, a party’s candidates organize themselves into party groupings—in Congress, for example, or the state legislature. They elect their own leadership and meet as a group to plan their legislative strategies. They may also discipline party members who don’t vote with the group, although American parties are not known for engaging in that kind of discipline too often.
Party Organization
Party organization in the United States reflects the federal nature of our political system. That is, parties exist on the national, state, and local levels. If we look at parties from the top down, national committees conduct the party’s business in between the quadrennial national conventions and are composed of prominent members of each state’s party organizations. The Democratic National Committee’s membership and structure are a bit more complicated than that of the Republican National Committee. Each national committee has a chairperson and a variety of other leadership posts. If the party in question has elected the President of the United States, the president typically selects the party chairperson, although the national committee officially votes them into the chair. They are responsible for the party’s vitality, its fundraising, outreach, voter registration efforts, and articulating the party platform, which is adopted at the national convention. The platform lays out the party’s position on various issues of the day.
Also, at the national level are the Hill committees—referring to Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. In the House of Representatives, there are the Republican and Democratic Congressional Committees, composed of each party’s various representatives. In the Senate, there are the Republican and Democratic senatorial committees, composed of each party’s U.S. senators. While Hill committees have been in existence for many years, the increase in congressional partisanship has elevated their importance. According to Political Scientist Sandy Maisel, “Their role has increased dramatically. Not only do they raise money for candidates, but they play critical roles in setting national campaign priorities.” (6)
The larger parties have a state organization in each of the fifty states. State party organizations have become more institutionalized, professional organizations in the last several decades. Still, state and local parties rely on countless volunteers to get their work done. Often, state party organizations will offer a few paid positions—like an executive director—who organizes volunteers to work in capacities from treasurer to secretary, from recruitment chair to various caucus chairs. State parties provide the same help to state candidates that national parties do to federal candidates. Indeed, state party organizations “are increasingly becoming service agencies for candidates.” (7)
Parties also have local units. For a time, urban political machines were key power centers in American politics, particularly for the Democratic Party. The machine built by Democrat Richard Daley helped him rule Chicago from 1955 to 1976. There are still vestiges of the Daley machine in Chicago and Democratic machines in other urban areas. Tammany Hall dominated New York City politics for much of the nineteenth century, providing immigrants with food, coal, patronage jobs, and a decidedly Democratic political orientation. The equivalent of suburban machines—mostly Republican—also existed in places like Nassau and Westchester counties in New York, Delaware and Montgomery counties in Pennsylvania, and DuPage county in Illinois. (8) But across the country, power has shifted from the local level up to state party organizations. Why? In many places, it was simply more efficient to locate party centers at the state level. Reforms that instituted merit systems for hiring city workers undercut the urban machine’s ability to use such jobs as patronage rewards. Government-run social welfare programs took away a mechanism for parties to use handouts to cultivate support among poor voters. And regulations requiring fair processes for awarding contracts largely eliminated the machine’s ability use those city contracts to garner key supporters.
References
1. George Washington letter to Thomas Jefferson. July 6, 1796. The National Archives.
2. No Author, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System,” American Political Science Review, vol. 44. September, 1950.
3. Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Page 6.
4. Stefano Fiori, “Forms of Bounded Rationality: The Reception and Redefinition of Herbert A. Simon’s Perspective,” Review of Political Economy. Volume 23, Issue 4. October, 2011.
5. Sean Illing, “Two Eminent Political Scientists: The Problem With Democracy is Voters,” Vox. June 24, 2017. See also Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.
6. Sandy Maisel, American Political Parties and Elections. A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Page 65.
7. Jewell and Morehouse, Political Parties and Elections in American States. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2001. Page 50.
8. James Reichley, The Life of the Parties. A History of American Political Parties. New York: The Free Press, 1992. Page 401. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/07%3A_Linkage_Institutions/7.01%3A_Chapter_41-_What_Do_Political_Parties_Do.txt |
“Americans want a politics they don’t have to hate. And therein lies our hope: Democracies are uniquely open to change, and if citizens want politicians to move beyond false choices, it is in their power to demand it.”
–E. J. Dionne, Jr. (1)
Political parties started early in the American republic, despite the fact that many founders—in theory, if not in practice—disparaged the factionalism and corrosive influence of political parties. In his farewell address, President George Washington warned against political parties, particularly those based on geographic loyalties. He went on to say that partisanship “serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passion.” (2) Nevertheless, political parties became entrenched in the political system.
In a survey course such as the one you are taking, there really isn’t time to go into the full scope of American party development, but you should be familiar with several important developments in the history of the American party system. One thing you should note is that, ideologically speaking, American political parties resemble tectonic plates on the earth’s surface that don’t stay firmly put in one place. Conservatism and progressivism have at various times found homes in different political parties.
Beginnings of the Party System
Party struggles really began within the Washington administration itself, personified by the political differences between his Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, and his Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson believed in a less energetic central government than did Hamilton—at least until Jefferson became president later and carried through the Louisiana Purchase without getting clear congressional authority. Hamilton pushed for the United States to develop its manufacturing sector and become a commercial power, while Jefferson envisioned a secure republic made by yeomen farmers with small landholdings. Jeffersonians formed the Democratic-Republican party, explicitly aiming to invoke the Revolution’s egalitarian principles, while the Hamiltonians formed the Federalist party to remind people of the Constitution’s triumphal plan. (3) It is somewhat ironic that Jefferson had a hand in founding a political party, because he shared Washington’s antipathy for them. He said, “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.” (4) And James Madison similarly warned against the evils of faction in Federalist #10. Despite that, the Democratic-Republican party coalesced around Jefferson and Madison. The Federalists initially had the upper hand in early party competition, selecting John Adams to replace Washington in 1797. But the Democratic-Republicans came charging back with Jefferson’s two-term administration beginning in 1801, James Madison’s two terms, and James Monroe’s two terms ending in 1825. The Federalists quickly faded from the scene.
Democrats and Whigs in the Antebellum Period
With the Federalists fading, the Democratic-Republicans were the only game in town, but then they disagreed among themselves in the 1820s and formed two discrete parties: the Democrats, which have continued to the present day, and the National Republicans, which then became the Whig Party that eventually dissolved over slavery in the 1850s. Meanwhile, back to the 1830s and 40s: The Democratic Party was the dominant one, electing Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, James Polk, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan between 1828 and the beginning of the Civil War. The Whigs managed to elect two ill-fated presidents. The first was William Harrison, who delivered a long inaugural address on a cold and windy day and died of pneumonia about a month into his presidency. (5) Zachary Taylor was the other Whig elected president. After taking office in 1849, he died of acute gastroenteritis sixteen months later. (6) The interesting thing about the antebellum national party system was that it was the Whigs, not the Democrats, who believed in using the central government’s power to make “internal improvements” to the country such as roads and canals. The Democrats were the party of the “common man,” which is still its reputation, but the Democratic party then was also openly hostile to Blacks, whether slave or free. John C. Calhoun, a prominent Democrat from South Carolina who at times served as a representative, a vice president, and senator, once lamented that the phrase in the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal “has become the most false and dangerous of all political errors. . . We now begin to experience the danger of admitting so great an error to have a place in the declaration of independence.” (7)
The Civil War Crisis
The American party system was rocked by the crisis over slavery and states’ rights that resulted in the Civil War. The Whig party split into a Northern wing that held on to the principles of an active central government, and a Southern wing whose members were concerned that a central government powerful enough to make “internal improvements” was powerful enough to end slavery. The Democrats were split between North and South as well, but that party survived whereas the Whig party completely disintegrated. In the mid-1850s, northern Whigs joined some antislavery Democrats and members of the antislavery Free Soil Party to create the modern Republican Party. Many early Republicans were so progressive that they were referred to as Red Republicans. Were you ever taught that in school? Neither was I. Pledged to fight the “twin relics of barbarism”—slavery and polygamy—early Republicans were mobilized when the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed, which overturned the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and allowed new territories to permit slavery if they wanted. Early Republicans had a vision of America as a land free not only from slavery, but from wage slavery as well—meaning the business exploitation of for-hire laborers. They celebrated autonomous workers—primarily independent farmers and the self-employed—and feared the power of capitalists, regardless of whether they were plantation owners in the South or factory owners in the North. Alvan Bovay was one of the people who initiated the push to establish the Republican Party in 1854. He is credited with naming it “republican” to hearken back to the views of Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. He worked on a number of radical causes, including a “vote yourself a farm” campaign, and wrote for George Evans’ Working Man’s Advocate and Young America newspapers. Abraham Lincoln, the Republican’s second presidential candidate, won the very divided election of 1860 with only 40 percent of the popular vote. The land reform that Bovay and Evans advocated in the 1850s was pushed by Lincoln and became the Homestead Act of 1862, which distributed land in the West to settlers who would “improve” it. (8) With the demise of the Whig Party over the slavery issue, the Republicans and Democrats became the pre-eminent political parties in American politics to this day.
Republican Dominance
The era from the Civil War to the Gilded Age was one in which the Republicans dominated the presidency—they elected twelve of fifteen presidents from 1860 to 1929—and often enjoyed Republican majorities in the House and Senate as well. The Republicans dropped any hint of “red republicanism” and evolved into a party that promoted business interests and economic growth, pushed public schools that produced the standardized graduates that business leaders needed, endorsed the gold standard that promoted price stability that business leaders wanted, and supported high tariffs on imports that protected U.S. manufacturers. It was during this period of Republican dominance that wealth and income inequality grew to obscene levels that were fueled by monopoly capitalism. The Democrats maintained a stronghold in the South and strong support among Northern-city Catholic immigrants and small Mid-western farm owners. Later, the South became known as the Solid South because Democrats dominated there until after the mid-1960s when Republicans began to rise. Populism gripped the Democratic Party in the late 1890s and it looked like they might break Republican dominance, but in the election of 1896, the Republicans’ huge financial advantage and victories in the Electoral College-rich Northeastern states kept the Democrats out of the White House. The spirit of progressivism infected both parties in the early 1900s, but it created the most lasting impression in the Democratic Party. In the 1912 election when Republicans split between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson became president, and the Democrats began to embrace many progressive ideals—using government to solve social problems, controlling the power of large business interests, and instituting social reforms such as extending the right to vote and banning child labor. However, the Democratic Party remained a bastion of racism, particularly in the South.
The New Deal Coalition
The period from the 1930s to the 1960s was a period of Democratic party ascendance. The Great Depression began with the stock market crash in October 1929 and marked the death-knell for Republican’s long-held dominance of national politics. Many people came to the conclusion that reckless pro-business Republican policies of the 1920s caused the Depression, and also were convinced that President Herbert Hoover’s conservative response to the crisis was insufficient. The 1932 election brought Democrat Franklin Roosevelt to power–the only president to win election four times–and his administration used government’s power to alleviate suffering, regulate the economy, and put people back to work. The overall policy, known as the New Deal, included such features as Social Security, unemployment insurance, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Works Progress Administration, among many others. The Democrats dominated national politics from 1933 to the end of the 1960s, largely because of what has become known as the New Deal Coalition. They cobbled together a coalition of unionized workers, farmers, Jews, white-collar professionals, African-Americans, and urban immigrants who were predominantly Catholics. The New Deal programs were popular enough that the Republican Eisenhower administration left them in place in the 1950s, and the Democratic Johnson administration built on them somewhat in the 1960s.
Contemporary Party Struggles
Things can change rather quickly in politics, but we can make the following observations about the contemporary party system. The first thing to note is the demise of the New Deal Coalition. The success of the Civil Rights Movement, the cultural turmoil of the late 1960s, and the stridency of the Democratic party’s anti-Vietnam War wing fractured the New Deal coalition and hurt many Democratic candidates’ electoral chances. The New Deal coalition had been built upon the economic interests of the common man regardless of race or religion. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, the Republicans became increasingly successful in attracting support from Whites opposed to racial desegregation, from men and women who were disconcerted by women’s liberation, from rural voters concerned about gun control, and from voters who disdained the perception of pacifism in American foreign policy. Moreover, the Roe v. Wade (1973) decision legalizing abortion and the rise of the gay rights debate handed Republicans two social issues that were instrumental in courting Catholics, evangelical Protestants, and Mormons.
Beginning in the 1960s, Republicans pursued what most people call the Southern Strategy—a conscious and largely successful attempt to capture the South by playing on White’s fears of the Civil Rights movement. The Southern Strategy was really a broader strategy linking the South with suburban and rural areas across the United States, aimed at White fears of racial integration, urban crime, and economic insecurity. In a 1981 interview, Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained that the Southern Strategy rested on stressing race without overtly mentioning it:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.” (9)
The Republican party also embraced an assault on public schools—relabeled in their vocabulary as “government schools”—at the behest of religious conservatives opposed to school integration and the teaching of evolution. The Southern Strategy was successful. The Democrat’s Solid South transformed to become a bastion of Republican office holders instead. Republicans won all but one presidential election from 1968 to 1992, won eight of the thirteen presidential elections from 1968 to 2016, and wrested both congressional chambers from Democrats control. Similarly, Republicans dominated state gubernatorial and legislative elections in 2010, which allowed them to gerrymander district boundary lines to their advantage following the 2010 census. (10) Even when outsider Donald Trump captured the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 against the wishes of party leadership, the Republicans were able to win the White House again with help from the Electoral College even when their candidate lost the popular vote that year. In 2020, President Trump lost his bid for reelection, but the Republican Party maintained control over the majority of state legislatures and regained control of the House of Representatives.
Meanwhile, the Democratic party hewed sharply to the right in the late 1970s in order to compete with the Republicans. The Democrats increasingly turned to the same sources as the Republicans to fund their candidates—corporations and the wealthy—and it pursued policies that were often indistinguishable from the Republicans. Bill and Hillary Clinton led the way in this transformation, aggressively courting Wall Street and corporate money and supporting anti-welfare, pro-finance, tough-on-crime policies designed to win back voters that the party had lost to Republicans. Still socially liberal, the Democratic party became controlled by the New Democrats, who can more properly be called the Corporate Democrats because of their connections with and deference to large corporations. (11)
President Obama was solidly in the corporate wing of the Democratic party, and his policies were described by one astute political observer as “crafted by representatives of corporate/financial America, who happen to entirely make up his inner circle.” (12) This was particularly true of Obama’s tepid response to the Great Recession that was caused by Wall Street’s predatory behavior, but also manifested itself in the very corporate friendly Affordable Care Act. (13) Progressive members of the Democratic Party had no place to go until democratic-socialist Bernie Sanders reignited their hopes in his failed attempt to gain the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. Sanders’ candidacy in 2016 and again in 2018 underscored the deep divisions in the Democratic party between its corporate and progressive wings. In 2020 the Democrats nominated Joe Biden as their presidential candidate, a veteran politician solidly in the corporate wing of the party. Once elected, Biden packed his cabinet with corporate leaning politicians and bureaucrats.
References
1. E. J. Dionne, Jr., Why Americans Hate Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Page 373.
2. George Washington, Farewell Address, September 19, 1796. The National Archives.
3. Actually, early on Jeffersonians simply called themselves the Republicans before they were called the Democratic-Republicans, and then the Democrats. To avoid confusion with the later and unrelated Republican Party, political scientists usually extend the Democratic-Republican name back in time to encompass Jefferson’s Republicans.
4. Paul Johnson, A History of the American People. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Page. 216.
5. He was replaced by John Tyler.
6. He was replaced by Millard Fillmore.
7. Mackubin T. Owens, “The Democratic Party’s Legacy of Racism,” a publication of the Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs at Ashland University. December 2002.
8. John Nichols, The “S” Word. A Short History of an American Tradition…Socialism. 2nd edition. New York: Verso, 2015. Chapters 2 and 3.
9. Rick Perlstein, “Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy,” The Nation. November 13, 2012.
10. Vann R. Newkirk II, “How Redistricting Became a Technological Arms Race,” The Atlantic. October 28, 2017.
11. Lance Selfa, The Democrats: A Critical History. Revised and Updated Edition. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008. Pages 63-85.
12. Matt Taibbi, “Obama and Jobs: Why I Don’t Believe Him Anymore,” Common Dreams. September 6, 2011.
13. Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History. New York: Random House, 2010. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/07%3A_Linkage_Institutions/7.02%3A_Chapter_42-_The_Historical_Development_of_American_Political_Parties.txt |
“The Republican Party is not, as advertised, conservative but radically oligarchical. Programmatically it exists to advance corporate economic and political interests, and to protect and promote inequities of opportunity and wealth.”
—Sheldon S. Wolin (1)
“Should Democrats somehow be elected, corporate sponsors make it politically impossible for the new officeholders to alter significantly the direction of society.”
—Sheldon S. Wolin (2)
How Political Scientists Analyze Parties
Political parties are complicated beasts, and not at all easy to capture in American Government textbooks. Political scientists tend to break the analytical problem down into three parts. (3)
The party in the electorate refers to the voters who support each party. Even this is difficult, because people may support the Democratic or Republican parties—or one of the third parties—without formally registering as a party affiliate. Indeed, one can say that the largest “party” in the United States are those who either intentionally refuse to commit to one of the parties or who have turned away from partisan politics altogether. However, even these Independents tend to favor the political positions of one party over another. Party affiliation tends to wander over time. Generally speaking, Republicans and Democrats each tend to constitute somewhere between 25-33 percent of the population, with Independents making up the rest. (4) Political scientists and survey researchers use the term party identification to refer to a voter’s self-identification with one party or another, whether or not they are formally party members. Through survey research, political scientists can make statements about the extent to which people who identify with one party support policy A versus policy B.
The party organization deals with what we talked about in a previous chapter—i.e., people who hold offices or volunteer positions in a political party at the local, state, or national level. They tend to be quite dedicated, devoting considerable time and effort promoting the party, its policies, and its candidates. This is a finite number of people, and political scientists can study them through both qualitative and quantitative methods. For instance, scholars can study the extent to which the political views of national party convention delegates are similar to or differ from those of rank and file party members. (5)
The party in government refers to elected and appointed public officials who identify with one party or another. As with party organization, this is a relatively well-defined universe of people that can be subdivided into precise groups like members of the House of Representatives or U.S. Senators. The behavior of these groups can be analyzed using quantitative and qualitative measures. For instance, the overall partisanship of Representatives and Senators can be analyzed by looking at the percentage of congressional votes that pit a majority of Democrats on one side voting against a majority of Republicans on the other side. Individual representatives or senators can be given partisanship scores for how closely they adhere to the party line, and those results can be compared to the voters’ views. (6)
These modes of analysis tend to accentuate the differences between Democrats and Republicans, regardless of whether we’re talking about ordinary voters, people who hold positions in party organizations, or public officeholders. They can tell us, for example, that party identification is remarkably stable over long periods of time. (7) They can also tell us that while a majority of all Americans think there is too much economic inequality, people who identify as Democrats are considerably more likely to think so than are people who identify as Republicans. (8) These analyses are also mentioned prominently in news media accounts of American politics.
A Critical Examination of the Democratic and Republican Parties
If we want to critically examine America’s dominant political parties, we should start with the economic context in which they operate. The Democratic and Republican parties contest for political power within a society that has long embraced a variant of capitalism marked by monopolies and oligopolies, by the privileged place of business in the political landscape, by stark economic inequality, and by a devaluation of the public versus the private sphere. (9) In turn, the dominant political parties often act to reify this particular capitalist system. A visitor from outer space who studied American politics would quickly note how the Democratic and Republican parties both seem to behave as though they existed primarily to execute the policies desired by financial institutions, large corporations, real estate developers, and insurance companies. In the famous words of scholar Noam Chomsky, “The United States has essentially a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party.” (10) As we’ll see in the chapter on campaign finance, almost all candidates from both political parties depend on money from businesses and their top management personnel to fund their campaigns.
Setting this context is necessary to understand the Democratic and Republican parties, but it’s not entirely sufficient. We need to keep our eye on another set of variables. As dominant as are the artificial people called corporations in the political party landscape, we have to be mindful that parties are coalitions of actual people as well—and actual people still retain a privilege not yet afforded by the Supreme Court to corporations. People vote, and through their votes they nominate candidates and elect politicians. Furthermore, ordinary Americans’ interests do not fully align with the interests of capitalists. To be sure, actual people need the jobs that corporate America provides, which means that workers and their employers are co-invested in a prosperous economy. Beyond that, however, the interests of living, breathing people and the interests of artificial people—i.e., corporations—diverge either somewhat or completely. This fact creates tensions and divisions within America’s dominant political parties, because elites and ordinary people contest each other over the policy programs on which political parties campaign. For example, Wall Street firms that give so much money to the Republican party—they give to both parties—don’t share the political goals of evangelical Christians, who are currently a significant part of the Republican coalition.
The interest alignment and misalignment between the corporate funders of America’s political parties and the coalitions of people who are party members or party identifiers is fertile ground for examining the three dimensions of power. Obviously, the first dimension of power manifests itself as party adherents vote in primaries and caucuses to nominate candidates to run in general elections. The second dimension of power can be seen clearly when party establishments—party leaders, who tend to be elites most closely tied to corporate sponsors—attempt to put their finger on the scales during the nominating process. This can happen at any level, but it gets the most attention at the presidential level. In 2016, the Republican party establishment was powerless to stop Donald Trump’s insurgent campaign to become the Republican presidential nominee. On the Democratic side, however, Bernie Sanders’ progressive movement was successfully stymied by party leaders. A secret agreement between the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign essentially gave Clinton’s camp “control (of) the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised” well before the nomination season had even started. In addition, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman gave Clinton an early look at what was going to be asked at a debate between the two candidates. (11) While it’s likely that Clinton would have gotten the nomination anyway for a number of reasons, the whole escapade nicely illustrates the second dimension of power in action. In the 2018 presidential nomination season, corporate leaders and corporate media put on a full-court press against the two progressive candidates, threatening to withhold support, red-baiting Sanders in particular, and hoodwinking ordinary people into thinking that the corporate-backed candidates actually had their interests in mind. (12) It was a classic illustration of the third dimension of power.
The Republican Party, which is the principal vehicle for conservatism in America, is caught in what political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson refer to as the conservative dilemma, which arises “when an economic system that concentrates wealth in the hands of the few coexists with a political system that gives the ballot to the many.” Here’s the dilemma: how does a party that serves the interests of concentrated wealth win enough votes from ordinary people? The conservative dilemma has plagued conservative parties in many countries, but appears to be particularly acute in the American context where the Republican Party, according to Hacker and Pierson, embraces policies that serve corporations and the economic elites while campaigning to voters using appeals to White grievance, ginned up moral outrage (for example, at “rigged elections,” or “critical race theory”), fears of creeping socialism, issues like guns and abortion, and outrage at the very elites Republicans serve with their tax breaks and deregulation agenda. (13).
Similarities and Differences Between the Democratic and Republican Parties
The analysis above suggests that there is a tug-of-war between ordinary Americans and elites over who is going to be able to capture America’s dominant political parties and use them to serve their interests. Sheldon Wolin, the political scientist whose quotes start the chapter, argues that both parties are fully captured by America’s corporate elite. This view is shared by historian Howard Zinn as well as writer and theologian Chris Hedges, who argues that corporate dominance of the parties has led many ordinary people to buy into “the con that deindustrialization, deregulation, austerity, bailing out the banks, nearly two decades of constant war, the exporting of jobs overseas, tax cuts for the rich and the impoverishment of the working class were forms of progress.” (14) Still, the corporate agenda inherent in both major American parties has to live alongside the aspirations of the millions of people who identify as Democrats or Republicans. How does this manifest itself?
The Democratic and Republican parties show remarkable similarities on many policies including mass incarceration, governmental and private sector surveillance of the population, and a campaign finance system that puts corporations and the wealthy in the driver’s seat. (15) However, we’ll focus here on two related policies upon which the two major parties agree. The fact that both parties have enthusiastically pursued these policies shows the political power of corporations and the elites who staff their upper echelons. It is these very policies that lead to much disillusionment among the rank and file members of both parties. Robert Reich, public policy professor and a former Secretary of Labor, confirmed this fact through his many interviews with people around the country:
“I heard the term ‘rigged system’ so often I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, CEO pay, and ‘crony capitalism.’ These came from self-identified Republicans, Democrats, and Independents; white, black, and Latino; union households and non-union. Their only common characteristic was they were middle class and below.” (16)
Judged by their behavior in office, the Democratic and Republican parties agree on these major points:
American Imperialism—Following World War II, the United States was a superpower, a nation-state able to project military, economic, and cultural power all across the globe. Its only rival from 1945 to 1991 was the Soviet Union, and the United States under both parties pursued an aggressive policy of trying to contain and push back against perceived communist advances around the world. Even beyond the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, America took on the role of the world’s policeman. Some American actions seemed justified like the defense of South Korea when North Korea invaded in 1950. Most, however, were of dubious strategic and moral value. These include intervening against the will of people who wanted leftist governments in places like Iran, Guatemala, and Chile; sponsoring a failed invasion of Cuba to unseat the Castro regime; and invading various places from Grenada to Panama. The most destructive of these interventions was America’s futile involvement in the Vietnam War, which did nothing but prolong the unification of the country, kill 58,000 American soldiers, wound another 300,000 American soldiers, and kill an estimated 3.3 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians. (17)
After the Soviet Union’s demise, there was no peace dividend for the American people, as new threats—mostly of our own creation—confronted superpower America. The U.S. funded Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, and then ended up going to war with Iraq when Hussein misread our commitment to Kuwait. The U.S. also funded fundamentalist Islamic rebels in Afghanistan. The presence of American troops in the Middle East—especially in Saudi Arabia—and the U.S. defending Israel in suppressing Palestinians blew back on the United States. The al Qaeda network retaliated by trying to bring down one of the World Trade Center towers in 1993 with a truck bomb, attacking the USS Cole in 2000, and then carrying out the catastrophic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 that brought down both World Trade Center towers with commercial airliners, damaged the Pentagon with another jet, and resulted in the crash of one more commercial airliner in Pennsylvania. The U.S. then did exactly what the terrorists hoped for—it got bogged down in invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Meanwhile, American presidents of both parties have become enamored of using military air strikes and drone strikes in places like Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, and Syria.
The tension between the corporate sponsors of the parties and the American people is palpable. The American penchant for drone strikes and invasions to meet its international obligations as a superpower have been very good for the military-industrial complex about which President Eisenhower warned. It has also undoubtedly opened markets for American and other international corporations. However, America’s militarism has led the people of the world to conclude that the United States is the greatest danger to the world, a result that can’t possibly contribute to overall American security. (18) And yet, after expending all this blood and money, Americans feel less safe with every new military adventure. (19) They seem to want some treasure spent instead to fix America’s infrastructure, to provide health care, to prevent undocumented immigrants from entering the country, to deal with environmental challenges, and to support public schools. (20)
Laissez-faire Economic PolicyWhile the Republican party has been a little more enthusiastic in this regard, for many decades both political parties have pursued clear laissez-faire economic policiesLaissez-faire is French for “allow to do,” and refers to a hands-off approach to economic policy that leaves corporations to do as they please with limited tax and regulatory burdens. This approach is also called neo-liberalism, which is a brand of conservatism that is particularly strong in the United States and reminds us that the original liberals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries opposed monarchy and wanted limited government. I know—the term neo-liberalism means conservative? It’s confusing. Remember that the wealthy and large corporations are the major funders of American political parties and candidates. They also control the positions government leaders go to when they walk through the revolving door. These two facts—combined with the triumph of laissez-faire/neo-liberal philosophy in America—mean that politicians and leaders of both political parties are predisposed to pursue policies that further the power of corporations and the wealthy.
What policies are we talking about? Congress and presidents of both parties have done the following: Lowered corporate taxes. Weakened insider trading rules. Deregulated banks, savings and loans, and other financial institutions that have used their freedoms in very predatory and reckless ways. Incentivized corporations to pay executives with stock options and encouraged corporations to buy back their own stock rather than pay workers or invest in new capacities. Put a lid on the federal minimum wage. Allowed anti-trust laws to languish on the books, encouraging monopolies and oligopolies in industries as varied as social media, telecommunications, and pharmaceuticals. (21) Passed trade agreements that put American workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in poorly regulated countries. Encouraged American companies to close factories here and move them abroad. Shaped bankruptcy law to allow corporations to wiggle out of obligations—like worker pay and benefits agreements when things turn south, but then trap average Americans with debts—like college loans—that cannot be escaped. Allowed the predatory payday loan industry to proliferate. Bailed out Wall Street banks for their reckless behavior that led to the 2008 Great Recession while leaving average Americans holding the bag. (22)
Laissez-faire policies have fueled America’s growing economic inequality. In other words, they’ve been great for corporations and those who were already in the top 10 percent income bracket. They have been a disaster for the bottom 60 percent of Americans. Further, they have contributed to the conclusion of many Americans that the establishment wings of both political parties have built this “rigged system” that they want torn down and replaced with a system that works for ordinary people. Neither party wants to do anything meaningful about challenging wealth and income concentration and getting us past laissez-faire policies.
The Democratic and Republican parties show clear differences on the following policies. Note, however, that what follows are necessarily generalizations. Individual Republicans can and do buck the tendencies described below, and so do individual Democrats. Note also that this is not an exhaustive list of partisan differences.
Taxes—Democrats and Republicans generally subscribe to two different economic policies. Conservatives tend to be advocates of what is known as supply-side economics. Supply-siders argue that economic growth is best promoted by lowering tax rates on wealthier individuals and corporations. The primary assumption of supply-side economics is that the recipients of these tax breaks will invest their extra money to expand existing businesses and create new ones. This, in turn, will put more people to work, and the workers will spend their paychecks to purchase goods and services. Democrats tend to come at the issue of economic growth from the bottom up, although demand-side economics is not really a term people use like they do supply-side economics. Rather than providing tax incentives for wealthy individuals and corporations, Democrats tend to support tax cuts for middle-class people, policies like increasing the minimum wage, and social programs for poor people. Their assumption is that these people are more likely to go out and spend that money, stimulating demand, and prompting wealthy individuals and companies to invest in businesses to meet that demand.
Civil Rights—It’s true that for much of its history, the Democratic party was the place to be for Southern Whites fighting against school integration, voting rights, equal employment opportunities, an end to housing discrimination, and so forth. However, the success of the Republican party’s Southern Strategy combined with Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and the Johnson administration’s advocacy of civil rights in the 1960s essentially flipped the narrative. It’s clear that since the 1970’s, the Democratic party has been more welcoming than the Republican party of equal rights regardless of race, sex, and sexual orientation. To be sure, many of the Democratic party’s leaders like the Clintons and the Obamas followed the lead of the Democratic rank and file rather than actually taking morally courageous stands on civil rights. Still, it has been the Republican party’s leaders as well as its ordinary members who have generally found the civil rights revolution unsettling. In the period from the 1970’s forward, the Republican party opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, opposed gay rights and gay marriage, turned a deaf ear to the Black community’s concerns about disproportionate police violence, and tried wherever it could to ensure that people used the bathroom that conformed to their birth certificate rather than their gender expression. The Republican party has been trying to use religious freedom as a tool to blunt the impact of civil rights—allowing, for example, religious people to discriminate against the LGBTQ community on religious grounds.
Female Bodily Autonomy—Although there are exceptions, Republicans tend to want to control women’s bodies whereas Democrats tend to defer to women to make intimate procreative decisions. (23) This division reflects the conservative impulse to maintain established social hierarchies and the progressive impulse to tear them down in favor of equality and individual autonomy. It’s a basic philosophical difference between ordinary Americans when it comes to this and other issues. Should the law be used to prevent women from terminating pregnancies caused by rape and incest, pregnancies that jeopardize their health, and pregnancies that would trap them in abusive relationships? Republicans are more likely to say yes. Should the government help support women’s reproductive services that include abortion? Should health insurance policies cover contraception and abortion? Democrats are more likely to say yes. (24) While Republicans would generally ban all abortions at any stage, Democrats would generally ban abortion late in a pregnancy and allow exceptions for the health and life of the pregnant woman.
Gun Control—The Democratic and Republican parties differ on measures to reduce America’s epidemic of gun violence. Americans die by gun violence at four times the rate of people living in war-torn Yemen and Syria. Gun deaths occur in the United States at a rate 74 times that of the United Kingdom and 111 times that of Japan. (25) Democrats tend to favor measures such as universal background checks, waiting periods, bans on assault style weapons, limitations on clip sizes, and gun registries, whereas Republicans tend to oppose them. The Supreme Court has affirmed that the Second Amendment to the Constitution confers an individual right to bear arms, but the Court has also said that regulation of firearms is permitted. In his majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), conservative Justice Antonin Scalia wrote “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
The Environment—While Republicans and Democrats tend to agree on a laissez-faire approach to the economy, including fairly relaxed corporate regulations, they do differ somewhat on the environment. This difference has been most notable from the late 1970s onward. The Democratic party has been more supportive of regulations designed to promote clean air and water, stricter protective designations for public lands, increased fuel efficiency standards for vehicles, renewable energy incentives, and measures to fight climate change. The Republican party takes a hands-off approach to environmental regulation and works to blunt or remove environmental regulations that are already in place.
Healthcare—There have long been differences between Democrats and Republicans on healthcare. Republicans have repeatedly teamed up with the healthcare industry to fight Democratic efforts to develop a national healthcare system in which all people would receive equal coverage and treatment. In 1945, Democratic President Truman put forward a national healthcare plan and was defeated by opposition from Republicans, the American Medical Association, and insufficient interest on the part of the voting public. (26) When Democratic President Lyndon Johnson created the Medicare and Medicaid programs, Republicans opposed them by saying they meant the end of freedom in America. (27) Similarly, Republicans opposed Democratic President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, even though the program was very pro-corporation and originated in a conservative think tank. (28) The telling historical fact is that even when Republicans held the White House and had both the House and Senate majorities, they did not formulate—let alone pass—a law designed to promote widespread healthcare coverage in the United States. The United States is the only advanced country without a national healthcare system; instead, we’ve opted for a patchwork one that leaves millions of people uncovered, results in frequent medical bankruptcy, and costs twice as much per capita as the systems in other countries. (29)
The Asymmetrical Nature of American Party Politics
Before we leave the topic of the two dominant political parties in America, we want to make sure that we understand what political scientists refer to as the asymmetric nature of the Democratic and Republican parties. Many political scientists have noted this distinction, but Matt Grossman and David Hopkins put it most authoritatively in their book Asymmetric Politics. In the modern era, the Democratic party is best characterized as a relatively non-ideological coalition of distinct groups like women, Blacks, the LGBTQ community, Hispanics, labor unions, environmentalists, and so forth. It’s a “big tent” party whose constituent groups sympathize and often support each other, but who have not created a powerful ideology to animate them all. Absent an overarching liberal or progressive ideology, the “Democrats continue to address the concrete agendas of discrete social groups, preferring a governing style of technocratic incrementalism over one guided by a comprehensive value system.” (30) This may explain the difficulty that relatively ideological Bernie Sanders had in trying to become the Democratic party presidential nominee in 2016 and 2020.
The Republican party, on the other hand, is one notably characterized by “movement conservatism,” an ideology of individual liberty that unites and animates its members. Whenever its candidates lose, the Republican party tends to conclude that the reason for the loss was that its particular candidate in a given race was not ideologically pure enough. The Republican party unites business and religious interests under a conservative banner clearly intended to prevent any cracks in the economic or social hierarchies that have developed in America. The conservative movement has shown “spectacular success in gaining control of the Republican Party.” (31) When outsider Trump gained the White House and became the Republican party’s de facto leader, it’s interesting that the two main reactions of conservatives were either to leave the party to maintain ideological purity or try to co-opt the opportunity provided by the Trump presidency to promote conservative ideological values in public policy and federal court nominations.
References
1. Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy, Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. New Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Page 187.
2. Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy, Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. New Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Page 201.
3. L. Sandy Maisel, American Political Parties and Elections. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pages 77-90.
4. John Laloggia, “6 Facts About U.S. Political Independents,” Pew Research Center. May 15, 2019.
5. Examples: Richard Herrera, “Are ‘Superdelegates’ Super?” Political Behavior. Vol, 16, No. 1. 1994. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, “Representation in the American National Conventions: The Case of 1972,” British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 5, No. 3. July 1975. Ronald Rapoport, Alan I. McGlennon, and John Abramowitz, The Life of the Parties: Activists in Presidential Politics. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1986.
6. For example, Logan Dancey and Geoffrey Sheagley, “Partisanship and Perceptions of Party Line Voting in Congress,” Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 1. March 2018.
7. Pew Research Center, “Party Identification Trends,” 1992-2017. March 20, 2018.
8. Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Ruth Igielnik, and Rakesh Kochnar, “Most Americans Say There is Too Much Economic Inequality in the U.S., But Fewer Than Half Call It a Top Priority,” Pew Research Center. January 9, 2020.
9. Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019. William Hudson, American Democracy in Peril: Eight Challenges to America’s Future. 6thEdition. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2010. Pages 213-249.
10. “Interview With Noam Chomsky,” Der Spiegel. October 10, 2008.
11. Greg Price, “Hillary Clinton Robbed Bernie Sanders of the Democratic Nomination, According to Donna Brazile,” Newsweek. November 2, 2017. Amber Jamieson, “DNC Head Leaked Debate Question to Clinton, Podesta Emails Suggest,” The Guardian. October 31, 2016.
12. Brian Schwartz, “Wall Street Democratic Donors Warn the Party: We’ll Sit Out or Back Trump, If You Nominate Elizabeth Warren,” CNBC. September 26, 2019. Julie Hollar, “Here’s the Evidence Corporate Media Say is Missing of WAPO Bias Against Sanders,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. August 15, 2019. Dave Lindorff, “The Red-Baiting of Bernie Sanders Has Begun and is Already Becoming Laughable. Counterpunch. February 13, 2020.
13. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2020. Quote from page 17.
14. Chris Hedges, “US Election 2020: A Circus Then, A Circus Now,” Geopolitics. January 22, 2020.
15. Chris Hedges, “Class: The Little Word the Elites Want You to Forget,” Truthdig. March 2, 2020.
16. Robert Reich, “Bernie Sanders is Not George McGovern,” Truthdig. February 28, 2020.
17. Ronald H. Spector, “Vietnam War,” Encyclopedia Britannica. February 14, 2020.
18. Eric Zuesse, “Polls: U.S. is the ‘Greatest Threat to Peace in the World Today.’” Gobal Research. August 9, 2017.
19. ABC News/Ipsos Poll. January 12, 2020.
20. Kim Parker, Rich Morin, and Menasce Horowitz, “Worries, Priorities, and Potential Problem Solvers,” Pew Research Center. March 21, 2019.
21. A monopoly is when one company dominates an economic sector. An oligopoly is when a few companies do so. See Thomas Philippon, The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2019. Philippon estimates that monopolies and oligopolies in America cost Americans an extra \$300 per month and short workers about \$1.25 trillion a year in wages.
22. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy. An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015. Robert B. Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few. New York: Vintage Books, 2016.
23. I reject the pro-choice/pro-life dichotomy because it obscures more than it illuminates. A better road into this issue is the extent to which the government should be able to control the bodies of women.
24. Katie Watson, Scarlet A: The Ethics, Law, & Politics of Ordinary Abortion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
25. Marc Silver, “A Doctor’s Insights into Gun Violence and Gun Laws Around the World,” NPR. August 6, 2019. Nurith Aizenman and Marc Silver, “How the U.S. Compares with Other Countries in Deaths from Gun Violence,” NPR. August 5, 2019.
26. Howard Markel, “69 Years Ago a President Pitches His Idea for National Healthcare,” PBS Newshour. November 19, 2014.
27. In 1961 Ronald Reagan said that if Medicare is not stopped, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” Igor Volsky, “Flashback: Republicans Opposed Medicare in 1960s by Warning of Rationing, ‘Socialized Medicine,’” Thinkprogress. July 29, 2009.
28. Avik Roy, “The Torturous History of Conservatives and the Individual Mandate,” Forbes. February 7, 2012.
29. Peter G. Peterson Foundation, “How Does the U.S. Healthcare System Compare to Other Countries?” July 22, 2019.
30. Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Page 101.
31. Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Page 79. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/07%3A_Linkage_Institutions/7.03%3A_Chapter_43-_Policy_Preferences_of_American_Political_Parties.txt |
“In our view, the ideal of popular sovereignty plays much the same role in contemporary democratic ideology that the divine right of kings played in the monarchical era. It is . . . a fiction providing legitimacy and stability to political systems whose actual workings are manifestly—and inevitably—rather less than divine.”
—Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels (1)
A Two-Party System and Its Alternatives
Since the Republican Party’s rise in the 1850s, all American presidents have been either Democrats or Republicans. The vast majority of congressmen since then have been either Democrats or Republicans. Because the two major parties dominate the system, political scientists classify the United States as a two-party system, even though we have many political parties. A two-party system is distinct from its alternatives: a one-party system in which other parties are either banned or so hobbled that they can’t compete with the ruling party, or a multi-party system, which features three or more parties with a viable shot of participating in government. Modern history is full of one-party political systems like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a one-party system. The People’s Republic of China is a one-party system. One-party systems can also be found in North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba. Multi-party systems exist in many countries like Denmark, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand. Why is the United States a two-party system as opposed to a multi-party one? It is, after all, a very diverse country that could probably support more than two parties.
Causes of America’s Two-Party System
The consensus among political scientists is that two structural features strongly favor a two-party system as opposed to a multi-party system. The first consists of a variety of laws that limit ballot access and otherwise penalize third parties. For instance, congressional rules all favor the Democrats and Republicans. If someone from a third party or a person with no party affiliation is elected to Congress, they must choose to be affiliated with one of the major parties to get assignments to standing committees. Presidential candidates from the major parties can receive public money to run their campaigns. But when a third-party candidate runs for president and wants public funding through the Federal Election Commission, they have to receive that funding after the election is over because the amount is tied to how well they did in the last election.
Third parties complain loudest about ballot-access restrictions, which are barriers to getting a candidate on the ballot so voters don’t have to write in their name. They argue that were today’s ballot-access restrictions in place in the 1850s, the Republican Party never would have risen to become a national party. As political analyst Richard Winger points out, the first ballot-access restrictions began in the late 1880s and became progressively stricter in the 1930s and the 1960s. (2) Natural experiments have shown that when ballot-access restrictions were lowered, the major parties faced significantly increased competition from third party and independent candidates. (3)
Ballot-access restrictions include filing fees, early deadlines to declare candidacy, and signature requirements. The latter is perhaps the most onerous burden on third parties. Many states require independent and third-party candidates to secure enough signatures on petitions in order to get on the ballot. Simply put, “The greater the share of the electorate required to sign nominating petitions, the fewer minor-party and independent candidates appear on the ballot.” (4) A third party that wants to run candidates for all the House seats across the country would have to collect millions of signatures. The Democrats and Republicans are relieved of this burden. Collecting these signatures is expensive and time-consuming. Together, filing fees and signature requirements stunt electoral competition, especially in races for the House of Representatives. (5)
The second structural element causing the United States to have a two-party system is our winner-take-all elections—which the British refer to as a first-past-the-post system—used in single-member districts. In such a system, a single person represents each electoral district for the House or Senate and gets that distinction by receiving the most votes of those cast, even if they did not receive the majority of the votes. So, if Juan receives 546 votes, Mary receives 545 votes, and Tarek receives 544 votes in a U. S. House of Representatives’ election, Juan wins even though he received only 33 percent of the vote. He received the most votes short of a majority, called the plurality of votes, and he will represent that district. Coming in second gets Mary nothing, and Tarek is similarly out of luck even though he received only 2 votes less than the winner. The tendency for winner-take-all, single-member district systems to promote two parties is sometimes referred to as Duverger’s Law, after the French political scientist Maurice Duverger.
How does the winner-take-all system help create a two-party system? To answer that, we’re going to need a more realistic example. Let’s say we have a progressive party that pushes the interests of the common laborer but has also been somewhat environmentally friendly—the Blue Party, and we have a conservative party that pushes the interests of big business and entrepreneurs and is very unfriendly to the environment—the Red Party, and we have a new party that is very concerned about the environment—the Green Party. Let’s assume we have three election districts, and the Green party starts strongest in one region. Finally, let’s be realistic and say that the Green Party does not have the strength that third-place winner Sam did in our example above. We have an election, and these are the results:
What happened? Blue wins two seats by getting the plurality of votes in District One and the majority of votes in District Three. Red wins one seat in District Two. Green gets nothing, bupkisnichtsnada. And this is after the Greens have gone through all the work and expense of getting the party started and getting on the ballot. Can the Green devotees keep the party going for two years until the next election? Maybe. Let’s assume that not only do they keep it going, they actually do a little better. Here are the results for the next election two years later:
Indeed, the Greens did a bit better, but what did it get them? Still nothing. The first lesson from this is that it’s very difficult to keep a new party going year after year if all that effort is not producing actual legislative seats. In this case, the Green party saw tremendous gains for a third party. That’s often not the case, and so aside from keeping the party going, it becomes difficult to convince citizens to keep voting for a loser that has little chance of gaining seats in Congress. People want to vote for a party that stands at least some chance of winning seats. That’s the second lesson. The third lesson is equally important. Look what happened in that second election. Green pulled voters away from Blue, which is the second choice among eco-voters because it is at least somewhat environmentally friendly. By doing so, these voters hurt the Blue party and guaranteed that Red would pick up another seat even though Red’s support didn’t actually go up. Since the average Green voter despises the Red party program, their support for the Green party in the election booth has led to the perverse result of having helped Red carry out its anti-environment program. In District One during Election #2, the Green candidate was the so-called spoiler candidate, who pulled enough votes away from the Blue candidate to ensure that Red won the seat.
What is a Green voter to do? One choice is to keep voting Green with the hope that the Blue party will self-destruct so that the Greens will be the only real alternative to the Reds. Something like that hasn’t happened in the United States since the 1850s, so it’s not very likely. Still, some people make this choice on principle. Many others, however, tend to stay within the Blue party and work to make it more environmentally friendly, which deprives the Green party of activists and undercuts the distinctive Green party call among the broader electorate.
What If?
What if we required third parties to gain enough signatures in a state once, after which they would be guaranteed ballot access in perpetuity instead of having to do it each election? In addition to that change, what if we also took a different approach to voting? One approach might be ranked choice voting (RCV), which has voters ranking all the candidates—e.g., I prefer Samantha first, José second, Bill third, and Kendra fourth. Votes are then counted in rounds. When RCV is used for single-winner districts, it goes like this: Someone can win an outright majority on the first round, and they are elected. If no candidate wins an outright majority on the first round, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and that candidate’s voters—who picked them as their first choice—will have their second-ranked choice votes allocated. This process continues until someone gets an outright majority of votes. RCV would work in a similar fashion for election districts with more than one winner. (6) RCV could easily be combined with multi-member districts, which might give more people the feeling that they are not wasting their vote.
References
1. Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy For Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Page 19.
2. See Richard Winger, editor of Ballot Access News, “The Importance of Ballot Access,” archived here. Richard Winger, “Institutional Obstacles to a Multiparty System,” in Paul S. Herrnson and John C. Green, editors, Multiparty Politics in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997.
3. Marcus Drometer and Johannes Rincke, “The Impact of Ballot Access Restrictions on Electoral Competition: Evidence from a Natural Experiment,” Public Choice. September 25, 2008. Pages 461-474.
4. Barry C. Burden, “Ballot Regulations and Multiparty Politics in the States,” PS: Political Science and Politics. October, 2007. Page 671.
5. Stephen Ansolabehere and Alan Gerber, “The Effects of Filing Fees and Petition Requirements on U.S. House Elections,” Legislative Studies Quarterly. 21(2). May 2, 1996.
6. See: FairvoteRanked Choice Voting Resource Center. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/07%3A_Linkage_Institutions/7.04%3A_Chapter_44-_Why_Do_We_Have_a_Two-Party_System.txt |
“People brag about the free market. But we have central planning here. It’s just not by government. It’s by corporations.”
—John Ikerd (1)
Theories About the Role of Organized Interests in the Political System
When the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States in the 1830s, he was struck by how well developed the “principle of association” was among average Americans. (2) Over the years, political analysts have tended to split over the question of how the American political system operates, and one side in this debate is well represented by de Tocqueville’s insights into the vitality of political associations in the young republic. Called Pluralism, this theory holds that American politics is marked by a rich diversity of organized interests vying with each other to see that their respective wishes are translated into government policy. (3) Ordinary Americans are free to start or join any of these groups, and the variety of possible interests makes for a more or less level playing field. In other words, no one set of interests is likely to dominate public policy—at least not for very long, because the many losers will temporarily put aside their differences to go after the top dogs. The pluralist argument is bolstered by the number and variety of interest groups, and by the fact that interests in one category—business, for example—often struggle with each other and fail to put up a monolithic front vis a vis labor or environmental groups.
Other political scientists argued that if the American system was at some point characterized by pluralism, over time it transformed into something less healthy: an out of control hyper-pluralist polity. Hyper-Pluralism suggests that the government has essentially been captured by the demands of interest groups. And rather than being an arbiter of the struggle between organized interests, the government tries to put into effect the wishes of them all to the detriment of the country. Political scientist Theodore Lowi called this pathological process interest group liberalism, which is often used interchangeably with the hyper-pluralism label. (4) These theorists point to the contradictory nature of government policy—for example, subsidizing tobacco farming while spending money trying to keep people from smoking—as evidence that there isn’t really a competition going on as envisioned by pluralism. The system more closely resembles a compartmentalized free-for-all.
The third branch of disagreement is called Elite Theory. Elite theorists hold that the many-interests-on-a-level-playing-field vision of the pluralists and the interest-group-chaos scenario of the hyper-pluralists fail to accurately show what is really going on: that a relatively small and wealthy class of individuals—the power elite—largely gets its way regardless of the surface appearance of political conflict. (5) According to this theory, the power elite either are the decision-makers, or they so influence the decision-makers that the elites get their way most of the time. Elite theory highlights the power of business and military interests and points to many government policies that lavish benefits on them. Moreover, business interests create interlocking and overlapping connections that reinforce their position and allow them to control the political system—witness how limited and overlapping are the memberships of corporate boards, foundation boards, and trustee positions for public and private universities, as well as corporate ownership of the media.
When political scientists have looked at actual public policy decisions and their correlation with interest group action, the opinions of wealthy Americans, and the opinions of middle-income Americans, they found support for the Elite Theory. For example, Martin Gilens from Princeton and Benjamin Page from Northwestern University, found that organized interests were not particularly attuned to the interests of average Americans, and that this was especially true of business interests and some single-issue groups such as those concerning abortion and gun rights. Their public policy analysis indicated that the preferences of ordinary citizens have little to no influence on the course of policy. Instead, elites and organized interests—many of whom are run by elites—have a large impact on public policy making in the United States. Their support is almost essential for a policy change to pass, and their opposition means that a policy change is extremely unlikely to pass. Gilens and Page suggest that those of us interested in seeing the popular will triumph in America might not be satisfied with what they actually found: “Democracy by coincidence, in which ordinary citizens get what they want from government only when they happen to agree with elites or interest groups that are really calling the shots.” (6) When a machine learning specialist and a mathematician applied different statistical techniques to the Gilens and Page data set they found the situation was even worse: they could predict public policy with a high degree of accuracy by consulting the opinions of only the wealthiest 10% of Americans and a few powerful interest groups. These scientists concluded that “the US government has significant plutocratic tendencies.” (7)
An offshoot of Elite Theory centers on how elites achieve their aims through the structures of corporate capitalism. During America’s founding period, large corporations were rather new entities that elicited suspicion among many people. Queen Elizabeth granted a corporate charter for the East India Company on December 31, 1600, and British colonization of North America intimately involved the Company and its personnel. In the 1770s, the East India Company was incensed that American privateers were importing tea on their own or going through the Dutch rather than the English. Beset by these and other problems, the East India Company fell on hard times and prevailed upon Parliament to pass the Tea Act of 1773, which exempted the company from English taxes and enabled it to drive American tea merchants out of business. As historian Ray Raphael puts it, the Boston Tea Party “began with the British government’s bailout of a corporation deemed too big to fail.” Unlike what I was taught in grade school, the Boston Tea Party did not concern a tax increase. Instead, the rebels who dressed up as Mohawk Indians and dumped the tea into the harbor were upset that the East India Company was being given a tax break and that the Americans had no say in that decision. (8)
Perhaps as a result of this founding shock, many Americans futilely resisted the rise of corporate power. In 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” (9) The powers of corporations in the United States were restricted through the language of their corporate charters, which were governed by state law. The charters limited large corporations’ behavior and made them serve the public interest as well as the interests of their shareholders. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Supreme Court began to treat corporations as legal “people.” From 1900 onward, states began to compete with each other to gut the strict provisions of corporate charters, relieving corporations of the need to be accountable to state governments and from the fear of having their corporate charters revoked should they overstep their bounds.
The contemporary situation, according to elite theorists who focus on the role of corporations, is that large corporations effectively rule not only the United States, but the world as well. (10) They have the same free speech rights as individuals with one important exception: unlike real people, “corporate people” have nearly unlimited funds to broadcast their views and support politicians. Corporations have become “too big to fail,” and so command politicians to provide taxpayer money to bail them out when they—through incompetence or malfeasance—bring themselves to the brink of economic collapse. And then the corporations and banks and investment houses lobby to defeat legislation that would regulate their incompetence and malfeasance in the future. When large corporations regularly flout worker safety and environmental laws, resulting in damage, injury and death, the corporate coffers pay the requisite fines, and they go about their business as though nothing had happened.
Kinds of Organized Interests
The term organized interests refers to political interests that have a specific organizational unit that works to influence public policy in numerous ways short of running actual election candidates. This organizational unit requires money and staff simply to exist, plus additional money to influence policy. We can categorize organized interests as follows.
Category 1: Economic Interests–These are groups that coalesce around the financial interests of their members.
• Corporations and Business Interests—Most large corporations actively work to influence public policy. Exxon, General Motors, Microsoft, Walmart, and Verizon all maintain teams of lobbyists and spend considerable money to get what they want. Business interests are also represented by associations like the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, and the National Small Business Association. Still others represent specific professions such as the American Medical Association. Then there are the corporate-funded think tanks whose ideas and spokespeople get much play on corporate-owned mainstream media. These include Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Club for Growth.
• Labor Interests—Organized labor unions also maintain professional staff dedicated to political action. They work to promote unionized workers’ interests specifically, and all workers generally. The dominant labor group is the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), which is an umbrella organization that encompasses nearly a hundred distinct unions including the American Federation of Teachers, the Airline Pilots Association, and the United Mineworkers of America. Altogether, the AFL-CIO represents more than twelve million workers. Independent labor unions include the Service Employees International Union and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
Category 2: Citizen’s Groups or Non-Economic Groups—This is a catch-all category that encompasses interests that are not overtly tied to the economic interests of their members.
• Public Interest Groups—Also known as good-government groups, they claim to represent the broad interests of all Americans. Many of these groups were started since 1960, although some are older than that. Common Cause is perhaps the most prominent of these. It was founded in 1970 by progressive Republican John Gardner and works on issues such as campaign finance reform, media reform, and making government more open, responsive, and ethical. Other public interest groups include the Center for Public Integrity, Citizens Against Government Waste, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Public Citizen, and the Center for Responsive Politics.
• Single-Issue Groups—These are groups that tend to concentrate on one issue or one area of public policy. They range across the political spectrum from the Sierra Club to the National Rifle Association, from the NARAL Pro-Choice America to the National Right to Life Committee. The narrow focus of these groups tends to attract highly motivated members, which can help the group maintain its power and role in the political system. These active members can be called upon to donate money, write emails to congressmen, and show up at demonstrations.
• Ideological Groups—Ideological groups are interested in a variety of issues and have a clear ideological bias that governs the kind of policies the group endorses. There are a number of conservative or libertarian groups that are heavily funded by corporate interests or by religious interests. These include the Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, Americans for Prosperity, the American Conservative Union, and the Eagle Forum. Less prominent are the liberal or progressive groups like United for a Fair Economy, the Economic Policy Institute, MoveOn, and People for the American Way.
• Demographic Groups—Some organized interests were created to defend or advance the interests and rights of specific demographic groups. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), which is a powerful lobby group with 35 million members, is the classic example of one of these demographic groups. There are others: The National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Council of La Raza, and Black Lives Matter.
Category 3: Government Interests—State, city, and local government interests have coalesced into organized groups. Most states and major cities have paid lobbyists in Washington. They’ve also formed groups such as the National League of Cities, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National Association of Counties, and the National Governors Association. So much of national government policy affects state and local governments that they organize to try to influence what comes out of Washington.
Corporate Dominance of the Organized Interest Universe
The political scientist E.E. Schattschneider once famously wrote that “The flaw in the pluralist heaven is the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent.” (11) We can say with a great deal of confidence that corporations dominate the universe of organized interests in the United States. One study suggested that business interests spent \$34 on lobbying for every \$1 spent on lobbying by all other interest groups and unions combined, and that over 90 percent of the largest lobbying organizations have been businesses. (12) Nearly three-quarters of the money donated to federal candidates comes from corporate political action committees. (13)
Corporate dominance of American organized interests comes not just from their campaign contributions and their direct lobbying efforts—although those are substantial—but also from other tools at their disposal. They serve as lucrative landing spots for politicians, congressional staffers, and executive branch officials who want to take advantage of the revolving door. As we’ll see later in our chapter on the media, they own the news channels that provide us with vital political information. Similarly, corporations buy advertising on media channels, and are able to pull that advertising should they disagree with viewpoints of particular shows. Corporations fund think tanks that argue for laissez-faire economic policies and tax cuts for businesses and the wealthy. Through their control of the news media, media in general, and think tanks, corporations have an upper hand in shaping public opinion. Corporations and the wealthy can also engage in a capital strike by withholding capital investment or by moving money elsewhere until they get the government policies they want. A capital strike “might take the form of layoffs, offshoring jobs and money, denying loans, or just a credible threat to do those things, along with a promise to relent once government delivers the desired policy changes.” (14)
Corporate dominance operates through two primary mechanisms. One is by participating in the political system very much as people do. They are, after all, artificial persons vested with rights by the Supreme Court, although not by the text of the Constitution itself. They lobby; they donate to politicians; they speak through the media that they own and support through advertising; they fund think tanks, and they operate the revolving doors to and from government.
The second mechanism is the cultivation of fear, for fear breads conservative responses. Fear that I might lose my job, especially if I speak up; fear that my senator or representative feels about the possibility that jobs will be lost in the district on their watch if they cross powerful corporations; fear that the same politician will see their funding sources dry up because of a vote for single-payer healthcare; fear that I cannot switch jobs or start a small business because I risk my family’s health coverage; fear of being transferred. Princeton professor Sheldon Wolin captured the fear that is the “constant companion” of ordinary people: “Downsizing, reorganization, bubbles bursting, unions busted, quickly outdated skills, and transfer of jobs abroad create not just fear but an economy of fear, a system of control whose power feeds on uncertainty, yet a system that, according to its analysts, is eminently rational.” (15) Neither good government groups, unions, single-interest groups, or ideological groups have this set of tools at their disposal the way corporations and business interests do.
What If?
What if we passed and ratified the We the People Amendment to the Constitution? (16) How would this amendment positively or negatively affect the American political system? Here’s the text of the amendment:
Section 1. Artificial Entities Such as Corporations Do Not Have Constitutional Rights
The rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons only.
Artificial entities established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state shall have no rights under this Constitution and are subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law.
The privileges of artificial entities shall be determined by the People, through Federal, State, or local law, and shall not be construed to be inherent or inalienable.
Section 2. Money is Not Free Speech
Federal, State, and local government shall regulate, limit, or prohibit contributions and expenditures, including a candidate’s own contributions and expenditures, to ensure that all citizens, regardless of their economic status, have access to the political process, and that no person gains, as a result of their money, substantially more access or ability to influence in any way the election of any candidate for public office or any ballot measure.
Federal, State, and local government shall require that any permissible contributions and expenditures be publicly disclosed.
The judiciary shall not construe the spending of money to influence elections to be speech under the First Amendment.
Section 3.
Nothing in this amendment shall be construed to abridge freedom of the press.
References
1. Nick Shaxson, “Rural America Doesn’t Have to Starve to Death,” The Nation. March 2, 2020. Page 17.
2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. Volumes 1 and 1, Unabridged. Translated by Henry Reeve. Digireads Publishing, 2016.
3. Classic texts in the Pluralist tradition include David B. Truman, The Governmental Process, 2nd edition. New York: Knopf, 1971; and Robert Dahl, Pluralist Democracy in the United States. Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1967.
4. Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism, 2nd edition. New York: Norton: 1979.
5. See C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956; and Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society. New York: Basic Books, 1969.
6. Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics. Fall 2014.
7. Shawn K. McGuire and Charles B. Delahunt, “Predicting United States Policy Outcomes with Random Forests,” Institute for New Economic Thinking. Working Paper No. 138. October 27, 2020.
8. Ray Raphael, “Debunking Boston Tea Party Myths,” History Net.
9. Quoted in Thom Hartman, Unequal Protection. The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights. Rodale Press, 2002. Page 82.
10. David. C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World. 2nd edition. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2001.
11. E.E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America. Boston: Wadsworth, 1975. Page 34.
12. Lee Drutman, The Business of America is Lobbying. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pages 1-21.
13. Karl Evers-Hillstrom, “Why Corporate PACs Have an Advantage,” OpenSecrets. February 14, 2020.
14. Kevin Young, Michael Schwartz, and Tarun Banerjee, “When Capitalists Go on Strike,” Jacobin. February 2017.
15. Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy, Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. New Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Page 67.
16. Move to Amend. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/07%3A_Linkage_Institutions/7.05%3A_Chapter_45-_The_Universe_of_Organized_Interests.txt |
“Today, most lobbyists are engaged in a system of bribery but it’s the legal kind, the kind that runs rampant in the corridors of Washington. It’s a system of sycophantic elected leaders expecting a campaign cash flow, and in return, industry, interest groups, and big labor are rewarded with what they want: legislation and rules that favor their constituencies.”
—Jimmy Williams (1)
Lobbying
All organized interests try to further their members’ political interests. They choose among myriad strategies, the most obvious being lobbying. Lobbying takes its name from the centuries-old British House of Commons tradition where constituents petition their member of Parliament (MP) in the building’s lobby. Since lobbyists cannot participate directly in work on the House or Senate floor, they interact—figuratively speaking—with Representatives and Senators in the Capitol building’s lobbies. Lobbying refers to efforts to persuade legislators and executive branch officials to make decisions that favor a particular set of interests over others. In Congress, lobbyists might testify before standing committees on legislation, ply congressmen and their staff with research and other information that favors their point of view, provide congressmen and their staff with draft legislation, or invite congressmen and their staff to events sponsored by the industry or interest they represent. Lobbyists also interact with executive branch officials, providing them with information and language in the rule-making process. Because of the revolving-door phenomenon, lobbyists are often former congressional members, former congressional staff, or former executive branch officials.
Campaign Financing
Another prominent strategy for organized interests is to donate money to political campaigns. They form political action committees—known as PACs—which must be registered with the Federal Election Commission. The PACs donate money to political candidates who are likely to support the group’s interests. Very often lobbyists concentrate on the incumbent congressional members who sit on the standing committees that write legislation on their key issues or who oversee the executive agencies they deal with most often. And the sums of money are significant. In the 2018 election cycle, PACs in the banking, finance, and insurance sector contributed over \$121 million to political candidates across the country; PACs in the healthcare sector contributed almost \$100 million; and organized labor PACs contributed almost \$59 million. (2)
What do the organized interests get for their money? Critics of America’s campaign finance system argue that if such contributions are not actually buying votes, which would be very hard to prove absent some smoking gun document linking the campaign cash and the vote in a quid pro quo arrangement, they are certainly buying access. That is, these groups’ lobbyists are likely to have the kind of close contact with congressional members and their staff that would not be afforded to other groups that had not donated. Organized interests have complained that they aren’t pressuring the politicians for votes, but that politicians are shaking them down for campaign contributions. Rarely is the relationship between lobbying, campaign contributions, and access to politicians made explicit, but sometimes people slip up and let the cat out of the bag. For example, in 2018 Mick Mulvaney, head of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau—the agency designed to protect financial services consumers—and a former congressional member, said the following about his standard operating procedure: “We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress. If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.” (3) He then added that if someone from his district came to D.C. and sat in his office lobby, he would talk to them regardless of financial contribution. Still, the implication is that of all the organized interests in Washington, he preferred to speak with those who contributed to his campaign war chest. Political science research confirms that money can buy access. In a neat experiment, Joshua Kalla and David Broockman, two Berkley graduate students, found that “Members of Congress were more than three times as likely to meet with individuals when their offices were informed the attendees were donors,” and that said meetings were more likely to include senior staff if the individuals were donors. (4)
Going Public
Organized interests often use the going-public strategy to further their interests. This is a catch-all category of activities in which the group generates or demonstrates public support for its cause. Examples include mobilizing the grassroots, which is getting ordinary people or members of the group to write letters. This can be very effective if it is genuine. That is, if the interest group can really get thousands of people to call, write, or email their congressman all expressing one side of an issue, it tends to get legislators’ attention. This works with executive agencies as well. Before government agencies publish regulations in the Federal Register, they invite all interested persons to comment, and organized interests are in a favorable position to generate significant volumes of comments. Very often, though, the organized interest will fake a grassroots movement by generating thousands of emails or faxes that only look like they come from ordinary people. Senator Lloyd Bentsen coined the term astroturf lobbying to describe this behavior. (5) Narrow economic interests will often employ astroturf lobbying to make it seem like they are representing large numbers of people.
Another form of going public is to run an expensive marketing campaign involving commercials on radio and television as well as advertisements and newspaper editorials. Organized interests might also stage a march or demonstration to show decision makers how numerous and mobilized their members are. Civil rights groups staged the March on Washington in 1963, filling the National Mall with some 250,000 peaceful protesters. Famously, it was at that march that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. In the spring of 2006, nearly a million people all across the country marched in demonstrations against what they perceived to be harsh anti-immigrant legislation pending in Congress. (6) Another example was the 2017 Women’s March on Washington D.C the day after Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. Beginning as a Facebook post by a Hawaiian grandmother the day after Trump was elected, it ballooned into what was referred to as “one of the largest and significant demonstrations for social justice in America’s . . . history.” The turnout of 500,000 people dwarfed the turnout for Trump’s inauguration itself, and altogether 2.6 million people marched in all fifty states and thirty-two countries. (7) The demonstrations in the middle of the 2020 pandemic highlighted the issue of police violence in the wake of cases like the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville.
Litigation
Organized interests frequently use litigation—taking the matter to court—to achieve their ends in addition to lobbying the legislative and executive branches. This can be an expensive strategy but can pay off well if they prevail in court and set precedent in their favor. The organized interest can bring the lawsuit directly, or they can finance lawsuits brought by others, or file amicus curiae briefs in favor of one side in another case to which the organized interest is not a direct party. Civil rights groups, led by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, successfully pursued litigation to strike down discriminatory laws and practices. Environmental groups often sue to halt or modify large projects that they believe violate environmental laws such as the Endangered Species Act or regulations against development in wetlands. Conservative groups have successfully used state legislation combined with litigation to chip away at and eventually overturn Roe v. Wade (1973), the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.
Iron Triangles
Iron triangles are not an organized-interest strategy. Rather, the term refers to the triangular relationship organized interests form with executive agencies and congressional decision makers. Political scientists refer to this mutually reinforcing relationship as an iron triangle, because it often seems impervious to outside influence. The triangle seems to operate as a sub-government unto itself. We can illustrate a generic iron triangle this way.
The double-arrowed lines in the diagram represent two-way supportive relationships. Let’s look at each point of the triangle.
The organized interest provides campaign contributions to members of congressional standing committees that deal with the organized interest’s issues and concerns. The organized interest also lobbies the government agency and may even provide the governing agency vital information it needs to do its job. This is the case with defense contractors and the Pentagon as well as pharmaceutical companies and the Food and Drug Administration. Through revolving doors, organized interests provide safe and lucrative landing spots for former congressional members and their staff and executive branch officials.
The government agency administers the programs or writes the regulations that the organized interest depends on. For example, if the Pentagon doesn’t purchase a new submarine, the company that makes submarines loses business. If the Food and Drug Administration writes overly stringent safety regulations for new drugs, pharmaceutical companies are going to have difficulty bringing new drugs to market. Also, government agency programs can provide important benefits to the relevant congressional committee members. For example, if the Pentagon does build the submarine, that means creating many jobs in the districts those congressmen represent. Agriculture Department subsidies tend to benefit congressional agriculture committee constituents.
Finally, the congressional committee is in a position to act favorably on legislation that benefits organized interests. If the committee decides to build the new submarine, the company that makes it will benefit. If the committee decides to fund subsidies for a certain crop, the crop growers will benefit. It also provides a budget and oversight to the government agency in question. If the committee were to reduce agency funding, the agency would lose power and prestige.
You can see how iron triangles are mutually reinforcing and tend to continue the status quo despite repeated calls to reduce government’s size. Pick an area of public policy and see if you can identify the key players and their relationship in an iron triangle.
References
1. Jimmy Williams, “I Was a Lobbyist for More Than 6 Years. I Quit. My Conscience Couldn’t Take It Anymore,” Vox. January 5, 2018. Emphasis in the original.
2. Opensecrets.org.
3. David A. Graham, “Mick Mulvaney Says the Quiet Part Out Loud,” The Atlantic. April 25, 2018.
4. Joshua L. Kalla and David E. Broockman, “Campaign Contributions Facilitate Access to Congressional Officials: A Randomized Field Experiment,” American Journal of Political Science. July 2016. Pages 545-558.
5. Peter Grier, “The Time-Honored Practice of Astroturf Lobbying,” The Christian Science Monitor. September 3, 2009.
6. Mark Engler and Paul Engler, “The Massive Immigration-Rights Protests of 2006 are Still Changing Politics,” Los Angeles Times. March 4, 2016.
7. Heidi M. Przybyla and Fredreka Schouten, “At 2.6 Million Strong, Women’s Marches Crush Expectations,” USA Today. January 22, 2017. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/07%3A_Linkage_Institutions/7.06%3A_Chapter_46-_Strategies_of_Organized_Interests.txt |
“The media . . . tend to ignore broad social and economic policy issues because their complexity makes it difficult to simplify and dramatize them.”
—William Hudson (1)
The mass media is a truly remarkable thing. It provides us with information and images that range from the ridiculous to the sublime. It is also a far larger beast than we’re prepared to deal with here. For the most part, we’ll ignore the entertainment side of the mass media, even though we’ll keep in the back of our minds the fact that media designed to entertain also has political ramifications. Indeed, the entertainment industry can be overtly political while also covertly reinforcing or challenging established social and political norms and myths. For this part of the course, we’re going to concentrate on the link between people, politics, and the news media. We’ll use the term media to refer to mass communication’s whole range, involving newspapers, books, radio, television, movies, recorded music, and the internet. And we’ll use the term news media to refer to that subset of mass communication that imparts useful information that citizens need in a democratic republic.
A Quick History of the Media in American Politics
The news media has been intimately involved in the American political process right from the beginning. John Peter Zenger began publishing the New York Weekly Journal in 1733, and almost immediately printed critical articles about William Cosby, the governor of New York colony, accusing him of “schemes of general oppression and pillage, schemes to depreciate or evade the laws, restraints upon liberty and projects for arbitrary will.” The paper went on to say that Cosby’s rule was so corrupt that the people of New York might soon rise up against the government. Zenger was arrested in 1734 and tried for seditious libel. The jury found him not guilty because the critical stories were factual and so did not constitute libel. Andrew Hamilton, Zenger’s lawyer, told the jury that “every man, who prefers freedom to a life of slavery, will bless and honor you, as men who have baffled the attempt of tyranny…exposing and opposing arbitrary power in these parts of the world at least, by speaking and writing truth.” (2) The case encouraged a rowdy press in the American colonies and also dissuaded the British from prosecuting writers who criticized them in the run-up to the American Revolution.
At the Constitutional Convention, the delegates adopted a secrecy rule. When someone carelessly left a copy of the Virginia Plan outside the meeting chamber, George Washington rose to “entreat the gentlemen to be more careful, least our transactions get into the newspapers and disturb the public repose by premature speculations.” (3) At the time of the American Revolution and the Constitutional Convention, the United States possessed a broadly literate population of White men who, for the most part, were able to read the arguments over independence and the debates between the federalists and the anti-federalists because they were published in newspapers, journals, pamphlets, and flyers.
In 1798, Congress passed and President Adams signed the Sedition Act, generally considered to be one of the greatest threats to a free press in the United States. This was basically a case of Federalist politicians attempting to stifle the voices of opposition newspapers. Here’s the meat of the legislation:
That if any person shall write, print, utter or publish…or shall knowingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering, or publishing any false scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or to bring them…into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them…the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition within the United States, or to excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing or resisting any law of the United States…then such person, being thereof convicted before any court of the United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years. (4)
Although the law seemed to offer protection in the case of one who uttered or printed the truth, it was really directed at people who expressed negative opinions about the Federalist government, and it did not exactly spell out how one would go about establishing the truth of an unfavorable opinion. Twenty-five Americans were arrested under the Sedition Act, and fifteen of them were indicted for trial. The Sedition Act expired the day before President Jefferson took office in 1801, and Jefferson pardoned those who had been convicted under the law. Jefferson went on to bring seditious libel charges against Harry Croswell, a Federalist newspaper editor. Again, the case hinged on whether Croswell had printed the truth when he alleged that Jefferson paid James Callender to slander George Washington, John Adams, and other Federalists. Croswell was initially convicted of seditious libel but was granted a new trial after New York changed its libel laws; he was acquitted in the second trial, but no definitive evidence established the truth of his claims. (5)
It wasn’t until the latter half of the nineteenth century that the number of daily newspapers exploded from approximately 250 to over 2,000 by 1900. The increase was partly due simply to the colonization of the American West and the creation of towns and cities that needed their own newspapers. Technology also improved and made it easier to print large runs of a newspaper in one day and then turn around and do it again the next day. Prices decreased as well. After Benjamin Day began the first penny press in New York in 1833, more inexpensive newspapers proliferated. The nineteenth century was also the golden era of the partisan press. Most newspapers didn’t worry about objectively printing the day’s or week’s events; they were often openly tied to political parties or movements and tilted the news accordingly. Competition in the business was stiff, and publishers often went for scandal and sensationalism to sell newspapers. This yellow journalism, as it was called, was perfected through the rivalry of the New York World, published by Joseph Pulitzer, and the New York Journal, published by William Randolph Hearst. Both Hearst and Pulitzer stirred up stories of Spanish atrocities in Cuba and implicated Spain in the explosion that destroyed the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor, which may have helped prime their audiences for America to intervene.
The early twentieth century muckrakers were pioneers of the kind of investigative journalism that continues to challenge the politically and economically powerful. (6) Of course, the term “muckraker” was an epithet coined by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 but has become something of a badge of honor among investigative journalists. A muckraker is a progressive-minded writer who investigates and reports on abuses of power and on the ways that government serves powerful interests at ordinary people’s expense. Lincoln Steffens was an editor and writer for McClure’s Magazine, where he wrote a series of investigative reports called “The Shame of the Cities” and “The Shame of the States,” focusing on political corruption and efforts to fight it. Ida Tarbell investigated the Standard Oil Trust for McClure’s and wrote a series of articles in 1902-03 exposing the secret bookkeeping, bribery, sabotage, conspiracy and other machinations of the Standard Oil monopoly. Upton Sinclair, a freelance journalist, was commissioned by Appeal to Reason to write a series about exploiting factory workers and their hardships. He focused on the meatpacking industry in Chicago and ended up writing a serial novel about it. The novel, published as The Jungle, described the life of meatpacking industry workers through the character of Jurgis Rudkos and his family, as they experience corruption, injury on the job, unsanitary work conditions, jail, and homelessness. Sinclair, a Socialist, was disappointed that the public focused on the poor quality and unhealthy meat-packing process instead of on the laborers’ poor working and living conditions. The publication of The Jungle did add fuel to the movement to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. David Graham Phillips wrote a nine-installment series called “Treason of the Senate” in 1906 for Cosmopolitan Magazine. He documented corporate manipulation and corrupt process of selecting U.S. Senators, which galvanized the reform movement that eventually resulted in ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, which mandated that senators be elected directly by the people. Ida B. Wells, who was born into slavery and become a journalist and a African-American and women’s rights advocate, wrote the pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, in which she referred to lynching as “that last relic of barbarism and slavery.”
Two early twentieth-century developments changed the news media forever. By the 1920s, newspapers had a competitor. Radio was becoming commonplace and had an immediacy and presence that newspapers couldn’t replicate. Politicians could speak directly to people, unmediated by journalists and newspaper editors. The most effective early use of radio was Franklin Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” that began in 1933 and ran to 1944. These broadcasts helped him explain his policies and decisions directly to millions. For example, in the December 9, 1941 fireside chat he said,
“We are now in this war. We are all in it—all the way. Every single man, woman, and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history. We must share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats and the victories—the changing fortunes of the war.” (7)
President Reagan revived the practice of doing a weekly radio broadcast, and presidents George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama continued to do so. President Trump initially started doing weekly broadcasts on YouTube, but then stopped the practice.
The other change to occur in the early 20th Century was the rise of a journalistic culture of objectivity. The partisan press of the nineteenth century began to fade, and professional journalism schools graduated journalists committed to reporting the news without intentionally slanting their coverage to suit party politics or ideology. Thus began a new format to separate newspaper pages between news stories, editorials, columns, and letters to the editor. The news stories were supposed to be objective, while the others were free to express opinions that would come from the author’s partisan or ideological preferences. The culture of objectivity continues to characterize most mainstream media outlets. Generally speaking, this is a positive aspect of American journalism. However, critics have pointed out that the culture of objectivity has unfortunately led to false balance on some issues. False balance has been defined as “when journalists present opposing view-points as being more equal than the evidence allows. But when the evidence for a position is virtually incontrovertible, it is profoundly mistaken to treat a conflicting view as equal and opposite by default.” (8) Indeed, according to these critics, both sides of issues like climate change and the efficacy of vaccines are treated equally in the media, when the science is overwhelmingly one- sided.
The emergence of television in the 1950s eroded the preeminence of both radio and newspapers. Political campaigns started marketing their candidates in television commercials that became increasingly more sophisticated over time. Televised presidential debates began in the 1960 election, and it immediately became clear that a candidate benefited from being telegenic. In the first of the four Nixon-Kennedy presidential debates in 1960, radio listeners thought that Nixon bested Kennedy, while television viewers came to the opposite conclusion. The reason? The radio listeners couldn’t see that with no make-up and sporting a five o’clock shadow, Nixon looked horrible compared to the tanned, make-up-wearing Kennedy. No presidential candidate has ever made Nixon’s mistake again. (9)
From 1949 to 1987, communication on public airwaves like radio and television was governed by the fairness doctrine. The Federal Communications Commission required licensees to serve the public interest in two ways: 1) devote a “reasonable percentage of their broadcasting time to the discussion of public issues of interest to the community served by their stations,” and 2) design programs “so that the public has a reasonable opportunity to hear different opposing positions on the public issues of interest and importance in the community.” (10) Conservatives campaigned against the fairness doctrine, and Republican-appointed FCC commissioners voted to end it in 1987; congressional Democrats objected. Scrapping the fairness doctrine helped give rise to the resurgence of partisan media in the United States. This, in turn, has contributed to the polarization of American politics. As Lawrence Lessig has written, “The general effect of news network polarization is clear: polarized networks make for a more polarized nation—in at least the minimal sense of being more consistently sorted along ideological lines than before.” (11) An expanding internet, social media, and customized news channels allows people to read, see, and hear only news and opinion pieces that reinforce their existing political views.
The most recent development in political media’s history is the rise of the partisan conservative media ecosystem. The demise of the fairness doctrine in 1987 allowed corporations and wealthy libertarians to develop an especially insular media empire centered on conspiracy theories and partisan news. The Columbia Journalism Review explains the conservative media ecosystem’s meteoric rise after Republicans junked the fairness doctrine:
“A remarkable feature of the right-wing media ecosystem is how new it is. Out of all the outlets favored by Trump followers, only the New York Post existed when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. By the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, only the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh, and arguably Sean Hannity had joined the fray. Alex Jones of Infowars started his first outlet on the radio in 1996. Fox News was not founded until 1996. Breitbart was founded in 2007, and most of the other major nodes in the right-wing media system were created even later.” (12)
This media ecosystem predominantly exists outside of traditional journalistic outlets; it operates with its own journalistic standards and draws stories from the conspiratorial fringes to the more prominent outlets like Fox News, which is owned by the Australian billionaire Murdoch family. Often immune from facts, this media ecosystem recycles conspiracy theories: the COVID-19 pandemic is a hoax designed to promote government surveillance and control; prominent Democrats were running a child pornography ring out of the (nonexistent) basement of a pizzeria in Washington; Ukraine was behind the theft of Democratic emails, and the server in question was hidden somewhere in that country; millions of illegal immigrants regularly voted in recent American elections; Barack Obama’s birth certificate was forged, and he wasn’t really born in Hawaii; a Democratic National Committee staffer stole the Democratic emails in 2016—not the Russians, as U.S. intelligence agencies concluded—and then was murdered for it, and so on. (13) This conservative media ecosystem serves as a well of animosity for Democratic politicians and a protective cushion for Republican office holders. Its alternate reality empowers and normalizes what, in the past, were ideas that only existed at the fringes of American political culture. Fox News, and the umbrella of other conservative media outlets like Breitbart, Newsmax, and OAN, promote hate and can convince people that the only way to save democracy is to destroy it. Kevin Drum put it this way:
“The Fox pipeline is pretty simple. Fox News stokes a constant sense of outrage among its base of viewers, larely hy highlighting narratives of white resentment and threats to Christianity. This in turn forces Republican politicians to follow suit. It’s a positive feedback loop that has no obvious braking system, and it’s already radicalized the conservative base so much that most Republicans literally believe that elections are being stolen and democracy is all but dead if they don’t take extreme action.” (14)
Is there a liberal or progressive media ecosystem? Indeed, there is, but by and large it does not dabble in conspiracy theories, and its components–like The NationCounterpunch, and Raw Story–don’t have the reach of the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox News, nor do progressive media outlets have the same kind of hold on the Democratic base as does the conservative media ecosystem on the Republican base.
References
1. William E. Hudson, American Democracy in Peril. Eight Challenges to America’s Future. Sixth edition. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2010. Page 194.
2. Eric Burns, Infamous Scribblers. The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism. New York: Public Affairs, 2006. Pages 102-111.
3. Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier, Decision in Philadelphia. New York: Ballantine Books, 1986. Page 115.
4. Eric Burns, Infamous Scribblers. Pages 355-356.
5. John Dickerson, “The Original Attack Dog,” Slate. August 9, 2016. The People of the State of New York v. Harry Croswell (1804).
6. This section relies on Ann Bausum, Muckrakers. How Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, and Lincoln Steffens Helped Expose Scandal, Inspire Reform, and Invent Investigative Journalism. Washington: National Geographic. 2007.
7. The fireside chats are available from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum.
8. David Robert Grimes, “Impartial Journalism is Laudable. But False Balance in Dangerous,” The Guardian. November 8, 2016.
9. To be fair, Nixon had recently injured his knee and spent two weeks in the hospital. He was still reportedly weak and twenty pounds underweight the night of that debate.
10. William B. Fisch, “Plurality of Political Opinion and the Concentration of Media in the United States,” The American Journal of Comparative Law. Volume 58, 2010. Page 514.
11. Lawrence Lessig, They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy. New York: HarperCollins. Page 94.
12. Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Ethan Zuckerman, “Breitbart-led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda,” Columbia Journalism Review. March 3, 2017.
13. David Atkins, “The Conspiracy Theories a Conservative Must Believe Today,” Washington Monthly. November 10, 2019. David Roberts, “Why Conspiracy Theories Flourish on the Right,” Vox. September 13, 2016. Oliver Darcy, “Fox News Staffers ‘Disgusted’ at Network’s Promotion of Seth Rich Conspiracy Theory,” CNN Business. May 22, 2017.
14. Kevin Drum, “The Real Source of America’s Rising Rage,” Mother Jones. September-October, 2021. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/07%3A_Linkage_Institutions/7.07%3A_Chapter_47-_The_Historical_Development_of_the_News_Media.txt |
“Who wants a revolution? No one who owns a major media outlet.”
—Julie Hollar (1)
It is important for you to understand the contemporary news media ecosystem, for it is a critical interface between you and national-level political decision makers. As a student in this class—indeed, as a citizen of the American republic—you should be a smart consumer of political news. You should especially apply the “Of what is this an example?” question to the myriad things you hear and see in the media. To that end, here are some things to look for.
Where Do People Get Their News?
The acquisition of political information has undergone several transformations in American history. As mentioned above, newspapers used to dominate because they were the only game in town. Radio challenged newspapers as news sources, but it was television—with its combination of audio and video elements, plus the ability to go live—that really dealt newspapers a blow. Newspaper readership stagnated after 1970. Physical newspapers were dealt a second blow by the internet’s onset. The first dial-up access to the internet started in 1989, and the 1990s saw internet browsers and search engines develop. (2) Newspapers, magazines, and television news channels migrated online, and most people now receive their political news from the internet and cable television. Local newspapers continue to struggle, even in the online setting. (3) People rely on getting their political news on television, the internet, social media feeds, newspapers, and radio, roughly in that order of importance. (4)
Concentration of Ownership
One of the most obvious characteristics of the contemporary media ecosystem is the concentration of media company ownership. In 1983, 90 percent of American media was owned by fifty companies. By 2012, 90 percent of American media was owned by just six companies: Viacom, News Corporation, Comcast, CBS, Time-Warner, and Disney. (5) Various mergers and acquisitions have occurred since then as the mediasphere has become even more concentrated. We can be very confident that nearly every form of mass media we use is controlled by the few people who run these corporations. We watch the movies these media giants decide to produce, read the books they decide to print, watch the television shows they decide to create on the cable or satellite systems that they own, read the magazines they decide to publish, watch what they consider to be news, and listen to the music that their musicians create.
Along with the general corporate media consolidation, the news media is quite concentrated as well. Look at the major news sources, whether broadcast, cable, or web: CNN is owned by AT&T’s WarnerMedia; ABC News is controlled by Disney; ViacomCBS owns CBS News; Fox News Channel is owned by the News-Corp, a media empire controlled by Australian-born Rupert Murdoch and his family; Comcast owns NBC News and MSNBC. PBS and NPR are owned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, for which conservatives have repeatedly tried to cut funds and make ever more reliant on private and corporate donations. (6)
The concentration of the news media ecosystem encompasses local newspapers and radio stations across the country. A 2016 report by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Media and Journalism documented local newspapers’ travails. Readership is down, many papers have closed or merged, and the number of companies that own newspapers has declined—the largest twenty-five companies own more than half of all daily newspapers in America, and the three largest companies own twice as many newspapers now than they did a decade ago. These companies often have little connection to the communities in which they own and operate newspapers. Many other towns don’t have daily newspapers at all, and the internet does not provide local news. The result is that America is pockmarked by news deserts, areas that receive little or no substantive public affairs or community-interest news coverage . (7) Do you know who owns the newspapers in your state or city? Overall, radio ownership is less concentrated. Still, the top ten corporations that own radio stations account for nearly half of all radio station advertising revenue. (8) Many of these corporations push a conservative agenda with prominent right-wing talk shows and mandatory “talking points” for radio and TV journalists to read on air. (9) Do you know who owns the radio stations you listen to?
Media ownership concentration has been proceeding apace for some time now, but it was encouraged and further enabled by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The congressmen who voted for this law—and President Clinton, who signed it—promised that it would create more media competition, more diversity, lower prices for things like cable service, and more jobs in the media and telecommunications industries. According to Common Cause, however, the law brought the public “more media concentration, less diversity, and higher prices.” The Telecommunications Act did the following:
• Lifted the cap on the number of radio stations any one company could own. This allowed Clear Channel to grow from a relatively small company to one that owns over 1600 radio stations across the country.
• Extended broadcast license terms from five to eight years and made it more difficult for the public to challenge license renewals.
• Deregulated cable rates, resulting in cable cost increases.
• Raised the caps on the number of television stations that any one company could own and the audience that it could reach. Now just five companies control 75 percent of primetime viewing.
• Eased cable system cross ownership. Ninety percent of the top fifty cable stations are owned by the giant companies that also own the media networks.
• Gave away valuable publicly owned digital broadcasting spectrum to the media conglomerates. (10)
The decade following the Telecommunications Act passage witnessed numerous high-profile media mergers, because the new rules allowed for greater concentration. The Federal Communications Commission has subsequently further loosened media ownership regulations.
The political implications of media concentration are obvious. If relatively few large corporations control what we think is news and entertainment, they can shape the political debate. One interesting study of the Telecommunications Act looked at newspaper coverage of that bill as it worked its way through the political process. The study’s authors compared the coverage offered by newspapers that were owned by companies that stood to benefit greatly from loosening television station ownership, verses newspapers who were owned by companies that stood to benefit somewhat, versus newspapers who were owned by companies that were not in the television business. Only 15 percent of stories from those newspapers owned by companies that stood to benefit mentioned any of the proposed bill’s negative consequences, while 58 percent of newspaper stories from those papers owned by companies that were not in the television business mentioned negative legislation consequences. The authors concluded, “In short, very different pictures of the likely effects of this legislation were being painted by the different newspapers examined, pictures that served to further the interests of the newspapers’ corporate owners rather than the interests of their readers in fair and complete coverage of an important public policy issue.” (11) Indeed, it’s very difficult to find a story on corporate-owned media channels about the very topic of media concentration and what its negative consequences might be.
On what other issues does media concentration affect the picture we are receiving? Former reporter Tom Fenton argues that corporate news-media dominance and the attendant concentration on the bottom line—has led to the evisceration of foreign reporting. He writes that in the two decades before the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01, American newspapers and television news stations reduced their coverage of foreign news by 70-80 percent. He also says that, “In the three months leading up to September 11, the phrase ‘al Qaeda’ was never mentioned on any of the three evening news broadcasts—not once.”(12) Others argue that when it comes to domestic coverage, the corporate news media have a clear pro-business slant. On April 30, 1997, the front page of the New York Times trumpeted the following headline: “Markets Surge as Labor Costs Stay in Check.” Of course, “labor costs” are the wages and benefits earned by workers, and “stay[ing] in check” is another way of saying that wages and benefits have not grown. Curiously, the article failed to quote any workers, their representatives, or labor activists about this development, but instead described the issue from the point of view of businessmen and financiers. Journalist Norman Solomon provides this example:
“At networks owned by multibillion-dollar conglomerates like General Electric, Viacom, and Disney, the news divisions solemnly report every uptick or downturn of the markets. In contrast, when was the last time you heard [television newscaster] Peter Jennings report the latest rates of on-the-job injuries or the average wait times at hospital emergency rooms?” (13)
Finally, consider the debate over whether to move from our current hodgepodge, largely corporate-run healthcare system to a single-payer healthcare system, which is favored by a majority of ordinary Americans because it would cost less and cover everyone. The organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has documented how corporate media frame the debate. The current healthcare system is referred to as “private health insurance” and its alternative is referred to as “socialized medicine” or “government-run healthcare.” The current system is never referred to as “corporate-run healthcare,” which would be the appropriate counterpart to the inaccurate epithet “government-run healthcare,” but corporate media won’t go there. What’s wrong with the oft-used phrase “government-run healthcare”? Well, the single-payer proposal would keep the same mix of mostly private doctors, clinics, and hospitals to provide care, but would pool tax revenue to create one public health insurance provider that would be governed by democratic input, unlike the health insurance companies we have now. (14)
The Internet Revolution
The Internet is a network of networks that gives people all over the globe the capability of emailing, webpage browsing, chatting, and file sharing. It grew out of embryonic networks such as the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) and the National Science Foundation’s NSFNet. The World Wide Web, the most visible part of the Internet, began when researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) created the first few web pages. There are well over 4 billion regular users of the Internet worldwide.
In the United States, a classic political struggle has been going on over the nature of the Internet. Telecommunication giants such as AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast—who own the “pipelines” through which the emails, videos, files, and web pages flow—would like to be able to discriminate between those who use the Internet and charge premiums to content providers who can pay for high speed and reliability. Those who could not pay for more than a simple connection would be relegated to whatever slow service was available after the large commercial content providers had used—and paid for—their share. As Steven Levy put it, “They would charge big companies like Google and Yahoo big fees to guarantee that their content got to customers at higher speeds. In other words, there’d be an elite toll road alongside a free but crowded interstate.” (15) An interesting coalition of consumer’s groups, small businesses and ideological groups from the left and the right argued against such a move. They maintained that “net neutrality,” which has been the norm on the Internet, should remain the standard practice—in other words, internet service providers should charge basic access fees to the Internet but otherwise not discriminate between those who would post web pages, video, or email. President Donald Trump campaigned against net neutrality. Ajit Pai, Trump’s pick to chair the Federal Communications Commission, cast the deciding vote in 2018 to kill net neutrality. However, the Biden administration affirmed its commitment to restoring net neutrality.
Meanwhile, the Internet revolution has been transforming the face of American politics in the following ways:
Campaign Mobilization and Fundraising—Howard Dean’s abortive 2004 run for the Presidency was notable for its pathbreaking use of the Internet to raise large sums of money through many small donations. The Dean campaign used the Internet to organize local meet-ups where supporters in a given locality could meet like-minded Deaniacs, talk about issues and strategies, and donate to the campaign. In the third quarter of 2003, the Dean campaign raised nearly \$15 million this way—a record amount of fundraising in one quarter by a Democratic presidential candidate by any method—making him a real threat to frontrunners for the Democratic nomination. (16) In 2008, Barack Obama did especially well raising large amounts of money from a broad base of smaller donors and using social media sites. In 2016, Bernie Sanders concentrated his fundraising on the internet and solicited small donations. His campaign set up a text-to-donate system. His average contribution was \$27, but he did quite nicely. In one day, he raised \$8 million by asking for small donations. Sanders did equally as well fundraising online in his failed attempt to secure the Democratic nomination for the 2020 election. (17) The internet appears to have broadened the political-fundraising base. Between 1992 and 2016, the percentage of Americans who donated to political candidates doubled. (18)
Political Advertising—The Internet can be used as a cheap way to get the message out for a political candidate or interest group. Every candidate knows that his or her campaign needs a website to promote themselves and raise money. Campaigns generate mass emails to targeted audiences quickly and automatically. Increasingly, candidates are attempting to attract younger voters by releasing web versions of campaign commercials. Candidate and then President Donald Trump effectively used Twitter to speak directly to his supporter base. In 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic forced shutting down traditional campaign rallies, candidates turned to internet versions of fireside chats.
Blogs, Blogs, and More Blogs—Web logs burst onto the political scene in a big way after the 2002 election but were in existence before that. Candidates use them to connect to potential voters in more personal ways than they can with static web pages. John Edwards, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 2004 and presidential candidate in 2008, dedicated “hours each week videotaping responses to videotaped questions, the entire exchange posted on his blog.” (19) Since then, candidates and politicians moved away from blogs to professionally maintained websites. But blogs are still relevant. Partisan or ideological blogs challenge politicians and sometimes hold the mainstream media to account. Often, blogs start rumors or conspiracy theories that are then picked up by corporate media. The location of all this debate and dialogue is often referred to as the blogosphere.
Fake News—The blogosphere and the internet revolution have given rise to numerous conspiracy-driven sites that don’t adhere to any journalistic standards and that publish stories with no real corroboration. Partisan Americans and other groups—e.g., the Russian government—have a strong interest that these kinds of Fake News stories flourish on the internet, where they sow confusion and animosity, and they undercut the news media and government’s legitimacy. Did Hilary Clinton and the Democrats run a child sex ring out of a D.C. pizzeria? No. Did a routine military exercise that happened to take place during the Obama administration constitute an attempt to occupy Texas? No. Fake news stories tend to be generated more often by conservatives who target liberal politicians because, as documented in the journal Psychological Science, social conservatives are simply more likely to believe unsubstantiated stories that trigger their fears. Fake news stories intended for liberal audiences just don’t seem to gain the same kind of traction. (20) So, fake news is a real phenomenon—carefully crafted, but unsubstantiated false stories intended to trigger fears, stimulate anger, or spread false information to a target audience—that has infected our political information stream. Unfortunately, the existence of fake news allows politicians to label as “fake news” any legitimate story that they don’t like.
Beware of Sound Bites
Unless you happen to be as old as the author of this text, you might not have noticed what is commonly called the incredible shrinking sound bite in politics. A sound bite is a short selection of what a candidate or sitting politician says in a speech or interview. Media editors use their judgment to select such clips to represent what they believe to be the politician’s most important or relevant point. Interestingly, the average sound bite in the 1960s was over forty-two seconds long, but fell to about nine seconds in 1988, and then to just over seven seconds in 2000 and 2004. (21) So, instead of allowing politicians to develop extensive arguments with assertions backed by evidence, the media have progressively been selecting shorter clips that essentially equate to bumper-sticker slogans—“Read My Lips, No New Taxes,” “Where’s the Beef?” or “Make America Great Again.” And because politicians no longer expect to be quoted at length, they now tend to pepper their speeches with these kinds of mindless slogans, knowing that the editors are looking for something catchy to put on the evening news. The result has been a mutually reinforcing process that has impoverished political debate. What is a media consumer to do? Go to the source, for one thing. Go to the candidate’s website to see if the full campaign speech text is posted there. Another possibility is to read a reputable news site, which will have much more extensive coverage of a candidate’s positions than you’ll find in the television news. Another strategy is to listen to public radio or television news shows, which tend to have longer sound bites and more extensive political discussions than network or cable television news.
Pseudo-Events
You should also be on the lookout for pseudo-events, which populate the political landscape like mushrooms in a forest. A pseudo-event is an event that exists solely to generate media coverage and has little or no substance of its own. The historian Daniel J. Boorstin coined the term pseudo-event in the 1960s in his book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America. There are several disturbing features of pseudo-events. For one, they are treated as news by the corporate media even though they are not really news. They are “planned” news events that the media find irresistible: a politician speaking about the importance of education just after having been photographed reading to little children or a politician riding in some piece of military hardware before making a speech on the military. Media consumers are lulled into thinking that something significant is happening. A second problem comes from the first. Pseudo-events crowd out real news coverage. Reporters devote time to them, leaving less time to report on real education or military issues. A third problem is that the imagery of pseudo-events can often be in direct contradiction to reality. The politician who poses for the cameras with disabled veterans may actually have voted to cut veteran’s benefits.
Political Advertisements
As an informed citizen, you should also cast a skeptical eye on political commercials. Politicians run campaign commercials and organized interests run advertisements designed to push their agendas. You should not rely on these commercials for more than a tiny fraction of your political knowledge. Because of their short format, political commercials do not provide voters the real information they need to understand complex political issues and how the various candidates plan to address them.
Keep an eye out for the following types of political ads but remember that these are ideal types. Real advertisements often combine characteristics of the following.
Negative campaign ads seek to associate an opponent with events or actions that are portrayed as horrendous in the extreme. My opponent is soft on crime! My opponent coddles foreign tyrants! My opponent is sleazy! You get the picture. The ads are characterized by unfavorable photos of the opponent paired with a litany of bad things or bad people. They treat issues in an extremely superficial way, often using code words and images to stand in for the issue of concern. Finally, they typically end with a shining photo of the candidate with their family, or smiling community members, or cops, etc., and a tag line about how they will stand strong against crime, against foreign tyrants, and against sleaze.
Backfire ads use the words and images of the opponent against them. Short clips of the opponent are used to show how wrong they were, how out-of-touch they are, how silly they looked, or how they’ve changed positions over time. They also often feature a sarcastic voice-over to drive the point home, just in case the viewer didn’t get it from the opponent’s words and images.
Candidate’s biography ads are sentimental, often sappy, reviews of the candidate’s life. They often highlight how dedicated and capable the candidate is, and how they are firmly in touch with American values. The ads might also feature the candidate’s family, usually with the unstated message that they are “normal” because they have a loving spouse and children. A further touch—when possible given the candidate’s actual life—is to highlight difficulties over which the candidate has triumphed. Candidates born into poverty or candidates who have a heroic war record often like to highlight those aspects of their lives. These ads are often completely devoid of real issue information—they rarely talk about what the candidate would do about specific issues—but are instead designed to give the viewer a positive feeling about the candidate.
Ads featuring endorsement by average folks or celebrities present the viewer with real people who praise and/or endorse the candidate. Ordinary people might talk about his qualities in person-on-the-street interviews. Maybe the candidate is shown interacting with average Americans, or a series of celebrities speak about the candidate. These ads are often used to showcase the populist aspects of the candidate’s personality or political program.
Political Spin
You should also remember that politicians, partisans, or ideologues spin much of the information you see or hear about politics. Spin refers to the biased portrayal of events that is designed to favor one set of interests over another. Spin happens in any mass communication setting, but we’re only concerned with political communication. Political interests are very concerned to place their partisans on radio and television programs and on web sites, so they can offer the most positive spin possible on any given development in the world of politics, society, and the economy. Such partisans are often called spin doctors, which is a derogatory term. A common spin tactic involves cherry-picking evidence—only citing evidence in favor of one’s position. Another involves choosing favorable language—is it an “estate tax” or a “death tax”, is it “tax relief” or a “tax cuts for the rich”? Yet another tactic spin doctors or politicians use is to employ passive language to defuse responsibility. They might say, “Mistakes have been made” instead of “I made a mistake” or “My party made a mistake.” Another tactic is to suppress expectations, which allows them to then exceed expectations when the election or primary happens. Spin is also frequently marked by the kinds of fallacious argumentation we discussed at the beginning of the text.
Issue Framing
Students of the mass media have long noted that news is portrayed through frames that embed events in a particular linguistic or situational context. (22) Part of this is a result of the words journalists and editors choose to represent the world. A politician’s program might be labeled “Social Security reform” or it might be called “Social Security privatization,” and the choice of those labels affects how viewers ultimately perceive the issue. But this linguistic aspect of framing is fairly obvious. Pay attention to the less obvious form of framing involving the broader situational context. Specifically, the news media tends to favor an episodic frame for the news over a thematic frame.
An episodic frame emphasizes individual events or cases, one after another with little history or context given to each incident. This frame predominates in television and newspaper news coverage—”Today there was a bombing, a layoff at the local factory, a sex scandal, and a flood.” Episodic news often focuses on the story’s sensational details at the expense of asking, “Of what is this an example?” or “How is this related to that?” or “What is the broader context for this event?”
thematic frame reverses the emphasis by looking at the broader context of an issue and relationships between the day’s or week’s happenings. So instead of an episodic story about layoffs at an automobile factory, with the requisite journalistic details about the factory, the numbers of jobs lost, and tearful interviews with a selected worker or two, thematic journalism would start with the context, say, deindustrialization or the effects of globalization, then add other examples of factory closures as well as some details. Indeed, the thematic frame would more likely do stories on the broader themes and then bring into the daily events as examples.
According to political scientist Shanto Iyengar, who has studied framing extensively, the predominance of episodic journalism encourages ordinary people to not make connections, to not place events in broader context, and to not assign responsibility to political elites. (23) If the news does an episodic story about a troubled military veteran who kills twenty people at a county fair, it becomes a sensation piece and the viewers naturally conclude that all responsibility for the event falls on the perpetrator. With thematic reporting, a news outlet might place the incident in the broader context of post-traumatic stress disorder or the extent to which America is flooded with guns. Then the viewers are likely to say that while the perpetrator is responsible for their actions, clearly political leaders have been making decisions with respect to veterans’ mental healthcare and gun regulation that have made such events more likely to happen rather than less likely. Read or watch news stories and ask yourself whether episodic or thematic frames predominate.
What If?
What if media literacy was a high school graduation requirement? What if schools from elementary through high school took it as their responsibility to ensure that students were savvy media consumers and critical skeptics of poor political media sources of information? Write curriculum that would accomplish this goal, with sections dedicated to elementary, junior high, and high school students.
References
1. Julie Hollar, “Who Wants a Revolution? No One Who Owns a Major Media Outlet,” FAIR. March 16, 2020.
2. Kim Ann Zimmermann and Jesse Emspak, “Internet History Timeline: ARPANET to the World Wide Web,” Livescience. June 27, 2017.
3. Chris Isidore, “Newspaper Chain McClatchy Files for Bankruptcy,” CNN Business. February 13, 2020.
4. A. W. Geiger, “Key Findings About the Online News Landscape in America,” Pew Research Center. October 11, 2019.
5. Ashley Lutz, “These 6 Companies Control 90% of the Media in America,” Business Insider. June 14, 2012.
6. John Nichols, “With His Assault on PBS and NPR, Trump Seeks to Eliminate Real News,” The Nation. February 14, 2018.
7. Penelope Muse Abernathy, The Rise of a New Media Baron and the Emerging Threat of News Deserts. The University of North Carolina School of Media and Journalism. 2016. No author, Thwarting the Emergence of News Deserts. The University of North Carolina School of Media and Journalism. 2017.
8. No author, “iHeart Tops Industry Revenue List With \$2.6B,” Inside Radio. July 6, 2016.
9. Mike Rosenberg, “Turmoil Inside KOMO News as Conservative Owner Sinclair Mandates Talking Points,” Seattle Times. April 3, 2018. Nicole Hemmer, “Sinclair Broadcasting, Not Fox News, is Becoming the Truest Heir to Roger Ailes’ Conservative News Legacy,” NBC News. June 12, 2018.
10. Common Cause, Unintended Consequences and Lessons Learned. The Fallout from the Telecommunications Act of 1996. May 9, 2005. Pages 3-5. See also Michael Corcoran, “Democracy in Peril: Twenty Years of Media Consolidation Under the Telecommunications Act,” Truthout. February 11, 2016. Downloaded December 28, 2016 from http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3...unications-act.
11. Martin Gilens and Craig Hertzman, “Corporate Ownership and News Bias: Newspaper Coverage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act,” Journal of Politics. 62(2): May 2000. Pages 369-386.
12. Tom Fenton, Bad News. The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All. New York: Regan Books, 2005. Quote on page 4. Emphasis in the original. Earlier reference on page 17.
13. Norman Solomon, “Big Money, Self-Censorship, and Corporate Media,” in Elliot D. Cohen, editor, News Incorporated. Corporate Media Ownership and Its Threat to Democracy. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2005. Page 55.
14. Michael Corcoran, “’Government-Run Healthcare’ is a Product of Health Industry-Run Media,” FAIR. July 1, 2019.
15. Steven Levy, “Celebrating a Web That’s Free—For Now,” Newsweek. October 9, 2006. Page 14.
16. Gary Wolf, “How the Internet Invented Howard Dean,” Wired Magazine. January 2004. Online version.
17. Clare Foran, “Bernie Sanders’s Big Money,” The Atlantic. March 1, 2016.
18. Adam Hughes, “5 Facts About U.S. Political Donations,” Pew Research Center. May 17, 2017.
19. Adam Nagourney, “Politics Faces Sweeping Change Via the Web,” New York Times. April 2, 2006.
20. Daniel M. T. Fessler, Anne C. Pisor, and Colin Holbrook, “Political Orientation Predicts Credulity Regarding Putative Hazards,” Psychological Science. 28(5) 2017.
21. Kiku Adatto, “The Incredible Shrinking Sound Bite,” The New Republic. May 28, 1990. Pages 20-23. Center for Media and Public Affairs, Campaign 2004: The Media Agenda. Part III—The General Election. Page 7.
22. An early analysis in this vein was Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. London: Harper and Row, 1974.
23. See, for example, his “Framing Responsibility for Political Issues,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. July, 1996. Pages 59-70. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/07%3A_Linkage_Institutions/7.08%3A_Chapter_48-_The_Contemporary_News_Media_Ecosystem.txt |
“Voting is a sacred right.”
—League of Women Voters (1)
“Females by the arbitrary rules of society are excluded and debarred from many things which males consider rights and high privileges such as the elective franchise, holding office. No one thinks of sympathizing with them in their deprivation. The negro is surely no better than our wives and children, and should not excite sympathy when they desire the political rights which they are deprived.”
—Iowa Journal of the Constitutional Convention, 1857 (2)
Whose Right to Vote?
Voting is the most visible manifestation of democracy. Ostensibly, our system provides you a periodic opportunity to make a meaningful choice among candidates for a variety of offices. The idea that the general public should have the right to choose its leaders is a fairly recent one. Indeed, through much of our history, the majority of the public did not have this fundamental right. You should be familiar with the major steps through which eligibility to vote expanded in American history.
In what is widely considered today to be a colossal mistake, the Constitution does not mention voting qualifications, and it does not even guarantee a right to vote—although it is implied because we have the elected House of Representatives. Instead, the issue of voting qualifications was left to the individual states, and the eligibility to vote itself required various Constitutional amendments to be extended beyond propertied White men. The fact that the Founders did not positively assert a fundamental right to vote has shaped the course of American history and undercut the democratic nature of America’s political system.
Property Qualifications and Voting Eligibility
During the colonial period, some states required religious qualifications to vote, but state legislatures abolished those by 1810. Initially under the Constitution, states permitted only White males with property to vote. Property qualifications to vote was a practice America inherited from England, where such restrictions had been in place since the Middle Ages. The idea behind these restrictions was that only men who freeheld enough property could be determined to be independent—that is, not dependent on others as women, servants, slaves, free Blacks, children, and others were, and that they simultaneously possessed a stake in society. During the Constitutional Convention, Governor Morris of New York advocated that just such a property restriction be written into the Constitution. Morris said:
“Give the votes to people who have no property, and they will sell them to the rich who will be able to buy them…The time is not distant when this country will abound with mechanics and manufacturers who will receive their bread from their employers. Will such men be the secure and faithful guardians of liberty?” (3)
According to Madison’s notes, Benjamin Franklin countered Morris, and spoke passionately in favor of the common man. The Constitution did not mandate a property qualification to vote and left it to the states. At America’s founding, each state differed in the amount of property a man must own in order to qualify as a voter. In some states, 90 percent of White men were disqualified because they did not own enough property. But the early republic was growing quickly through immigration and natural increase, and there was a spirit that celebrated liberty, extolled the common man, and reveled in partisan struggle. New states like Missouri and Illinois joined the union without voting restrictions on adult White men. Property qualifications for White men to vote were dropped across the board by the 1850s, usually due to parties competing in the state legislatures. Thus, the United States possessed universal White male suffrage by the eve of the Civil War.
Race and Voting Eligibility
The United States fought the Civil War over the issue of slavery and the political struggle over whether slavery could be extended outside the South. Before the war, Abraham Lincoln did not support African-American voting rights. During the war, he changed his mind and favored extending the right to vote to Black soldiers in the Union army and to “very intelligent” Blacks. (4) After the North won that bloody conflict, there was an opportunity to pass an amendment to the Constitution to establish a positive right to vote. Instead, the Republicans in Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, which simply established a prohibition on the states without firmly establishing a right to vote. The Fifteenth Amendment says that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude…” Their intention in passing the amendment was to give the vote to newly freed Black men, so they could defend the rights of their families in the political environment after the Civil War. However, since the amendment was written in broad language, it theoretically applied to all non-White males.
Southern Democrats bitterly opposed expanding voting rights to Blacks. Democratic Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky said that African Americans were “in a condition of brutalized, ferocious, and ignorant barbarism,” and could therefore not take their place alongside Whites as citizens empowered with a voice in government. (5) In the decades after passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, Southern Whites took numerous measures–discussed in chapter 68–to ensure that Blacks did not actually vote. Due to that suppression, by the 1950s voter turnout among African Americans in the former Confederacy was approximately 50 percentage points lower than turnout for Whites. That gap was essentially eliminated in the three decades after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is a testament not only to the efficacy of legislation, but also to the Civil Rights Movement generally. (6)
Sex and Voting Eligibility
While the Fifteenth Amendment was being discussed, feminists argued that the right to vote ought to be extended to women as well, but they lost that fight. Feminists finally won fifty years later when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920. It was a long, difficult struggle to secure the right to vote for women. The Seneca Falls Declaration in 1848 was the first national call for women’s suffrage. Organizations like the National American Women Suffrage Association employed tactics such as petitions, marches, speeches, court cases, debates, picketing at the gates of the White House, and prison hunger strikes. The 1917 protest at the White House gates involved over 5,000 women during its two-year run and has been described as “the first high-visibility nonviolent civil disobedience in American history.” (7)
Women’s suffrage came first in the West. In 1869, Wyoming allowed women to vote, and Utah followed suit the next year. Colorado passed a women’s suffrage bill in 1893, and Idaho joined the effort in 1896. There are many reasons why this happened first in Western territories and states. Historian Beverly Beeton emphasizes pragmatic rather than ideological reasons. In Wyoming, for instance, one of many factors was that state legislators thought that enfranchising women would “advertise the territory to potential investors and settlers,” because it only had 9,000 residents at the time. (8) Western states and territories were largely being founded after the Fifteenth Amendment passed, and many people wondered why it made sense to deny educated White women the right to vote when it had just been extended to uneducated former male slaves. Western suffrage movements also benefitted from the work that was being done by East Coast national organizations. The fact that women were able to vote in Western states helped the national suffrage movement, and it did not result in the ills that suffrage opponents claimed, such as the corruption of women by politics, the destruction of relationships with husbands, the neglect of children, and so forth. This is often the case with social change, whether it be gay marriage, racial integration of the military, or women’s rights.
Poll Taxes and Access to the Ballot
In 1964, sufficient states ratified the Twenty-fourth Amendment, which states that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.” This effectively outlawed poll taxes, which Southern states had passed early in the 1900s primarily to suppress poor people from voting. (9) Opposition to the poll tax really began to gel in the 1930s, and it was primarily centered on arguments of class rather than race. But poll taxes were also part of the Southern quiver of arrows used to prevent Blacks from voting. Indeed, the poll tax as applied in Dixie has been referred to as “one of the great symbols of Southern racism.” (10) During the 1901 Alabama Constitutional Convention, delegate Henry Fontaine Reese spoke approvingly of the poll tax’s racial implications: “When you pay \$1.50 for a poll tax, in Dallas County, I believe you disenfranchise 10 Negroes. Give us this \$1.50 for educational purposes and for the disenfranchisement of a vicious and useless class.” (11) Its abolition via the Twenty-fourth Amendment was a victory for poor people regardless of race, but it’s become bound up in our civil rights narrative surrounding race.
Age and Voting Eligibility
The final national-level expansion of the right to vote happened in 1971, when the Twenty-sixth Amendment was ratified. This amendment set a national voting age of eighteen years. The Vietnam War was raging, and the campaign for the Twenty-sixth Amendment argued that if people were old enough to fight, they were old enough to vote. When the Twenty-sixth Amendment was submitted to the states, it was ratified in a record 100 days, the fastest of any constitutional amendment. (12) Currently, many groups around the country are trying to lower the voting age to 16 or 17. (13) The National Youth Rights Association advocates for lowering the voting age. (14) All other voting qualifications are still set by the individual states.
Incarceration and Voting Eligibility
A felony conviction and incarceration typically negate your ability to vote in most states. Interestingly, prior felony conviction and incarceration do not abrogate your freedom of speech, freedom of religion, right to join a group, right to marry, etc. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, only Maine and Vermont allow convicted felons to vote while serving their sentences. For many years, Utah joined Maine and Vermont, but the voters of Utah ended that practice through a ballot initiative in 1998. In sixteen states, felons automatically get their voting privileges reinstated upon release. In eleven states, “felons lose their voting rights indefinitely for some crimes or require a governor’s pardon in order for voting rights to be restored, face an additional waiting period after completion of sentence (including parole and probation) or require additional action before voting rights can be restored.” (15) The Brennan Center for Justice refers to disenfranchisement laws as “relics of our Jim Crow past,” and that they “send the message that the voices of individuals returning to their communities don’t count.” (16)
It is interesting to reflect that while the Constitution went into effect in 1789, the United States did not have legally recognized adult suffrage for all men and women, regardless of race, until ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the extension of the right to vote to 18-year-olds in 1971. We might also note that voting is not an inalienable right recognized by the Constitution, as witnessed by the way that we strip the ability to vote from incarcerated men and women. What, then, does democracy mean in America when the most basic democratic act is so tenuously grounded in our law and history?
What If. . . ?
What if we amended the Constitution to establish an affirmative right to vote? Representatives Mark Pocan and Keith Ellison introduced such an amendment, which reads:
A Constitutional Amendment for an Explicit Right to Vote
”SECTION 1. Every citizen of the United States, who is of legal voting age, shall have the fundamental right to vote in any public election held in the jurisdiction in which the citizen resides.
SECTION 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce and implement this article by appropriate legislation.” (16)
References
1. League of Women Voters.
2. Iowa Journal of the Constitutional Convention, 1857, State Historical Society of Iowa, Des Moines, Iowa, 241-242; Gallaher, 173-174, 186. Quoted in Libby Jean Cavanaugh, Opposition to Female Enfranchisement: The Iowa Anti-Suffrage Movement. Master’s Thesis, Iowa State University, 2007. Page 15.
3. Michael Waldman, The Fight to Vote. New York: Simon and Schuster. Page 22. This section draws heavily on Waldman’s excellent book.
4. Eric Foner, “Freedom’s Dream Deferred,” American History. 50 (4): December, 2015.
5. Allan J. Lichtman, The Embattled Vote in America. From the Founding to the Present. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018. Page 83.
6. Niraj Chokshi, “Where Black Voters Stand 50 Years After the Voting Rights Act was Passed,” The Washington Post. March 3, 2015.
7. Michael Waldman, The Fight to Vote. New York: Simon and Schuster. Page 122.
8. Beverly Beeton, “How the West Was Won for Woman Suffrage,” in Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, One Woman, One Vote. Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement. Troutdale, OR; Newsage Press. Pages 99-116.
9. Alexander M. Bickel, “Congress and the Poll Tax,” The New Republic. April 24, 1965.
10. Bruce Ackerman and Jennifer Nou, “Canonizing the Civil Rights Revolution: The People and the Poll Tax,” Northwestern University Law Review. 103(1): 63-148. Page 65.
11. Quoted in Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot. The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. New York: Farrar, Strus and Giroux, 2015. Page 17.
12. National Museum of American History.
13. Geraldine Sealey, “Too Young to Vote?” abcnews.com. March 10, 2004. Kelsey Piper, “Young People Have a Stake in Our Future. Let Them Vote,” Vox. September 20, 2019.
14. National Youth Rights Association.
15. National Conference of State Legislatures. October 14, 2019.
16. The Brennan Center for Justice.
17. FairVote.org. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/08%3A_Electoral_Politics_and_Public_Opinion/8.01%3A_Chapter_49-_Expanding_Voting_Eligibility_in_American_History.txt |
“The fact is that registration was created to stop black people and American citizen immigrants from voting. That is the real history of registration in the United States.”
—Greg Palast (1)
The election system that we have today was greatly shaped by three reforms pushed through at the state level in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century. Because these are state laws, differences exist from one state to another, but we can make some generalizations.
The Australian Ballot
Introduced in Australia in 1855, the Australian ballot was the first reform that all U.S. states adopted by 1888. The Australian ballot has three important characteristics. 1) It is printed, distributed, and counted by the state at taxpayer expense. 2) It lists all the candidates for all the offices from all parties. 3) voters complete the ballot in private. While these characteristics of Australian ballots seem rather mundane today, they greatly changed the character of voting in the United States. Prior to the Australian ballot, the most common way to vote in the United States was to use party ballots, which were printed by the parties themselves. Upon arriving at the voting place, you were confronted by a literal party—bands playing, dancing, free food, and free booze. When you were ready to vote, you would pick up a ballot that only listed one party’s nominees for all the offices and drop it into the ballot box. The party ballots were color-coded, so it was very easy for your neighbors to see which party you supported. In addition, it was much easier to stuff the ballot box at the end of the day with the appropriate colored ballots—and no one would know the difference between a legitimate vote and a fraudulent one. (2) Finally, split-ticket voting was very difficult before the Australian ballot came along. Split-ticket voting is when you divide your votes among different parties for different offices. You might vote Democratic for president and Republican for representative. The prevalence of split-ticket voting peaked in the early 1970s and has steadily declined since then as the two major political parties polarized. (3)
Primaries and Caucuses
The second reform was to create primaries and caucuses to nominate candidates to run for office. Instead of having a few party “bigwigs” in the proverbial smoke-filled backrooms deciding which people to run for office, reformers pushed through mechanisms that allow politically active—but otherwise ordinary—people to make those decisions. A primary is an election before the general election in which people vote for one of several possible nominees. A caucus is a meeting—or a series of meetings—at which party members gather, deliberate, and choose nominees that they support and where they often choose delegates for state or national political conventions. Most states rely on primaries to nominate party candidates for each office. In a closed primary, only people who are registered with a particular party can vote in that party’s primary. In a closed primary state, only Republicans vote in the Republican primary, only Democrats in the Democratic primary, and typically those who registered as Independents or unaffiliated can vote in neither primary. In an open primary, voters can vote in the party primary of their choice, but not in both. Another version is the blanket primary, in which voters can essentially split their ticket within the Democratic and Republican primaries. You could vote in the Republican gubernatorial primary, but then vote in the Democratic primary for senator. Participation in primaries and caucuses tends to be quite low, usually less than 10 percent nationally, which is an incentive for you to get involved, as your individual vote is magnified by the low turnout.
Voter Registration
The final state-level reform that affects today’s politics is the requirement that citizens register to vote sometime prior to election-day. Registration to vote is a double-edged sword that has both laudatory and pernicious effects. Let’s talk first about the benefits of voter registration. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American elections were often corrupted by people who voted multiple times, people who sold their votes, or by people casting votes on behalf of dead or otherwise fictitious people. According to historian Adam Smith, “The most acute periods of concern about electoral fraud have coincided either with a big influx of immigrants or with an extension of voting rights to African Americans, or both.” (4) By having people pre-register to vote, election officials can create an official list of voters and can check your name off the list once you’ve voted. Most states have a requirement that people register to vote before the election, and this has greatly cleaned up American elections. However, this does place a burden on the citizen to get themself registered before the deadline. Deadlines vary from one state to another. It also opens up opportunities for partisan state officials to purge voter registration lists of people who might disproportionately vote for their opponents. More about that in the chapter on voter suppression.
References
1. Chauncey DeVega, “How Trump Will Cheat in This Election—and How Dems May Bilk Bernie,” Alternet. February 28, 2020.
2. Jill Lepore, “Rock, Paper, Scissors: How We Used to Vote,” The New Yorker. October 6, 2008.
3. Ronald Brownstein, “Voters Don’t Split Tickets Anymore,” The Atlantic. September 1, 2016. Geoffrey Skelley, “Split-Ticket Voting Hit a New Low in 2018 in Senate and Governor Races,” FiveThirtyEight. November 19, 2018.
4. Adam Smith, “A Brief History of ‘Election Rigging’ in American History,” History Extra. November 3, 2106. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/08%3A_Electoral_Politics_and_Public_Opinion/8.02%3A_Chapter_50-_Early_Election_Reforms.txt |
“The graveyard of constitutional amendments altering the electoral college is the Senate—which, as we have seen, is the citadel of unequal representation.”
—Robert Dahl (1)
Why Do We Have an Electoral College?
The Electoral College is probably the least understood aspect of American government. As originally conceived at the Constitutional Convention, the Electoral College was to be an esteemed body of men chosen according to state law who would cast votes for the president and vice president. In Federalist #68, Alexander Hamilton wrote that the presidency “will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications,” because the distinguished electors from each state “possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.” However, almost from the beginning the Electoral College has not worked like Hamilton envisioned. The electors rather quickly devolved into what Jesse Wegman describes as “obedient partisan hacks, rubber stamps for their party’s candidate.” (2)
The Electoral College appears to have been a solution to two main concerns—the concern that the general population would be ill suited to cast votes for president, and the concern over sectionalism. Historian Jill Lepore reminds us that during the Constitutional Convention, a motion to allow U.S. citizens to directly elect the president was defeated by a vote of twelve states to one. Lepore writes, “That the people, even given limited suffrage, would elect the president directly was almost inconceivable. Congress electing the president, however, violated the separation of powers. The Electoral College, proposed after the defeat of the direct-election motion, was an ill-begotten compromise.” (3) To be fair, not all the Founders felt this way. James Wilson of Pennsylvania, for example, placed a great deal of faith in the common man and envisioned the broader democracy to which America would later aspire. As recorded by James Madison in his Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, James Wilson said that “if we are to establish a national government, that government ought to flow from the people at large,” and that “the majority of the people, wherever found, ought in all questions to govern the minority.”
Political scientist Thomas Schaller illustrates the sectionalism concerns, writing that the founders “expected such a glut of sectional parties that they created the Electoral College—not in order to make any kind of final selection but simply to winnow the choices down to a couple of finalists. They assumed the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives, with the result that an elite institution would pick the ultimate winner.”(4) Initially, state legislatures chose the electors, but by the 1820s, most states left selecting the electors up to the voters, and South Carolina became the last state to do so in 1864.
The Electoral College is a classic example of a political kludge–an improvised, crudely designed solution to an immediate problem. For as smart as they were–and despite their individual and collective faults, they were a impressive gathering of men of their time and place–the Founders were clearly stymied when it came to designing a rational way to select the president. James Wilson called for a popular vote for president, and was supported by fellow Pennsylvanian Gouverneur Morris, but that idea was shot down for various reasons: distrust by some delegates for the common man, the inability for ordinary people in that day to be informed about national candidates, or the fear that it would empower the more populous states. The issue was referred to a subset of the delegates known as the Committee on Unfinished Parts, which came back with the idea of respectable electors from each state voting for president. The number of electors afforded each state would reflect the compromises already reached in allocating senators and representatives–with each state getting electors to equal the number of representatives and senators it had. In the very first presidential election, George Washington received unanimous support from the electors, and no official popular vote was tallied. (5)
How the Electoral College Works
Let’s talk about how the Electoral College works. But first, some key terminology. When we refer to the Electoral College vote, we’re referring to the votes of the electors who actually vote for president and vice president. When we refer to the popular vote, we’re referring to ordinary citizens like you and me who cast our ballots in November for electors pledged to vote for president and vice president. The Electoral College works like this:
• Each state has the same number of electors that it has U.S. representatives and U.S. senators. But keep in mind that the electors are not the U.S. representatives and senators. Since Utah has four representatives and two senators, Utah has six electors. Wyoming has three electors because it has one representative and two senators. The four largest elector sources are California (54), Texas (40), Florida (30), and New York (28). The District of Columbia, even though it is not a state, is allotted three electors. The Electoral College has a total of 538 electors.
• Sometime prior to the November election, each party with a presidential candidate on the ballot will select a slate of electors who are pledged to vote for that party’s nominee. To use Utah as an example, in 2020, the Republicans picked six Republican party members pledged to Donald Trump and his running mate; the Democrats picked six Democratic party members pledged to Joe Biden and his running mate; the Green Party picked six party members committed to Howie Hawkins and his running mate…and so on. The Supreme Court has ruled that electors can be bound by their states to vote for their party’s nominees, thus eliminating the “faithless elector” problem. In Colorado Department of State v. Micheal Baca, et al (2020) and Chiafalo, et al v. Washington (2020), the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that states can hold electors to their vote pledges.
• On election night in November, we go to the polls and cast our votes. This is where it gets confusing, since most Americans think they are voting directly for president. Technically, we are voting for one of those slates of electors, rather than for the candidate for president. In every state except Maine and Nebraska, electors are awarded according to a unit rule, meaning that the candidate whose slate has the most popular votes—even if it is not a majority—gets all of the electors. The unit rule means that in forty-eight states, the Electoral College is a winner-takes-all situation. The winning candidate could have gotten a majority of the popular vote in the state–i.e., 50 percent or more of the popular vote—or the winning candidate could have gotten a plurality of the popular vote, meaning that they received the most votes, even if it is well short of receiving 50 percent of the popular vote. All a candidate needs is one more popular vote that their opponent in most states to win all of that state’s electors.
• On the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, the winning slates of electors gather at their state capitals and cast their votes for president and vice president. These votes are sent to the Senate, where they are counted and certified before a joint congressional session in January. That is the official vote for president.
• A candidate needs 270 or more of the Electoral College votes to win, which is a simple majority. If no candidate gets a majority—which hasn’t happened since 1824—then the election is pushed into Congress. The House of Representatives, with each state delegation getting one vote, elects the president, and the Senate elects the vice president.
What’s Wrong with the Electoral College?
The Electoral College is a vestige of an eighteenth century, slave-holding America in which ordinary people were not fully trusted with political sovereignty. It is fundamentally undemocratic. If you look around the world, the Electoral College is not a constitutional feature that other democratic countries have adopted. We can focus our attention on two main deficiencies of the Electoral College.
The Achilles heel of the Electoral College was revealed for modern generations to see during the 2000 presidential race between George Bush and Al Gore and the 2016 race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The popular vote for president does not determine who goes to the White House; the elector’s votes are decisive. Normally, the Electoral College vote mirrors the popular vote. However, the elections of 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016 resulted in the eventual “winner” actually receiving fewer votes from American voters. In 2000 Al Gore received roughly 537,000 more popular votes across the country than did George W. Bush, but Bush won the disputed state of Florida when the Supreme Court stepped in to halt manual recounts. Florida’s electoral votes gave Bush a total of 271—just enough to win. The imbalance was even more noticeable in 2016, when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 2,865,000 votes but Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote 304 to 227.
The winner-takes-all aspect of the Electoral College also tends to distort our perceptions of the American electorate. It pushes us to talk about red-state voters versus blue-state voters, which is obviously an oversimplification of the partisan divide in the United States. The Electoral College is biased in favor of smaller, more rural states, because they are entitled to proportionally more electors than they would have in a straight popular vote. For example, a voter in Wyoming has nearly four times the weight of a voter in California when it comes to the Electoral College. (6) This reflects the Connecticut Compromise between large and small states at the Constitutional Convention. (7)
The Electoral College forces presidential campaigns to focus on swing states, which are states that are narrowly balanced between Republicans and Democrats, so they could go either way. Swing states are competitive states, so they are also referred to as battleground states. The winner-takes-all principle means that it is smart for presidential campaigns to devote considerable resources to getting every possible popular vote in those states, because even a slim victory results in winning all of that state’s electors. In 2016, Clinton racked up significant popular vote majorities in solid Democratic states like California, but narrowly lost popular votes—and therefore all of the electors that went with them—in a number of swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In 2020, Democratic candidate Joe Biden racked up 7 million more popular votes nationwide than did Republican Donald Trump, but the Electoral College could have overturned the popular vote if just 45,000 people in Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona had voted for Trump instead of Biden. (8)
The second key problem of the Electoral College is its susceptibility to political manipulation at both the state and federal levels. Federal law requires states to deliver a certified slate of electors to Congress. However, any number of political maneuvers by the state election board, the governor, or the state legislature could cast doubt on the legitimacy of the slate of electors submitted by a given state. Indeed, different entities in a state could send their own slates of electors, each claiming that theirs was the only legitimate one. The 1876 election saw the most prominent example of this when South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida all sent competing slates of electors. This dispute was resolved in the famous “Corrupt Bargain” of 1877 that allowed the Republican Rutherford Hayes to ascend to the presidency while Southern Democrats were empowered to end Reconstruction—which is why many people also call this the “Great Betrayal” of newly freed African Americans in the South.
Responding to the 1876 election, Congress passed the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which was amended in 1948. This law governs how Congress should deal with Electoral College controversies, but it is widely considered to be inadequate to the task. Indeed, it is clear now that once the Trump campaign realized that it had legitimately lost both the popular and Electoral College vote in 2020, it attempted to exploit weaknesses in the system. Specifically, the Trump campaign attempted to get local Republicans to gin up false controversies in competitive states. Fortunately, those local Republicans refused to do so. (9) Then Trump’s lawyer wrote a memo laying out a plan where on January 6, 2021, when he presided over the Congressional session dedicated to counting the electoral votes, Vice President Pence would simply announce that electors from seven states were in dispute. Because of the “disputed electors” in those seven states, Pence would then claim that Donald Trump received the majority of the remaining electors and Pence would declare that Trump was reelected. Even if he could not get away with that scheme, went the memo, then the “disputed” election for President would be thrown to the House of Representatives, where the Republicans held more state delegations than did the Democrats. (10) Vice President Pence refused to steal the election, and Trump attacked his own Vice President on Twitter and refused to call off the crowd that he and others had stoked and aimed at Congress on January 6, 2021. That is the reason why Vice President Pence had to cower in a loading dock on that day while members of Trump’s mob ransacked the Capitol and threatened to hang him. (11) In response to Trump’s attempt to exploit weaknesses in the Electoral College process, Congress passed the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022. This law clarified several points:
• The vice president’s role is solely to open and count the votes and the vice president cannot solely adjudicate disputed slates of electors.
• Raised the threshold in Congress for objecting to the validity of a state’s slate of electors. Whereas previously such an objection only needed one representative and one senator, now it requires one-fifth of the members of the House and the Senate.
• Identifies governors as the state official responsible for submitting the certificate of ascertainment for the state’s electors unless the state constitution specifies otherwise.
• Established a speedy process for judicial review of the validity of a state’s electors if they are challenged.
What If . . . ?
What if we replaced the Electoral College with a different way of selecting the president? We could pass a constitutional amendment that abolished the Electoral College and replace it with a direct popular vote, perhaps with a run-off of the top two candidates in case the first round did not produce a winner who had received a majority of the popular vote. The problem, as referenced by Robert Dahl in this chapter’s opening quote, is that such an amendment would need to pass the U.S. Senate with a two-thirds vote, and senators from small states would not want to diminish the power of their states by moving to a direct popular vote for president. It would be the right thing to do if one were interested in democracy—and perhaps this new generation of politicians will step up—but it is still unlikely.
Another possibility takes the form of the National Popular Vote movement, which began in 2006. (12) This approach would preserve the Electoral College and would not require a constitutional amendment. It is a state-based approach based on a compact or agreement. Since state legislatures are empowered by the Constitution to allocate electors, the National Popular Vote Compact would enlist sufficient states to agree to allocate their electors to the national popular vote winner regardless of the results in individual states. Thus, if candidate A wins the popular vote in Illinois—one of the states that has already signed on to the National Popular Vote Compact—but candidate B wins the national popular vote, the twenty electors from Illinois would be allocated to candidate B. The idea is to get enough states to sign on to the compact to guarantee that the winner of the national popular vote would also win at least 270 Electoral College votes. The Compact would only go into effect when jurisdictions—states and the District of Columbia—representing at least 270 electors sign on. What do you think of this proposal?
Here’s the text of the National Popular Vote Bill.
Article I—Membership
Any State of the United States and the District of Columbia may become a member of this agreement by enacting this agreement.
Article II—Right of the People in Member States to Vote for President and Vice President
Each member state shall conduct a statewide popular election for President and Vice President of the United States.
Article III—Manner of Appointing Presidential Electors in Member States
Prior to the time set by law for the meeting and voting by the presidential electors, the chief election official of each member state shall determine the number of votes for each presidential slate in each State of the United States and in the District of Columbia in which votes have been cast in a statewide popular election and shall add such votes together to produce a “national popular vote total” for each presidential slate.
The chief election official of each member state shall designate the presidential slate with the largest national popular vote total as the “national popular vote winner.”
The presidential elector certifying official of each member state shall certify the appointment in that official’s own state of the elector slate nominated in that state in association with the national popular vote winner.
At least six days before the day fixed by law for the meeting and voting by the presidential electors, each member state shall make a final determination of the number of popular votes cast in the state for each presidential slate and shall communicate an official statement of such determination within 24 hours to the chief election official of each other member state.
The chief election official of each member state shall treat as conclusive an official statement containing the number of popular votes in a state for each presidential slate made by the day established by federal law for making a state’s final determination conclusive as to the counting of electoral votes by Congress.
In event of a tie for the national popular vote winner, the presidential elector certifying official of each member state shall certify the appointment of the elector slate nominated in association with the presidential slate receiving the largest number of popular votes within that official’s own state.
If, for any reason, the number of presidential electors nominated in a member state in association with the national popular vote winner is less than or greater than that state’s number of electoral votes, the presidential candidate on the presidential slate that has been designated as the national popular vote winner shall have the power to nominate the presidential electors for that state and that state’s presidential elector certifying official shall certify the appointment of such nominees.
The chief election official of each member state shall immediately release to the public all vote counts or statements of votes as they are determined or obtained.
This article shall govern the appointment of presidential electors in each member state in any year in which this agreement is, on July 20, in effect in states cumulatively possessing a majority of the electoral votes.
Article IV—Other Provisions
This agreement shall take effect when states cumulatively possessing a majority of the electoral votes have enacted this agreement in substantially the same form and the enactments by such states have taken effect in each state.
Any member state may withdraw from this agreement, except that a withdrawal occurring six months or less before the end of a President’s term shall not become effective until a President or Vice President shall have been qualified to serve the next term.
The chief executive of each member state shall promptly notify the chief executive of all other states of when this agreement has been enacted and has taken effect in that official’s state, when the state has withdrawn from this agreement, and when this agreement takes effect generally.
This agreement shall terminate if the electoral college is abolished.
If any provision of this agreement is held invalid, the remaining provisions shall not be affected.
Article V—Definitions
For purposes of this agreement,
“chief executive” shall mean the Governor of a State of the United States or the Mayor of the District of Columbia;
“elector slate” shall mean a slate of candidates who have been nominated in a state for the position of presidential elector in association with a presidential slate;
“chief election official” shall mean the state official or body that is authorized to certify the total number of popular votes for each presidential slate;
“presidential elector” shall mean an elector for President and Vice President of the United States;
“presidential elector certifying official” shall mean the state official or body that is authorized to certify the appointment of the state’s presidential electors;
“presidential slate” shall mean a slate of two persons, the first of whom has been nominated as a candidate for President of the United States and the second of whom has been nominated as a candidate for Vice President of the United States, or any legal successors to such persons, regardless of whether both names appear on the ballot presented to the voter in a particular state;
“state” shall mean a State of the United States and the District of Columbia; and
“statewide popular election” shall mean a general election in which votes are cast for presidential slates by individual voters and counted on a statewide basis.
References
1. Robert A. Dahl, How Democratic is the American Constitution? Second edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Page 87.
2. Jesse Wegman, Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2020. Page 5.
3. Jill Lepore, The Story of America: Essays on Origins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Page 244.
4. Thomas Schaller in a panel discussion “High Noon for the Republican Party,” Harper’s Magazine. July 2008. Page 14.
5. Jesse Wegman, Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College. New York: St. Mrtin’s Griffin, 2020. Page 79.
6. There are around 200,000 voters in Wyoming per elector, and around 720,000 voters in California per elector.
7. Andrew E. Busch, “The Development and Democratization of the Electoral College,” in Gary L. Gregg, II, ed., Securing Democracy. Why We Have an Electoral College. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2001. Pages 27-42.
8. Russell Berman, “The Secret to Beating the Electoral College,” The Atlantic. December 9, 2020.
9. Bob Christie and Nicholas Riccardi, “GOP Leaders in 4 States Quash Dubious Trump Bid on Electors,” ABCNews. November 14, 2020.
10. John Eastman, “Privileged and Confidential. January 6 Scenario,” CNN. September 21, 2021.
11. Brendan Cole, “Mike Pence Hid in ‘Loading Dock’ in Underground Parking Garage During January 6 Riot,” Newsweek. November 9, 2021.
12. Miles Park, “Congress Passes Election Reform Designed to Ward Off Another Jan. 6,” National Public Radio. December 23, 2022.
13. National Popular Vote. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/08%3A_Electoral_Politics_and_Public_Opinion/8.03%3A_Chapter_51-_The_Electoral_College.txt |
“When I die, I want to be buried in Louisiana, so I can stay active in politics.”
—Governor Earl Long (1)
“There are forces in America that are trying to make it harder, more difficult for people to cast a vote. We must not let that happen.”
—John Lewis (2)
The politicians and citizens of any democracy need to be vigilant when it comes to the integrity of the voting process. Elections without integrity produce governments without legitimacy in the peoples’ eyes. Societies with illegitimate governments are justly prone to uprisings and rebellions. Maintaining the integrity of a society’s elections is an investment in social stability and an affirmation that we care about democratic principles. There are many threats to election integrity, but we’ll concentrate on these two: voter fraud and election fraud. (3) We’ll also look at the issue of legal voter suppression.
Voter Fraud
We’ll define voter fraud as a voter intentionally corrupting the electoral process in a way that distorts the “one-person, one-vote” principle. This can take several forms. A college student might try to register and vote in both their college town and their hometown. A person who is not a citizen might try to register and vote. A person might try to pose as a person who has recently died but whose name has not yet been purged from the list of registered voters. A person might sell their vote to another. Voter fraud is a federal crime, punishable by heavy fines and the possibility of jail time. (4) Few people are willing to risk such penalties for the marginally impactful practice of casting an extra vote. While voter fraud may have been fairly common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is remarkably uncommon now. Most voter-fraud allegations turn out to be clerical errors and bad data matching—like Edward Gomez in one voting district being mistaken for a different Edward Gomez in another district, when in fact they are two different people in two different locations. Voter-fraud allegations are usually based on hearsay, speculation, and poor investigative techniques.
The issue of voter fraud has been studied extensively and has been found to be a marginal problem at best. In 2007, the Brennan Center for Justice studied elections where there were voter-fraud allegations—and credible allegations of voter fraud are themselves rare—and found that there is a greater chance that an American “will be struck by lightning than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.” With respect to the oft-alleged situation of non-citizens voting in American elections, the Brennan Center could not find “any documented cases in which individual non-citizens have either intentionally registered to vote or voted while knowing that they were ineligible.” (5) In 2016, a comprehensive study of voter fraud allegations in elections from 2000 to 2012 found exactly ten individual cases of voter impersonation out of the 146,000,000 registered voters in twenty-four federal elections in that time span. (6) When President Trump’s much ballyhooed Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity—which appeared from the outset as though it was intended to conclude that voter fraud was prevalent—quietly folded in 2018, one of its members had to subpoena the commission’s records so that he could unequivocally state that the group “had uncovered no evidence to support claims of widespread voter fraud.” (7)
In the wake of his popular and Electoral College defeat in 2020, President Trump based his attempt to overthrow the election on false claims of voter fraud in states he lost. In Georgia, for example, he railed against alleged fraud surrounding mail-in absentee ballots. A state audit of those ballots could not find a single instance of fraud. The story was the same all across the country. In fact, experts on election security held that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history” and as smooth as they had ever seen, due primarily to expanded audits and more jurisdictions using machines that produced a paper trail. (8) Ironically, the conservative Heritage Foundation found that “In every listed indictment and conviction for voter fraud or other malfeasance in connection with the 2020 presidential general election, when the culprit’s political affiliation is known he or she turns out to be a Republican or ‘unabashed conservative.'” (9)
Election Fraud
We’ll define election fraud as election officials, campaign staff, advocacy groups, or political candidates intentionally corrupting the electoral process. This happens more often than does voter fraud. According to the Justice Department, “Election fraud usually involves corruption in one of three processes: the obtaining and marking of ballots, the counting and certification of election results, or the registration of voters.” (10) The Justice Department lists the following specific activities as prosecutable under federal statutes:
• Paying voters for registering to vote or for voting.
• Conspiring to prevent voters from participating in elections. This might take the form of robocalls falsely informing people that the election was cancelled or its date delayed a week.
• Intimidating voters through physical duress or threats, thereby preventing them from voting or registering to vote. Allegations of this happen in nearly every election.
• Malfeasance by election officials involving diluting valid ballots with invalid ones—e.g., ballot-box stuffing—rendering false tabulations of votes or preventing valid voter registrations.
• Producing voter registration rolls that qualify alleged voters to vote that the election official knows are incorrect.
• Keeping under one’s authority armed persons at any polling place unless said actors are active civilian police or military personnel.
What does this look like in practice? A 2018 fraud case out of North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District election is a good case in point. The race’s outcome had Republican Mark Harris defeating Democrat Dan McCready by only 905 votes. However, officials discovered that Harris had hired a Republican operative named Leslie McCrae Dowless to work on voters who requested absentee ballots. Dowless apparently led a scheme in which his co-conspirators showed up at voters’ doors and collected absentee ballots—which is illegal under North Carolina law—promising the voters that they would turn them in for them. When Catawba College political science professor Michael Bitzer analyzed absentee ballot results in Bladen County—at the heart of the Ninth District—he found that “registered Republicans submitted just 19 percent of absentee ballots that were accepted by the county, compared with 42 percent for Democrats and 39 percent for unaffiliated voters. Yet Harris won 61 percent of mail-in ballots in the county. In every other county in the district, McCready won the absentee ballot vote by a wide margin.” (11) The North Carolina board of elections had to cancel the election and hold a new one. Harris declined to run again, citing health reasons.
Another example? President Donald Trump and his associates unsuccessfully attempted what would have been the most consequential election fraud in American history. Trump personally called the Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, attempted to bully him to endorse any one of several unfounded internet conspiracy theories, and said he needed to “find 11,780 votes” and that “there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.” Raffensberger resisted this attempt at election fraud and told Trump that “Well Mr. President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.” (12) Trump attempted to corrupt the Department of Justice to serve as his political hammer and investigate false claims of election and voter fraud, declare (falsely) that fraud had taken place in the 2020 election, and tell swing state legislators that they should appoint pro-Trump slates of electors even though Trump had lost the vote in those states. (13)
A worry many people have about election fraud has to do with the voting machines themselves. In particular, they are concerned about these machine’s lack of transparency, the privacy of the companies that make them, and the fear that the machines could be hacked or manipulated. When the U.S. regularly used paper ballots that were manually marked by the voter, ballots were typically printed either by state authorities or by private companies whose quality was verified by state authorities. With the advent of electronic voting machines, America turned its election system over to corporations. Just three companies—Election Systems & Software, Dominion Voting Systems, and Hart InterCivic—control the vast majority of the voting machines used all across the United States. (14) Their technology is considered proprietary, and thus not open to scrutiny. The British newspaper The Guardian elegantly put the problem like this:
“The fact is that democracy in the United States is now largely a secretive and privately-run affair conducted out of the public eye with little oversight. The corporations that run every aspect of American elections, from voter registration to casting and counting votes by machine, are subject to limited state and federal regulation. The companies are privately-owned and closely held, making information about ownership and financial stability difficult to obtain. The software source code and hardware design of their systems are kept as trade secrets and therefore difficult to study or investigate.” (15)
The second issue with respect to electronic voting machines is their vulnerability. Because they are proprietary black boxes, it is unclear whether they could be set up to rig elections by their manufacturers or by outside actors. Computer scientists have repeatedly warned that electronic voting machines are vulnerable to hacking. (16) In 2016, Russian hackers attacked voter databases and software systems in thirty-nine states. While there is no evidence that any votes were changed, the ultimate aim of the incursions may have been to cast doubts about the election results’ validity. (17) Fortunately, the 2020 election was very secure because the federal government improved its efforts, and many state and local jurisdictions demanded electronic voting machines that produced a paper ballot that is amenable to audit after the fact.
A potential election fraud threat is built into the very structure of America’s election machinery—namely, the partisan nature of state offices that conduct elections and election boards that certify election results. Ordinary Americans need to be vigilant about this potential threat to the integrity of elections. Each state conducts their elections differently so it’s difficult to generalize. However, typically there is an elected position like a lieutenant governor or secretary of state who is responsible for conducting the election. That person is usually either a Democrat or a Republican. Further, state and local election boards are often staffed by members of the two major parties. The potential issue comes if these people substitute their party interests in place of the will of the voters.
Fortunately, in modern American history most state and local election officials have conducted themselves with integrity. However, it appears as though the Republican party has a growing problem in this regard. In Florida in the 2000 election, secretary of state Katherine Harris, who was the state co-chair of Republican George W. Bush’s campaign, rushed to declare her preferred candidate the winner. In the 2020 election, Tina Peters, the Republican clerk overseeing elections in Mesa County, Colorado—a person who had twice been accused of incompetently running previous elections—became a loud proponent of Donald Trump’s big lie that the election had been stolen from him. Peters went so far as to allow unauthorized people to access Mesa County’s election machines and download data– including passwords—which were then circulated on the Internet. (18) Following Trump’s 2020 narrow defeat in Georgia, Republicans in control of the state legislature there passed legislation that gives it effective control of Georgia’s State Election Board and, in turn, over the local election boards in Democratic strongholds like Fulton County. (19) In Michigan and other states, Republicans replaced local election board members with 2020 “stop the steal” conspiracy theorists and promoted candidates for state election posts with pro-Trump positions. (20) What does this portend for election integrity?
Legal Voter Suppression
Forms of voter suppression exist that are unfortunately legal, unless they can be proven to violate civil rights. These include strict voter identification laws, overly aggressive voter-registration rolls purges, and bureaucratic hurdles to casting a vote.
Allegations of voter fraud—which we’ve seen is not a real problem—are often used as a reason to implement strict voter-identification laws. In principle, there’s nothing wrong with ensuring that the person who is casting a vote is 1) the person they say they are, and is 2) eligible to vote. The question is whether the onus is on the person or on the state. For many years, other countries like France and Sweden have used government resources to automatically register people to vote. In 2016, Oregon became the first state to do so, and there are now sixteen states that also have automatic voter registration. (21)
Other states have gone a different way, requiring potential voters to prove their identification. These are almost always states with Republican majorities in state legislatures and/or Republican governors. As late as 2008, no states had voter identification requirements. (22) Since 2010, fifteen states put more restrictive voter-identification laws in place, twelve states made it more difficult to register to vote and stay registered, and ten states made it more difficult to vote early or absentee. Altogether, thirty-five states have some form of voter-identification requirements. (23) Many states face legal challenges over their voter I.D. laws. The reason? Voter advocacy organizations argue that voter-identification laws are intended to disproportionately hinder groups of voters who are most likely to vote for Democratic candidates: students, poor people, and racial and ethnic minorities. Research has found that “strict ID laws doubled the turnout gap between Whites and Latinos in the general elections and almost doubled the White-Black turnout gap in primary elections.” (24) In a survey of voters, three times more Blacks and Hispanics than Whites said they—or someone in their household—lacked the appropriate identification to vote. (25)
Another concerning practice is aggressive state-voter-registration-roll purges. This practice first came to widespread attention during the 2000 presidential race in Florida. When the Supreme Court stopped the recounts, George W. Bush led Al Gore by 537 votes. What most people don’t realize is that prior to the election, Florida’s Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris—who also served as Bush’s campaign state co-chair—oversaw a purge of Florida’s voter rolls that used a company with strong Republican ties and that erroneously removed thousands of Democratic leaning voters. The list of purged voters was so flawed that the Madison County elections supervisor was surprised to find her name on it as a convicted felon. A U.S. Commission on Civil Rights analysis found that the list had at least a 14 percent error rate. (26)
With this successful Florida experience, Republicans turned to purging voter rolls as an election strategy. When it is employed, this strategy always hides under the legitimate interest that states have of keeping their voter rolls accurate. But if the effort is overly aggressive in a way that targets people who are likely to vote Democratic, then it serves an evil purpose. Typically, these efforts go hand in hand with hyped voter-fraud allegations. As political journalist Ari Berman, who has extensively studied this issue, writes, “The 2000 election in Florida forever changed American politics and kicked off a new wave of GOP-led voter disenfranchisement efforts. . . Bush’s election empowered a new generation of voting-rights critics, who hyped the threat of voter fraud in order to restrict access to the ballot.” (27) In 2018, this strategy worked to perfection in Georgia’s gubernatorial election. Brian Kemp, Georgia’s Secretary of State and Republican candidate for governor, purged more than half a million names from Georgia’s voting rolls for not having voted in prior elections—the stated assumption being that they had died or moved away. A study by American Public Media found that over 100,000 of these people were erroneously removed from the voter rolls. When people tried to register, their applications were put on hold due to a strict “exact match” policy that “held up 53,000 pending registrations, mostly of people of color, many over small typos, like a missing apostrophe or hyphen.” (28) Kemp won the election by less than 55,000 votes. Georgia has continued to purge additional voters, and has been joined by Ohio, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma.
Many states erect unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles that serve no election security function, but make it difficult for people to cast their ballots. Two important hurdles include shortening the hours when polls are open and closing polling places altogether. After the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder (2013) decision to set aside pre-clearance requirements, Southern states closed nearly 1,200 polling places, leaving some counties with only one place to cast a vote. Often, polling places were closed in poorer and more urban areas, resulting in long lines to vote. Having to wait six to ten hours in order to cast a vote is a completely unnecessary hoop that deprives the voter of time they would spend with their families or opportunity to work. As such, it has the functional effect of acting like a poll tax, which the 24th Amendment officially outlawed. (29)
Following the 2020 election, Republican state governments passed a variety of laws designed to make voting more difficult. The Brennan Center tallied 30 such laws in 18 states within 9 months of the election, with particularly aggressive examples in Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Arizona, Arkansas, and Montana. These laws close polling places, limit hours, restrict absentee balloting, curtail registration and voting times, limit ballot drop boxes, and other measures. Other states, particularly those controlled by Democrats or where the parties are fairly evenly split, passed measures to expand voting access. (30)
What If. . . ?
What if all adult citizens had a positive right to vote? What if the federal government was charged with ensuring that all people were accurately registered to vote in the district in which they lived? What if this responsibility were explicitly given to federal civil servants instead of state-level partisan politicians?
References
1. Justin Levitt, The Truth About Voter FraudBrennan Center for Justiceat New York University. 2007. Page 3.
2. Ari Berman, Give us the Ballot. The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015. Page 269.
3. The definitions below draw on Gail Ablow, “Voter Fraud, Explained,” Bill Moyers. June 24, 2016.
4. Richard C. Pilger, editor, Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses, Eighth Edition. U.S. Department of Justice. December, 2017. Pages 23-26.
5. Justin Levitt, The Truth About Voter FraudBrennan Center for Justiceat New York University. 2007. Page 4 and page 18.
6. Sami Edge and Sean Holstege, “Voter Fraud is Not a Persistent Problem,” News21. August 20, 2016.
7. Statementon August 3, 2018, from Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap. Van R. Newkirk II, “The Trump Voter Fraud Commission’s Data Problem,” The Atlantic. September 12, 2017.
8. Mark Niesse, “No Fraud: Georgia Audit Confirms Authenticity of Absentee Ballots,” Atlanta Journal Constitution. December 29, 2020. Pam Fessler, “Former Election Security Official Says It Will Take ‘Years’ to Undo Disinformation,” National Public Radio. December 22, 2020.
9. Dennis Aftergut, “The Pattern of GOP Voter Fraud,” The Bulwark. November 18, 2021.
10. Richard C. Pilger, editor, Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses, Eighth Edition. U.S. Department of Justice. December, 2017. Page 2. List of offenses on pages 23-26.
11. Pema Levy, “Republicans Finally Have an Election Fraud Scandal. And None of Them Want to Talk About It,” Mother Jones. December 4, 2018.
12. No Author, “Read the Full Transcript and Listen to Trump’s Audio Call with Georgia Secretary of State,” CNN. January 3, 2021.
13. Senate Judiciary Committee, How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DOJ to Overturn the 2020 Election. October 7 2021.
14. Pam Fessler and Johnny Kaufman, “Trips to Vegas and Chocolate-Covered Pretzels: Election Vendors Come Under Scrutiny,” NPR’s Morning Edition. May 2, 2019.
15. Jordan Wilkie, “’They Think They’re Above the Law’: The Firms That Own America’s Voting System,” The Guardian. April 23, 2019.
16. Ben Wofford, “How to Hack an Election in 7 Minutes,” Politico. August 5, 2016. Alex Hern, “Kids at Hacking Conference Show How Easily US Elections Could Be Sabotaged,” The Guardian. August 22, 2018. A.J. Vicens, “Researchers Assembled Over 100 Voting Machines. Hackers Broke Into Every Single One,” Mother Jones. September 27, 2019.
17. Michael Riley and Jordan Robertson, “Russian Hacks on U.S. Voting System Wider Than Previously Known,” Bloomberg News. June 13, 2017.
18. Bente Birkeland, “Voting Data From a Colorado County Was Leaked Online. Now the Clerk is in Hiding,” NPR’s Morning Edition. September 3, 2021.
19. Tessa Stuart, “Republicans Plot Elections Takeover in One of Georgia’s Most Democratic Counties,” Rolling Stone. September 28, 2021.
20. Sam Levine, “Why are Michigan Republicans Quietly Replacing Key Election Officials?” The Guardian. October 14, 2021.
21. Unknown Author, “Automatic Registration, A Summary,” Brennan Center for Justiceat New York University. July 10, 2019.
22. Zoltan Hajnal, Nazita Lajevardi, and Lindsay Nielsen, “Voter Identification Laws and the Suppression of Minority Votes,” unpublished manuscript. Page 5.
23. Unknown Author, “New Voting Restrictions in America,” Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. November 18, 2019.
24. Vann R. Newkirk II, “How Voter ID Laws Discriminate,” The Atlantic. February 18, 2017. See also Issie Lapowsky, “A Dead-Simple Algorithm Reveals the True Toll of Voter ID Laws,” Wired. January 1, 2018.
25. Vann R. Newkirk II, “Voter Suppression is Warping Democracy,” The Atlantic. July 17, 2018.
26. Gregory Palast, “Florida’s Flawed ‘Voter Cleansing’ Program,” Salon. December 4, 2000. Katie Sanders, “Florida Voters Mistakenly Purged in 2000,” Tampa Bay Times. June 14, 2012. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential ElectionJune, 2001.
27. Ari Berman, “How the 2000 Election in Florida Led to a New Wave of Voter Disenfranchisement,” The Nation. July 28, 2015.
28. Angela Caputo, Geoff Hing, and Johnny Kaufmann, “After the Purge: How a Massive Voter Purge in Georgia Affected the 2018 Election,” American Public Media. October 29, 2019.
29. Andy Sullivan, “Southern U.S. States Have Closed 1,200 Polling Places in Recent Years: Rights Group,” Reuters. September 9, 2019. Adam Eichen, “Long Voting Lines are a Poll Tax,” Jacobin. November 3, 2020.
30. No Author, “Voting Laws Roundup, July 2021” The Brennan Center for Justice. July 22, 2021. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/08%3A_Electoral_Politics_and_Public_Opinion/8.04%3A_Chapter_52-_The_Integrity_of_American_Elections.txt |
“Redistricting today has become the most insidious practice in American politics—a way . . . for our elected leaders to entrench themselves in 435 impregnable garrisons from which they can maintain political power while avoiding demographic realities.”
—Robert Draper (1)
“History has shown that both major parties are perfectly willing to rig the electoral rules to benefit their own, and to draw the lines to punish opposing partisans.”
—Justin Levitt (2)
Gerrymandering has long been a problem in American politics. It stems from a few basic historical facts. One is that the Constitution mandates that the number of House seats a state receives be apportioned based on population. Another is the Apportionment Act of 1842, which requires that congressional districts be compact and contiguous, and that states with enough population be split into more than one single-member district. In the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, Congress stopped increasing the number of seats in the House of Representatives, legislatively fixing it at 435 seats. In Wesberry v. Sanders (1964) the Supreme Court ruled that House districts grossly unequal in population violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. In 1967, Congress passed the Uniform Congressional District Act that mandated single-member House districts. Finally, every ten years the Census figures out how many people are in the United States and where they are living, forcing the reapportionment of the 435 House seats. Some states gain seats in the House of Representatives after reapportionment, and some states lose them. Each time that happens, the district boundaries are redrawn.
In 1812, state legislative supporters of Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry created a salamander-like electoral district that slithered its way from Marblehead through Danvers and Lynnfield and up to Salisbury, Massachusetts. The district was lampooned in local papers as a gerrymander, and the name has stuck ever since, referring to any manipulation of election districts to serve the interests of one party or group over others. Specifically, political scientist Nick Seabrook defines gerrymandering as “the manipulation of election districts for partisan and political gain.” He further argues that it is a “uniquely American phenomenon,” as “virtually every nation that uses districts for its elections has made at least some effort to prevent those in power from manipulating them for partisan gain.” (3) Gerrymandering has become a real problem in the House of Representatives in the last few decades, as political parties have been able to combine massive demographic databases with geographic information systems (GIS) software. These tools have allowed unprecedented levels of slicing and dicing of the electorate to serve partisan political interests. Essentially, what we have in recent House reapportionment schemes are politicians choosing their voters rather than voters choosing their politicians. This has not been a problem in the Senate for the simple reason that Senate district boundaries don’t change—they are the state boundaries.
The Mechanics and Politics of Gerrymandering
Successful gerrymandering involves two main moves: packing and cracking. House districts need to be roughly equal in population, and in practice in a given state they tend to fluctuate within 10 percent of each other. Beyond that stipulation, the district’s geographic shape is open to all sorts of configurations. Who draws the lines? In most states, the politicians in the state legislature draw the boundaries. If the political majority in the state legislature wants to advantage their party and disadvantage their opponents in federal House races, they will pack and crack voters in just the right ways. Packing involves “the practice of drawing particular districts in such a way as to ensure that another party’s candidate wins that seat by a tremendous margin.” The party doing the gerrymandering wants to concede this district and pack as many of the other party’s supporters in there as possible. This will make neighboring districts easier to win for the party doing the gerrymandering. Cracking involves “drawing districts in such a way as to divide a concentration of voter-specific types across several districts such that they are a minority in each one, with practically no hope of achieving representation in any of the districts.” The party doing the gerrymandering seeks to spread the opposing party’s supporters across the remaining districts, hoping to dilute their electoral weight. (4)
Historically, gerrymandering has been a tool used by both political parties in federal House races and state legislative races. Southern Democrats were famous for drawing districts that cracked Black voters into multiple White-dominated districts. After passing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a number of states practiced “affirmative gerrymandering,” or designed districts intended to elect members of racial minorities to the House. In Shaw v. Hunt (1993) and then Miller v. Johnson (1995) the Supreme Court decided that race could not be a predominant factor in creating election districts. More recently, the conservative majority on the Court has turned against remedies to gerrymanders that have racial implications, allowing redistricting schemes that lower courts had rejected because they constituted unlawful racial gerrymandering. (5)
Since 2010, Republicans have been at the forefront of gerrymandering schemes, pursuing a concerted plan to use their dominance in state legislatures to draw districts to thwart democracy. (6) Republican operative Thomas Hofeller, known as “the master of the modern gerrymander,” made a career out of helping Republicans master demographics and the ever more sophisticated mapping tools that would help them draw state and federal electoral districts to benefit the Republican party. When he died in 2018, his files and emails became public. In one of his most famous consultations, Hofeller helped Republicans in North Carolina draw a House map where the district boundary split the campus of the nation’s largest historically black college, guaranteeing that it would be represented by two Republican congressmen. (7)
Gerrymandering’s impact is decidedly anti-democratic, no matter which party does it. The Center for American Progress studied gerrymandering’s impact after the 2010 Census and found that it resulted in the partisan shift of fifty-nine seats in twenty-two states in the 2012, 2014, and 2016 elections, with a net gain of nineteen seats for the Republicans. “The inescapable conclusion,” the authors wrote, “is that gerrymandering is effectively disenfranchising millions of Americans.” (8) A study of the 2018 election by Data for Progress estimated that due to partisan gerrymandering a net 2.6 percent of Democrats nationwide “ha[d] their votes cancelled out” by the way districts were drawn. (9)
The Supreme Court has thus far decided to sidestep the issue of partisan gerrymandering. In 2019, it reviewed a challenge to a Democratic gerrymander in Maryland and a challenge to a Republican gerrymander in North Carolina. In a narrow decision along ideological lines, the Court ruled that the issue was out of its hands. Writing for the five conservatives on the Court, Chief Justice John Roberts said in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) that partisan gerrymandering presents “political questions beyond the reach of federal courts.” In her blistering dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan wrote:
“The partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people. Of all the times to abandon the court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government.” (10)
What if. . . ?
How can we address the issue of gerrymandering? Perhaps we could repeal the part of the Uniform Congressional District Act that requires single-member districts for the House of Representatives and move to multimember districts in which the top candidates all got elected. Even if we didn’t do that, what if we took the power to draw districts out of state legislators’ hands and gave it to independent commissions? Many states have already done so. What if all did? And what if those commissions relied primarily on computer algorithms to make the districts as compact and unbiased as possible? (11)
References
1. Robert Draper, “The League of Dangerous Mapmakers,” The Atlantic. October issue, 2012.
2. Nina Totenberg, et al., “Supreme Court Rules Partisan Gerrymandering is Beyond the Reach of Federal Courts,” NPR’s All Things Considered. June 27, 2019.
3. Nick Seabrook, One Person, One Vote: A Surprising History of Gerrymandering in America. New York: Pantheon Books, 2022. Page 6.
4. Malia Jones, “Packing, Cracking and the Art of Gerrymandering Around Milwaukee,” WisContext. June 8, 2018. Jones references a third gerrymandering technique known as stacking, involving districts that are evenly split between lower-income, less educated minorities and higher-income, more educated whites. What would be the likely outcome in those districts?
5. Robert J. Shapiro, “The Decline and Possible Resurrection of Radical Gerrymandering,” Washington Monthly. January 4, 2023.
6. Robert Draper, “The League of Dangerous Mapmakers,” The Atlantic. October issue, 2012. Kevin Drum, “Who Gerrymanders More, Democrats or Republicans?” Mother Jones. January 4, 2013.
7. David Daley, “The Secret Files of the Master of Modern Republican Gerrymandering,” The New Yorker. September 6, 2019.
8. Alex Tausanovitch, “The Impact of Partisan Gerrymandering,” American Progress. October 1, 2019.
9. Nathan Lazarus, “The Impact of Gerrymandering, Visualized,” Data for Progress. January 22, 2019.
10. Rucho, et al v. Common Cause, et al(2019)
11. Brian Olson, “Engineering Elections Without Bias,” TEDx.June 22, 2016. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/08%3A_Electoral_Politics_and_Public_Opinion/8.05%3A_Chapter_53-_Gerrymandering.txt |
“Money, get back
I’m all right, Jack, keep your hands off of my stack
Money, it’s a hit
Don’t give me that do goody good bullshit
I’m in the high-fidelity first-class traveling set
And I think I need a Learjet”
—Pink Floyd (1)
“The concentration of wealth in America has created an education system in which the super-rich can buy admission to college for their children, a political system in which they can buy Congress and the presidency, a health-care system in which they can buy care that others can’t, and a justice system in which they can buy their way out of jail.”
—Robert Reich (2)
The Role of Money in American Politics
The American electoral system revolves around money. Its role in American elections is so pervasive that attempts to write about it in detail quickly become outdated. Therefore, it is more helpful if we get an overall impression of how money operates in American elections. Here are some things we can say with confidence.
Money is so central to a person even considering whether they could enter politics that political scientists and journalists often speak about the money primary, by which they mean “the competition of candidates for financial resources contributed by partisan elites before the primaries begin.” (3) Money is the ticket to success in American politics. You must either have enough to finance your own campaign, come from the elite strata where you have friends, contacts, and supporters with disposable wealth to donate to your campaign, or you must ingratiate yourself to the elites who can fund your campaign.
Because elections are so expensive, and we don’t have publicly financed campaigns, politicians appear to be in a never-ending race for money. It typically takes a couple of million dollars to win a race for House of Representatives and anywhere from two to ten times more than that to win a Senate race. In presidential races, the candidates together spent in the billions of dollars—not counting outside spending by organized interests on behalf of one candidate or the other. (4) Congressional members can easily spend half their working time raising money rather than legislating. According to Newsweek, “A leaked PowerPoint presentation from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) revealed that an ideal daily schedule consists of four hours of time spent on the phone” raising money. (5) The need for money has even changed the very nature of congressional leadership. As law professor Lawrence Lessig put it, “If leaders had once been chosen on the basis of ideas, or seniority, or political ties, now, in both parties, leaders were chosen at least in part on their ability to raise campaign cash. Leading fundraisers became the new leaders. Fundraising became the new game.” (6)
Most money in American elections comes from corporations and the wealthy. Corporations and wealthy individuals contribute the bulk of the money to federal elections. According to data from the Federal Election Commission, we can safely say that corporations and wealthy individuals contribute at least two-thirds of federal-election money. An analysis in 2010 by Good Magazine revealed that .26 percent of the American population made up 68 percent of the money contributed to congressional members. (7) Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich reported that while in 1980 the richest .01 percent of Americans accounted for 15 percent of all campaign contributions, by 2016 the richest .01 percent of Americans accounted for 40 percent of all campaign contributions. (8) Some candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren did a good job crowd-sourcing their campaigns with large numbers of small donors, but they lost their presidential primary races to other candidates in 2016 and 2018. Wealthy individuals can finance part, most, or all of their own campaigns. Moreover, wealthy people often act as bundlers who organize and collect contributions to one campaign from a variety of other wealthy people. (9) As you can imagine, a candidate from the elite who knows a few other elites who are willing to act as bundlers is in a very good position indeed.
The candidate who spends the most money tends to win. If you were a betting person and the only information you had about a particular race for the House of Representatives or the Senate was the amount of money the candidates were spending, you would be wise to bet on the candidate who was spending the most money. Historically, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the better financed House candidate wins about 90 percent of the time and the better financed Senate candidate wins about 80 percent of the time. (10) Most congressional races are financially uncompetitive, meaning that one candidate is spending two or more times the money of the other candidate.
Money in American elections pushes politics in a conservative direction. Because corporations and the wealthy are the principal sources of most campaign money, the entire campaign finance system is biased in favor of conservative candidates and against candidates who would like to see real progressive changes. Corporations and the wealthy are beneficiaries of the current system, so it is typically not in their interest to support candidates who would shake up the status quo. Back in 1995, political scientist Thomas Ferguson coined the phrase the investment approach to American party politics, in which he argued that ordinary voters cannot afford the costs of paying attention to political issues, researching candidates, watching what they do once elected, and rewarding or punishing them if they don’t pursue policies beneficial to those ordinary people. Who can afford those costs? Corporations and wealthy people have the resources to monitor politics, donate to candidates to reward them for good behavior when in office, and punish them if they don’t follow the wishes of the elites. Moreover, these individuals and corporations have much to lose if the politicians don’t act the way they would like, so they invest in those that will. Corporations and the wealthy are invested in politics in ways that ordinary people cannot match, which pulls the entire system to the Right or conservative side of the ideological spectrum. (11)
The Supreme Court has stricken down many attempts to reign in money in American elections. Consider the track record of the Court:
• Buckley v. Valeo (1976) Overall campaign spending, personal spending on one’s own campaign, and independent expenditures cannot be capped.
• First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978) States may not prohibit banks and corporations from paying for advertisements taking a stance on a ballot initiative on which citizens would be voting.
• FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life (2007) The government cannot stop outside groups from spending on political advertising in the period before an election.
• Citizens United v. FEC (2010) The government cannot place limits on the amount of outside spending, and corporations can spend directly to support or oppose campaigns.
• Arizona’s Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom PAC v. Bennett (2011) Public financing systems cannot use escalating matching funds.
• American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock (2012) The Court struck down Montana’s ban on corporate spending on state elections that dated back to 1912.
• McCutcheon v. FEC (2014) A donor’s overall spending on federal campaigns cannot be capped. (12)
• Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta (2021) States may not require non-profit organizations that influence politics to disclose their wealthy donors.
Enforcement of federal election laws is weak. America’s weak election laws are enforced by a weak agency. The Federal Election Commission (FEC), charged with regulating America’s election and campaign finance laws, has long been referred to as “the little agency that can’t.” (13) Structurally, the nature of the commission produces deadlock because the Democrats and Republicans each have the same number of commissioners. The FEC is under-funded, under-staffed, and has a perpetual backlog of cases so that candidates and organized interests have little fear of being prosecuted for alleged violations. (14) Sometimes, the FEC is given a near impossible task. Take the case of coordination: outside groups are forbidden from coordinating their expenditures with political campaigns. It’s extremely difficult to prove, especially for a hobbled agency like the FEC. (15)
Attempting to Regulate Money in American Elections
We have a long history of trying to regulate money in politics. The Tillman Act of 1907 banned corporations from making direct campaign contributions, and this prohibition was extended to unions in 1943. Over time, laws and court decisions have created a fairly confusing medley of rules and allowances. Generally speaking, we divide campaign finance into hard money and soft money.
Hard money contributions are regulated by the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), which Congress passed in 1971 and was significantly amended in 1974. Hard money refers to contributions made directly to a political campaign. You should be aware of the following provisions of the Federal Election Campaign Act:
• Created the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to enforce federal campaign regulations. However, Congress keeps the FEC chronically under-funded and understaffed, making it difficult to police elections. In many instances, campaign finance-law violators are let off with a slap on the wrist or with a plea bargain arrangement because the FEC does not have the resources to pursue the matter. Moreover, the commission is evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, which often results in paralysis.
• Limited the amount of money that candidates could give to their own campaigns. Significantly, the Supreme Court struck down this provision in the case of Buckley v. Valeo (1976). The Court said the limitation of self-contributions was a violation of the candidate’s freedom of speech.
• Required campaigns for federal office to report periodically to the FEC all its campaign contributions as well as its expenditures. These reports are a matter of public record, itemizing all contributions and expenditures greater than \$200.
• Limited the amount of money that individuals and organized interest groups could donate to federal candidates. Individuals are limited to \$2,800 per candidate per election, and political action committees are limited to \$5,000 per candidate per election. If a candidate is involved in a primary election and a general election, you may donate the maximum amount to them on both of those occasions.
• Created presidential candidate public financing. This takes the form of a little box on your federal tax forms that allows you to allocate a small amount of your taxes to a presidential election fund. If candidates accept this money, they must abide by limits on their total spending in the presidential race. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first candidate to opt out of public financing in the general election. In 2012, Obama and Mitt Romney both opted out of public financing, and candidates in subsequent presidential elections also opted out.
The only legal way for organized interests to donate money directly to campaigns is for them to create a political action committee, or PAC, which is an FEC-recognized entity that can legally engage in campaign finance. There are different types of PACs that give directly to campaigns, and you should know two of them. Traditional PACs are entities created by organized interests—corporations, unions, and interest groups—as vehicles to raise money and funnel it to candidates. A leadership PAC is established or controlled by a political candidate or a person who holds federal office to raise and give money to other politicians. Leadership PACs are separate from the candidate or office holder’s election or reelection committee. Congressional members often have leadership PACs to raise money and support candidates or other congressional members with whom they share ideology, party affiliation, or policy positions.
The amount of PAC money in congressional races has more than doubled in the last twenty years. There are more than 4,000 PACs registered with the FEC. PACs give the overwhelming majority of their money to incumbents, or those who are in office and are running for reelection, as opposed to challengers. There are three reasons why PACs favor incumbents. For one thing, incumbents tend to win. It’s a safe bet for an organized interest to give money to an incumbent who already votes favorably to its interests. Incumbents have Washington experience and might sit on important committees. Committee and subcommittee chairmen tend to receive a great deal of PAC money. Finally, incumbents have a voting track record on national issues, so they are often more of a known commodity than are challengers.
Soft money originally referred to contributions to political parties that were supposed to be used for “party building measures,” but instead, were used to help elect particular candidates. Technically, the parties were not supposed to use soft money to directly help individual candidates, but in the 1990s, both parties violated the law—especially in presidential races—and used the money for campaign commercials for candidates. Because there are no limits on soft money contributions, corporations especially began to flood the parties with soft money. Soft money now refers to largely unregulated independent expenditures by parties and organized interests to support or oppose candidates. These organizations buy advertisements, establish phone banks, pay for people to go door to door for a candidate, and so forth.
In the spring of 2002, Congress passed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, popularly known as the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill, and President Bush signed it into law despite the objections of many in his own party. This law banned soft-money contributions to the national party organizations, doubled the hard money limits of the FECA, and restricted the airing of advocacy ads sixty days before a general election. In 2003, a federal district court struck down key provisions of the law, but the Supreme Court upheld the law in December of that year. Rather quickly, however, the Court decided to revisit organized-interest sponsored advocacy ads. In 2010, the Court ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that key restrictions on corporate or union spending in elections were unconstitutional. Because of this decision, corporations and unions are free to make advocacy ads during the election period and are free to make unlimited independent expenditures in favor of—or opposed to—specific candidates. As the Center for Responsive Politics puts it:
“[Citizens United ] permits corporations and unions to make political expenditures from their treasuries directly and through other organizations, as long as the spending—often in the form of TV ads—is done independently of any candidate. In many cases, the activity takes place without complete or immediate disclosure about who is funding it, preventing voters from understanding who is truly behind many political messages.
As a result of the Citizens United case and another federal case called SpeechNow v. FEC (2010), outside spending has exploded. Looking just at midterm elections from 2010 to 2022, outside spending by billionaires—who represent a tiny fraction of one percent of the population—exploded by nearly 3,000 percent, rising from \$32 million in 2010 to nearly \$1 billion in 2022. (16) The vehicles for much outside spending are super PACs, a new kind of organization that falls under the soft money category. Where traditional and leadership PACs donate money directly to campaigns, super PACs cannot do so, but they can spend unlimited amounts of money on behalf of one candidate or another. They must do so independently of the candidate they are supporting, meaning they cannot coordinate their activities with the campaign they are supporting. They can raise unlimited amounts of money from corporations, unions, and individuals, but they must disclose their donors to the FEC.
A special kind of soft money is called dark money. Under sections 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) of the tax code, politically active nonprofit organizations can raise unlimited money and spend it to support or oppose candidates. The most interesting thing about these organizations—and the reason they are called “dark”—is that they don’t have to disclose the sources of their money. These organizations are supposed to be primarily social-welfare groups rather than overtly political, but neither the IRS nor the FEC has cracked down on them. Now, with the Supreme Court’s decision in Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta (2021), states may not require dark money organizations to disclose their wealthy donors.
Conservative dark money organizations funnel corporate and elite money to promote presidential, congressional, and judicial candidates who fight against increasing the minimum wage, organizing rights for workers, worker safety laws, universal health care, background checks for gun purchases, environmental regulations, policies to fight the climate emergency, and many more. In the first several elections following the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, Republican-leaning dark money organizations outspent Democratic-leaning dark money organizations, although dark money groups that support corporate Democratic candidates gained much of that ground back in 2018 and 2020. (17)
It is unlikely that any form of privately donated campaign money—coming as it does primarily from corporations and the top 5 percent of the population—is ever going to support truly progressive candidates. This is why progressive candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren tried to rely primarily on small donations from ordinary people. True progressive change that would greatly improve the lives of ordinary people is blocked by monied interests. As professor Lawrence Lessig put it, money “will always block reform, at least so long as the essential element to effecting reform, Congress, remains pathologically dependent upon the campaign cash that those who block reform can deliver.” (18)
Summation
Let’s end this chapter with the realization that campaign finance can be quite confusing. It’s also a bit depressing if we are interested in a government that serves the public interest. Here’s a quick chart to help you keep it straight:
Hard Money
Regulated contributions made directly to campaigns.
Contributions to campaigns by individuals, traditional PACs, and leadership PACs.
Contributions are limited and must be reported to the FEC.
Soft Money
Largely unregulated independent expenditures by parties and organized interests to support or oppose candidates.
Super PACs can raise unlimited money to spend for or against candidates, must report donors to FEC, and cannot coordinate their expenditures with campgains.
Dark money groups can raise unlimited money to spend for or againist candidates, do not have to report donors to FEC, and cannot coordinate their expenditures with candidates.
The Bottom Line
Regardless of whether it's hard or soft money, the most campaign funding comes from corporations and the wealthy elite and goes to candidates who support their backers' agendas. This dynamic is likely to only be disrupted by organized and mobilized ordinary voters who demand systemic changes in America's campaign finance system.
What If. . . ?
What if in every election cycle, the federal government gave all voting age adults four “democracy vouchers” of \$10 each that they could donate to any federal campaign or donate to no one? What if candidates for federal office could decide whether to raise money from corporations, wealthy individuals and PACs, or they could raise money via these democracy vouchers, but not both? (19)
References
1. “Money” written by Roger Waters of Pink Floyd.
2. Robert B. Reich, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. Kindle edition. Page 4 of 198.
3. Randall E. Adkins and Andrew J. Dowdle, “The Money Primary: What Influences the Outcome of Pre-Primary Presidential Nomination Fundraising?” Presidential Studies Quarterly. June, 2002. Page 257.
4. See current figures at Center for Responsive Politics website: www.opensecrets.org
5. Stacey Selleck, “Congress Spends More Time Dialing for Dollars Than on Legislative Work,” U.S. Term Limits. April 26, 2016. Ryan Bort, “John Oliver Breaks Down the Disturbing Truth of Congressional Fundraising.” Newsweek. April 4, 2016.
6. Lawrence Lessig, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It. New York: Twelve, 2011. Page 94.
7. See current figures at Center for Responsive Politics website: www.opensecrets.org. See the Good Magazine infographic here.
8. Robert B. Reich, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. Kindle edition. Page 16 of 198.
9. Peter Overby, “Explainer: What is a Bundler?” NPR. September 14, 2007. Maggie Severns, “Biden Reveals Deep Bench of Campaign Bundlers,” Politico. December 27, 2019.
10. Anonymous Author, “Did Money Win?” Center for Responsive Politics.
11. Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money Driven Political Systems. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. See his quick synopsis of this theory on YouTube.
12. Andrew Prokop, “40 Charts That Explain Money in Politics,” Vox. July 30, 2014.
13. Benjamin Weiser and Bill McAllister, “The Little Agency That Can’t,” The Washington Post. February 12, 1997.
14. Dave Levinthal, “Another Massive Problem With U.S. Democracy: The FEC is Broken,” The Atlantic. December 17, 2013. Kelly Ceballos, “Federal Election Commission Must Be Restructured,” League of Women Voters. April 14, 2016. Soo Rin Kim, “FEC Left Toothless With Three Empty Seats Heading Into the 2020,” ABC News. August 27, 2019.
15. Rachael Marcus and John Dunbar, “Rules Against Coordination Between Super PACs, Candidates, Tough to Enforce,” Center for Public Integrity. January 13, 2012.16. Center for Responsive Politics. At https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/fes_summ.php
16. William Rice, Zachary Tashman, and Frank Clemente, Billionaire Money in the 2022 Election: Buying Elections and Distorting Democracy. Americans for Tax Fairness. November, 2022. Page 6.
17. Lawrence Lessig, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It. New York: Twelve, 2011. Page 191.
18. Lawrence Lessig, They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy. New York: Harper Collins, 2019. Pages 141-142. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/08%3A_Electoral_Politics_and_Public_Opinion/8.06%3A_Chapter_54-_Campaign_Finance.txt |
“If solutions within the system are so impossible to find, then maybe we should change the system itself.”
—Sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg (1)
Congressional Reelection Rates
This is a good place in the textbook to delve into the advantages of incumbency in congressional races. Remember, an incumbent is a current officeholder who is seeking to be reelected to that office. Incumbent congressmen have excellent odds of being reelected. This is especially true of Representatives. As the Center for Responsive Politics put it, “Few things in life are more predictable than the chances of an incumbent member of the U.S. House of Representatives winning reelection.” In the past twenty years, the lowest reelection rate for the House of Representatives was 85 percent, and the mean reelection rate is more than 94 percent. Reelection rates in the U.S. Senate are a bit lower, but still impressive. In the past twenty years, the mean reelection rate for senators is 86 percent. (2) It is difficult to square these high reelection rates with Americans’ overall low opinion of Congress. Gallup tracking polls of Americans’ opinions of Congress over the past twenty years reveal that rarely do more than 25 percent of Americans approve of Congress and frequently their approval is down in the 14-20 percent range. In one recent Gallup survey, as few as 9 percent of people approved of the way Congress was handling its job. (3)
Combined with what we have learned about campaign finance, gerrymandering, and public opinion, the above information about congressional reelection rates raises an interesting set of questions.
1. How can the Congress’ approval as an institution be so low compared with the high reelection rate of Representatives and Senators?
2. What does the high reelection rate for congressional members say about the American democracy’s health? Is this a good sign or a bad sign?
3. Does the high reelection rate for congressional members indicate that Madison was correct in Federalist #10? He wrote that having a large republic with an elected legislature would “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”(4)
4. Why is the reelection rate for the House of Representatives normally higher than that of the Senate?
These are good questions to discuss in class or with your friends. Take a look at these visual representations created by OpenSecrets.org of House and Senate reelection rates.
The Advantages of Incumbency
The high reelection rate for members of Congress may be due to several advantages that incumbents have over their challengers. You should be familiar with these advantages.
As we’ve seen in the chapter on campaign finance, incumbents often have a significant financial advantage over their challengers. Political Action Committees and wealthy individuals have numerous incentives to donate to incumbents. This has enormous implications for how a challenger might mount a campaign, since campaign commercials are expensive to produce, air time is expensive to purchase, effective websites that provide continually updated information and allow people to donate are expensive to set up and maintain, electoral consultants are expensive to hire, and so on. Sheila Krumholz from the Center for Responsive Politics said something in 2006 that is just as sobering when read today: “A challenger who spent less than a million dollars technically had zero chance of winning.” (5) More than half of House races feature one candidate spending at least \$10 for every \$1 spent by the challenger. We call these financially uncompetitive races. (6)
Another important factor is the power of seniority and experience. Almost invariably in campaigns that feature a congressional veteran against an upstart challenger, the incumbent stresses the importance of their seniority and experience in Washington. This is a powerful argument, for it is certainly true that seniority in Congress results in more power, better committee assignments, and greater ability to get bills passed—or greater ability to stop unfavorable bills. All this can translate into a larger voice for the state or district being represented by the incumbent. In the unlikely event that the challenger wins, they are going to be a freshman with little experience and no seniority. Of course, all of this assumes that the incumbent’s seniority and experience is actually being used to serve their constituents, as opposed to serving the interests of their financial backers. However, most congressional members have little difficulty spotlighting their positive-bills sponsorship—even if they never become law—or the bacon they’ve brought home to their state.
We’ve already talked about gerrymandering in a previous chapter, so we won’t go over the details here. Nevertheless, we need to recognize the role of gerrymandering in promoting the reelection rates of Representatives—but not Senators, for the Senate’s districts are fixed by state boundaries. Essentially what we have in recent House reapportionment schemes are majority parties in state legislatures drawing boundaries that favor members of their own party. A direct result of this is the decline of competitive House seats. Many House races are uncompetitive because of the incumbent’s financial advantages and because many districts have been gerrymandered to produce safe seats for one party or the other. A safe seat is one that is securely in the hands of one party as long as that party puts forward a reasonable candidate. Candidates in safe seats often win with 67 percent or more of the vote in the district. Going into the 2022 congressional elections, just 6 percent of the House races were expected to be competitive. (7)
Incumbents benefit greatly from name recognition and positive media coverage. Incumbents usually enjoy a name recognition advantage over their challengers. When this is the case, the challenger has to spend considerable money—which they probably don’t have—trying to build up name recognition in the state or district. Any incumbent who manages to stay out of scandal is virtually guaranteed positive coverage in the local media. This is especially true of local television coverage, which tends to focus on staged events at which the incumbent appears at events such as a local conference on aging, a local pro-am golf tournament, or a construction ground-breaking for which the incumbent helped secure the funds. Rarely does local media focus on how incumbents vote on key issues and how those votes affect real people.
Representatives and senators are given allowances every year to cover their expenses. Representatives have a Members’ Representational Allowance and Senators have an Office Personnel and Office Expense Account. (8) Generally speaking, these allowances vary from one congressman to the next based on how far their district is from Washington, rent in their district, and so forth. They use this money to hire staff in both their Washington and their local district or state office. Congressional staff spend much time on constituent service, which refers to troubleshooting and problem solving for their constituents. By being in a position to solve problems for their constituents, congressional members generate positive feelings that challengers cannot. In addition, constituent-service benefits ripple through many people via word of mouth. This is an advantage for incumbents that most challengers cannot match.
Since the beginning of the republic, members of Congress have enjoyed the franking privilege, meaning that they are allowed to send mail for free to their constituents. The first Congress implemented this rule and based it on a practice that had originated in the British Parliament over a hundred years before the American Revolution. Members of Congress are never allowed to use the privilege for overt campaign literature or allowed to send such mail within ninety days of an election, but the simple ability to send direct mail touting the incumbent’s congressional activities throughout most of their term is definitely an advantage.
What If. . . ?
The incumbent advantage is not something that can be resolved in our current system. Indeed, it wouldn’t even be considered a problem if we could be confident that our Representatives and Senators were acting in the voters’ interest instead of serving the corporations and the small sliver of the electorate that can afford to donate mounds of money to their campaigns. Incumbent congressmen have little incentive to change a system that makes it so easy for them to stay in office.
What if we thought way out of the box when it came to our legislative bodies? Two interesting possibilities come to mind. The first would center on the idea of sortition. Political writer and intellectual David Van Reybrouck spelled out this possibility in his book with the intriguing title Against Elections: The Case for Democracy. (9) Sortition refers to the drawing of lots—where we get the term lottery—and so would mean selecting our members of Congress by some sort of random process that resembled a lottery. In ancient Athens, magistrates, members of the Boule (council), and jurists were chosen via sortition. Why couldn’t we do the same for representatives and senators? Set some basic qualifications, allow people to indicate on their tax forms whether they would like to be eligible for the congressional lottery, and select people to fill nonrenewable terms. It would require a few supplementary changes, one of which would be a change in how congressional staff are chosen, for you’d want nonpartisan staff to help these citizen-legislators craft effective laws. Another recommended change would be to change the legal code to make interfering with the congressional lottery’s random nature a form of treason.
The second possibility would feature citizens’ assemblies and deliberative democracy. (10) A citizens’ assembly is just what it sounds like: a group of adult citizens chosen at random. What if every year we established a Citizens’ Assembly devoted to each of a few particular issues—e.g., automobile fuel standards, judicial appointments, and immigration reform this year and renewable energy, judicial appointments, and a national healthcare system next year, and so on. With the help of some nonpartisan facilitators, each Citizens’ Assembly would practice deliberative democracy, which is a nonadversarial, discussion-centric form of decision making that educates the citizens in the assembly and helps them reach decisions. More technically, political scientists Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson define deliberative democracy as “a form of government in which free and equal citizens and their representatives, justify decisions in a process in which they give one another reasons that are mutually acceptable and generally accessible, with the aim of reaching conclusions that are binding in the present on all citizens but open to challenge in the future.” It has several operating principles:
1. The reason-giving requirement, which means that the assembly’s members give reasons for their actions that “should appeal to principles that individuals who are trying to find fair terms of cooperation cannot reasonably reject.”
2. The accessibility requirement, which means that “to justify imposing their will on you, your fellow citizens must give reasons that are comprehensible to you.”
3. The binding requirement, which means that the assembly is not just an intellectual exercise. It will produce decisions that are binding on their fellow citizens for a period of time.
4. The dynamic requirement, which means that the assembly “keeps open the possibility of a continuing dialogue, one in which citizens can criticize previous decisions and move ahead on the basis of that criticism.” (11)
Modern citizens’ assemblies seem to have started in British Columbia in 2004. Ireland has a citizens’ assembly that numbers among its accomplishments creating referenda in which the entire population voted in 2015 to end the ban on gay marriage and in 2016 to end the ban on abortion. Both referenda passed easily, perhaps because they were discussed and drafted by the Irish Citizens’ Assembly. (12) Citizens’ assemblies have been used in Scotland, the Netherlands, and Poland. In the United Kingdom Extinction Rebellion called for a citizens’ assembly to deal with the climate and ecological emergency. (13)
References
1. Robert B. Reich, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. Kindle edition. Page 5 of 198.
2. No Author, “Reelection Rates Over the Years,” Center for Responsive Politics. No date.
3. No Author, “Congress and the Public,” Gallup. No date.
4. James Madison, Federalist #10. November 23, 1787. The Avalon Projectat Yale Law School.
5. Dan Gilgoff, “A Fake Democracy? (Why House Incumbents Just Don’t Lose). U.S. News and World Report. May 9, 2006.
6. No Author, “Most Races for Congress Are Not Even Competitive,” Center for Responsive Politics. No date.
7. Kenny Stancil, “Just 6% of U.S. House Seats Expected to be Competitive Thanks to Rigged Maps,” Common Dreams. February 17, 2022.
8. Robert Longley, “Allowances Available to Members of U.S. Congress,” ThoughtCo. July 3, 2019.
9. David Van Reybrouck, Against Elections: The Case for Democracy. London: Penguin Random House, 2013.
10. Rob Hopkins, From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2019. Pages 144-148.
11. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy?Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pages 1-63.
12. Rob Hopkins, From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2019. Page 147.
13. Extinction Rebellion. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/08%3A_Electoral_Politics_and_Public_Opinion/8.07%3A_Chapter_55-_The_Advantages_of_Incumbency.txt |
“A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.”
—James Madison (1)
What is Public Opinion?
Public opinion refers to the aggregation of individual American’s political views. In Federalist #10 James Madison referred to “popular governments.” Today, we are more likely to call them democracies or republics. What Madison meant—and what we mean today—are polities that base the source of their legitimacy and authority on the people rather than some other source like God, and that take into account peoples’ aggregate views when making policy. Indeed, if democracy is to mean anything it must refer to a government that periodically turns to the people to either make decisions directly or to select representatives to make decisions. It must also refer to a government whose policies accord with what the public wants it to do.
Measuring Public Opinion
You probably know what your family and friends think about particular political issues. How? You ask them. Similarly, we know quite a bit about public opinion by regularly asking individual Americans what they think in public opinion polls. Political scientists often rely on scientifically rigorous survey research methods in their research. You should be familiar with several issues regarding measuring public opinion. In our discussion, we’ll use the terms public opinion pollpublic opinion survey, and survey research interchangeably to mean scientifically rigorous solicitations and aggregations of individual political views.
It is very important for you to be able to tell the differences between legitimate versus illegitimate public opinion polls. A legitimate survey must (must!) follow two simple rules regarding the samples they take from the population about which they want to make a statement.
1. It must be based on a random sample drawn from the population about which you wish to make a statement. Survey researchers go through several practices to ensure that the people they contact are truly random. All people in the population need to have an equal chance of being in the sample. Above all, pollsters want to avoid selection bias, which is when some members of the population who have particular characteristics have an increased or decreased chance of being sampled. The most famous case of selection bias occurred in 1936 when a survey conducted by the Literary Digest predicted that Republican Alf Landon would beat Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt when in fact Roosevelt trounced Landon. Why was the poll wrong? It turns out that it drew its sample from telephone directories and automobile registrations, and in those days, wealthier Americans were much more likely to be on those lists. The poll had inadvertently weeded out potential Roosevelt supporters from the sample. Selection bias is a constant threat to survey research.
2. The sample must be large enough to make accurate statements. A survey of 100 people will rarely suffice. However, a sample of 1,000 people is large enough to make statements about a very large population if you’ve satisfied rule number one. Consider something as simple as flipping a coin. Flip a coin 1,000 times and record the results. There is a 95 percent chance that the number of heads will be between 46.9 percent and 53.1 percent. The 3.1 percent variation around the exact fifty-fifty distribution of heads and tails is known as the margin of error. (2) The same principle works for survey research, where the margin of error refers to the variability amount that we can expect a poll to have from the true result if we actually surveyed the entire population. It comes with a confidence interval. Thus, “A margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level means that if we fielded the same survey 100 times, we would expect the result to be within 3 percentage points of the true population value 95 of those times.” (3) Always look for polls that publish the margin of error.
The accuracy of polling can sometimes be undermined by social desirability bias, which is “the concept that people won’t tell pollsters their true intentions for fear of being stigmatized or being politically incorrect.” Many political scientists and journalists blame social desirability bias for polls in 2016 that incorrectly showed Donald Trump trailing Hillary Clinton in key battleground states. (4) People will tend to underreport behavior and opinions that they think the pollster will find unacceptable and overreport behavior and opinions that are socially desired. Some survey respondents will tell pollsters that they voted when they didn’t, that they support racial or gender equality when they don’t, and that they don’t use illegal drugs when they do.
When you see polls reported in the news media, pay attention to question wording, or the way that the survey items are phrased. Question wording can have a dramatic effect on the overall results of a survey. Beware especially of leading questions, which are questions that are intentionally or unintentionally phrased to elicit a particular response. Let’s look at a subtle case of unintentionally leading survey respondents. Consider two ways to ask a question:
Do you support President Bush’s decision to send additional troops to Iraq?
Or
Do you favor or oppose sending additional troops to Iraq?
When the first version of the question references an authority figure like the president and only uses the word support, it could unintentionally lead people to say that they support the policy. The second version is more neutral. (5) There are far more egregious examples of leading questions. In 1937, Gallup asked, “Would you vote for a woman for president if she were qualified in every other way?” The implication of the question is that the mere fact of being a woman might be a disqualifying characteristic. (6)
This is a good place to note the role of push polling in American politics. A push poll is not a real attempt to get the opinions of people. Instead, a push poll is a form of negative advertising in the guise of a survey. An organization that is either hired by a political campaign or funded by soft money contacts people and tells them that they are doing a survey, but instead they use the opportunity to tell the people potentially negative things about a candidate. For example, when Mitt Romney ran for president, a company called potential voters in Iowa and New Hampshire asked questions like “Did you know Mitt Romney received military deferments from the Vietnam War when he served a church mission in France? Did you know Mormons believe the Book of Mormon is better than the Bible? Did you know that some people believe the Mormon church is a cult?” It was nomination season, and Romney’s Republican opponents denied that they were behind the calls. (7)
Survey research has been complicated by changing technology. In the old days, survey research companies called people at home. On their land line. Obviously, that has become much more difficult as most people no longer have hard wired phones in their homes. Cellphone surveying is more difficult because of caller screening and because many people who have cellphones are not adults.
Does Public Opinion Influence Policy?
Going back to the chapter on Political Science as a Social Science, we might say that in a democracy, we hypothesize a causal relationship between public opinion on a particular issue and the public policy that Congress and the president produce. How often does this take place? As we’ve seen thus far in this textbook, the American political system appears to be fairly non-responsive to ordinary people’s wishes. It doesn’t appear to be responsive to real world issues at all, even if elites would benefit from them as well. The American political system simply has too many points at which positive change can be defeated. Consider that America does not have a health care system that covers everyone; that America is not addressing the climate crisis—arguably the greatest crisis that has threatened mankind since the dawn of civilization; that America’s infrastructure is decrepit compared to its competitors; that America makes access to a quality college education contingent on family income, unless one wants to go into debt; that America has terrible rates of infant mortality, child poverty, hunger, and homelessness compared to its peers; that America can’t ensure that people will be paid a living wage or be treated with dignity while on the job; that America doesn’t guarantee paid family leave at the birth of a child; that America cannot even marginally address its epidemic of gun deaths; that America cannot stop itself from over spending on its military apparatus while underspending on its public health system; that America cannot ensure the integrity of its elections. What interpretation of “promote the general welfare” does this fit? Or, as Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig put it, “How much do we suffer because we have a government that cannot govern?” (8)
Recall what political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded after thoroughly studying the connection between public opinion and public policy. They found “democracy by coincidence, in which ordinary citizens get what they want from government only when they happen to agree with elites or interest groups that are really calling the shots.” (9) We should not be surprised at this conclusion, given the constitutional and process barriers to democracy that we’ve highlighted in this text as well as the gross economic inequalities in American society that translate into vast differences of political power between different classes.
We might ask another–less depressing–question: under what conditions is public opinion more likely to influence public policy? Under the current political system, which is not particularly suited to translating popular will into policy, four conditions appear to be the most important for allowing ordinary Americans’ opinions to influence public policy. Political scientists Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro noted three of these conditions. “Policy,” they wrote, “tends to move in the same direction as public opinion most often when the opinion change is large and when it is stable—that is, not reversed by fluctuations.” Large and stable shifts in public opinion can result in public policy change. “Similarly,” wrote Page and Shapiro, “policy congruence [with public opinion] is higher on salient than on non-salient issues.” (10) Issue salience refers to its prominence in the public sphere—are people talking about it, are they writing about it on news sites, is the issue important to many people? A third condition is the intensity with which people hold their opinions. If a significant enough plurality of people holds very intense opinions about an issue—e.g., gun rights, abortion, or civil rights—that translates into letters to Congress, votes on election day, demonstrations, and other forms of political behavior that can move elected officials to act.
The fourth condition that appears to determine whether public opinion can influence policy is whether elites are divided about the issue. We’ve already seen that if elites are unified on an issue, they appear to have a veto on political change. But things are different when elites are divided on an issue. Political scientist David Hubert, author of this textbook, showed how issue salience combines with elite division to create the ideal conditions for popular opinion to impact foreign policy. He found that when elites are divided on a salient political issue, at least one side of that division has an interest in enlisting public opinion as an argument for why their side of the policy debate should win. (11) This finding accords with political scientist E. E. Schattschneider’s assertion that “The role of the people in the political system is determined largely by the conflict system, for it is conflict that involves the people in politics and the nature of conflict determines the nature of the public involvement.” (12) If the main combatants—politicians, elites, and corporations—differ on a public policy, they draw in public opinion as a resource in their struggle.
The role of public opinion in affecting policy is limited and conditional. That is unlikely to change unless one of two things happens: 1) large numbers of people unify on a particular policy proposal and have some elite supporters and politicians on board, or 2) large numbers of people organize around significant changes to the political system that would make it more attuned to the wishes of ordinary Americans.
Opinion Leadership
Often, elites go beyond merely enlisting public opinion in their political battles. There is considerable evidence for a phenomenon known as opinion leadership, which refers to the ability of political leaders to change the opinions of large numbers of people. The truth is that on many issues, individuals do not have strongly formed opinions. When a pollster asks them a question, they’ll give an answer, but often it is an issue about which they haven’t devoted much thought. If a political leader that they respect and/or with whom they share party affiliation comes out forcefully in favor of a different approach to that policy, many people will shift their opinion. For instance, after candidate and president Donald Trump and other Republican luminaries such as the leaders of the National Rifle Association took on a much more friendly approach to Russia and its leaders, the opinions of Republicans shifted in the same direction. Between 2014 and 2018, the percentage of Republicans who viewed Russia as an ally or as friendly toward the United States doubled, but the views of Democrats towards Russia actually soured a bit. (13)
Political Socialization
Political scientists and psychologists have long been interested in how people develop their individual approach to politics and political issues. There is no definitive answer, nor is there ever likely to be. Indeed, a mix of influences unique to each individual is likely to be the real source of our ideologies, attitudes, opinions, prejudices, and dispositions. You should be familiar with the prime suspects when it comes to our political socialization, by which we mean “the process by which people acquire their political attitudes, beliefs, opinions, and behaviors.” (14) There are many candidates, but we’ll only focus on four.
There is a growing body of research demonstrating that our political orientation may be in part a hard-wired component of our personality. Just as two siblings born of the same parents and raised in the same household can have vastly different personalities, we may be born with dispositions that affect the political ideologies we develop by the time we are adults. Psychologists and political scientists have found that conservatives and progressives appear to have an innate difference in threat perception, with conservatives more attuned to potential threats. Similarly, conservatives may be more fearful of those threats and want government to respond to them with military or police forces and/or laws. Conservatives have a lower tolerance for ambiguity and a lower tolerance for disorder than do progressives. (15) Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued convincingly that conservatives and progressives come from different moral standpoints. For instance, take the issue of fairness. Haidt argues that progressives see fairness as one of access to basic resources, whereas conservatives see fairness as getting what one deserves based on effort expended. In other words, both conservatives and progressives value fairness, but they may have innately different moral understandings of the concept. (16)
Occupation is another obvious candidate to be an influence on our political views. In Federalist #10 James Madison wrote that,
“the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views.” (17)
One’s occupation is intimately tied to one’s vested interests and is therefore likely to have a strong interest on one’s political opinions. For example, teachers have different opinions than do members of the general public on issues like teacher pay, vouchers, the impact of teachers’ unions, and how often students should be subject to standardized tests. (18) Factory workers are likely to have a different opinion of globalization and offshoring jobs than the people who own the company. Blue-collar workers are likely to have a different opinion of unskilled immigrants than are white-collar workers who don’t have to compete with such immigrants for jobs.
We should recognize the roles of family and friends in shaping our political opinions. Children are raised by parents who have more or less well-developed political outlooks and in families with particular moral or ethical values. Parental viewpoints can transfer to children. In one early study, psychologist Eugene Thomas found an average 75 percent congruence rate between college-age students and their parents with respect to political attitudes. Moreover, two aspects of the family dynamic contributed the most to fostering parent-child attitude congruence: the extent to which the parents were dedicated to political causes and the extent to which the parents explicitly tutored children “into an awareness of the political realm.” (19) As children grow, they engage with other young people who influence and reinforce their attitudes and behaviors. Sociologist Denise Kandel noted that “adolescents who share certain prior attributes in common tend to associate with each other and tend to influence each other as the result of continued association.” (20) What Dr. Kandel described is the importance of homophily, which is “the tendency for individuals to associate with similar others,” and it is “one of the most persistent findings in social network analysis.” (21) We have a tendency to associate with people who are like us in some respect(s), and we then reinforce each other’s attitudes and behaviors. Homophily becomes more prominent as children get older and are able to transcend the imperatives of neighborhood geography, extend their potential networks, and go to college.
What about education? Broadly speaking, formal education can play a role in fostering tolerance for people who are racially, ethnically, or religiously different from us—assuming that the school is itself inclusive and promotes those values. Formal education also tends to promote what is known as political efficacy, or a person’s belief that they can influence public policy through their political behaviors like voting, demonstrating, donating to candidates, and organizing collectively for action. There is some evidence that more democratic forms of school governance can produce even more gains in political efficacy than traditional—i.e., not-very-democratic—school governance. The famous psychologist Jean Piaget once asked and answered an important question: “How are we to bring children to the spirit of citizenship and humanity which is postulated by democratic societies? By the actual practice of democracy at school.” (22)
References
1. James Madison, Federalist #10. November 23, 1787. The Avalon Projectat Yale Law School.
2. This example comes from Ginsberg, et al., We the People. 12thedition.
3. Andrew Mercer, “5 Things to Know About the Margin of Error in Election Polls,” Pew Research Center. September 8, 2016.
4. Tom Bevan, “Pollster Who Got It Right in 2016 Does It Again.” Real Clear Politics. November 10, 2018.
5. Anonymous author, “Question Wording,” American Association for Public Opinion Research. No date.
6. Craig Charney, “The Top 10 Ways to Get Misleading Poll Results,” Charney Research. July 9, 2007.
7. Anonymous author, “Push Polling Targets Mitt Romney,” KSL. November 16, 2007.
8. Lawrence Lessig, They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy. New York: Harper Collins, 2019. Pages 141-142.
9. Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics. Fall 2014.
10. Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro, “Effects of Public Opinion on Policy,” The American Political Science Review. March, 1983. Page 181.
11. David Hubert, Public Opinion and the Reagan Doctrine: Issue Structure and the Domestic Setting of Foreign Policy. Doctoral Dissertation at the University of Connecticut. 1995.
12. E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People. Hinsdale, IL: The Dryden Press, 1960. Page 126.
13. R. J. Reinhart, “Republicans More Positive on U.S. Relations With Russia,” Gallup. July 13, 2018.
14. Diana Owen, “Political Socialization,” Oxford Bibliographies. July 20, 2014.
15. Emily Laber-Warren, “Unconscious Reactions Separate Liberals and Conservatives,” Scientific American. September 1, 2012. Vinita Mehta, “Why Liberals and Conservatives Think So Differently,” Psychology Today. February 27, 2017.
16. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012.
17. James Madison, Federalist #10. November 23, 1787. The Avalon Projectat Yale Law School.
18. Paul E. Peterson, Michael Henderson, and Martin R. West, Teachers Versus the Public: What Americans Think About Schools and How to Fix Them. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 2014.
19. L. Eugene Thomas, “Political Attitude Congruence Between Politically Active Parents and College-Age Children: An Inquiry into Family Political Socialization,” Journal of Marriage and Family. May, 1971. Page 379.
20. Denise B. Kandel, “Homophily, Selection, and Socialization in Adolescent Friendships,” American Journal of Sociology. September, 1978. Page 435.
21. Per Block and Thomas Grund, “Multidimensional Homophily in Friendship Networks,” Network Science. August, 2014. Page 189.
22. Ralph Mosher, Robert Kenny, and Andrew Garrod, Preparing for Citizenship. Teaching Youth to Live Democratically. Westport/London: Praeger, 1994. Piaget quoted on page xi. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/08%3A_Electoral_Politics_and_Public_Opinion/8.08%3A_Chapter_56-_Public_Opinion_and_Political_Socialization.txt |
“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
—Winston Churchill (1)
Who Tends to Vote?
Voting matters, even in an attenuated democracy. Every two years we have a federal election during which we decide who is going to occupy all 435 House seats and one-third of the 100 Senate seats until the next federal election. Obviously, this election has enormous implications for legislation that passes Congress. Every four years, we have a federal election for president and vice president, which has many implications for judicial nominations, the prosecutorial discretion of the Justice Department, and the extent to which the new administration will or will not aggressively implement environmental, worker and consumer safety, and economic regulations, as well as how responsive the federal government is to national emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic and natural disasters.
There are a couple of things you should know about voting turnout in the United States. First, American voting turnout is not particularly high. Second, it bounces around depending on whether we’re talking about a presidential election year or what’s known as a midterm election. A presidential election year is one in which we elect the president. A midterm election year is one in which presidential candidates—technically, the slates of electors pledged to presidential candidates—are not on the ballot. From 1980 to 2016, voting turnout in presidential election years averaged just shy of 57 percent, meaning that for every 100 people who were of voting age, only 57 did so. From 1982 to 2018, voting turnout in midterm elections averaged just under 41 percent. (2) By international standards, voter turnout in the United States is lower than most countries to which we’d like to be compared. While we are very proud of ourselves when turnout in a presidential election year breaks 60 percent, turnout in the most recent elections around the world put America to shame: the UK 63 percent, France 67 percent, Germany 69 percent, New Zealand 76 percent, Denmark 80 percent, and Belgium 87 percent. (3)
Can we make some useful generalizations about the people who do tend to turnout in American elections? Yes, there are some informative things we can say, but keep in mind that demographic variables correlate with each other. (4) Race and ethnicity appear to be relevant. Consider that in the last presidential election, 65 percent of Whites voted, 60 percent of Blacks voted, and 45 percent of Hispanics voted. That ranking generally holds true over time, although the Black turnout rate did eclipse that of Whites in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections. It is also true that the Hispanic voting turnout rate has been increasing over time—in 1996 Hispanic turnout was only 38 percent. Age is a strong and consistent predictor of voter turnout. As age increases, tendency to vote increases. In the last presidential election, 43 percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds voted, 57 percent of thirty- to forty-four-year-olds voted, 66 percent of forty-five- to sixty-four-year-olds voted, and 71 percent of people sixty years and older voted. This age ranking holds true in all recent elections. Finally, we should note that formal education correlates with tendency to vote. In the last presidential election, only 31 percent of people without a high school diploma voted, while 85 percent of people with a graduate degree voted. This pattern holds at every increased level of education: high school graduates vote at higher rates than those who didn’t finish high school; people with college degrees vote at higher rates than high school graduates, and so on. Let’s look at these relationships over time thanks to Professor Michael P. McDonald and the United States Elections Project at the University of Florida:
Why do these patterns hold? Why would education, age, and race have anything to do with tendency to vote? Discuss this with your classmates or friends. Certainly, political decisions made at the national level are not intrinsically more important to sixty-year-olds than they are to twenty-year-olds. They are not more intrinsically more important to Whites than they are to Hispanics. Nor are people without a high school diploma somehow unaffected by national politics. Think about political efficacy. Think about candidates’ race, age, and education levels. Think about the voter-registration burdens we put on people. Think about political alienation. Think about economic reasons why we might see these patterns.
Who Tends to Vote for Which Party?
In this section, we want to make some generalizations about how different demographic groups tend to vote. If there’s one thing we know about political preferences in American politics, it is that they change over time. The patterns we’ll describe are real—that is, supported by public opinion and exit polling data—but they might not have existed in the past and they might change going forward. Still, understanding voting patterns can help you make sense of contemporary political news. Let’s keep another thing in mind as well. These are only tendencies. Each person makes up their own mind how to vote, and there’s a chance that they will not conform to the patterns described below. Just because you happen to fall into a demographic group that tends to vote for one political party, it doesn’t mean you can’t be perfectly happy voting for a different one.
Race and Ethnicity has a clear impact on tendency to vote Republican or Democratic: In general, Whites tend to vote Republican, and ethnic minorities vote Democratic—although there are exceptions and matters of degree. In the 2020 election, according to CNN exit polls, Republican Donald Trump beat Democrat Joe Biden among Whites by 17 percentage points—58 percent to 41 percent. Biden beat Trump among Blacks by a remarkable 75 percentage points—87 percent to 12 percent. Biden beat Trump by 65 percent to 32 percent among Hispanics and by 61 percent to 34 percent among Asian Americans. (5) These results are not surprising, as they track pre-election party identification. For example, 84 percent of Blacks and 63 percent of Hispanics identified with the Democratic party. Whites were about 8 percentage points more likely to identify as Republican leading up to the 2020 election. (6) One of the most interesting aspects of the Trump years is that the Republican Party saw significant gains among Hispanic voters. (7) Why do we see party identification and voting patterns among racial and ethnic groups in the United States?
The gender gap is currently one of the most interesting demographically driven voting pattern that gets noticed in the media. The gender gap refers to women’s tendency to vote for Democratic candidates and men’s tendency to vote for Republican candidates. The gender gap didn’t used to exist. Women won the right to vote in 1920, and for many decades afterwards there wasn’t really a noticeable difference between women and men’s voting preferences. Gender-based voting preferences began to change in the 1970s but became fully noticeable with the 1980 election. The gap has grown ever since and continues to fit the pattern of women voting more Democratic and men voting more Republican. There was an 8 percentage point male-female gap in the 1980 presidential race, a 12 percentage point male-female gap in the 2000 presidential race, a 13 percentage point male-female gap in the 2016 presidential race, and a 14 percentage point male-female gap in the 2020 presidential race. (8) Why did the gender gap arise in the 1970s and 80s, and why does it persist? Think about issues on which men and women might differ. Think also about the conservative and progressive tenets described earlier in the text. How long do you think the gender gap will persist in American politics?
Religious denomination and overall religiosity are important demographic factors in party identification and voting. Evangelical Christians—those belonging to more fundamentalist, White Protestant denominations—voted 76 percent to 24 percent for Trump over Biden in 2020. Mormons are similarly more likely to vote for Republican presidential candidates. Catholics were fairly evenly split in 2020, with a slight tilt toward Biden, who is Catholic. Jews are more likely to identify as Democrats. Religiosity—the extent to which a person is devout and practices their religion by going to religious services—also plays a role in voting. Christians who regularly attend church services are more likely to identify as Republican. People who say they are religiously unaffiliated are significantly more likely to identify as Democratic. (9) Why do we see these differences in voting and party identity between different religious denominations and religiosity levels? What issues might be relevant to particular denominations, or be perceived differently by those who do and do not regularly attend religious services? What about the relevance of conservative and progressive tenets?
The United States has a pronounced urban/rural divide in voting. The generalization to be made here is that urban areas tend to vote Democratic, rural areas tend to vote Republican, and suburban areas are more likely to be battlegrounds that could go either way. Compare the county-level election results in 2020 with the state-level results, and you can see that rural counties tend to vote Republican and urban counties tend to vote Democratic–although there are exceptions like in Alaska and south Texas. According to exit polls in 2020, voters in urban areas supported Democrat Joe Biden by 60 percent to 38 percent, while voters in rural areas supported Republican Donald Trump by 57 percent to 42 percent—almost a mirror image. The suburbs went for Biden by just 2 percentage points. Party identity also mirrors this urban/rural divide. (10) Why do we see these geographic voting-pattern differences in the United States? What issues are perceived differently in urban and rural America? How might a person’s geographic identity interact with some of the other demographic variables discussed above?
What If. . . ?
What if we had nationwide, mail-in balloting for all federal elections? Democrats have introduced legislation in Congress to do just this, but Republicans oppose it. As of this writing, five states have universal mail-in balloting, but most do not—although many states allow mail-in balloting in certain elections or in certain circumstances such as absentee voting.
David Roberts, who lives in a state that has mail-in balloting, described the process.
I got my ballot in the mail several weeks before the election. One night the following week, after dinner, my family gathered around the dining room table. On one side, we had our ballots. On the other, we had Washington state’s official voter guide, along with several informal voting guides from some of our favorite publications and people.
We went through the ballot vote by vote — president, governor, on down to ballot initiatives on carbon taxes and public transit — discussing the opposing arguments, allowing the boys (11 and 13) to ask questions. Overall, it took about an hour. When we were done, we put our ballots in a special envelope, affixed stamps, and dropped them in the mailbox. That’s it.
We did this at our leisure, not during proscribed hours. We weren’t subject to the vagaries of weather or the idiosyncrasies of polling staff. We didn’t have to show any ID or wait in any lines. We had plenty of time to research and mull over each vote.
It felt deliberative, civilized, like the way human beings ought to vote. (11)
References
1. Winston Churchill on the floor of Parliament in November, 1947. Kevin Robillard, “10 Great Quotes About Voting,” Politico. November 1, 2012.
2. Author’s calculations from figures on the University of Florida’s United States Elections Project.
3. Drew Desilver, “The U.S. Trails Most Developed Countries in Voter Turnout,” Pew Research Center. May 21, 2018.
4. All figures in this paragraph come from the University of Florida’s United States Elections Project.
5. Exit Polls, CNN, 2020.
6. No Author, “Trends in Party Affiliation Among Demographic Groups,” Pew Research Center. March 20, 2018.
7. Tim Alberta, “Why Democrats are Losing Hispanic Voters,” The Atlantic. November 3, 2022.
8. Derek Thompson, “Why Men Vote for Republicans, and Women Vote for Democrats,” The Atlantic. February 9, 2020. Figures from 2020 from CNN exit polls.
9. Exit Polls, CNN, 2020. No Author, “Trends in Party Affiliation Among Demographic Groups,” Pew Research Center. March 20, 2018.
10. Exit Polls, CNN, 2020. No Author, “Trends in Party Affiliation Among Demographic Groups,” Pew Research Center. March 20, 2018.
11. David Roberts, “Voting by Mail is Fair, Safe, and Easy. Why Don’t More States Use It?” Vox. May 27, 2017. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/09%3A_Individual_Political_Behavior/9.01%3A_Chapter_57-_Voting.txt |
“Our most cherished moment of democratic citizenship comes when we leave the house once in four years to choose between two mediocre white Anglo-Saxon males who have been trundled out by political caucuses, million-dollar primaries and managed conventions for the rigged multiple-choice test we call an election.”
—Howard Zinn (1)
Historian Howard Zinn’s famous quote from 1976 about voting in America is dripping with sarcasm and frustration. One can hardly blame him, for elections in America are very stage-managed affairs that barely ask Americans to get off their asses to cast a vote for one of two usually uninspiring options. For most voters, elections are passive, momentary experiences—infused with a horserace ethos devoid of real issue substance—and Zinn is right to regret that we hold elections up as vaunted symbols of how democratic we are. And yet, elections do matter. Ask an ordinary Republican if elections matter during a two-term Democratic president’s administration. Ask an ordinary Democrat if elections matter after a long run of Republican majority rule in Congress.
Let’s assume that you, too, are frustrated with the idea that voting in a federal election every two years is the apotheosis of your political behavior. Good! Let’s get a little prescriptive in this chapter. If you want to participate more in the political process, there are a number of things you can do. Let’s organize them by ascending effort-level.
Slacktivism
The Internet has allowed the birth of something we never used to have as an option for political participation. It goes by two names and it’s difficult to pick between clicktivism and slacktivism, but we’ll go with the latter. Slacktivism is a portmanteau. How’s that for a word? It means that it is a new word created by smushing together two previously existing words—in this case slacker and activism. The Cambridge Dictionary defines slacktivism as “activity that uses the Internet to support political or social causes in a way that does not need much effort, for example by creating or signing online petitions.” (2) An organization or your friend sends you an online petition for a cause that you support and you click “yes” on it. It doesn’t take any effort. In other cases, organizations will solicit your help in a letter-writing campaign. They’ve prewritten the letter, so all you have to do is click on a link and provide some basic information; the organization then directs thousands of these letters to the targeted politicians. Slacktivism feels good, because you get to add your voice to potentially thousands of other people whom you’ve never met.
It’s unclear whether slacktivism actually produces political change. Part of the problem is that the Internet and social media have sorted people into like-minded groups who speak to each other, share news stories of interest to each other, and serve as the same insular audience for online petitions and boycott drives. Social media algorithms are designed to give you more of what you like, based on the pages you’ve liked, your searches, with whom you are friends, and what their interests are. (3) Thus, there is a preaching to the choir effect in slacktivism, whereby people can sign petitions for issues on which they already have a firm stance and can express outrage over politicians they already dislike. It may feel good, but slacktivism is important only if it results in new action on the part of people who weren’t already engaged with a particular issue. Unfortunately, business scholars have suggested that slacktivism “does not lead to increased meaningful support for social causes.” (4) What is the point if this sort of action doesn’t change minds, get people to the polls, win elections, or implement policies? This is not an argument for not participating in slacktivism. Rather, it’s an argument that slacktivism without further action is pointless.
This is not to argue that social media isn’t politically relevant. Indeed, many of the forms of political behavior described here—from demonstrating to organizing—are facilitated by social media tools.
Moderately Active Forms of Political Participation
Tips on writing to an elected official:
• Keep it brief. Letters should never be longer than one page and should be limited to one issue. Legislative aides read many letters on many issues in a day, so your letter should be as concise as possible.
• State Who You Are and What You Want Up Front. Tell your legislators in the first paragraph that you are a constituent and identify the issue about which you are writing. If your letter pertains to specific legislation, identify the legislation by its bill number, e.g. H.R. ____ or S. _____.
• Hit your three most important points. Choose and flesh out the three strongest points that will be most effective in persuading legislators to support your position.
• Personalize your letter. Tell your elected official why this legislation matters in their community or state. If you have one, include a personal story that shows how this issue affects you and your family. A constituent’s personal story can be the very persuasive as your legislator shapes their position.
• Personalize your relationship. Tell your elected official or their staff if you have you ever voted for this elected official or contributed time or money to their campaign. Are you familiar with them through any business or personal relationship? If so, The closer your legislator feels to you, the more powerful your argument is likely to be.
• Be courteous, to the point, and firm. Take a firm position. Remember that often your elected official may not know more about the issue than you do. (5)
• Spell-check your letter before sending it. The reasons here are obvious.
Keep your word processor handy; we’re not done with writing. You can also write for publication in online news and opinion sites or other political blogs. Writing for publication reaches people across a broader political spectrum than merely sharing with your friends on social media. While competition is stiff, don’t be discouraged to submit an op-ed in national publications like The New York TimesThe Washington Post, and USA Today, it’s very worth trying. But your odds are greater at local and regional newspapers and political sites.
Here are some of Duke University’s tips for effective op-ed pieces:
• Keep it short. Target length is about 750 words.
• Make one central point. Don’t address several issues in the op-ed. “Be satisfied with making a single point clearly and persuasively. If you cannot explain your message in a sentence or two, you’re trying to cover too much.”
• Write one sentence that strongly addresses your central point. Make this be the first sentence or two. “You have no more than 10 seconds to hook a busy reader, which means you shouldn’t ‘clear your throat’ with a witticism or historical aside. Get to the point and convince the reader that it’s worth his or her valuable time to continue.”
• Tell readers why they should care. “Put yourself in the place of the busy person looking at your article. At the end of every few paragraphs, ask out loud: ‘So what? Who cares?’ Will your suggestions help reduce readers’ taxes? Protect them from disease? Make their children happier? Explain why.
• Offer specific recommendations. “How exactly should your state protect its environment, or the White House change its foreign policy, or parents choose healthier foods for their children? You’ll need to do more than call for ‘more research!’ or suggest that opposing parties work out their differences.”
• Use the active voice. “Don’t write: ‘It is hoped that [or: One would hope that] the government will …’ Instead, say ‘I hope the government will …’ Active voice is nearly always better than passive voice. It’s easier to read, and it leaves no doubt about who is doing the hoping, recommending or other action.”
• Showing is better than discussing. “We humans remember colorful details better than dry facts. When writing an op-ed article, therefore, look for great examples that will bring your argument to life.”
• Acknowledge the other side. “Op-ed authors sometimes make the mistake of piling on one reason after another why they’re right and their opponents are wrong. Opinions that acknowledge the ways in which their opponents are right come across as more credible and balanced. When you see experienced op-ed authors saying ‘to be sure,’ that’s what they’re doing.”
• Make your ending a winner. “In addition to having a strong opening paragraph to hook readers, it’s also important to summarize your argument in a strong final paragraph. That’s because many casual readers scan the headline, skim the opening, and then read the final paragraph and byline.” (6)
Another moderately active form of political participation is to attend a demonstration for a cause in which you believe. The effects of political demonstrations range from inconsequential to earth shaking. A good demonstration broadly raises the publics’ awareness of a cause, making the news and bringing the issue to people who may never have considered that the issue was even a problem. When thousands or tens of thousands or millions of people gather in one location, or in cities and towns across the country or world, that tells other people and politicians that the issue is salient. For every person who attends the demonstration, typically there are many more who think the same way. Politicians pay attention to that show of support. Consider the historical significance of the 1963 March on Washington, the 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, the 1989 Berlin Wall Protests, the ACT UP AIDS awareness and action demonstrations of the 1980’s and 90’s, the 2003 Iraq War protests, the 2017 Women’s March, and the 2017 People’s Climate March.
Another thing you can do is attend local meetings with your U.S. representative and U.S. senators. Meetings with constituent groups can have a significant impact on legislators. Former U.S. congressional staffer Bradford Fitch suggests these effective meeting tips:
• Go early and connect with staff. Building relationships with staff in state legislative offices is an important advocacy strategy.
• Bring talking points. If you get a turn at the microphone, you want to be ready to make an important point in 30 seconds or less. Be ready to talk about several points, in case someone has already made a good point and you don’t want to go over that ground again.
• Bring a friend or a dozen friends. It is powerful to see many people all carrying signs and wanting to talk about a salient issue at a local meeting.
• Be polite. Being uncivil or rowdy or disrespectful undercuts your message. Why should the politician listen to you? (7)
There are several types of these meetings. A townhall meeting is an open forum where lawmakers give a speech and answer questions from the audience. A tele-townhall meeting is an online or conference call meeting, usually with more restricted participation. Beware of politicians who only hold tele-townhall meetings, because that’s a good sign that they are afraid to fully defend their positions to their constituents. Check your politician’s website for information about upcoming meetings or call the staff in the local office. The Townhall Project—whose motto is “Show Up. Speak Out”—does a good job connecting you with these events and keeping track of those members of Congress who are choosing not to meet with their constituents. In those cases, the Townhall Project encourages you to organize an empty chair townhall meeting and invite your member of Congress to fill that chair. If they don’t come, have the meeting anyway and educate the attendees about the congressman’s voting record.
Active Forms of Political Participation
A great form of political participation is to organize, organize, organize! It’s very easy in American society to think of yourself as an isolated individual, powerless in the face of larger forces that have more money and better access than you can imagine. The only way to combat that feeling is to get together with like-minded people and organize yourselves into something that can exert more influence. Join an already existing organization. Get to know people in your local or state chapters, and work on meaningful projects. There are a multitude of state and national-level political organizations working to influence public debate, organize protests, lobby legislators, and make life better for millions of Americans. When you have a little extra money, donate some to that organization. If not, give your time. If an organization doesn’t exist that specifically addresses your political interest, start a new organization. The Internet and social media can be great resources in this regard. This is not slacktivism. This is using the connectivity afforded us by modern technology to organize people and to communicate a common purpose. In 2017, freelance filmmaker Nathan Williams and a small group of organizers and activists started the Townhall Project to help people keep tabs on their elected officials. (8) Katie Fahey, a twenty-six-year-old Michigander and a small group of political novices started Voters Not Politicians, a group that fought gerrymandering in their state. They succeeded in getting a proposal on the ballot to change the state constitution to have a multi-partisan commission draw district lines instead of the legislature. It won with 60 percent of the vote. (9)
Consider how Black Lives Matter started in the wake of police shooting unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, 2014. Journalist Wesley Lowrey described the spontaneous way in which responses to that outrage sparked a new organization:
“Across the country, at a time when Twitter had yet to become the primary platform for news consumption, a thirty-one-year-old activist in Oakland named Alicia Garza penned a Facebook status that soon went viral. She called the status ‘A love letter to black people.’
‘The sad part is, there’s a section of America who is cheering and celebrating right now. and that makes me sick to my stomach. We GOTTA get it together y’all,’ she wrote, ‘stop saying we are not surprised. That’s a damn shame in itself. I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter. And I will continue that. stop giving up on black life.’
‘Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter,’ she concluded.
Her friend and fellow activist Patrisse Cullors found poetry in the post, extracted the phrase ‘black lives matter’ and reposted the status. Soon, the two women reached out to a third activist, Opal Tometi, who set up Tumblr and Twitter accounts under the slogan.” (10)
Black Lives Matter became a fully realized organization. It describes itself as “A chapter-based, member-led organization whose mission is to build local power and to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.” (11) #Black Lives Matter became a rallying cry across the country during the protests against police violence in 2020.
Political scientist Eitan Hersh points out that one important way to become politically engaged is to leave behind what he calls political hobbyism and get involved with a political party or campaign. Too many people are failing to take this obvious step. Just before an election, he asked a random sample of 1,000 Americans if they thought the Democratic Party or the Republican Party had the right ideas for improving life in the United States. About 30 percent of the respondents said Republicans, about 30 percent said Democrats, 30 percent said neither, and 10 percent said both. He then asked those who did have a party preference whether they were involved in any volunteer work to help advance those ideas. The result? “83 percent of the Democratic supporters said no, they didn’t participate in any volunteering. Ninety percent on the Republican side said no.” (12) Out of his sample of 1,000 Americans, only about 81 people were doing volunteer work with a political party or campaign.
Political parties and campaigns have many ways for you to get involved. Don’t leave it to others. Parties have numerous volunteer positions, from certifying the accounts to putting up yard signs, from being county-level leaders to people who staff phone banks. Parties are in particular need of developing a cadre of long-term volunteers who can be counted on to volunteer for a variety of projects and initiatives over time. This develops networks and deepens the party’s resources. Similarly, campaigns are fairly lean and rely on volunteers, although this need is more seasonal than that for parties. Canvassing door to door with a friend is a great way to spend the day, especially in the evening when you gather with others at a pub to give your tired feet a rest.
Finally, you could run for political office. People do it all the time. Why not you? A clerk at my grocery store ran for U.S. Representative. She lost but told me that it was an extremely valuable and empowering experience. Volunteering for a political party or a campaign is a great way to gain experience before you decide to run for office yourself. In addition, there are websites and books that can guide you through the process of running for local, state, or federal office. (13) Thanks to the Internet, you can even crowdsource funding for your campaign.
What If. . . ?
What if you became an elected official and you passed a law that granted all employees twenty-four hours per year of paid time-off for political activity? This time would be in addition to vacation time and would allow people to vote, participate in demonstrations, volunteer for campaigns, and attend political conventions. Americans have less time away from work than workers in most comparably wealthy countries. (14) Ensuring that we can take time off of work for political activity—but not eat away at our vacation time—would send an important message about what we value.
References
1. Howard Zinn, “Beyond Voting,” HowardZinn.org. October 19, 2016. Originally in the Boston Globein 1976.
2. Cambridge Dictionary.
3. Melissa Priebe, “The Social Media Sorting Hat: How Algorithms Drive Your Exposure to News and Politics,” The College of Communication Arts and Sciencesat Michigan State University. August 13, 2019.
4. Kirk Kristofferson, Katherine White, and John Peloza, “The Nature of Slacktivism: How the Social Observability of an Initial Act of Token Support Affects Subsequent Prosocial Action,” Journal of Consumer Research. April, 2014. Page 1163.
5. No Author, “Tips on Writing to Your Elected Officials.” aclu.org. No date.
6. No Author, “Writing Effective Op-Eds,” Duke UniversityCommunicator Resources. No date.
7. Bradford Fitch, “How Citizens Can Influence Congress at Townhall Meetings,” Roll Call. June 23, 2015.
8. Colby Itkowitz, “Have Something to Say to Your Member of Congress? These Guys are Making It Easier to Find Them,” Washington Post. February 17, 2017.
9. Riley Beggin, “Katie Fahey of Voters Not Politicians to Take Michigan Model National,” Bridge. March 31, 2019.
10. Wesley Lowry, “Black Lives Matter: Birth of a Movement,” The Guardian. January 17, 2017.
11. Black Lives Matter.
12. Eitan Hersh, Politics is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change. New York: Scribner, 2020. Page 141.
13. Runforoffice.org. June Diane Raphael and Kate Black, Represent: The Women’s Guide to Running for Office and Changing the World. New York: Workman Publishing, 2019. Amanda Litman, Run for Something: A Real-Talk Guide to Fixing the System Yourself. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017. Miles Parks and Chloee Weiner, “How to Run for Office,” NPR. October 17, 2019.
14. G. E. Miller, “The U.S. is the Most Overworked Developed Nation in the World,” 20 Something Finance. January 13, 2020. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/09%3A_Individual_Political_Behavior/9.02%3A_Chapter_58-_Beyond_Voting.txt |
“This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.”
“If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth . . . but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1)
What is Civil Disobedience?
In the mid-nineteenth century, Henry David Thoreau coined the term civil disobedience in his essay called On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Political philosopher John Rawls defined civil disobedience as “a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law, usually done with the aim of bringing about a change in the law or policies of the government.” (2) The law being violated does not have to be the law that people find objectionable. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. When the law requires or allows lunch counters in department stores be reserved for Whites only, and African Americans sit there anyway, they are directly violating the objectionable law. They may also stage an unpermitted demonstration on the street outside the department store, in which case they are violating city policies on demonstrations to call attention to the segregation laws surrounding places of public accommodation—in this case, Whites only lunch counters in department stores. Both actions are examples of civil disobedience.
When people practice civil disobedience, they must do so thoughtfully, knowing and accepting the consequences of their actions. When one knowingly and publicly violates the law, one must be prepared to go to jail. Indeed, groups engaging in civil disobedience will sometimes do so with the intent of overtaxing local police and judicial resources, because that very fact serves to highlight the importance of the cause.
The nonviolent “requirement” for civil disobedience is somewhat controversial in the field of political philosophy and among activists. Nonviolent direct action has a long and celebrated history. (3) Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. were famous for advocating and practicing strict nonviolent disobedience. However, others argue that strict nonviolence puts activists in a box. For example, political philosopher Robin Celikates has argued that slavish devotion to nonviolence is an unnecessary addition to the definition of civil disobedience. He argues for legitimate blockades, directly confronting security forces, and sabotaging facilities used for animal experiments or facilities built on disputed lands. In part, Celikates argues that these actions should be considered civil disobedience because state authorities have a tendency to pick and choose among political groups—labeling as violent any groups with whom they disagree, while not doing so for other groups. “Governments,” he writes, “pursue a strategy of divide and rule with regard to protest by portraying and celebrating certain forms of protest as good (good in terms of who protests, how and with what aim) and labeling and repressing other forms of protest – often those of marginalized groups – as violent, uncivil and criminal.” (4)
How Does One Decide When Civil Disobedience is Required?
The case for civil disobedience as a legitimate form of political behavior is easiest to make in dictatorships, oligarchies, theocracies, and other authoritarian regimes that don’t have institutions and practices intended to translate the will of the people into law and public policy. However, civil disobedience is also legitimate in places like the United States, which is characterized by attenuated democracy and oligarchic tendencies. There is always a tension in democracy between the desire to empower the majority and the classical liberal need to ensure that minority rights are not trampled. Sometimes the majority gets it wrong with respect to law or policy, and the political system is unresponsive to within-system efforts to fix the problem. However, these sorts of situations give rise to several dilemmas. How do we know when law or policy are sufficiently wrong? Who is allowed to make that determination? How do you know when you have sufficiently exhausted legal efforts to address the wrong? How does one decide when civil disobedience is required?
While confined in Birmingham City Jail in 1963 for civil disobedience targeting that city’s segregationist policies, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote a letter in response to a letter in local papers from eight local clergy who criticized the actions of the civil rights movement of which King was a leader. In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, King argued that unjust laws must be opposed, even if it means breaking the law. (5) He then made arguments regarding how to recognize just and unjust laws. He gave the following advice:
• “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or with the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.”
• “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.”
• “An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself.”
• “An unjust law is a code that is inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating because they did not have the unhampered right to vote.”
• “There are some instances when a law is just on its face and unjust in its application.”
What do you think of those arguments? Can you think of concrete examples of what might fit each definition of just and unjust? Do you find them equally applicable? Do you think reasonable people would be able to apply those rules easily, or might they disagree about them?
How long must we live with injustice before we act? Many would argue that we must give organizing, lobbying, voting, and other forms of political engagement a chance to fail before we opt for civil disobedience. Thoreau acknowledged that some forms of injustice can be waited out, giving them time to “wear smooth” in the ordinary course of political development. He was most concerned with laws and policies that turn us into unwilling instruments of oppression or injustice. Those, he argued, merited immediate civil disobedience. King and his colleagues in the civil rights movement were continually berated for pushing for too much change too quickly. He responded in the Letter from Birmingham Jail this way:
“Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was ‘well timed,’ according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the words ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’”
Prominent Examples of Civil Disobedience
There are many historically significant examples of civil disobedience, and there’s no rational way to decide which ones a college-educated person should know. Should you know about demonstrations blocking clinics that provide abortion services? Should you know about actions freeing animals being used in experiments? Yes, of course. To make matters worse, some prominent examples of civil disobedience don’t come from the American experience. Therefore, we’re going assert—without a defense—that any college-educated person should be familiar with the following examples of civil disobedience. Knowing these examples will help you situate contemporary examples you read about in the news–or your own actions–in a broader historical context.
Henry David Thoreau—As mentioned above Thoreau coined the term civil disobedience, and his essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience has certainly been one of the most globally influential pieces of political writing by an American who wasn’t a politician. Disgusted with slavery and the war with Mexican, which he saw as an unjust attempt to extend slavery to new territory, Thoreau refused to pay his Massachusetts poll tax and spent a night in jail. He said that prison was “the only house in a slave-state in which a free man can abide with honor.” His friends paid his tax without his consent and he was released. When his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson asked him why he had gone to jail, Thoreau reportedly replied “Why did you not?” (6)
The White Rose—In the 1930’s and 40’s, numerous people resisted the Nazi regime in Germany. People rose up in extermination and work camps, committed sabotage, tried to assassinate Adolph Hitler, and helped Jews and others escape persecution. One resistance movement was called the White Rose, which consisted mostly of young people who abhorred the regime’s racism and antisemitism as well as the destruction unleashed when Germany invaded western and eastern Europe. Among the leaders of the White Rose were siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl and other college students such as Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell, and Willi Graf. Kurt Huber, a Munich University professor, acted as a mentor to the group. The White Rose wrote graffiti on buildings in Munich—e.g., Hitler Mass Murder, Freedom—and printed thousands of leaflets that they secretly left in university buildings and elsewhere. On February 18, 1943, the Scholls were seen distributing leaflets at the university and Nazi authorities rounded up the group’s leadership. Hans SchollSophie Scholl, and Christoph Probst were found guilty of treason four days later and were beheaded. Schmorell, Graf, and Huber were also later executed, and ten other members were sentenced to prison. The British Royal Air Force got ahold of the last leaflet printed by the White Rose and dropped hundreds of thousands of copies of it over Germany. (7)
Gandhi—In 1893, while serving as a lawyer in South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi took up the cause of discrimination against Indians. On one occasion, Gandhi refused to move from a first-class railroad car when a White passenger objected. He was thrown off the train at the next stop. After the end of World War I, Gandhi emerged as a leader of India’s independence movement against colonial British rule. At the Massacre of Amritsar in 1919, colonial forces opened fire on unarmed demonstrators and killed 400 of them. Gandhi organized marches, boycotts, walkouts and tax protests. Gandhi’s most famous act of defiance was the Salt March of 1930. The British had imposed laws against Indians collecting or selling salt and had imposed a tax that fell heavily on poor Indians. Gandhi walked for twenty-four days over 240 miles from his home to the coast where he broke the law by gathering salt from evaporated seawater. Gandhi was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1930. India and Pakistan gained independence in 1947. Gandhi was assassinated in 1948 by Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse, who did not like Gandhi’s tolerance of Muslims. (8)
The American Civil Rights Movement—The civil rights movement engaged in coordinated political, legal, and nonviolent direct-action strategies to overcome housing segregation, educational segregation, voter discrimination, segregation of public accommodations, and a variety of other manifestations of racism. In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to move to the “colored section” of a public bus. She was not the first to engage in this kind of protest, but she became the most famous because her action stimulated a city-wide boycott of Montgomery, Alabama’s bus system by African Americans. The boycott’s organizers elected newcomer Martin Luther King, Jr. to coordinate and lead the effort. In another example, the Greensboro Four—Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil—all of whom were students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, sat down at a segregated lunch counter at a Woolworth’s store and refused to leave. Their actions spread to college towns across the South. (9)
Climate Strikes—In 2018, Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish student, started boycotting school on Fridays to call attention to the climate emergency. Her action blossomed into a worldwide #FridaysForFuture movement. Millions of students in 117 countries have participated in multiple iterations of this form of protest. The goal of the movement is to “Sound the alarm and show our politicians that business as usual is no longer an option.” (10) As if to show the students how clueless politicians were, British Prime Minister Theresa May criticized the protesters and said that each demonstration “increases teachers’ workloads and wastes lesson time.” (11) God forbid we take time away from school lessons to fight something as trivial as a climate crisis that threatens to disrupt human civilization. When she was asked to speak at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in 2019, Thunberg stuck to her values and made the crossing from Sweden to New York by sailboat rather than jet plane.
As you can see, the consequences of civil disobedience can range from missing school to losing one’s life. Civil disobedience has achieved many policy and law changes in human history, and it will always be in the political activist’s toolkit.
References
1. Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. 1849. Project Gutenburg.
2. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Pages 364-366.
3. Mark Kurlansky, Non-Violence: The History of a Dangerous Idea. New York: Random House, 2008.
4. Robin Celikates, “Democratizing Civil Disobedience,” Philosophy and Social Criticism. March, 2016. Page 3.
5. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail. April 16, 1963. Stanford UniversityMartin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.
6. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Page 156. Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018. Pages 246-247.
7. Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War. New York: Penguin Books, 2008. Page 628-629.
8. Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi: The Man, His People, and the Empire. University of California Press, 2008.
9. No author, “Greensboro Sit-in,” History.com. February 4, 2010.
10. Nives Dolsak and Aseem Prakash, “Climate Strikes: What They Accomplish and How They Could Have More Impact,” Forbes. September 14, 2019. Damian Carrington, “School Climate Strikes: 1.4 Million People Took Part, Say Campaigners,” The Guardian. March 19, 2019.
11. Alan McGuinness, “Theresa May Criticizes Pupils Missing School to Protest Over Climate Change,” Sky News. February 15, 2019. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/09%3A_Individual_Political_Behavior/9.03%3A_Chapter_59-_Civil_Disobedience.txt |
“Black men are about 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police over the life course than are white men . . . American Indian men are between 1.2 and 1.7 times more likely to be killed by police than are white men . . . Latino men are between 1.3 and 1.4 times more likely to be killed by police than are white men . . .”
—Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito (1)
“Others Take Notice! First and Last Warning!”
—Note pinned to the body of union organizer Frank Little, who was found in 1917 hanging from a railroad trestle in Butte, Montana (2)
Three Forms of Political Violence
A Swedish sociologist named Johan Galtung made important contributions to our understanding of political violence. You should be familiar with Galtung’s three forms of violence that can characterize any political system.
Direct violence is fairly self-explanatory. It refers to a specific destructive act by a definable actor that limits the bodily or mental potential of the persons who are the object of the act. Murder, rape, assault and the like are examples of direct personal violence, as are forms of torture and verbal abuse that have physical as well as mental effects. American history has been rife with direct violence: assassinations, bombings, lynching, riots, military campaigns, and the like. Police violence is direct violence.
Structural violence refers to the same limitations of bodily or mental potential, but that result from the way political, social, or economic systems are organized, instead of via direct action by a specific individual or group. Often, there is no readily definable actor in structural violence, but people are nevertheless being hurt, killed, or mentally anguished. It’s called structural violence because violent outcomes appear to be built into the structure of the system; people are hurt because the system operates the way it does. Galtung provided some examples of structural violence: “Thus, when one husband beats his wife there is a clear case of personal [direct] violence, but when one million husbands keep one million wives in ignorance, there is structural violence. Correspondingly, in a society where life expectancy is twice as high in the upper class as in the lower classes, violence is exercised even if there are no concrete actors one can point to directly attacking others, as when one person kills another.” (3)
Cultural violence refers to “those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence,” religion, ideology, language, art, and science, “that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence.” (4) The range of possibilities here is very wide, but you might recognize the following examples:
• Media censorship or self-censorship that minimizes the brutality of war by refusing to show certain images or describe certain events. The same can be said of media coverage of mass shootings, with the media always stopping short of showing bodies riddled with gaping bullet holes.
• The constant association of the words “patriot” and “hero” with military figures, while those terms are almost never associated with anti-war demonstrators, children striking for environmental awareness, or teachers.
• Ideological assertions that poverty and significant inequality are natural.
• Religious exhortations to kill or shun the enemies of God.
• Educational institutions that go out of their way to avoid having students grapple with issues such as capitalism as practiced in the United States, religion, sexual orientation, environmentalism, race, class or gender, thereby blinding students to the realities of direct and structural violence associated with these dimensions of human existence.
• Constantly suppressing alternatives to economic or political realities. Media drumbeat that the status quois really the only way to arrange our businesses, our politics, and our society.
• Media glorification of “tough cops” who use violence.
Galtung referred to direct violence as a discrete event, structural violence as a process, and cultural violence as a permanence that legitimized and rendered acceptable the other two.
The Overall Pattern of Political Violence in American History
The difficulty in understanding political violence in America’s past and present is that it seems like random noise. It is not. When we focus our attention on the three forms of violence in American political history, a fairly clear ideological pattern emerges. Remember that in the chapter about the Supreme Court as an ideological actor, we talked about conservatism and progressivism. Conservatism is an ideology that defends existing privilege and power. It’s worth repeating political scientist Corey Robin’s summation: “Conservatism is the theoretical voice of . . . animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, and agency the prerogative of the elite.” (5) Progressivism, on the other hand, is an ideology that believes in using the power of government to help all people live full lives, solve social problems, and counter the power of business interests. It is an emancipatory ideology in that it hopes to disrupt established hierarchies, promote equal rights and opportunity, and create a society that is less economically and politically unequal. Conservatives and progressives oppose each other because the progressive project is directly opposed to the conservative project.
It’s plain from examining America’s past and present that political violence is much more frequently used to further conservative aims than progressive ones. Time and time again, those with power who feel their privileges are threatened have gone to drastic lengths to aggressively defend their position. They have repeatedly engaged in direct violence and benefited from structural violence that keeps subordinated people in their place. They have relied on assassination, bombing, lynching, rioting, military or police assault, purging people from their jobs, violence-first policing techniques, and mass incarceration. Progressive groups, on the other hand, are far more likely to march in the streets for civil rights, hold anti-war demonstrations in front of public buildings, tie themselves to the White House gates to protest the lack of women’s suffrage, try to peacefully block construction of nuclear power plants, and other similar actions.
To be sure, progressives have sometimes employed violence to further their goals. Consider that some leftist groups like the Weather Underground or the Black Liberation Army bombed ROTC buildings on colleges campuses as well as other buildings they associated with American imperialism and racism. Usually, these groups took pains to detonate their bombs when they thought the buildings were empty, so relatively few people were killed by the thousands of bombings that took place over several decades. (6) Altogether, this left-wing bombing campaign killed far fewer people than did Timothy McVeigh’s one bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City—an act that was specifically intended to kill many people and start an uprising. It is also true that some environmentalist and animal rights groups have destroyed property to further their causes. David Helvarg argues that such violence has more than been matched by violence directed at environmentalists. (7)
Examples of Direct, Structural and Cultural Violence
Let’s review several prominent examples of how direct, structural, and cultural violence interact to maintain privilege and sustain existing power hierarchies. Keep in mind that what follows is necessarily superficial because this is a survey text of American politics that has to cover many topics. These are just a few examples among many we could have explored. Imagine the direct, structural, and cultural violence that for years kept women in subordinate positions to men, and still does, despite centuries of legal, social, and cultural progress. Consider the direct violence inflicted upon children separated from their undocumented parents and put in holding cells, and the structural violence of an economic system that allows agribusinesses to pull low skilled workers into the country in the first place, only to terrorize them with harassment, precarious employment, exposure to toxic chemicals, and the ever-present threat of deportation. (8) Reluctantly setting aside those and many other cases, let’s look at three main examples.
White Nationalism
If one were to take a cynical view of American political history, it would be tempting to sum it up as follows: A group of White merchants and plantation owners got together to establish that all men are created equal, and then spent the ensuing centuries proving to people of color that they didn’t really mean to include them in their understanding of universal equality. In fact, whenever people of color demanded that we actually live up to our founding principles, Whites in positions of economic and political power acted to violently suppress those demands.
Often, maintaining White power and privilege took the form of direct violence. America’s history of lynching is a good example. Lynching refers to the extra judicial killing by persons or a mob that is incited to take the law into its own hands. From 1882 to 1968, there were 4,743 documented lynchings in the United States, and nearly 73 percent of them were of Black people. (9) Surely, many more people were lynched in the period from the end of the Civil War to 1882, and there are probably some lynchings in the later period that did not get recorded. Or consider the targeted assassinations and bombings that were directed at civil rights leaders. In 1963, a White supremacist Klansman assassinated Medgar Evers, the Mississippi Field Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Evers was ambushed and shot in the back as he walked from his car to his house. He died in front of his two small children. The assassin, Byron De la Beckwith, was twice acquitted by all White juries—the fact that African Americans were routinely excluded from juries is a great example of structural violence—and congratulated by the state governor. The case was finally reopened 30 years later, and De la Beckwith was convicted of murder in 1994. (10) Let’s stay in Mississippi and remember the 1964 killings of Andrew GoodmanJames Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, three young men who were working on voter registration, education, and civil rights when they were stopped for speeding and taken to the Neshoba County sheriff’s office. They disappeared after that. After six weeks of searching—during which the bodies of nine (!) Black men were found in the nearby woods and swamps—the bodies of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were found buried in an earthen dam. Eighteen White men were indicted, and eventually seven were convicted and served time. (11)
These examples of White supremacist violence are but a small sampling of the broader universe of such actions that range from colonial times to the present. Consider the tragic example of the White coup in Wilmington, North Carolina. White supremacists, fed up that Wilmington had developed into a prominent example of a successful mixed-race community, stormed through the town on November 10, 1898, murdering and beating people, destroying property, and forcing progressive people to flee. All together, the mob of Whites killed at least 60 Black men. (12) And we should not forget that the threat of violence can be just as effective. Hateful graffiti; nooses put near houses, dorm rooms, or school lockers; and racist chants by large groups serve to put people of color on notice that they should not venture into spaces and roles that “belong” to Whites.
The effects of direct violence and threats are reinforced through structural violence. The school to prison pipeline, for example, affects young people of color more than it does Whites. This pipeline refers to the way in which students are identified as struggling or disruptive in school and funneled out of schools to juvenile detention and criminal justice systems. Facing disproportionately more suspensions, expulsions, and arrests in schools, and often excluded from honors or college-track courses, students of color are more likely to enter juvenile justice systems, which further limits their opportunities, often resulting in their incarceration as adults. (13)
Or consider another example. The United States has a problem with its militarized approach to policing, which seems to be a function of three things. America is a heavily armed society, with more personal firearms than there are people to carry them. This means that police have to go into every domestic violence situation, every robbery at a convenience store, and every traffic stop with the knowledge that the person they encounter could very well be armed. The second factor is that war metaphors have taken over our cultural understanding of the relationship between the police and society. Since the late 1960s, our politicians have led us into waging twin wars on crime and drugs, and our movies are rife with scenes of uncivilized criminals kept at bay only through the armed response of police. Finally, America’s imperialist and warlike approach to global relations has ensured a steady stream of military equipment and tactics that are made available to police forces around the country. The militarized approach to American policing is a plague that falls on all of us, but disproportionately on people of color. As the writer Mychal Denzel Smith argued in his analysis of a midnight SWAT raid in Detroit in which a seven-year-old girl named Aiyana Stanley-Jones was shot while she slept, “Part of what it means to be Black in America now is watching your neighborhood become the training ground for our increasingly militarized police units.” (14) In an interesting study in the Journal of the National Medical Association, researchers found that state-level structural racism—as reflected in residential segregation and disparities in incarceration rates, educational attainment, employment, and economic indicators—is directly related to the prevalence of police shootings of unarmed Black suspects. The authors concluded that “For every ten-point increase in the state racism index, the Black-White disparity ratio of police shooting rates of people not known to be armed increased by 24%.” (15)
Colonists Over Indigenous Peoples
As noted toward the beginning of this text, America was founded by European colonists who continued the colonial expansion until it consumed the continent. No one knows for sure how many native people inhabited the Americas before the Europeans came. Estimates range from a low of 1.8 million people to a high of more than 100 million people. Prior to 1492, the Americas possessed sophisticated cities, many agricultural settlements,and uncounted nomadic groupings. In a historical blink of an eye, those civilizations and populations were decimated. By 1900, the population of Native Americans had dropped to around half a million. This disaster destroyed more than people. As Charles Mann has written, “Languages, prayers, hopes, habits, and dreams—entire ways of life hissed away like steam.” (16)
The majority of this assault came in the form of pandemic disease: Native American populations had scant defenses against smallpox, typhoid, bubonic plague, influenza, mumps, measles, whooping cough, cholera, malaria, and scarlet fever. The remaining assault took the form of direct and structural violence, justified then and now by cultural violence.
As with our discussion of direct violence against civil rights leaders, we can only touch on a couple of illustrative examples here. Regardless of whether you look at New England, the South, the Ohio Valley and the Great Plains, or the West, the time period from the early 1600s to the official closing of the American frontier in 1900 was marked by assaults and treachery on the part of colonial invaders and counter attacks and strategic retreats on the part of indigenous people. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 must surely go down as one of the most aggressively imperialistic laws in American history. The Act euphemistically sought to “provide for an exchange of lands with the Indians residing in any of the states or territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi.” (17) Many tribes were peacefully removed from their lands within existing states and pushed west, only to face pressures again when the frontier expanded westward. The experience of nations like the Cherokee, the Seminole, and other tribes who opted not to trade their land indicated that the polite language of the Removal Act was a front for naked aggression. According to President Andrew Jackson, the Removal Act promised what Adolph Hitler would later refer to in the context of Nazi Germany as lebensraum: Indian removal, he said, “will place a dense and civilized population in large tracts of country now occupied by a few savage hunters.” Cherokee leaders addressed the United States and said in no uncertain terms that “We wish to remain on the land of our fathers. We have a perfect and original right to remain without interruption or molestation.” In what became known as the Trail of Tears, up to 100,000 indigenous people—men, women, and children—were removed from their lands in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama and force marched during the winter of 1838-39 to new lands west of the Mississippi River. About half of the Cherokee, Muskogee, and Seminole perished along the way, and about 15 percent of the Chickasaws and Choctaws also died during the march. (18)
The progression of colonial settlement across the continent was marked by a series of massacres and battles. Starting in 1539 with a massacre in what was to become Florida to the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890, European-Americans perpetrated hundreds of attacks on unarmed indigenous people who, in turn, committed atrocities of their own as their territory and way of life disappeared under the colonial onslaught. (19) Consider just two of these events. In November 1864, a group of Arapahoe and Cheyenne camped along Sand Creek in eastern Colorado, thinking they were under the protection of soldiers at Fort Lyon. Instead, Major Scott Anthony and Colonel John Chivington planned an attack on the peaceful encampment. When they learned of the plans, some soldiers such as Captain Silas Soule, Lieutenant Joseph Cramer, and Lieutenant James Connor protested, saying that “It would be murder in every sense of the word” and a violation of pledges of safety that had been given to the tribes. The Sand Creek Massacre was a war crime, pure and simple. The encampment set no watch and was attacked by 700 soldiers at first light while its occupants slept. The cavalry, led by Chivington, killed 133 people, 80 percent of whom were women and children. Many were scalped or otherwise brutalized. (20)
Nearly two years before, the largest massacre of indigenous people occurred in what would later be southern Idaho. The Bear River Massacre in January of 1863 had a familiar story. After thousands of predominantly Mormon pioneers entered the area, the prospects of the local Shoshone people looked increasing desperate. Unable to feed themselves, the Shoshone ended up dependent on food donations from Mormon settlers. After a Native American attack on some miners, Colonel Patrick Connor led a group of volunteers from Fort Douglas to an encampment of Shoshone along the Bear River. Colonel Connor appeared to have made his decision to attack the Shoshone absent any definitive proof of their involvement in the attacks and with the full intention of not taking prisoners. The Shoshone had taken some defensive measures, but their weaponry was clearly inferior, and they were desperately short of ammunition. The troops surrounded the encampment and attacked at dawn on January 29. After a four-hour battle, the infantry and cavalry almost completely annihilated the Indian encampment. Connor, who was promoted to General after the battle, estimated that his men had killed between 250 and 300 men, women, and children—the deadliest massacre of Native Americans in U.S. history—and one observer claimed that as many as 265 women and children were among the dead. Visiting the site five years after the massacre, a Deseret News reporter wrote that “The bleached skeletons of scores of noble red men still ornament the grounds.” (21)
In addition to direct violence, the structural and cultural violence against indigenous Americans has been impressive in its impact. Even without the massacres and battles, it appears that the very machinery of colonization would have doomed them anyway. The colonial mechanism worked like this: Backed by military forces, settlers increasingly pushed into lands claimed and not claimed by the United States. Disputes between settlers and indigenous people inevitably arose and served as evidence that the Native Americans were savages. Sayings such as General Philip Sheridan’s “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead” typified the culture of the colonists. Pushed to ever marginal lands and reservations, the way of life of one tribe after another changed forever. As the invaders took the lands of Native Americans by theft, deception, and treaty, they also took steps to establish property rights and the rule of law—for themselves and their descendants—in the Wild West. (22) Native children were shipped off to American Indian boarding schools, the goal of which was to destroy indigenous language and culture, as kids were taken from their parents and assimilated into Anglo culture. Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, director for 25 years of one of these schools, famously said that his goal was to “Kill the Indian, save the man.” According to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, “By 1926, nearly 83 percent of Indian school-age children were attending boarding schools.” (23) Meanwhile, communities of indigenous people were starved of capital and broad economic development by the logic of capitalism, condemning many of them to cycles of poverty, crime, ill health, and social dysfunction. Only the courageous and dedicated indigenous people who know this history have saved the remains of their cultural heritage.
Suppression of Working People
Considerable violence has been and continues to be directed at workers who refuse to take on the roles elites want them to play in America’s brand of capitalism—which is to say that violence is targeted at workers who want to organize together, demand better pay and working conditions, and who want a greater voice in the economy.
The unremitting direct violence against working men and women in American history is not something typically taught in high school. Indeed, I was not taught much about the nature of the relationship between workers and capital. I was not taught, for example, that a president as revered as Abraham Lincoln warned against giving capitalists too much power. In his 1861 State of the Union letter to Congress, Lincoln took time away from addressing the outbreak of the Civil War (!) to make publicly known his fear that capital was threatening to usurp labor as the primary consideration of government. He said “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” He then issued a warning to working men that they should not surrender “a political power which they already possess, and which if surrendered will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them till all of liberty shall be lost.” (24) Sociologist James Loewen confirmed in his study of school textbooks that despite the fact that “social class is probably the single most important variable in society,” American history textbook “treatments of events in labor history are never anchored in any analysis of social class.” (25)
The United States had a de facto civil war that lasted 100 years between the capitalist class and workers who tried to organize to better defend their interests. Let’s look at a couple of examples of direct violence to maintain the interests of elites versus workers. The first is the company tactic of strike busting when workers resorted to strikes because corporate owners would not negotiate or would not make concessions on wages or working conditions. In the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century, companies often used their own guards or hired outsiders to beat and harass strikers. They hired what striking workers called scabs to break strikes. A scab is a worker—often one who was unemployed or who had no prior connection to the company—who is willing to cross a picket line and work. Sometimes strike busting got way out of hand. Consider the Ludlow Massacre. In 1913 thousands of Colorado miners went on strike for better wages and working conditions as well as in protest of the feudal conditions they suffered in company-owned towns. When labor organizer Mother Jones came to Colorado to support the miners, she was arrested and deported from the state. Evicted from their shacks by the mining companies, thousands of miners and their families set up shanty towns in the Colorado hills. The largest of these tent settlements was at a place called Ludlow. On the morning of April 20, 1914, the National Guard—called in by Colorado’s governor at the behest of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Corporation, which was owned by the Rockefeller family—opened up on the camp with machine guns and then set fire to the tents. Twenty-six people were killed, including eleven children and two women. More violence followed. In total, sixty-six people were killed. No one was ever even indicted for the crime. (26)
You should be aware of two times the federal government stepped in to further the interests of the elites versus the ideological left wing. Elites were terrified at the prospect of a successful social and political revolution in the United States. To thwart this possibility, the government engaged in two Red Scares—one after each world war. We can define a Red Scare as a hyped fear of socialists and communists that is used to silence their voices as well as any progressives or leftists. In the three years following the 1917 Russian Revolution, government leaders created a Red Scare and went after socialists of all stripes. Aided by passage of the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1918, “Hundreds of Socialist leaders and other radicals were convicted of sedition and antiwar activities, and party newspapers across the country were suppressed and barred from the mails.” (27) Attorney General Alexander Palmer, fearing insurrection from leftist radicals, directed a series of raids—called Palmer Raids—that rounded up around 10,000 Communists, Socialists, and Anarchists. Over 500 of them were deported. Another Red Scare took place from 1947 to 1957 and is most closely associated with Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin. Earlier, in 1940, Congress had passed the Smith Act, which made it a crime to “knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise or teach the duty, necessity, desirability or propriety of overthrowing the Government of the United States or of any State by force or violence, or for anyone to organize any association which teaches, advises or encourages such an overthrow, or for anyone to become a member of or to affiliate with any such association.” Then, in 1947, Democratic President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9835, which established loyalty oaths for government employees. The House Un-American Activities Committee issued subpoenas and hauled people in to testify about their political affiliations or to rat out their co-workers and colleagues. Thousands of people—from blue-collar union workers to Hollywood stars and writers—lost their jobs. McCarthyism had a chilling effect on people advocating leftist ideas such as universal healthcare.
The civil war between capital and labor quieted somewhat after passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, which allows workers to organize and prevents unfair practices by corporations against union activity. After World War II ended, corporations lobbied for limitations on union practices, and Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which requires unions to honor existing contracts without striking, forbids unions from secondary strikes, general strikes, and wildcat strikes, and places other restrictions on unions. These two pieces of legislation, more than anything, reduced the temperature of the civil war between corporate owners and workers. Nevertheless, this struggle still bubbles below the surface of media attention. Workers are fired when they try to organize—although the company invariably cites a different reason for terminating the employee—and companies threaten to move production elsewhere unless they get concessions from workers. (28) And then there’s wage theft, or when “a worker doesn’t get fully paid for the work they’ve done. Often employers pull this off by paying for less than the number of hours worked, not paying for legally required overtime, or stealing tips.” Company wage theft against hourly workers happens regularly and amounts to nearly the value of all other property theft combined each year. (29)
Occasionally, the media accidentally lets the cat out of the bag and acknowledges that the interests of the elites who own the economy are at odds with the workers who produce the value that gets skimmed off by elites in the form of profits and dividends. One of these accidental revelations occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. On the April 9, 2020 edition of a CNBC show about the economy, the network accidentally juxtaposed the exuberant title of the segment “The Dow’s Best Week Since 1938” with a crawling newsfeed at the bottom of the screen about the news of the day, which said “More than 16 million Americans have lost jobs in 3 weeks.” (30) Wall Street was confident that recent stimulus packages heavily tilted to big business and financial institutions, quantitative easing, and low oil prices meant that they would weather the storm nicely. The high-flying investors had already priced the suffering of millions of low paid workers into their investment strategies.
Cultural violence continually justifies our rigged economic system and serves to deflect attention away from its inequities. Have you heard this joke? A wealthy capitalist, a worker, and an immigrant are sitting around a table. The capitalist has a plate in front of them with nine cookies on it. The worker has a plate in front of them with one cookie on it. The immigrant’s plate is empty. The capitalist says to the worker, “Be careful, the immigrant is going to try to steal your cookie.” Some version of this scenario plays out in America’s news media all the time. If workers are poor, the cause must be immigrants, foreigners, technological forces, poor education, people of a different race, or their own character flaws. It couldn’t possibly be the result of the particular way that we’ve set up our version of a market economy that gives ninety percent of the benefits to the top ten percent of families. Because if it were, we could change those rules—and it’s important to elites that ordinary Americans think that the way things are currently done is the only way they could possibly be done. To cite an example of what they do not want you to consider, we couldn’t possibly establish incorporation and tax rules that favored worker-owned cooperatives. But, of course we could, and many of us might be better off if we did just that. (31)
Final Thoughts
Political violence is a component of corporate and elite power, but we should recognize that violence has also been used by ordinary Americans who fight for change or who are so frustrated that they lash out. Think about the Donald Trump supporter who was arrested for sending explosive devices to prominent Democrats, or the Bernie Sanders supporter who opened fire on Republican congressmen who were practicing for a baseball game. (32) These are certainly disturbing events, and violence should be condemned whenever it happens regardless of target. The point of this chapter, however, is that the whole toolbox of political violence as described by Galtung is really only available to elites who have the means, motive, and opportunity to employ direct, structural, and cultural violence to achieve political ends. Their particular style of violence has the effect of nullifying direct threats to their rule, fragmenting class consciousness, deflecting attention toward red herrings, extracting income and wealth from ordinary people, and preventing full realization of how rigged the economic system has become.
References
1. Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito, “Risk of Being Killed by Police Use of Force in the United States, By Age, Race-Ethnicity, and Sex,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. August 20, 2019.
2. Rory Carroll, “The Mysterious Lynching of Frank Little: Activist Who Fought Inequality and Lost,” The Guardian. September 21, 2016.
3. Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research. 6(3): 1969. Page 171.
4. Johan Galtung, “Cultural Violence,” Journal of Peace Research. 27(3): August, 1990. Page 291.
5. Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pages 7-8.
6. Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence. New York: Penguin Books, 2016.
7. David Helvarg, The War Against the Greens. New York: Random House, 1994.
8. Ariel Ramchandani, “There’s a Sexual-Harassment Epidemic on America’s Farms,” The Atlantic. January 29, 2018.
9. No author, “History of Lynching,” NAACP. No date.
10. No author, “The Medgar Evers Assassination,” PBS Newshour. April 18, 2002.
11. No author, “Murders in Mississippi,” PBS American Experience. No date. Stephen Smith, “’Mississippi Burning’ Murders Resonate 50 Years Later,” CBS News. June 20, 2014.
12. David Zucchino, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. New York: Grove Press, 2020.
13. Anthony Nocella, II, Priya Parmar, and David Stovall, editors, From Education to Incarceration: Dismantling the School to Prison Pipeline. Second edition. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2018. Monique Morris, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools. New York: New Press, 2015. Christopher A. Mallett, The School to Prison Pipeline: A Comprehensive Assessment. New York: Springer Publishing, 2015.
14. Mychal Denzel Smith, “Why Aiyana Jones Matters,” The Nation. June 19, 2013.
15. Michael Siegel, et al., “The Relationship Between Structural Racism and Black-White Disparities in Fatal Police Shootings at the State Level,” Journal of the National Medical Association. April, 2018. Pages 106-116.
16. Charles C. Mann, “1491,” The Atlantic. March, 2002.
17. Text of the Removal Act, dated May 28, 1830. Mount Holyoke College.
18. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2014. Pages 110-114. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Pages 137-142.
19. William M. Osborne, The Wild Frontier: Atrocities During the American-Indian War from Jamestown Colony to Wounded Knee. New York: Random House, 2000. Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the Californian Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873. Yale: Yale University Press, 2016.
20. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2014. Pages 137-38. Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1970. Pages 83-94.
21. Brigham D. Madsen, The Shoshoni Frontier and the Bear River Massacre. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1985. Estimate of 265 women and children killed is on pages 189-190. Deseret Newsreporter quote on page 194.
22. Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill, The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.
23. National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1995. Ward Churchill, Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2004.
24. Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union Address. December 3, 1861. PresidentialRhetoric.com.
25. James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Pages 202-203.
26. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. Pages 354-357. Scott Martelle, Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008.
27. Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Wolfe Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. Page 244.
28. Michael Sainato, “’It’s Because We Were Union Members’: Boeing Fires Workers Who Organized.” The Guardian. May 3, 2019. David Welch, “GM Squeezed \$118 Million From Its Ohio Workers, Then Closed the Plant,” Forbes. March 29, 2019.
29. Luke Darby, “Is Your Employer Stealing From You?” GQ. November 8, 2019.
30. Sky Palma, “Viral Screenshot of Jim Cramer’s ‘Mad Money’ Shows ‘Everything That’s Wrong With America,’” Rawstory. April 13, 2020.
31. Soheil Saneei, “Worker Cooperatives Popular, Will Move America Forward,” Democracy at Work. December 5, 2018. Michelle Chen, “Worker Cooperatives are More Productive Than Normal Corporations,” The Nation. March 28, 2016.
32. CBS News, “Cesar Sayoc, Package Bomb Suspect, is a Florida Trump Supporter,” October 27, 2018. Jose Paglieri, “Suspect in Congressional Shooting was Bernie Sanders Supporter, Strongly Anti-Trump.” CNN. June 15, 2017. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/09%3A_Individual_Political_Behavior/9.04%3A_Chapter_60-_Political_Violence.txt |
“Forget politics as you’ve come to see it, as electoral contests between Democrats and Republicans. Think power. The underlying contest is between a small minority who have gained power over the system and the vast majority who have little or none.”
—Robert Reich (1)
Pay Attention to Social Class
Americans are not used to thinking in terms of social class. There are a couple of reasons for that. For one thing, social class is not a concept about which social scientists agree. Social class refers to a group of people in a society with similar levels of income, wealth, education, and type of job. That’s a deceptively simple definition that hides a truly messy concept that can be difficult to operationalize. In order to sidestep the mess, we tend to simplify it by dividing the population into income quintiles—the top 20 percent of income earners, the next 20 percent of income earners, and so forth. At the time of this writing, a simple class structure for America looks like this:
• \$233,895 Average family income: Upper class—Top 20 percent
• \$101,570 Average family income: Upper middle class—Next 20 percent
• \$63,572 Average family income: Middle class—Middle 20 percent
• \$37,293 Average family income: Lower middle class or working poor—Next 20 percent
• \$13,775 Average family income: Lower class, the working poor, or the precariously employed—Bottom 20 percent (2)
Notice the disparity in family income. Even this breakdown of the numbers under-represents the gross disparities in America’s class structure, because the top 20 percent category has an astronomical upper end. In 2018, a small group of 211 families—out of 167 million families in the United States—each earned more than \$50 million a year. That’s just their wages and doesn’t count their investment income. (3) The prospects for American families have diverged. The incomes of the top 20 percent of families have grown faster in the past 50 years than have the incomes of all the families below them, and incomes of the top 5 percent of families have grown even faster still. (4)
Another consideration is that our media and schools go out of their way to portray America as a classless society—as if such a thing ever existed. It’s a form of capitalist propaganda that is very effective. Richard Reeves has written that America is “a society that likes to think of itself as classless—or, more precisely, one in which everyone likes to think of themselves as middle class.” For decades, more than 80 percent of Americans have described themselves as middle class. (5) No matter how far down the economic ladder and no matter how difficult upward mobility is in this country, many Americans see themselves as soon-to-be-rich. The truth is that Americans have much less of a chance of climbing the economic ladder than do people in other wealthy democracies. (6)
Paying attention to social class is important because Robert Reich’s quote at the start of this chapter is spot on. The struggle today has become one in which the upper class is accruing wealth and political power at the expense of the lower classes. Focusing on class also unites Americans across our racial, gender, and religious divisions. Gross inequality of wealth and political power is not a natural phenomenon; it is created by the way we structure our economic and political systems. Outrage at our current state of inequality does not mean that anyone is arguing for complete equality. Such allegations are an example of the reductive fallacy. A vigilant citizen in an attenuated democracy simply argues for less economic inequality and for greater political power for middle- and lower-class Americans who make up the majority of the population.
Uphold Democratic Values
To be a citizen in an attenuated democracy, one must continually uphold democratic values. To begin with, citizens need to be vigilant about two things: All adult citizens should have an equal ability to vote, and all ballots should be counted. Attempts at voter suppression, voter fraud, and election fraud must be resisted any time they occur. But there are other values that are essential to a democratic republic, and citizens need to vigorously defend them. Specifically, citizens should do the following:
Embrace Tolerance Except of Ideas and Practices That are Themselves Intolerant or Destructive—Tolerance is a willingness to accept behavior and beliefs that are different from your own, although you might not agree with or approve of them. In a diverse republic such as the United States, it is commonplace for one group of people to engage in behaviors and espouse ideas that are strange to other people. As long as those behaviors or ideas are not destructive and do not attempt to negate the possibility of others’ innocuous behaviors or ideas, they should be tolerated. Sometimes, however, we encounter ideas and behaviors that are themselves intolerant or destructive. Democracies do not need to tolerate people and groups that are intolerant, that preach hatred, or that practice violence.
Uphold science and fact—Defenders of democracy would do well to also defend science. Celebrated science writer Timothy Ferris has argued that the democratic revolution that began in the eighteenth century “was sparked . . . by the scientific revolution, and that science continues to foster political freedom today.” He argues that both science and democracy require freedom of speech, travel, and association, and that scientific skepticism is a perfect companion to democracy but is “corrosive to authoritarianism.” (7) Science and democracy are equally dependent on facts. Unfortunately, facts are under assault in the United States. The public sphere has intentionally been flooded with so much bullshit and so many conspiracy theories that we face what David Roberts calls an epistemic crisis. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy dedicated to understanding “how we know things and what it means for something to be true or false, accurate or inaccurate.” An epistemic crisis is when a society cannot agree “who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know—what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening.” (8) Not only do we need to believe in facts, but we have to believe in the processes—e.g., science, good journalism, public investigations, testimony, academic debates—that are likely to produce facts. We must also turn away from processes—e.g., talk radio bloviating, people passing as journalists who do not adhere to journalistic standards, pseudoscience, deferring to corporate-funded shills—that are leading us to a new Dark Age.
Defend the Rule of Law—We’ve talked about the rule of law, which refers to the related ideas that no one is above the law; that all of us are equally subject to the laws that we collectively make together and that decisions are reached by following pre-established procedures. It is essential that citizens demand that elected and appointed office holders as well as government staff uphold the rule of law in all that they do. This is especially important in crisis or heated situations, when people most often argue to set aside the rules. Defenders of the rule of law know that cronyism, favoritism, nepotism, and corruption have no place in a functioning democracy.
Defend Institutions—Democracy and the rule of law require robust, professional institutions upon which people can depend. This encompasses governmental institutions like Congress, the presidency, the federal courts, and the myriad of federal agencies that do the work of the government. It also includes other societal institutions like colleges and universities, legitimate news media, and churches. A politician who labels news outlets as “enemies of the people” are only doing so because they wish to undermine factual but critical information about them or their administration. They are going after the free press as a vital institution in a democracy. Historian Timothy Snyder suggests that you “choose an institution you care about—a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union—and take its side.” (9)
Take an Interest in Your Congress Members
Remember that your elected officials are public servants. They should be serving the broad public good. Take an interest in them. The first step is to find their websites and bookmark them on your browser. Typically, you can just search for their name and location—e.g., Ben McAdams, House of Representatives—and then make sure you are getting Representative McAdams’ official website. The official website of each office holder will have a contact form in which you can paste a letter. Typically, they will also have a calendar of townhall meetings back in their state or district. You should also check the Town Hall Project. The website of the U. S. House of Representatives has a list of representatives. From that site, you can see which representative is sitting on which standing committees. The same thing applies to researching the U. S. Senate and its standing committees. If you want to officially confirm how your representative or senator voted, you can go to the Congress.gov site and look it up. Note, however, that it helps to have some distinctive keywords for the measure that interests you or have the number of the bill, like H.R. 1158 or S. 1332. Another place to look for rollcall votes in Congress is the Govtrack site. You should also see which individuals and organized interests are funding your elected officials’ campaigns. The Federal Election Commission collects information such as this, but the Center for Responsive Politics makes it more accessible at its Open Secrets website. From the menu there, you can browse through recent congressional and presidential campaigns and learn a great deal about who finances our politicians.
Inform Yourself
One can always choose to be an uninformed participant in a democratic polity. That would be a shame, for you run a high risk of being misled or worse, acting against your own interests. Your first step is to get a formal education. If you are getting a college degree, make sure that it has a robust general education component that will give you broad knowledge in the liberal arts and sciences, by which we mean arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. When you finish with your college degree—or if you don’t have one—you have to continue to educate yourself. Focus on American history, political issues, and the political process. Get in the habit of reading books as well as articles on those topics.
Your second step is to avail yourself of credible media sources that report on politics, history, economics, and society. You should also read well-written political commentary and watch political documentaries. The first thing to note about your possibilities for media sources are that they are distributed along an ideological continuum. The second thing to note is that people disagree about the political leanings of various publications. One recommendation that might help you is to read widely from sources that differ in their ideological positions on issues and events. There’s no such thing as “reading too much” when it comes to informing yourself. You can find media bias guides online that will help you understand the general ideological perspectives of major publications. AllSides has one, as does Ad Fontes Media.
Understand Political Language
Political language is such a minefield that it’s difficult to give cogent advice about how we might approach it. As citizens of an attenuated democracy, we have to be on guard against powerful people using language to get what they want at the expense of ordinary people. We have to avoid being manipulated into joining their project. Here are four things you should learn to spot in political language:
1. In his essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote that “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” (10) People in power often defend the indefensible by using euphemisms when they speak. A euphemism is when a person substitutes “an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant.” (11) During war, the military uses the euphemism “collateral damage,” which sounds like maybe a tank accidentally bumped a farmer’s shed. In fact, collateral damage typically means that a military strike killed and maimed innocent men, women, and children. Political language on all sides of the ideological spectrum is full of euphemisms. Try to cut through euphemisms so you understand the reality of what people are saying.
2. Beware also of big lies and obvious lies, repeatedly told. In Mein KampfAdolph Hitler articulated “the sound principle that the magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility,” and that people “more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one.” (12) The same can be said of an obvious lie. When a politician tells a big or an obvious lie—particularly when they tell it repeatedly and publicly—some people tend to believe it simply because it is told so openly. It must be true, they think, because why would anyone lie about something so big or so obvious?
3. Be concerned by political leaders who scapegoat one or more groups. Scapegoating refers to improperly placing blame on a person or group for bad things that have or are happening, either to fit a political narrative or to displace blame from the real culprit. For example, saying that crime is caused by undocumented immigrants, or blaming a past administration for a current administration’s inability to solve a problem.
4. Pay attention when politicians frequently need to show how strong they are by using macho, brutal language. Do they encourage their supporters to assault their political opponents? Do they threaten to bomb other countries back to the stone age? Do they bully their opponents and expect complete submission from their supporters? Do they—like domestic abusers—use a “you made me do it” language style that blames the victims of their abuse or policies? People who are frequent users of that kind of language are unlikely to uphold democratic principles while in office.
Avoid Despair
If you agree with the theme of this text that America’s political system represents an attenuated form of democracy, you might be tempted to throw up your hands in despair. That should not be your main takeaway. If you agree with the text that corporations and a small circle of very wealthy families exert disproportionate power over public policy, you might be tempted to conclude that conditions are unlikely to improve for ordinary people. To do so would be a mistake. American politics is a struggle between the oligarchs and the public, between a small minority and the rest of us. As we’ve seen, the small minority has structural advantages, but the rest of us can use collective action and our votes to effect positive change. We have to be vocal. We have to be active. We have to sustain that pressure for years.
America’s history shows us that positive change is possible. Robert Reich nicely summed up this comforting reminder, and it’s worth quoting him at length:
“In the early twentieth century, progressives reclaimed our economy and democracy from the robber barons of the first Gilded Age. Wisconsin’s “Fighting Bob” La Follette instituted the nation’s first minimum-wage law. Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan attacked the big railroads, giant banks, and insurance companies. President Theodore Roosevelt busted up the giant trusts. Suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony secured women the right to vote. Reformers like Jane Addams successfully pushed for laws protecting children and the public’s health. Organizers like Mary Harris “Mother” Jones spearheaded labor unions. The progressive era welled up because millions of Americans saw that wealth and power at the top were undermining American democracy and stacking the economic deck. Millions of Americans overcame their cynicism and began to mobilize.” (13)
Be Active on Two Fronts
Citizens in an attenuated democracy should vote, speak, write, organize, and engage in collective action. They should focus their political engagement on two fronts. The first is to take decision making power from the elites by electing politicians who are beholden to ordinary people or by supporting existing politicians who already act on behalf of ordinary people. If there are no such candidates for local, state, or federal office, then become one. The second focus should be to change the rules of the game so that ordinary people can have a greater voice in the American political system. Change the way campaigns are financed—perhaps by putting a tax on corporate contributions to incumbents, the proceeds of which go to challengers. Argue for citizens’ councils to address political issues. Push for changes that take away politicians’ ability to gerrymander electoral districts for partisan advantage. Change the way elections are conducted and make them less restrictive with respect to which citizens can participate. For example, prioritize vote by mail systems and automatic registration. Amend the Constitution so that corporations are not considered people.
Politics is not a spectator sport. Despite the predominant ethos of the media coverage, elections are not merely horse races between candidates for whom we passively root. They have life and death consequences for us and our neighbors. They determine the future of the republic. Remember political scientist Eitan Hersh’s admonitions: “Politics is for power” and “power is derived from serving others.” (14) Collectively organize and pool resources to serve neighbors and show them that local action pays immediate dividends and can show the way to larger changes. Be more than a consumer of political news. Be an actor, a person who convinces neighbors and friends and family that collective action can swing the balance of power in American politics away from corporations and the wealthy elite and toward ordinary people.
References
1. Robert B. Reich, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. Kindle edition. Page 6 of 198.
2. Tax Policy Center. March 24, 2020.
3. Jim Wang, “Average Income in America: What Salary in the United States Puts You in the Top 50%, Top 10%, and Top 1%,” Wallet Hacks. March 10, 2020.
4. Katherine Schaeffer, “6 Facts About Economic Inequality in the U.S,” Pew Research Center. February 7, 2020.
5. Richard Reeves, “The Dangerous Separation of the American Upper Middle Class,” Brookings. September 3, 2015.
6. Katie Jones, “Ranked: The Social Mobility of 82 Countries,” Visual Capitalist. February 7, 2020.
7. Timothy Ferris, The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature. New York: Harper Collins, 2010. Kindle edition. Pages 1-2 of 374.
8. David Roberts, “America is Facing an Epistemic Crisis,” Vox. November 2, 2017.
9. Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Kindle Edition. Crown Publishing, 2017: New York. Page 22 of 128.
10. George Orwell, Politics and the English Language.
11. Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
12. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. Page 231. Originally published in 1925, and the quotes are in Volume 1, Chapter 10.
13. Robert B. Reich, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. Kindle edition. Page 95 of 198.
14. Eitan Hersh, Politics is For Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change. New York: Scribner, 2020. Page 212. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/09%3A_Individual_Political_Behavior/9.05%3A_Chapter_61-_A_Guide_to_Living_in_an_Attenuated_Democracy.txt |
“Laws passed after years of untiring effort, guaranteeing married women certain rights of property, and mothers the custody of their children, have been repealed in states where we supposed all was safe. Thus have our most sacred rights been made the football of legislative caprice, proving that a power which grants as a privilege that what by nature is a right, may withhold the same as a penalty when deeming it necessary for its own perpetuation.”
—National Woman Suffrage Association in 1876 (1)
Americans are accustomed to using “civil rights” and “civil liberties” interchangeably, as though they mean the same thing. That is acceptable for daily conversation, but you do need to know the difference between these concepts for this class. Part of the confusion is due to the fact that both civil rights and civil liberties ultimately originate from the idea of natural rights, which we discussed at the beginning of the course. We should also note that mankind went through a civil liberties revolution between the Medieval period and the nineteenth century. We all continue to benefit from that revolution. What we mean is that our entire frame of reference has changed from one that emphasized the primacy of royal and aristocratic privileges to one centered on individual liberties. It was a slow and difficult revolution, but it happened through the struggles of many people. (2) If you’d like to test this proposition, try this experiment: Get in your time machine and travel back to the year 800 and talk to some European serfs about their individual freedom of religion, speech, conscience, and the like. They would not know what the Hell you were talking about. If you then transported yourself to 1880 and talked with some farmers about the same topics, you would be speaking a language that they understood and embraced.
Civil Liberties
Your civil liberties are essentially your natural rights of life, liberty, and property translated into specific guarantees by the United States Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that no state may “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” These guarantees were designed to protect each individual from the potentially abusive power of government, although civil libertarians today are growing increasingly concerned about the ability of large corporations to infringe on individual liberties as well. The bulk of your civil liberty guarantees are located in the Bill of Rights. These include freedom of speech and the press, freedom of religion, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, procedural guarantees if you are accused of a crime, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, and property rights. Some civil liberties protections are included in the body of the Constitution itself, including the privilege of habeas corpus, and prohibitions against bills of attainder, ex post facto laws, and the impairment of contracts.
The last Constitutional protections mentioned above are things you should know. Habeus corpus literally means “you have the body,” and refers to a court ordering state or federal authorities to bring a detained person to the court and show cause for the detention or incarceration. A bill of attainder is when a legislative body acts like a judicial body by passing a law that declares a person or a group guilty of a crime and punishes them. Congress and state legislatures are forbidden from doing that. Ex post facto means “after the fact,” so an ex post facto law is one that declares an action illegal after it has already happened and subjects the person or group who did it to arrest and trial. It would also refer to a law that increased the penalty for a crime if the legislature tried to apply the stiffer penalty to those who committed the crime before the law was passed. Congress and state legislatures are forbidden from doing that. Congress and state legislatures are also forbidden from impairing the obligation of contracts. If I render services to you and you owe me a great deal of money according to the contract that we both signed, you might be tempted to go to your friends in Congress and get them to pass a law saying that you do not have to pay me. That is not allowed.
Civil Rights
In addition to life, liberty, and property, natural rights philosophers were concerned that individuals be treated equally. Of course, those very same philosophers had a fairly limited notion of “the people” for whom they sought equal treatment. The same is true for the Constitution’s framers, who did not concern themselves with equal treatment of women, men without property, and non-Whites. Our modern notion of civil rights—freedom from discriminatory treatment based on some characteristic—is tied in large part to the civil rights clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that no state may “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The verb “to discriminate,” in its generic sense, brings to mind someone who is making fine distinctions between two things that are otherwise similar. For instance, a wine connoisseur with a discriminating palate might be able to tell whether a German wine came from the Rhine Valley or the Mosel Valley. In the political arena, discrimination occurs when people—who are otherwise quite similar—are not receiving the equal protection of the laws or equal access to liberties based on a characteristic such as their gender, race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, age, or disability.
Similar to civil liberties, we’ve gone through a civil rights revolution. This revolution happened more recently, between the mid-eighteenth century and now. We used to have no real qualms about parsing out civil liberties on an unequal basis, with the determining factors being sex, race, religion, class, and so forth. We used to take it for granted that some people were freer than were others. We no longer think so, although we do still argue about civil rights.
Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Issues
The key contextual clue in determining whether a particular situation is a civil rights or a civil liberties issue is the presence or absence of discrimination. Were a state to pass a law stripping all citizens of the right to possess firearms, that would be regarded as a civil liberties issue. If that same state were instead to pass a law—similar to actual laws that several states used to have—that forbid African Americans from possessing firearms, then that would be a civil rights issue. In the latter case, a person’s freedom from government intrusion is contingent upon their race, which is an idea that is no longer constitutionally acceptable in the United States. | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/10%3A_Civil_Rights_and_Civil_Liberties/10.01%3A_Chapter_62-_The_Difference_Between_Civil_Rights_and_Civil_Liberties.txt |
“The right of one charged with crime to counsel may not be deemed fundamental and essential to fair trials in some countries, but it is in ours. From the very beginning, our state and national constitutions and laws have laid great emphasis on procedural and substantive safeguards designed to assure fair trials before impartial tribunals in which every defendant stands equal before the law.”
—Justice Hugo Black (1)
Does the Bill of Rights, which is where many of your civil liberties are located, protect you only against infringements by the United States government, or does it protect you against your state and local government as well? The answer is that it protects you against abuses from all levels of government, but this has not always been true. The important case is Barron v. The Mayor of Baltimore (1833). John Barron owned a wharf in the eastern section of Baltimore harbor. Beginning in 1815, Baltimore began a series of construction and paving projects that involved the diverting streams. As it happened, the diverted streams came out into the harbor immediately next to Barron’s wharf. By 1822, Barron sued Baltimore city and the mayor because the newly diverted streams were causing silt to build up to such a degree that ships were no longer able to access his wharf. Barron’s lawsuit rested on the Fifth Amendment, which says that no one’s property may be seized for public use without due process and just compensation. Since there was neither due process nor any compensation for damage to the economic viability of his property, Barron felt he would win. However, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Baltimore, saying that the Bill of Rights protects people from actions of the central government, not state and local actions. The Supreme Court said that Barron needed to seek redress from the Maryland state constitution, but there was no such provision in that document that would help Barron. The significance of the Barron decision is that it set up a dual system of civil liberties: a national one to protect individuals from the central government, and widely varying standards to protect people from state and local government abuses. Therefore, your civil liberties depended upon where you lived and what level of government you faced.
After the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment seemed to correct the imbalance defined in Barron by saying that no state “shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States.” However, the Supreme Court did not interpret the privileges and immunities clause as a corrective to Barron. Instead, in the late nineteenth century, the Court began incorporating the Bill of Rights protections using the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause instead of the privileges and immunities clause. The due process clause says that states may not “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Many people see this as an odd way of nationalizing the Bill of Rights and other broad liberties, but there it is. (2) In specific cases, the Court incorporated individual Bill of Rights protections into the due process clause by limiting states’ ability to infringe upon them. The Court did this selectively and patiently, waiting for individuals to challenge their state when it infringed on specific civil liberties. The process of incorporation lasted into the early twenty-first century as cases came to the Court.
You do not need to know all of the incorporation cases, but you should be familiar with the following three examples. They not only illustrate the concept of incorporation, but also are cases whose impacts are still felt today.
Important Incorporation Cases
Mapp v. Ohio (1961)–This case involved the Fourth Amendment’s provision that people be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures. The Amendment says that search warrants need to be issued by judges upon probable cause and that warrants need to be specific rather than general. Under the Barron precedent, the Fourth Amendment only protected you against federal officials. State and local officials were regulated by state constitutions, which varied in how much they protected people from unreasonable searches and seizures.
On May 23, 1957, three Cleveland, Ohio police officers came to Ms. Dollree Mapp’s house looking for a male suspect whom they believed was related to a bombing incident as well as an illegal gambling outfit. Ms. Mapp called her lawyer and refused to let the officers in because they did not have a warrant. Three hours later, the officers, whose ranks had grown to seven, forcibly entered Mapp’s house, roughed her up and handcuffed her, and proceeded to search the house. They did not find the man, bomb-making equipment, or gambling paraphernalia, but they did find that Mapp possessed “obscene materials,” for which she was arrested on the spot. Mapp was convicted but appealed her conviction all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in her favor and incorporated the Fourth Amendment into the Fourteenth. State and local authorities now face the same obligation that federal officials do to respect the Fourth Amendment. Additionally, the Mapp case also applied the exclusionary rule to state and local police: any evidence they gather in violation of the Fourth Amendment must be excluded from the defendant’s trial.
Gideon v. Wainwright (1963)–This case deals with the Sixth Amendment’s provision that criminal defendants have a right to counsel for their defense. Following the Barron precedent, the Court had long held that indigent defendants facing federal charges would be provided a public defender, but states could set their own rules for defendants facing state criminal charges. Later, the Supreme Court ruled that defendants charged with a capital offense must be provided a lawyer if they could not afford one. Still, the vast majority of criminal defendants do not face either federal or capital charges.
In 1961 Clarence Earl Gideon was a 51-year old drifter who had been in and out of trouble with the law since he had run away from home at age sixteen. Gideon was arrested in Panama City, Florida for breaking into a poolhall and stealing some money and alcohol. At his trial, he asked the judge for a lawyer to defend himself against the charges but was denied because he was charged with neither federal nor capital offenses. Without a lawyer, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. While incarcerated, Gideon made use of in forma pauperis, a Supreme Court procedure that waives the filing fees and other requirements for indigent petitioners. He wrote a letter to the Supreme Court asking them to take his case. The Court granted certiorari and appointed Abe Fortas, a well-respected Constitutional lawyer and future Supreme Court justice himself, to represent him. The majority ruled in Gideon’s favor, and remanded the case back to Florida where Gideon was given a retrial with a public defender. Gideon’s lawyer was able to show that the state of Florida could not meet its burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that Gideon had done the crime, so he was released. The result of the case is that the Sixth Amendment was incorporated into the Fourteenth, and criminal defendants must be appointed lawyers if they cannot afford one. This is extremely important, because approximately 80 percent of all criminal defendants are too poor to hire their own lawyer. (3) Public defenders are clearly overworked and underpaid—earning below minimum wage in some cases—but defendants without any legal assistance are at a huge disadvantage when faced with state power in a court of law.
McDonald v. Chicago (2010)–The most recent incorporation case occurred in 2010 and involved the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the right to bear arms. In 1983, Chicago banned the sale and ownership of handguns. This ban was similar to those in other cities, such as Washington, D.C. In 2008, the Chicago Police Department refused Otis McDonald, a 76-year old retired maintenance engineer, permission to own a handgun. McDonald wanted a gun to protect himself in his crime-ridden neighborhood. Supported by gun rights groups and joined by three other petitioners, McDonald sued the city of Chicago.
Meanwhile, in the same year the Supreme Court struck down Washington D.C.’s gun ban in a case known as The District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). Despite the language in the Second Amendment clearly predicating the right to bear arms in the context of a “well-regulated militia,” the Court narrowly ruled in Heller that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to own and carry weapons. However, the Heller case did not have immediate implications for other city and state gun laws because of D.C.’s special status as a federal district. InMcDonald v. Chicago(2010), the Supreme Court decided (5-4) in McDonald’s favor and incorporated the individual right to bear arms into the Fourteenth Amendment. The ruling, therefore, made it applicable to states and cities across the United States. The Court also said that the individual right to bear arms was subject to regulation. In the D.C case, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. . . [N]othing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” He was also clear that the list of restrictions he just mentioned was not “exhaustive.” (4) However, in the case of New York State Rifle and Pistol Association Inc. vs. Bruen (2022), the conservative majority on the Court struck down a 109-year-old New York state law requiring people to show cause for why they needed to carry a handgun in public. Effectively, this decision struck down laws in a number of states where a quarter of the U.S. population lives. It also shifted the gun debate to the issue of “sensitive places” where bearing arms could still be restricted. Is a court of law a sensitive place? A legislative chamber? What about a grocery store or a political rally? Due to incorporation, future decisions of the Court on these matters will apply to all states.
References
1. Gideon v. Wainwright (1963).
2. Scholar Daniel A. Farber writes, “Picking the Due Process Clause as the home for fundamental rights was something of a historical accident, but not completely ungrounded…The [privileges and immunities clause] and the Ninth Amendment would have given a much stronger basis for protecting fundamental rights from state governments.” See his Retained by the People. New York: Basic Books, 2007. Pages 76-77.
3. Alexa Van Brundt, “Poor People Rely on Public Defenders Who Are Too Overworked to Defend Them,” The Guardian. June 17, 2015.
4. District of Columbia, et al. v. Heller (2008). | textbooks/socialsci/Political_Science_and_Civics/Attenuated_Democracy_(Hubert)/10%3A_Civil_Rights_and_Civil_Liberties/10.02%3A_Chapter_63-_Incorporation_or_Nationalization_of_the_Bill_of_Rights.txt |
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