1. Introduction
There are two fundamental problems in American politics. The first is that most Americans do not believe that elected officials represent their interests. The second is that they are correct.
Public confidence in government is alarmingly low. One of the most reliable ongoing academic studies—the General Social Survey—has asked Americans a similar question about confidence in the U.S. Congress for over twenty years. In 1974, 17 percent of respondents had "a great deal of confidence" in Congress, but that figure dropped to 13 percent in 1984 and to 8 percent in 1994. Meanwhile, the percentage expressing "hardly any" confidence in Congress went up from 21 percent in 1974 and 1984 to 39 percent in 1994. The same survey found that more and more Americans believe that "most public officials are not really interested in the problems of the average man [sic]." In 1974, 64 percent of respondents agreed with that statement, and that number rose to 68 percent in 1984 and 74 percent in 1994.[1]
Not only do Americans have a particularly dim view of Congress, they place little trust in other elected officials. Public confidence in the executive branch of the federal government has declined in tandem with the drop in the public's estimation of Congress. Roughly 10 percent of Americans have "a great deal" of confidence in Congress and the executive branch. When forced to choose, most survey respondents say that state governments "do a better job running things" than the
More precisely, a majority of Americans have come to believe that elected officials do not represent average citizens. Most Americans think representatives are insincere and unresponsive to the public's real concerns. Eighty-eight percent agree with the statement: "Government leaders tell us what they think will get them elected, not what they are really thinking." Seventy-nine percent agree that "government leaders say and do anything to get elected, then do whatever they want." Seventy percent agree that "the government is run for the benefit of special interests, not to benefit most Americans."[3]
Whether these perceptions are accurate is difficult to judge. One might make this judgment by comparing surveys of elected officials with similar surveys of the general public. For example, a 1987 study found that members of the U.S. House of Representatives had similar views to those of the public on defense spending and foreign policy toward Central America, but representatives' views were out of sync with the public's on aid to minorities, minimum standards of living, government services, abortion, and foreign policy toward Russia.[4]
Another approach is to measure the fit between actual public policies and the public's stated policy preferences. A team of investigators took this approach in a 1993 study of state governments.[5] To permit a simple analysis of all fifty state governments and their citizens, the authors reduced public opinion and public policy to a single liberal–conservative scale. They found a strong correlation between their ideological ratings of actual state policies and the average ideology of the state's electorate.
One can quibble over the mixed results and methodological details of such studies, but the fundamental problem with both of these approaches is their reliance on conventional measures of public opinion. Democratic theorists stress the difference between surface opinion and an "enlightened understanding" of one's interests in light of all available information.[6] There is a profound difference between an unreflective preference based on unreliable information and a more deliberative judgment grounded in accurate data, careful reasoning, and the consideration of alternative viewpoints. To judge the correspondence between the policy priorities of the government and its constituents accurately, it would be necessary to have a more reliable indicator of the public's enlightened or deliberative policy views.[7]
Because few data exist on the public's enlightened policy priorities, it is impossible to demonstrate directly that elected officials often fail to represent the interests of the larger public. Nonetheless, there is still a compelling reason to suspect such misrepresentation. Paradoxical though it may seem, officials interested in reelection should not, in fact, strive to represent the broader public interest. This is because in most campaigns for public office, fund-raising is a primary consideration, and candidates receive contributions from a relatively small number of sources. Wealthy donors, party activists, and myriad special interests give money to candidates who support their own views, and particular views are overrepresented on candidates' contributor lists. Regardless of where candidates get their money, mass-mediated and even door-to-door elections are not exercises in public deliberation. Images, nonissues, and distorted policy debates decide close races far more often than genuine substantive differences in candidates' policy stances. Politicians certainly do scrutinize public opinion surveys, but polls are counterproductive in two respects: rational candidates concern themselves only with the views of likely voters, who make up a small percentage of the general public; and, as explained earlier, conventional polls fail to measure the public's more reflective concerns.[8]
When looked at from this perspective, the apparent "electoral connection" between voters and elected officials in Congress is actually part of the problem. When congressional scholars find similarities between the views of representatives and voters, they sometimes shrug in disbelief. As Robert Erikson and Gerald Wright muse, "It is as though all our individual ignorance and misinformed judgments cancel out, so that average perceptions and judgments are responsive to what the candidates say and do." In these scholars' view, "The result is a more representative Congress than the electorate sometimes seems to deserve."[9] Questions of merit aside, the views that Congress represents are not necessarily those that best serve individual representatives' constituents, let alone the nation as a whole. Inattention and ignorance cause voters to notice (and oppose) only those policies that would impose large, direct short-term costs. Unfortunately, such policies (e.g., new taxes or the elimination of entitlements) may benefit the general public in the long term, and an officeholder's responsiveness to these narrow concerns serves the official's reelection imperative more than the public's interests. In a sense, the material self-interest of a constituency is simply one more narrow interest directing a representative away from any broader public good.[10]
To the limited extent that voters weigh issues during an election, they "override any broad concerns they may have with collective issues and vote in accord with ensuring immediate benefits…. Likewise, the legislators may share a growing concern with collective societal and economic reversals," but their "electoral security" is best served by promoting "particularized programs" of concern to specific groups.[11] More than simply compelling Congress to enact self-serving laws, shoddy public oversight frequently causes Congress to avoid "acting on problems or considering specific policy options because legislators fear retribution by ordinary citizens."[12] The result is that "the emerging collective problems of the new era thus go unacknowledged and tear away at the fabric of society."[13] In sum, elected officials may wish to act in the public's enlightened interest for altruistic reasons, but the structure of federal, state, and local electoral systems instructs them to do otherwise.
The importance of this problem is self-evident to any sincere democrat. In theory, representative government should discern and act upon the public's will, whether that means fairly considering the myriad concerns of divided subgroups or discovering the shared aspirations of the public as a whole. If, instead, elected officials represent only the concerns of powerful, vocal individuals and interest groups with unrepresentative agendas, the fundamental goal of democracy is not achieved. When the political system itself reinforces this problem, the system itself must undergo change.
Unrepresentative government is a serious failing, and low public confidence in that same government can prove even more dangerous. Healthy public skepticism toward authority has deep roots in American political history, and this attitude can hold up a democracy when extreme nationalism or hero worship threaten to topple it. Too much distrust, however, can prove just as disastrous as blind faith.
Despite claims to the contrary, few politicians are mind-readers. Consequently, it is difficult for political leaders to discern the aspirations of a public that doubts their sincerity. An honest dialogue between the public and public officials can only take place when there is mutual respect between citizens and officeholders. Deep public mistrust of government makes it that much harder for government to get beyond conventional, but unreliable, manifestations of public sentiment, such as opinion polls, town meetings, and interest groups.
Even when a government glimpses the public will, it has difficulty implementing and maintaining coherent policies without a broad public understanding and appreciation of them over a long period of time. A public that doubts the integrity of sincere school boards, mayors, and governors is unlikely to endorse the policies they adopt, however public-spirited. As a consequence, a governor's welfare reform system or a mayor's economic development program may never come to pass, because the refined policy preferences of special interests offer clear direction compared to the stubborn skepticism of a public unwilling to take government seriously.
In addition, many public programs require active citizen participation to succeed. Community policing depends on active neighborhood watch programs, public schools need parental involvement, drug abuse prevention campaigns require awareness and use of government services, and anti-poverty programs benefit from partnerships with local businesses. When anything governmental is immediately suspect, public cynicism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.[14] Without a broad base of reasoned public trust in government and electoral systems, even successfully elected leaders discover that the public will not trust their actions. Without any leeway or public patience, leaders lack the flexibility to act.[15]
At the extreme, public distrust of politicians and elected officials can ultimately erode support for democratic institutions themselves. Such rebellion is unimaginable to most Americans, but history has not been kind to governments that have lost public support. It is not a leap from cynicism to outright rejection. If citizens believe that their government is not only inept but altogether illegitimate, and if they believe elections provide no recourse, they will eventually call into question the entire political system. Even when the government is, in fact, striving to serve the public's best interests, if the public fails to recognize that fact, the government is in danger. For example, extreme anger toward government has played a role in the militia movement and the Oklahoma City bombing.[16] For all of these reasons, growing political cynicism remains a serious problem, whether or not one shares that sentiment.
Many modern reformers believe they have discovered the solution to these problems. The simplest solution is "more of the same." The Reasoning Voter, Samuel Popkin's defense of the low-information voter, concludes by arguing that American democracy only needs noisier, more exciting, and more aggressive campaigns. Rejecting calls for more "positive" or deliberative campaigns, Popkin argues that "there is no electoral problem in America that would be solved by restricting television news to the MacNeil-Lehrer format and requiring all the
As I explain in chapter 3, citizens' reliance on simple "information shortcuts," such as choosing candidates based on party membership, results in superficial elections and flawed voting choices. Most voters have difficulty constructing and articulating clear policy preferences through conventional elections, and voter ignorance and misjudgment do have a real cost. Amplifying existing communication channels will not fundamentally change the nature of American elections, improve public representation, or rebuild public trust.
A more widespread view holds that the United States needs to implement one of several possible electoral reforms. These include new voting systems (e.g., proportional representation), term limits, public financing or strict regulation of campaign fund-raising, voluntary rules of campaign conduct, and the widespread distribution of voting guides. Each of these reforms has merits, which I discuss in chapter 4. If designed properly, some of the most popular electoral reforms can make elections more competitive, and others can improve the representation of minority viewpoints in legislative bodies. Some reforms can improve voter decision making by reducing the frequency of deceptive campaign messages or by delivering useful information to attentive voters. Nevertheless, even when taken as a whole, these reforms fall short: they provide no means of recording the public's deliberative voice, and they make electoral outcomes unpredictable but no more reliable as a means of ensuring public-spirited representation. Moreover, public trust in government has continued to decline, even as states have adopted sweeping term limits and other campaign reforms.
Many civic-minded reformers turn away from the blood and gore of electoral politics. Instead, they seek to restore public trust and representative government through renewed community life and citizen dialogue. In The Promise of Democracy, a companion to a PBS series on democracy, James Crimmins argues that "a good representative on a city council or in the state legislature can bring resources to a city, but she or he cannot make it a good city…. Change comes slowly in our capitols, and then only reluctantly."[18] In this view, which has become
At the extreme, this perspective holds that "civil society is in fact the domain of citizens."[19] Citizens can deliberate and take action in their communities without worrying about elections. When turned militantly inward, extra-governmental action by a local community can even lead to disconnection from public life, as when residential community associations use residence fees to replace public infrastructure with private goods and services (e.g., build their own roads, maintain private swimming pools).[20] Interactions with public officials are nonexistent and unnecessary.[21]
There is no doubt that citizens can achieve much outside the official sphere of government decision making. Social bonds, community identity, civic traditions, and a degree of local independence create a wealth of "social capital" that helps local communities thrive both politically and economically. Studies of community politics are replete with examples of local citizen groups taking action on their own behalf, with or without any assistance from public officials and institutions.[22]
Even active communities with abundant social capital can remain disconnected from the electoral process, and they may do so at their peril. Representative institutions in the United States are powerful at the local, state, and federal levels, and a comprehensive theory of public deliberation must ultimately connect the community to its government. Some political philosophers, such as Michael Walzer, have tried to counter the "antipolitical tendencies that commonly accompany the celebration of civil society," but the gap between community politics and formal representative institutions remains wide.[23]
Some reformers, however, have begun to connect face-to-face deliberation with elections. For the past three decades, public policy pioneers have experimented with different methods for developing and recording a deliberative public voice. Programs such as citizen juries and "deliberative polls" bring together representative samples of the public for face-to-face discussions with one another and with expert panels. After a few days of deliberation, these citizen bodies answer survey questions or draft recommendations to tell public officials what policies the larger public might endorse if it had the chance to deliberate. The judgments that citizens reach after participating in these brief deliberative forums
Unless taken farther, even these deliberation programs will fail to build public trust and improve representation. As I argue in chapter 6, the participants in quasi-juries and large deliberative polls, such as the 1996 National Issues Convention, may experience profound attitudinal and behavioral changes, but their numbers are too small to have a noticeable impact on larger public attitudes and electoral outcomes. Many citizens vicariously participate in these exercises through newspaper accounts and broadcast coverage, but the impact on those people is relatively small.[25]
In some views, the solution to this problem is simply one of scale. Past efforts may have had a limited impact, but future efforts will succeed by invigorating the public and drawing it into an ever-widening network of public forums and deliberative practices. Unfortunately, this approach requires the development of a powerful sense of civic responsibility and a nationwide commitment to active, ongoing participation in public life. As David Ryfe points out, "Asking citizens to do better is a perfectly reasonable goal for deliberative reformers," but "asking them to contradict their basic sensibility toward politics will probably be unsuccessful. Care must be taken to craft principles of deliberation which speak to people as they are rather than imagine them as they will never be.[26]
Thus, for random sample forums to create a powerful public voice with significant electoral impact, it is necessary to use the existing capacities of the public to connect face-to-face deliberation in small groups with the voting choices of the mass public on election day. In chapter 7, I propose such a link. My basic recommendation is that voters should have access to the results of representative citizen deliberation on the candidates and issues that appear on their ballots. Using small random samples of the general public, government institutions could sponsor deliberative panels on past legislative actions, individual candidates, and ballot measures. Panel participants could summarize the results of their deliberations, and federal election officials, secretaries of state, and county clerks could communicate those results to the larger voting public through various means.
For these citizen panels to achieve their intended purpose, they would have to produce high-quality judgments, and citizens would need to be willing and able to consider panel results when voting. If subject to self-deception, "groupthink," and other decision-making illnesses, the panels could falter by reaching unwarranted conclusions and promoting the election of unqualified and unrepresentative candidates. If voters find the panel results to be irrelevant, elitist, or confusing, the panels would also fail to have their intended impact. Chapter 8 addresses these dangers and explains why the panels would generally reach sound and infiuential judgments. Finally, chapter 9 suggests an experimental approach to implementing citizen panels. By gradually testing some of the main claims underlying the citizen panel reform, it will be possible to gauge both its necessity and electoral impact before institutionalizing panels nationwide.
The citizen panel proposal, however, is the end of this story. The virtues of the panels relative to other reforms are most apparent once one firmly grasps the problems at hand. Those problems, in turn, are best understood when framed within a simple model of political behavior. To that end, I draw upon the work of the economist Albert Hirschman, who bridged the intellectual chasm between economics and political science in his 1970 book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Hirschman sought to explain the performance of large firms and complex organizations, and I have modified his model to describe the behavior of public officials and voters.
This abstract model is valuable because it provides a simple framework for examining the democratic ideal (chapter 2), existing political practices (chapters 3 and 5), suggested reforms (chapters 4 and 6), and a new proposal for citizen panels (chapters 7–9). Framed within the theoretical model, the American political system's twin problems of public trust and representation, noted at the outset of this chapter, will become more apparent. When carried through the subsequent chapters, the model will also explain why past attempts to solve those problems have failed and why citizen panels might succeed.