3. Why Elections Fail
To Ensure Accountability
Everyone who grows up in our society is bound to become aware, at some level of consciousness, that an individual vote is more nearly a form of self-expression and of legitimation than of influence and that the link between elections and value allocations is tenuous.Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle
In theory, elections in representative democracy ensure accountability through lively candidate competition and careful voting decisions. In the ideal election, voters begin with a relatively well-developed sense of self-interest and some conception of the public good. Though those views may shift slightly over the course of an election, voters remain steadfast in their values and never lose sight of their primary concerns. Meanwhile, a list of qualifled but diverse candidates appears for every public office, and voters have a wide range of choices to consider. Voters examine the candidates by meeting them face-to-face, attending public forums, listening to speeches, watching debates, and sampling the offerings of a wide variety of relevant printed and electronic media. The candidate whom voters judge most suitable is then charged with pursuing the public's interest as its representative. When the next electoral cycle begins, if the official seeks reelection, his or her voting record becomes one of the electorate's primary considerations when comparing the incumbent with the new set of challengers.
Most Americans' experience of elections is far from that ideal. Voting is, as Murray Edelman observes, closer to "a form of self-expression" than an act of political influence. Benjamin Barber aptly describes the uninspiring experience of most voters: "Our primary electoral act, voting, is rather like using a public toilet: we wait in line with a crowd in order to close ourselves up in a small compartment where we can relieve
This chapter examines why elections fail to provide a strong connection from deep public concerns to real public policy. The problems underlying this failure are underdeveloped public judgments, superflcial voter evaluations of candidates, and the shallow pool of contestants for elected office. Together, these problems thwart attempts at electoral rejection of unrepresentative incumbents, thereby making officials less accountable for their actions. In addition, public awareness of these problems leads citizens to neglect the political system, worsening the very problems that spark voter apathy and cynicism in the first place.
INTERESTS AND IDEOLOGY
A fundamental requirement for democratic self-governance is that the public must develop clearly deflned interests that it can articulate during and between elections. One of the principles of democracy is that an individual is the best judge of what is in his or her best interest. Democratic political processes presume that it is best to let each individual articulate his or her own wants and needs. Other people may sometimes be in a better position to judge one's interests; however, there is no way to know when that is the case, so it is safer to assume the competence of every individual to decide his or her own interests. This principle, which Robert Dahl calls "the strong principle of equality," does not presume that individuals know their own interests; rather, it just asserts that no individuals "are so deflnitely better qualifled than the others" that they should have the ultimate authority to make decisions on behalf of those others.[2]
Presuming self-awareness does not make it so, however. Does the typical American voter, in fact, know what policies are in his or her best interests? And if voters ultimately seek to discern the interests of the larger public, can they tell what is best for the city, state, or nation as a whole? It is impossible to answer those questions because there is no independent ground from which to judge the accuracy of citizens' perceptions of the public good. Some philosophers make compelling claims that freedom and equality are relatively "neutral" standards for making such a judgment,[3] but I wish to ask a more simple question. Regardless of the substance of their views, do individual citizens have wellinformed and coherent policy positions?
By "well-informed and coherent," I mean three things. First, a wellinformed view is one that is based upon a modest amount of relevant
Well-informed Americans ought to know a good deal about public issues and government. Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter studied this subject in depth in What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters (1996). Using survey data from the National Election Studies, they reported discouraging results: "Only 13% of the more than 2,000 political questions examined could be answered correctly by 75% or more of those asked, and only 41% could be answered correctly by more than half the public." On questions regarding political institutions and processes, the median respondent gave correct answers 49 percent of the time. On foreign affairs, the median was 44 percent, and on domestic politics, the median was 39 percent. Across the population, knowledge was distributed in a bell-shaped curve, with relatively few respondents having very high or low knowledge scores, except that a relatively large percentage of Americans knew very little about domestic politics. The poor performance of respondents on these knowledge questions led the investigators to conclude that the American public's judgments are "hardly the stuff of informed consent, let alone of a working representative democracy." The authors also found that despite all the varied changes in public education, journalism, and politics over the past flfty years, "citizens appear no less informed about politics today than they were half a century ago." The bad news is that they also "appear no more informed."[5]
Evidence from both public surveys and psychological experiments shows that most Americans' political views are often not only poorly informed but also rather incoherent. One of the most comprehensive and well-supported theories of public opinion paints a humbling portrait of how we think about political issues. The political scientist John Zaller brought together previously unconnected flndings on attitude instability, public opinion shifts, media discourse, reelection campaigns,
A useful metaphor for understanding Zaller's claim is the "attitude pie." In this view, attitudes don't exist as coherent entities, as popularly imagined. Instead, a typical person holds conflicting views on an issue, plus a measure of neutrality. In two dimensions, one can think of an attitude as a pie sliced into thirds—one piece favoring a policy, one piece opposing it, and one piece representing a neutral attitude. When asked to give an opinion in a survey, a citizen might say she supports welfare reform, yet that support might only represent the largest "slice" of her different views on the issue: 40 percent of her thoughts on the subject might support reform, but another 35 percent might oppose it, with neutrality accounting for the remainder of her attitude.[7]
"Latitude theory" suggests another way of understanding indeflnite attitudes. This theory "depicts a preference not as an optimal point on a dimension of opinion, but as a line segment, within which all points may be roughly equivalent in attractiveness."[8] A person's attitude toward free trade is not really a single point on a spectrum (e.g., 5 on a ten-point scale), but rather a range of acceptable positions (e.g., 2 to 6 on the same scale). In this view, attitude instability is typically just movement within this range of acceptability, and citizens are not so much indecisive as they are flexible.
An open-minded person always welcomes conflicting considerations, and an ideal judgment weighs different facts, ideas, and perspectives in making a decision. That decision might remain open to reconsideration in light of new information and insight, but it is unlikely to change in the meantime because it was reached through careful deliberation and reflection. Though latitude theory and the attitude pie metaphor suggest ways in which unstable attitudes can still be well formed, the evidence
For most citizens, Zaller's receive-accept-sample model suggests that the main determinant of policy views is the balance of opinions expressed in the mainstream media. Thus, the public's reported attitudes hinge upon the average attitudes communicated through radio, television, newspapers, magazines, the Internet, and other mass media. Careful analysis of such media messages is a task far beyond the scope of this book, but two observations about the quality and authenticity of the public attitudes created through this process should give one pause. First, as the media critics Jay Blumer and Michael Gurevitch note, "Less and less of the political communication diet serves the citizen role—due to the predominant presentation of politics as a game; the irrelevance of campaign agendas to the post-election tasks of government; and the diminished space and time devoted to policy substance."[9] Both qualitative studies and systematic content analyses have found that the political news reaching mass audiences in the United States focuses more on the game of politics than the substance of policy and elections.[10] Second, there is no doubt as to the fact that paid media (e.g., political advertising and public relations campaigns) overrepresent the views of wealthy individuals and corporations. Political observers and cultural critics have provided ample evidence of this bias, but it is nearly inevitable that an uneven distribution of wealth results in an uneven distribution of paid, mass-mediated political messages.[11] When this steady stream of unbalanced messages flows into the drying creek bed of political journalism, the result is a river of public opinion biased toward particular interests.
The history of American public opinion, however, demonstrates that public opinion does have some independence from media influence. The reason is that relatively sophisticated and ideological citizens tend to choose the messages they sample; even more important, these citizens do not uniformly accept the messages they receive. Regardless of the balance of messages in the media, these citizens can form what appear to be informed and coherent policy views by sleight of hand. If a person can at least form a general ideological bias, he or she can rely on political elites who share that ideology to reach judgments instead: "Ideology … is a mechanism by which ordinary citizens make contact with specialists who are knowledgeable on controversial issues and who share the citizens' predispositions." In other words, so long as at
Ideology is not the norm for citizens. As Lance Bennett argues, "Most individuals struggle with internal belief conflicts, making the measurement of stable beliefs and dispositions beside the point, not to mention an unlikely result."[13] Though the pure concept of ideology may be somewhat mythical, it is still useful to estimate how many voters think along such lines. Based on a careful examination of National Election Study data, it appears that roughly half of the American electorate are "nonideological," in that their political attitudes and behaviors show little ideological consistency. Roughly 20 percent of the electorate show unambiguous signs of ideological organization, usually along the lines of the liberal-conservative dichotomy, which remains popular in American politics. Another third of the electorate demonstrate at least some higher-order structuring of their political beliefs.[14] Other researchers have demonstrated that even nonideological thinkers still organize their political beliefs into lower-level schemas,[15] but only those with an ideological orientation that corresponds to ongoing political discourse will have the advantages Zaller describes. One can only "make contact with specialists" and adopt their ideologically consistent policy positions if one recognizes one's ideology in them.
Even for the flfth of the population who think ideologically, Zaller's characterization is far from flattering. Citizens who are politically knowledgeable and ideological obtain large amounts of political information and simply fllter out ideologically inconsistent views. The result is far from a well-reasoned set of attitudes. Instead, these citizens develop a crude copy of the views of elites who appear to share a similar ideological orientation. As a result of careful flltering, ideological citizens appear to have developed a coherent set of informed attitudes corresponding to a more basic set of core values. In truth, these citizens have assumed that like-minded elites hold attitudes that the citizens themselves would hold if they thought through the issues. That assumption permits ideological citizens to articulate views on a broad range of policy issues without devoting scarce time and energy on researching those same issues. Sometimes, however, citizens' genuine
More generally, elites model attitudes that dismiss alternative points of view, and they pass this extremism down to citizens who might otherwise prefer a more balanced policy position. This problem becomes acute when citizens seek to understand the larger public good. Ideological flltering of elite messages does not help a citizen develop a broad public perspective on current issues. Such a viewpoint would listen to and incorporate diverse viewpoints and seek out common ground upon which all parties can stand. Citizens cannot develop an inclusive public voice if they systematically dismiss ideologically divergent views.[17]
Despite these limitations, there is still value in picking up "cues" from ideological elites. There are simply too many issues for average citizens to study and develop nuanced views on every policy debate. Identifying oneself with a liberal or conservative ideology and adopting the views of corresponding elites has its hazards, but it does permit a busy citizen to take strong positions on complex issues. So long as citizens must make a wide range of political choices, such cue-taking is an attractive alternative to exhausting research or studied indifference.
HOW VOTERS EVALUATE CANDIDATES
Just as citizens have difficulty developing well-informed and coherent policy views, they also face a serious challenge when asked to make voting decisions. The popular science-fiction television program The X-Files ends its opening montage with the now-famous phrase, "The truth is out there." For most elections, this is the case. A diligent voter with unlimited resources and cognitive abilities can flnd out which candidate
To undertake the study of each election would require both skill and will. Research skills would be necessary to reach a broad range of information sources about the candidates, and intellectual and political talents would enable a voter to decode and process the information obtained. No voter would put those skills to such hard use, however, if he or she did not also have the conviction that doing so would prove useful. Returning to the psychological concepts introduced in chapter 2, a voter would need enough self-efficacy to believe that he or she can competently perform exhaustive candidate evaluations, an expectation that the research will result in correct evaluations, and the confldence that fellow voters will be able to do the same. Underlying those beliefs, to overcome the voter's awareness of the low probability of his or her vote influencing the election's result, there must also be a driving sense of duty or a powerful concern about its outcome. Few voters have the necessary constellation of abilities, beliefs, and motivation to study the candidates on their ballot tirelessly in this way.
RETROSPECTIVE VOTING
Nonetheless, voters do attempt to make candidate evaluations, and how they reach those imperfect judgments varies considerably from one election to the next. The most widely studied race of them all—the presidential election—appears to trigger a special form of candidate evaluation. In presidential elections, citizens often engage in what Morris Fiorina has called "retrospective voting." Many Americans evaluate presidential incumbents based on the actual condition of the nation. In addition to taking into account candidate issue stands and their promises for the future, voters take a hard look at what they have experienced under the president's administration before deciding whether
Once again, such voting behavior is the exception. Fiorina argues that the retrospective voting model does not work very well outside of the presidential election. In his view, the model's weakness stems from the decline of political parties in America. He cites the example of the 1978 elections, before which the Democratic Party held power in both the White House and on Capitol Hill. In that year's congressional elections, voters' ratings of Democratic incumbents depended "only weakly and erratically" on perceptions of government's success at addressing "inflation, unemployment, or anything else of a programmatic nature."[19]
More important, crude retrospective voting is usually an ineffective method of candidate evaluation. If a voter looks at the condition of the local or national economy and judges candidates on that basis, the voter is using an objective but not necessarily relevant piece of information. Forces beyond the control of public officials cause most economic shifts, and an incumbent may deserve no credit or blame for one's fortunes. Presidents can have a noticeable short-term economic impact, and economists have named such election-year tinkering "the political business cycle." If successful, the president might trigger a brief spurt of economic growth, but voting based on that short-term change would be a mistake.
Even when voters more broadly judge the incumbent's overall performance, few know much about the actual performance of most of their public officials. Some voters may judge presidents based on overall economic trends, but how many voters have solid indicators of the performance of state legislators, judges, school board members, and secretaries of state?[20] A
Nonetheless, there is evidence that voters sometimes make accurate connections between legislators' actions and real short-term policy outcomes. The congressional scholar Douglas Arnold describes these linkages in detail in The Logic of Congressional Action. In Arnold's view, a representative's action is "traceable" when "a citizen can plausibly trace an observed effect first back to a governmental action and then back to a representative's individual contribution." Relatively few effects are traceable; most go unnoticed by stakeholders, have multiple interconnected causes, or have little visible impact on individual constituents. With the aid of concerned interest groups, however, citizens do sometimes trace connections between individual representatives and speciflc outcomes. This potential for citizen oversight prevents career-minded legislators from enacting disastrous policies that would cause unnecessary and immediate harm to their constituents.[23]
Unfortunately, Arnold points out how this same process results in the avoidance of good legislation and the passage of unsound bills. Because citizens only notice short-term negative impacts on their own lives, "legislators' fear of retrospective voting impels them to avoid … politically infeasible policies," including some proposals that would produce good long-term outcomes. Instead, legislators look for "politically attractive policies" that appear to have the same beneflts (in the short run) but "spread the costs more widely, impose them as later-order effects, or push them further into the future." When casting about for such an alternative, representatives sometimes run into "politically compelling policies" whose "intended effects are popular, irrespective of whether the proposed means will really achieve those ends." Meanwhile, legislators tend to avoid "politically repellent options" because citizens either fail to see how the instruments could bring about the desired effects (e.g., subtle economic incentive mechanisms) or provide beneflts only to disliked or marginalized social groups. Overall, "to the extent that citizens are poor policy analysts, they may obtain policy instruments they favor but fail to get the policy outcomes they really want because their chosen instruments are incapable of producing the desired effect.[24]
In sum, retrospective voting does occur in relatively high-proflle elections. At first, this approach to electoral decision making appears to flt the ideal model outlined in chapter 2: voters assess the performance of
IDEOLOGY, PARTISANSHIP, AND COGNITIVE SHORTCUTS
To move beyond such simplistic candidate selection methods, some American voters turn to ideology. A small portion of the electorate evaluates candidates through indirect sources of information about their policy views. For example, a sophisticated voter might know that the Center for Tax Responsibility shares his or her views on public spending. The voter can then evaluate an incumbent based upon the rating that the center gives to that representative's voting record. Though the voter still does not know the incumbent's voting record, the voter may infer with confldence that a high rating of the incumbent by the center signals that the representative acted in sync with the voter's own policy preferences. Such inferences are quite logical, and an ideologically self-aware voter familiar with a political organization's rating system has as good a chance as any of making sensible candidate evaluations. When such voters have adequate information and a viable opponent to consider, their behavior comes close to the ideal presented in chapter 2. If a representative's constituents have a clear ideological bent and obtain solid information about all candidates, these voters have the potential for successful electoral rejection of incumbents who stray too far from their ideologically deflned interests. That threat, in turn, might win such a constituency sound representation in government.
Such a combination of factors is rare, however. Even when there are alternative candidates to consider, limited political sophistication, low
Samuel Popkin, a polling consultant and public opinion scholar, has examined these short cuts carefully in relation to presidential campaigns. One of the most commonly used metaphors for such thinking is the Drunkard's Search: when a drunken man stumbles outside of a bar at midnight and drops his keys, he drags himself over to the streetlight to look for them; the keys probably fell elsewhere, but he can only see the pavement that's under the light. Thus, rather than trying to piece together all the information they have obtained, voters make judgments based on the one or two pieces of information in which they have some confldence. Popkin stresses the importance of personal information in a presidential race, but the metaphor works equally well for other salient facts that a voter might glean from an election—or even from the ballot itself.[26]
Many political observers argue that one particular fact—a candidate's party—is enough information to make an informed choice about which candidate will best represent a voter's interests. Though relatively few voters have strong ideological orientations, as many as three-quarters of the electorate identify with either the Democratic or the Republican Party. For example, in the 1998 House elections, 73 percent of voters described themselves as either Democrats or Republicans. Eightynine percent of Democratic voters backed Democrats, and 91 percent of Republican voters backed Republicans. Nonaligned voters, by contrast, split their vote almost evenly between the two parties. Statistics for House elections from 1980 to 1996 show a consistent pattern of from 77 to 92 percent of partisans voting for their party's candidate.[27] Numerous other studies have found that political partisanship is the most powerful predictor of voting choices in a wide range of partisan general elections in the United States. For example, voter partisanship predicts roughly 50 percent of all voting in the presidential election.[28] Highly sophisticated partisans sometimes even use party-identiflcation cues in nonpartisan elections by reading party "voting guides" or "candidate slates."
Nonetheless, both the prevalence and value of partisan voting cues are overestimated. After having chosen to vote Republican, for example, voters are more likely to identify themselves as Republican in response
In any case, there is considerable evidence that the power of the partisan cue is declining. After studying the past forty years of party politics in the United States, Martin Wattenberg concluded, "Once central and guiding forces in American electoral behavior, the parties are currently perceived with almost complete indifference by a large proportion of the population." Consistent with this view, surveys conducted in 1994, 1996, and 1997 have found that between two-thirds and threequarters of Americans report that they regularly vote for candidates of parties other than their own in at least one race per election.[30]
Table 1 shows, however, that over the past quarter-century, strong partisans of the two major parties have never made up more than a third of the voting-age population. The table also shows that the percentage of partisans in the general population has changed little during that same period. Some observers have argued that despite the scarcity of self-identifled party loyalists, independents are actually far more rare. In this view, "pure independents" make up only 10–15 percent of the electorate, because most independents actually "lean" toward one of the two major parties. Self-reported voting data from 1962 to 1990 show that these "leaners" were no less partisan than "weak" Democrats and Republicans. When viewed from another standpoint, however, it is just as noteworthy that over one-quarter of "weak" partisans vote against their party in U.S. House elections. Whether this makes the weak partisans independent or the leaning independents partisan is a deflnitional question. The fact remains that only a fraction of the electorate consistently vote for just one party.[31]
One example of the decline of political party identiflcation is the case of Maine, which some political observers view as a bellwether state. In the 1998 election, the Democratic Party campaigned vigorously in the gubernatorial election, but not with an eye toward recapturing the governor's seat. Late polls showed the Democratic candidate, Tom Connolly, with just 6 percent of the vote, well behind the Republican candidate and the independent incumbent, Governor Angus King Jr. As the
| Strong Democrat (%) | Strong Republican (%) | Total Strong Partisans (%) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1997, table 461, based on surveys conducted by the Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. | |||
| 1972 | 15 | 10 | 25 |
| 1980 | 18 | 9 | 27 |
| 1984 | 17 | 12 | 29 |
| 1986 | 18 | 11 | 29 |
| 1988 | 18 | 14 | 32 |
| 1990 | 20 | 10 | 30 |
| 1992 | 18 | 11 | 29 |
| 1994 | 15 | 16 | 31 |
Maine's successful independent governor has inspired candidates and voters in other states to abandon the major parties. The most surprising example of this influence was the successful 1998 campaign of the wrestler-turned-governor Jesse "The Body" Ventura in the historically liberal state of Minnesota. In a three-way open-seat race against nondescript Republican and Democratic challengers, Ventura persuaded just over a third of Minnesotans to support his Reform Party candidacy. The Minnesota electorate that supported Ventura did not do so because of his political party per se. Rather, voters largely ignored his Reform Party affiliation and embraced him because his personal history, campaign style, and rhetoric were so different from those of traditional Democrats and Republicans.[33]
Not only is support for the two major parties declining, but partisanship is also most common among those voters who are the most knowledgeable and ideological. Strong Democrats are the most liberal voters, while strong Republicans are the most conservative, and this relationship is even stronger for those voters with the most political
Making matters worse, those less sophisticated voters who rely upon partisan cues are more likely to have incidental party affiliations. For most Americans, political party membership is not a "fundamental belief … but rather an inherited trait."[36] When a person votes for Democrats because his or her parents voted for Democrats, that voting pattern represents the person's actual concerns only to the extent that child and parent share similar values, circumstances, and knowledge. Historical party realignments, such as the African-American shift toward the Democratic Party during the Civil Rights era, show that people can change party membership in response to changing party platforms or shifts in voters' own attitudes. Nonetheless, party identity remains stable for most Americans regardless of changing personal and political circumstances.[37] Party membership influences other attitudes and candidate evaluations far more often than these beliefs influence membership.[38]
Even if a large proportion of the electorate do rely on partisan cues when making voting choices, this dependence is often counterproductive. Recalling the general model of representative democracy in chapter 2, one of the primary purposes of elections is to give an electorate the opportunity to reject an incumbent who has failed to represent its interests. When voters base reelection decisions entirely on the candidates' party membership, they necessarily overlook other information about the incumbent and challenger. Though publicly available, an official's voting record often goes unnoticed. Thus, a congressional district populated by liberal Democrats might consistently reelect a conservative Democrat over a liberal Republican because the former shares the majority's party identity. More generally, voters' reliance on partisan cues permits representatives to act against their constituents' interests. If a single representative consistently deviates from the party line even on roll-call votes, the party may sabotage that particular incumbent's reelection bid, but if the party as a whole violates its membership's
The use of "open primaries" worsens the situation by permitting voters to cross party lines in the primary election. In states such as California, primary voters select one candidate from among the entire pool of candidates in each race, and candidates advance to the general election if they win more votes than any other in the same party. Voters can support Democrats in some primary races and Republicans in others, regardless of their own party affiliation. Californians embraced this electoral reform as offering "more choice" in the primaries, but the system can easily be abused to select general election candidates out of sync with their own party. The candidacy of an unopposed Democratic incumbent might, for example, encourage Democratic voters to support the most incompetent or unpopular Republican in the primary. With Republicans divided among a group of candidates, this Democratic voting bloc can thus bring victory in the primary to the worst Republican choice. Alternatively, Democratic activists in a strong Republican district can use this system to support a liberal Republican in the primary, leaving Republican voters with nothing but liberals in the general election.[40] When voters use a candidate's party as a shortcut to evaluation, they risk serious misjudgment, and the open primary makes the risk even greater.
A more serious problem with partisan cueing lies in the limited range of parties Americans can choose from today. In most races in the United States, voters must choose either a Democrat or a Republican. In a satire of this situation, the animated television program The Simpsons imagined what would happen if the Democratic and Republican candidates in the 1996 presidential election were actually Kang and Kodos, tentacled space reptiles seeking to conquer Earth. On the eve of election day, Homer Simpson unmasks the aliens before a large crowd assembled on the steps of the nation's capitol. Unperturbed, one of the aliens explains, "It makes no difference which one of us you vote for. Either way, your planet is doomed. Doomed!" In reply to this boast, a bold spectator declares, "Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate." Kang and Kodos writhe and laugh maniacally. "Go ahead," they retort.
"Throw your vote away!" In the closing scene, legions of human slaves toil to build a giant ray gun, while an alien administrator bellows, "All hail President Kang!"
Though the Democratic and Republican parties often see eye to eye on fundamental economic class issues, they differ in many important respects. Party allegiance is a meaningful choice between the ideological left-to-center and center-to-right, and the party unity displayed in rollcall votes in Congress has increased in recent decades.[41] If party identity is becoming more ideologically grounded, as some election scholars claim, this trend would result in more meaningful partisan voting.[42]
Nonetheless, reliance upon just two parties makes a citizen's choices extremely narrow. Beyond the factions within parties, there are many ideological identities that cross party lines. The Libertarian Party, the Reform Party, and other independent and multifaceted parties provide other choices, but the reality of winner-take-all elections is that those parties have few opportunities to elect their candidates to public office. Voters can register with and vote for a third party to play the role of spoiler, as the Green Party has done in New Mexico, but taken as a whole, third parties play only a marginal role in U.S. politics.[43] In sum, because two choices obscure the real diversity of meaningful viewpoints among which one might otherwise choose, parties only crudely represent Americans' concerns.
The ultimate failing of partisan cue reliance, however, is an inescapable feature of conventional American elections. Simply put, partisan cues are useless in nonpartisan elections and party primaries. When choosing among finalists in a nonpartisan general election, less sophisticated voters usually remain unaware of the candidates' party loyalties, or the candidates may belong to the same party. Innumerable political observers have declared the party voting cue to be the connection between public preferences and political representation, yet no such connection exists in numerous local and statewide nonpartisan races for judgeships, executive offices, councils, and boards. Though nonpartisan systems are often designed to make local government "less political" and avoid graft and corruption, the net result is the removal of the one cue that most voters rely on to distinguish among competing candidates. For this very reason, many political observers oppose the very concept of nonpartisan elections, let alone changing some local elections from partisan to nonpartisan.[44]
For the same reason, it turns out that every election suffers from dependence on partisan cues. When two Democrats face off against each
One might counter that political parties manage their own primaries and indirectly ensure that the most representative party member goes on to the general election. The problem with this argument is that it is false. That may have been the case at one time, but incumbents are now stronger than the local parties. Renomination and reelection depend upon the decisions of the incumbent, over whom the party has precious little control.[46]"Few congressional candidates flnd opposition from the local party leaders to be a signiflcant handicap; neither is their support very helpful," Gary Jacobson observes.[47] In other words, party primaries are often critical decisions for voters, yet overreliance on partisan cues makes these choices extremely difficult.
In sum, relatively few voters use their ideology as a guide when making voting decisions. Many more voters use partisan cues as a guide to voting. By doing so, they hope to overcome the limitations of their own underdeveloped interests. If a voter decides that the Democratic or Republican Party adequately represents his or her interests, candidate party membership can then be used to guide otherwise complex voting decisions. The use of these cues may be in decline, but partisan voting has limited value, in any case. Strong partisan loyalty can actually obscure poor representation by diverting attention from the actual views of candidates and the performance of incumbents. The limited twoparty system in the United States also makes it difficult to represent diverse public viewpoints in partisan voting. When the diversity of viewpoints on current issues is condensed into a binary choice, many ideas and concerns get lost in the process. Finally, partisan cues are useless in nonpartisan and primary elections. Since election to nearly every office requires winning either a party primary or a nonpartisan election, reliance on party membership as a voting guide is inadequate.
POLITICAL CONVERSATION AS A PERSONAL SHORTCUT
Despite their drawbacks, partisan cues (and ideological cues) are appealing, because they give voters a way to make seemingly sophisticated choices without tremendous effort. What voters need is a more reliable cognitive shortcut to use during campaigns. If voters banded together into small groups, they might be able to pool their limited knowledge into relatively nuanced judgments. Like-minded citizens could compare their candidate preferences, and citizens with divergent views could consider one another's viewpoints. Even relatively passive and uninterested voters could use the summary judgments of these localized reference groups to make voting decisions. Such a system of information distribution, deliberation, and collective decision making could not only improve the quality of individual voting choices but also the likelihood of successful collective rejection of unrepresentative elected officials.
Many voters do, in fact, make "collective" judgments, whether as a couple, a family, or a group of friends.[48] National surveys conducted in 1981 and 1990 found that roughly 70 percent of Americans "often" or at least "sometimes" discuss political matters when they get together with friends.[49] One study of voters in the vicinity of Albany, New York, prior to the 1998 presidential election found that 88 percent had discussed the election in the past week. On average, people reported talking about the campaign with seven or eight people during that week.[50]
The frequency with which spouses, families, and housemates vote together has led many political campaigns to target voters "by household." When a precinct walker or a telephone survey interviewer learns that one adult in a household is favorable toward a particular candidate, the campaign then attributes that preference to all voters in that residence. Campaigns are wise to aggregate voters within households: families do tend to vote together, because there is tremendous political influence within typical American families.[51]
Do these social networks of political influence result in more informed candidate evaluations? Perhaps campaign conversations can make what Zaller calls an "unsophisticated" voter into a sophisticated one. Recall that in Zaller's model of public opinion formation, a sophisticated voter is distinguished by the ability to fllter out messages that are contrary to his or her preexisting ideology. Regular political conversations between sophisticated voters and less sophisticated ones permit the latter to substitute a social sieve for a cognitive fllter of massmediated messages.[52]
Research suggests that this portrait is only half-true. It is certainly the case that much political conversation flows directly from the media: a recent focus-group study found that more than a quarter of all statements in an open-ended discussion had direct or indirect references to both factual news programming and entertainment media. A study of the 1992 Pittsburgh newspaper strike also demonstrates a relationship between mass media coverage of elections and the quantity of political conversation: the strike "limited voters' exposure to media reports concerning the local U.S. House races, and interpersonal discussion of those elections declined in response.[53]
Though conversations do transmit media messages, the interpersonal relay messengers are not necessarily the most sophisticated voters. The most careful modern study of political conversation suggests that the people who most influence their fellow citizens are distinguished, not by their political knowledge and expertise, but rather by their mere interest in politics. Even if the most influential political conversants were politically sophisticated, the value of their influence is questionable, because they are noted only for their ability to fllter out ideologically dissimilar views. Political deliberation requires the consideration of alternative views, but research suggests that the most influential discussants are those who accurately understand that their conversation partners share views the same as their own.[54]
Despite its limitations as a means of reaching sophisticated candidate evaluations and collective electoral action, campaign conversation has at least one redeeming quality. As a modest form of public deliberation, it motivates people to get more involved in elections and, speciflcally, to take the time to vote.[55] At the very least, crude candidate evaluations combined with the act of voting come closer to attempted electoral rejection than the passive act of nonvoting.
VOTER SOPHISTICATION AND ELECTION VISIBILITY
The preceding discussions have demonstrated the different ways in which voters can make candidate evaluations. Whether a voter primarily considers a candidate's past record, ideological commitments, party membership, or other characteristics depends upon some of the variables presented above, such as the voter's ideology and party identity, as well as the type of election (nonpartisan, party primary, or partisan). Two more variables play an important role in influencing candidate evaluations. The first consideration is a voter's political sophistication.
A highly sophisticated or "politically aware" voter is more able and inclined to think and vote based upon complex information about candidates in an election. Moderately sophisticated voters seek out a modest amount of political information and make some effort to relate it to what they know about political parties and their own interests. The least sophisticated voters only learn about candidates passively, when the candidates reach out to them through television, radio, and other media, and these voters do little to process the information they receive. Using data on political ideology and involvement and the category definitions presented above, roughly a third of voters fall into each of these three categories.[57]
How a voter of low or high political sophistication evaluates candidates also depends upon the nature of the campaign itself. In particular, elections vary in the overall intensity of candidates' campaigns and the media coverage of those campaigns. At the high end of the spectrum is the presidential election, to which there is no comparison. Every day for weeks, if not months, voters are pelted in a hailstorm of information and opinion about the presidential candidates. The intensity of the presidential campaign is so great that it saturates the consciousness of even the most reclusive voter, and only a few high-visibility races for governor or the U.S. Senate compare to it in intensity.
Because of its importance and stature, the presidential election has attracted the most attention from scholars of voting. The most influential works on voting have studied presidential elections, and this narrow focus may have caused past research to overgeneralize from the one anomalous election to others.[58]
Campaigns of moderate intensity, such as typical gubernatorial or
U.S. Senate elections, cost far less than a presidential race. Spending only a million dollars or so, a candidate can usually make voters aware that an election is taking place with modest television and radio advertising and a professional campaign organization. In a small town, just a few thousand dollars and a large grassroots effort can create a campaign of sufficient visibility that voters know the candidates by name
But there is a stratum of elections beneath even the so-called "lowinformation" races, and here lie most elections for public office. The vast majority of election research has focused on presidential and congressional elections, but those elections are for only one of the over 80,000 governments across the United States. Most races for office in the 50 state governments are very low-proflle, as are the vast majority of elections to office in over 3,000 counties, 19,000 municipalities, 16,000 townships, 14,000 school districts, and over 33,000 other special districts across the United States[60] Most voters are hardly aware of these elections and may not even know a single fact about the candidates until they see names and other details on the ballot. In Texas judicial races, for example, roughly four-fifths of voters could not recognize the names of major candidates just minutes after voting. In 1976, because he shared a familiar surname—Yarbrough—with a former senator and gubernatorial candidate, voters unwittingly elected to the Texas Supreme Court a candidate who claimed he "took his instructions from God."[61] The lowest of the low-intensity races even surprise some voters, who proclaim, "I didn't know there was an election" for the state legislature, county council, municipal judgeship, or school board. As Harry S Truman once remarked about a local elected office in Pittsburgh, "What in the hell's a prothonotary?"[62]
Local representatives, as well as the more obscure state elected officials, barely make a blip on the average citizen's radar. As James Fishkin muses, "I know almost nothing about most of the 200 to 350 people[63] [who represent me], and they certainly know almost nothing of me. Public awareness of these elections is sometimes so low that turnout is under 20 percent or even below 10 percent. Capitalizing on this fact, the Christian Coalition began targeting local elections in 1990 because it knew that a small, activist core could prove decisive in them. Victory required few votes, and "stealth candidates" could win support without voters knowing what special interests they actually represented.[64]
Table 2 brings together voter sophistication and campaign visibility to demonstrate how candidate evaluation varies depending on these two variables, plus the partisan nature of voters and elections.[65] The table identifles the primary evaluation method of different combinations of voters and elections. The four evaluation methods can be summarized as decision-making shortcuts used by voters to select candidates:
| Type of voter | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Type of election voter | Independent, unaware voter | Independent, aware voter | Partisan, unaware voter | Partisan, aware voter | ||||||||
NOTE: The cells in the body of the table correspond to four evaluation methods:
| ||||||||||||
| Low-visibility nonpartisan/ primary | Name | Name | Name | Name | ||||||||
| Low-visibility partisan | Name | Name | Party | Party | ||||||||
| High-visibility nonpartisan/ primary | Media | Ideology | Media | Ideology | ||||||||
| High-visibility partisan | Media | Ideology | Party | Ideology | ||||||||
- Name: If little is known about the candidates, vote for the candidate with the more familiar name. If some positive and negative personal information is known about candidates (e.g., incumbent went to the same school as the voter or dresses poorly), average those considerations and choose the candidate with the best average rating.
- Media: Average all media messages (e.g., campaign ads, news-paper/television campaign coverage) received and choose the candidate with the best average rating. All messages are treated as being equally credible and relevant.
- Party: Choose the candidate who shares the same party affiliation as the voter.
- Ideology: Excluding messages provided by elites with a dissimilar ideology (e.g., ads produced by ideologically dissimilar organizations, endorsements by ideologically dissimilar newspaper editors), average all media messages received and choose the candidate with the best average rating.
For ease of presentation, table 2 includes a few simpliflcations. The flgure substitutes "awareness" for political sophistication, and it collapses awareness into two categories—unaware and aware. Table 2 also collapses ideological and political sophistication into one variable. Voters with high political awareness are presumed to both attend to political messages and to approach them with a clear ideological orientation. In reality, most voters falling into one category also fall into the other, but a minority of ideologues lack political sophistication and vice versa. For the same reason, campaign intensity is collapsed into two categories—low- and high-visibility. The dividing line between those categories is, roughly, a moderate-intensity congressional election.
In a typical low-visibility nonpartisan or primary election, the Name model best describes candidate evaluation. Because they have no party affiliation, independent voters also select candidates using Name in lowvisibility partisan elections. If asked to explain why they voted the way they did, these voters might say they "preferred" their candidate of choice, without any deeper explanation, or they might admit that they simply chose the one candidate whose name they recognized or whose hand they had shaken.[66] In a high-visibility election, independent voters with low political awareness use the Media voting method because they receive a signiflcant number of mass media and advertising messages about candidates.[67] Low-awareness partisan voters also use the Media evaluation method in high-visibility party primaries and nonpartisan races. Having received some relevant media messages, many of these voters will be able to recall more substantial arguments for and against candidates; some may even be able to mention key candidate actions and use those as a partial basis for voting.[68] Party is the primary evaluation method for partisan voters in partisan races, with one exception: partisan voters with high political awareness use their ideological sophistication to fllter media messages and identify the optimal candidate.[69] Highly aware independent and partisan voters use this Ideology method in every high-visibility election, although true independents have considerable difficulty identifying like-minded ideological elites in highly polarized media environments.
Table 2 is a crude summary portrait of candidate evaluation, but it makes clear two of the central points in this chapter. First, only partisan voters with high political awareness use party or ideology to evaluate candidates in three of the four types of elections. If only 20 percent of the public is ideological, and 20 percent of those are independent,
POWERFUL INCUMBENTS AND SCARCE OPPONENTS
The difficulty of successful electoral rejection stems not just from illdeflned interests and crude candidate evaluations, but also from the limited pool of candidates requiring evaluation. Imagine that a relatively liberal Republican voter learns from liberal ideological elites that people with liberal values should support Medicare, cuts in defense spending, and a progressive tax system. Having clarifled some of her basic policy concerns, this earnest citizen might exercise her voice and ask for these policies from a conservative incumbent who represents her in Congress. Rebuffed by the incumbent, the citizen then prepares to become a voter exercising her right to attempt electoral rejection by studying the candidates opposing her Republican incumbent. This story might end any number of ways, but it is likely that this citizen-voter will end up frustrated by the range of alternative candidates available. In some stories, she is shocked to discover that there is no opponent in the primary or general. Or perhaps the incumbent has only a more conservative opponent in the Republican primary, or the Democratic nominee opposing the incumbent has views resembling those of the incumbent. Or, most likely of all, the Democratic primary election results in an opponent who is neither politically viable nor capable. Even if the voter had, in theory, all of the skills necessary to recognize her (and the larger public's) genuine interests and to evaluate competing candidates, she may flnd herself with no real choice.
Recall that in chapter 2, a necessary precondition of successful collective rejection of unrepresentative incumbents was the existence of alternatives. In the case of elections, this means that (a) one or more electoral opponents must have a chance of winning the election, (b) opponents' policy positions must differ from those of the incumbent, and (c) opponents must have at least minimal competence to pursue those policies in office. America has a long-standing tradition of debate and conflict, and its democratic political philosophy and institutions are primarily adversarial in nature.[70] Nonetheless, many factors
One reason that potential candidates often decline to oppose an elected official is that they dislike the personal criteria by which candidates are judged. For the highest offices, media coverage of campaigns devotes considerable attention to uncovering the "character" of candidates by scrutinizing their personal lives. Tempting targets, such as Gary Hart and Bill Clinton, have habituated the media to looking for personal weaknesses while covering the candidates in presidential primaries. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have been frustrated by the unwillingness of possible candidates to step into the political arena for this reason. Though the media pay scant attention to the personalities and family lives of lower-level candidates, there remains a widespread perception that campaigning for any political office exposes one to inappropriate scrutiny.
For similar reasons, flerce negative campaigning also has turned away potential candidates. Citizens contemplating a career in public service cannot help but notice the harsh television ads and mudslinging mailers exchanged by candidates in other races. Though a low-intensity campaign against an incumbent might never prompt such an attack on the challenger, prospective candidates must still weigh the odds that they will be unfairly attacked, or that their past missteps will be broadcast for all to see. Whether running for federal, state, or local office, the fear of becoming the target of a negative campaign makes qualifled citizens wary of seeking election.[71]
But even angelic candidates and thick-skinned sinners avoid running for office because of the long odds of defeating an incumbent. By virtue of their position, elected officials have numerous advantages over challengers. Members of Congress, for instance, can send mail to constituents without charge. They have travel and communication allowances, constant invitations to public events, regular media exposure, a district office, and paid staff.[72] Even before a campaign begins, the electorate is normally quite familiar with the incumbent's name, while unable to recognize that of the challenger. An aggressive campaign can reduce but not remove that advantage. After the 1990 and 1994 House elections, for instance, an average of 91 percent of voters reported having had some contact (from a piece of mail to a handshake) with incumbents, but only 40 percent reported contact with a challenger. Eighteen percent said they had met the incumbent, compared to only 3 percent who had met the challenger.[73] Given the frequency with which
The greatest advantage of incumbency, however, is fund-raising ability. The rising price of seeking the presidency has received considerable attention, but costs are climbing for other offices, as well. A tremendous amount of money has been spent on House and Senate races nationwide for decades, and the cost of election has continued to grow. Candidates for the House and Senate spent $740 million dollars in the 1997–98 two-year election cycle. To make matters worse, Gary Jacobson explains, "a vastly disproportionate share of the growing pot of campaign money has gone to incumbents and candidates for open seats."[74]
The average cost of contested races is far more than even those flgures would suggest. Some unopposed incumbents initially raise funds to intimidate potential opponents and keep them off the ballot, but once that task has been accomplished, "safe" incumbents raise relatively little money. The bulk of fund-raising and spending occurs in the handful of competitive races across the country. To take an extreme example, in the 1996 race for the lone congressional seat for North Dakota, one of the nation's least-populated states, with a relatively small economy, the Democratic incumbent, Earl Pomeroy, spent $971,000 defeating the $434,000 campaign of his Republican opponent (55 percent to 43 percent). High-proflle competitive races involve much greater sums. When Senator Jesse Helms, the long-time incumbent, fought off the challenge of Harvey Gantt in the 1996 North Carolina Senate election, Helms outspent his opponent by nearly two-to-one, even though Gantt spent $8 million.[75]
The national trend of escalating campaign costs has parallels for most state and local offices as well. In California, for example, it is now common for candidates for the state legislature to spend as much, or even more, than candidates for U.S. Congress in comparable districts. New candidates for the California legislature now need to raise $500,000, or possibly more, to compete against an incumbent. These high stakes for state races led one Los Angeles Times reporter to note that "even back-bench legislators attract $100,000 or more from single sources."[76] In New Mexico, one of the poorest states in the United States, candidates for the state legislature have in the past routinely run for office on budgets under $15,000. In 1996, however, a highly competitive Democratic primary set an ominous precedent, with three candidates
Aside from the daunting fund-raising requirements of an effective challenge, Gary Jacobson notes, the personal flnancial cost of running has escalated: "The investment of time and energy … required to run an all-out campaign is daunting. A serious House candidacy is a fulltime job—with plenty of overtime. Most non-incumbents have to flnance the campaign's start-up costs while forgoing income from their regular work for many months.[78]
The high personal and flnancial cost of campaigning has contributed to the dearth of candidates for public office. Surveying nine congressional districts in Tennessee in 1998, for example, the Associated Press reporter Rachel Zoll identifled only one credible challenger. The 1997–98 Tennessee congressional delegation included five Republicans and four Democrats, reflecting the parity between the two parties statewide, and in the 1996 presidential election, President Clinton defeated Robert Dole in Tennessee by just two percentage points. Nonetheless, no Tennessee incumbent has lost reelection to the House since 1974, and the 1998 elections proved no exception. When Zoll asked local analysts to explain the lack of credible challengers, they gave two explanations: the "intensive and intrusive media attention" candidates receive and "the high cost of running."[79] Tennessee is no exception: the number of experienced challengers choosing to run against congressional incumbents has declined from 1950 to 1990.[80]
What is true for national races is also true in low-proflle races. As James MacGregor Burns and his colleagues explain in their survey of state and local elections: "Getting good people to run for office is … a challenge. The spiraling cost of campaigns and the advantages enjoyed by incumbents have deterred many good potential candidates. Others are repelled by the nasty and negative tone of recent elections. Unless a democracy produces able citizens who are willing to run for office, itloses its ability to hold incumbents accountable.[81]
For these reasons, the opponents that incumbents face in both highand low-proflle races usually have serious liabilities. Some lack basic intellectual and political skills, and many more are political extremists. There is no way of preventing unqualifled candidates from seeking local, state, and federal offices, but it is striking how often such candidates appear as the only opposition on the ballot. This problem of unchallenged incumbency is by no means new. Just one example among
Although voters are asked to choose every year between well-qualified and politically distinct candidates, many of these elections turn out to be meaningless, because the challenger cannot compete against the well-funded incumbent. These challengers choose to run against the odds, but precious few ever manage to beat those odds. In partisan races in strong Democratic or Republican districts, challengers cannot overcome the unpopularity of their own party, and in more evenly matched districts, nonpartisan races, and primary elections, the incumbent derives a decisive advantage from name recognition and a larger advertising budget. The dramatic victories of underdog challengers make for good stories because they are the exception, but their occurrence in no way changes the overall pattern of uncompetitive elections.
There are situations in which voters have the luxury of choosing among equally qualifled and viable candidates. A few incumbents inhabit volatile districts in which every new election is as stressful as the last: the late George Brown represented his southern California district in the House from 1972 to 1999, but he only managed to do so by flghting off one challenger after another. He won his 1996 reelection campaign with 50.5 percent of the vote, and he won with 51 percent in 1994.[82]
Most competitive races, though, feature no incumbent—either because one lost in the primary or because the incumbent has chosen to retire or run for another office instead. When these "open-seat races" take place in even marginally competitive districts, they often result in aggressive campaigns and even higher levels of candidate spending. For example, after Bill Bradley announced his retirement from the U.S. Senate, two New Jersey congressmen ran against one another in the 1996 general election. The Republican, Dick Zimmer, was pro-choice and moderate on many social issues, but he nonetheless clashed with his Democratic opponent, Robert Torricelli, on many issues. With each of the candidates spending over $8 million, neither had a clear flnancial edge, and after a hard-fought election, Torricelli won with 53 percent of the vote.[83] The central question, however, is whether voters have a realistic
| Percentage Reelected | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Main Presidential Candidates | U.S. House of Representatives (%) | U.S. Senate (%) | |
| SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1997, table 447. 1998 flgures are calculated directly from 1998 election results. The percentages represent the number of incumbents who won both primary and general elections divided by the total number who ran for reelection. | |||
| 1972 | Nixon–McGovern | 94 | 74 |
| 1974 | — | 88 | 85 |
| 1976 | Ford–Carter | 96 | 64 |
| 1978 | — | 94 | 60 |
| 1980 | Carter–Reagan | 91 | 55 |
| 1982 | — | 90 | 93 |
| 1984 | Reagan–Mondale | 96 | 90 |
| 1986 | — | 98 | 75 |
| 1988 | Bush–Dukakis | 98 | 85 |
| 1990 | — | 96 | 97 |
| 1992 | Bush–Clinton–Perot | 88 | 82 |
| 1994 | — | 90 | 92 |
| 1996 | Clinton–Dole–Perot | 94 | 91 |
| 1998 | — | 98 | 90 |
| Average from 1972 to 1998 | 94 | 81 | |
Together, these factors result in a very secure incumbency for most public officials. Periodically, there is a public cry of "Throw the bums out!" Ross Perot tried to ride such a wave of protest into the White House in 1992. The reality is that even such elections result in little turnover. In the case of Congress, for example, 88 percent of U.S. representatives and 82 percent of senators won reelection despite the cry for reform and new candidates from "outside the Beltway" (see table 3).[84] For the House, reelection rates since 1972 have never been below that mark, though the Senate had a period of turnover following
Upon closer inspection, reelection is even more of a certainty than table 3 suggests. A few highly volatile congressional districts across the country account for most of the turnover. Most representatives have even higher probabilities of reelection, with 65–85 percent of House incumbents typically winning with at least 60 percent of the vote—a victory margin of 20 percent or greater. After studying the signiflcance of incumbency in 150 years of congressional races, John Alford and David Brady conclude that "personal incumbency advantage now rivals partisan advantage in its contribution to reelection margins."[86] Beyond the relatively high-proflle U.S. House and Senate races, typical state and local incumbents enjoy at least as powerful an inherent advantage over their challengers. Since these low-visibility races do not receive signiflcant media exposure and seldom attract well-funded opposition, these elected officials are often even more secure in their jobs.[87]
NONVOTING, DISTRUST, AND CIVIC NEGLECT
Some might argue that high reelection rates simply reflect the public's satisfaction with its representatives. Were this the case, one would expect that at least half the population would have very favorable views of local, state, and federal public officials. As suggested in chapter 1, however, public confldence in government is low. Taking a closer look at public trust, table 4 shows that only one in twenty American adults have "a great deal" of confldence in their public officials and political institutions, and roughly one-third have "very little" confldence in them. More qualitative research has also found evidence supporting the claim that the majority of Americans feel "shut out" of government and have come to "hate" the political process.[88]
Not only is public confldence in representative institutions low, it is in decline. As mentioned in chapter 1, 17 percent of respondents in 1974 had "a great deal of confldence" in Congress, but only 8 percent reported the same view in 1994. Twenty-one percent expressed "hardly any" confldence in Congress in 1974, and 39 percent held this view in 1994. In 1974, 64 percent of respondents agreed that "public officials
| Institution | A great deal (%) | Quite a lot (%) | Some (%) | Very little (%) | No answer (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1997, table 460, based on Gallup survey Giving and Volunteering in the United States, 1996 (Washington, D.C.: Independent Sector, 1996). | |||||
| Local government | 5 | 26 | 43 | 23 | 2 |
| Federal government | 5 | 18 | 44 | 31 | 2 |
| Congress | 3 | 12 | 42 | 39 | 4 |
| Political organizations, parties | 4 | 11 | 39 | 43 | 4 |
When placed in a broader context, some of this decline in public trust actually may have been healthy. In his history of American public life, Michael Schudson points out that "there can be too much trust as well as too little." High public trust in the 1950s and 1960s partly "reflected a moment of unusual consensus in American life held together by Cold War paranoia, middle-class complacency, postwar affiuence, and the continuing denial of a voice in public life to women and minorities." Thus, "Some of the skepticism about major institutions today is amply warranted…. Then again, some of it seems to express a deeper alien ation and aimlessness.[90]
This alienation manifests itself in the perception that American elected officials do not represent the public. Reviewing 1995 data introduced in chapter 1, table 5 shows that depending on the words one uses, 60–88 percent of Americans agree that representatives are insincere and unresponsive to the real concerns of the public. Whereas nearly two-thirds of Americans in 1964 agreed that "elections make the government pay a good deal of attention" to the public, only 42 percent held that view in 1996. Or, in more general terms, in 1964, 32 percent agreed that "the government pays a good deal of attention to what people think," but only 15 percent held that view in 1996.[91]
It is not so much the political institutions themselves that people distrust—it is the people elected to represent them within those governmental
| Statement | Strongly Agree (%) | Total Who Agree Statement (%) |
|---|---|---|
| SOURCE: Alan F. Kay, Locating Consensus for Democracy (St. Augustine, Fla.: Americans Talk Issues Foundation, 1998), 2. | ||
| Government leaders tell us what they think will get them elected, not what they are really thinking. | 61 | 88 |
| Government leaders say and do anything to get elected, then do whatever they want. | 55 | 79 |
| Politicians work for themselves and their own careers, not the people they represent. | 41 | 73 |
| The government is run for the beneflt of special interests, not to beneflt most Americans. | 37 | 70 |
| Government leaders are out of touch. They don't know or care about what's going on in the rest of America. | 30 | 60 |
Along with deep public distrust, the number of eligible American citizens who do not vote concerns many political observers. Though many bemoan the "steady decline" in American electoral participation,[94] voting in major elections has not changed dramatically in recent decades. The more important point is that turnout remains very low. Table 6 shows that voter turnout in presidential general elections has not declined dramatically since 18- to 21-year olds were given the right to vote prior to the 1972 election. Roughly half of the electorate has voted in each presidential general election for the last seven elections. During the forty years prior to 1972, turnout for the eligible electorate ranged from 51 percent (Truman-Dewey in 1948) to 63 percent (Kennedy
| Main Presidential Candidates | Turnout (%) | |
|---|---|---|
| SOURCE: Federal Election Commission. Data available at http://www.fec.gov/pages/electpg.htm. | ||
| 1972 | Nixon–McGovern | 55 |
| 1974 | — | 38 |
| 1976 | Ford-Carter | 54 |
| 1978 | — | 37 |
| 1980 | Carter-Reagan | 53 |
| 1982 | — | 40 |
| 1984 | Reagan-Mondale | 53 |
| 1986 | — | 36 |
| 1988 | Bush-Dukakis | 50 |
| 1990 | — | 37 |
| 1992 | Bush-Clinton-Perot | 55 |
| 1994 | — | 39 |
| 1996 | Clinton-Dole-Perot | 49 |
| 1998 | — | 36 |
Voting rates for most elections are lower. Even-year general elections usually draw out substantially more voters than do primaries, odd-year general elections, and local and special elections may bring out as little as 10 percent of the electorate. Those who show up on election day also tend to stop voting as they reach the lower-proflle races farther down the ballot. This process is called voter "roll-off" or "drop-off." From 1972 to 1996, for example, there was usually a 3–5 percent drop-off from presidential to House elections nationwide. That means that one in twenty citizens counted as voting did not, in fact, do so in the congressional elections. The drop off for lower races is much more substantial. As an illustration, table 7 shows the extent to which voters in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, "dropped off" as they went down their ballots. For example, 8 percent of those who went to the polls or fllled out absentee ballots declined to vote for a state corporation commissioner, and when they got to a state Supreme Court retention election, in which they had the choice of retaining or rejecting a sitting justice, 22 percent declined to vote. Drop-off of this magnitude is common, and uneven drop-off among different voting groups can make the voting population even less representative of the larger population.[96]
| Public Office | Ballots without a Vote (%) |
|---|---|
| SOURCE: Bernalillo County Clerk. Data available at http://www. bernco.gov/clerk/election.html. | |
| NOTE: Offices are listed in the order they appeared on the ballot. To reduce table size, some offices have been omitted. The Supreme Court retention election gave voters the option of voting "for or against" a sitting justice. | |
| U.S.President | 2 |
| U.S. Senate | 3 |
| U.S. House of Representatives | 4 |
| State Corporation Commissioner | 8 |
| Court of Appeals, Position 1 | 11 |
| Supreme Court (retention vote) | 22 |
What is the source of persistent nonvoting and drop-off among those who do choose to vote? One view is that nonvoting reflects public complacency or approval of government.[97] Low public trust and confldence in government, however, suggest that nonvoting reflects frustration and alienation more than complacency and satisfaction. Another view is that nonvoters are engaging in a meaningful form of public protest. For example, the radical activist Erwin Knoll argued that his vote would count the most if he refused to cast it. A willful nonvoter once suggested a more indirect protest to an interviewer: he didn't vote because he didn't want to "encourage them."[98] Given the ineffectiveness of this form of protest, it is not surprising that research on nonvoting flnds no support for the protest explanation.
Together, deep public distrust, nonvoting, limited candidate scrutiny, and even ill-defined public opinion are signs of a growing civic neglect. As explained in chapter 2, when dissatisfled citizens fail to use their vote (and their voice), their inaction constitutes neglect of the system. By declining to register their disapproval, citizens permit poor representation to persist. Even in those cases where public officials do face serious challenges to their incumbency, because of the public's inattention and superflcial candidate evaluation, strategically sound challengers would be mistaken to focus their campaigns on a substantive critique of incumbents' public records. Genuine policy debate on a complex issue wins few voters during campaigns, which are more commonly characterized by misleading accusations, personal insinuations, and one-sided attacks.[99] Exchanges between candidates are more vitriolic
This pattern of civic neglect, nondeliberative campaigning, and questionable representation has self-reinforcing qualities. As James March and Johan Olsen argue in Democratic Governance, "Political actors act on the basis of identities that are themselves shaped by political institutions and governance."[101] Individuals' experience of the political process shapes their understanding of themselves, their civic capabilities, and their understanding or "accounts" of the process itself. The electoral process described in this chapter leads voters to conclude, as Murray Edelman argues, that voting is closer to "self-expression" than powerful political action. Repeated lessons in futility are likely to engender a helpless or cynical self-identity as a voter, cause civic skills to atrophy, and lead to even more skeptical beliefs about the value and impact of elections.[102] Then, in turn, "voters who are left feeling that they are not represented are very likely to feel alienated and detached, and as nonparticipants they are unwilling to shoulder the sacriflces that may be required to promote the common good."[103] When this detachment leads to nonvoting, it further weakens the effectiveness of elections by making the remaining voting population less representative of the general public.[104]
When this process is repeated over time, it reinforces some of the very problems that lead to hasty candidate evaluation, distrust, nonvoting, and misrepresentation. To put it mildly, the American electoral process does not appear to be a self-correcting system. Instead, the extreme difficulty of challenging unresponsive elected officials fosters a civic neglect that further erodes the electoral process.