4. Appraising Radical
And Conventional
Electoral Reforms
If voters look for information about candidates under streetlights, then that is where candidates must campaign, and the only way to improve elections is to add streetlights.Samuel Popkin, The Reasoning Voter
The severity of the problems outlined in chapter 3 has inspired many attempts at reforming elections in the United States. Some of the most radical critics of modern American elections suggest discarding the representative system for a more direct form of democracy, whereas others embrace the principle of representation but flnd fault with winner-take-all district elections. In this chapter, I briefly discuss these proposals, but I devote more attention to the relatively modest changes that political reformers have already put in place. In the broadest sense, these reforms (and suggested improvements to them) are all in the spirit of Samuel Popkin's call for adding streetlights to elections so that average voters can make better choices on their ballots. More precisely, this metaphor concerns voters' ability to see clearly the real abilities and beliefs of the candidates.
If political reforms, be they modest or monumental, can help voters tell a sound candidate from an unrepresentative one, then they might open wide the door to effective electoral action. And if voters regularly begin to reject officials who are unresponsive and out of touch with the general public, it may lead to governance that better corresponds with the public's best interests. Ultimately, that is the criterion by which all electoral reforms must be judged.
DIRECT DEMOCRACY
Critics of representative democracy argue that government serves the public's interest only when the two become one. In this view, it is too difficult to make representatives accountable for their actions even with periodic elections, and, in any case, the public is capable of governing itself directly. If a democratic system makes all decisions in this way, vote and voice become unnecessary, because the public has no bad rep resentatives to reject or chastise. Instead, citizens deliberate together, then express their views directly through their own votes. If their votes produce policies that undermine the public's interest, they have no one to blame but themselves. Even when writing in theoretical terms, however, advocates of direct democracy do not go that far.
The most influential writer on direct democracy was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued for direct self-governance in The Social Contract over two hundred years ago. Rousseau maintained that government and its laws can only embody the general will if they come directly from the governed. Rousseau envisioned face-to-face assemblies of citizens as the ideal form of democratic deliberation and policymaking, but he reluctantly recognized the limits of this vision. "It is impossible to imagine," he wrote, "that the people should remain in perpetual assembly to attend to public affairs." Thus, even Rousseau recognized that a direct system of democracy would have some measure of representation, although the public might be divided into small electorates that maintained an intimate relationship with their representatives.[1]
One of the most recent proposals for a such a system came from Frank Bryan, a University of Vermont political science professor, and John McClaughry, a Vermont state senator. In The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale (1989) these authors outline a system that places the greatest amount of political power in the hands of local shires made up of 10,000 people in five to ten towns. In this vision of democracy, citizens would make most of the important decisions of their lives within these shires. True direct democracy would take place in small town meetings, and these face-to-face assemblies would also elect the most powerful local representatives. State government would have relatively little power, and its primary role would be channeling funds to the shires and providing them with technical assistance on matters of policy. Relatively few decisions would be made at state and federal levels, and shires would even have ways of playing a direct role in the nation's foreign policy.
Kevin O'Leary suggests another means by which large-scale institutions can be brought down to the community level. He proposes that every congressional district in the United States should have a legislative assembly, representing flfty subdistricts. The 435 such assemblies across the country "would have the duties of helping to set the legislative agenda and … deliberating and voting on bills that have passed the House." In effect, a bill that made it through Congress would then have one more stop before reaching the president. If deemed sufficiently important by the joint executive committee overseeing the network of assemblies, each local body would deliberate and vote on a bill, and their votes would be decisive.[2]
Local legislative assemblies would not be a form of direct democracy per se. They would make federal government more local, however, and because of the small size of the local assemblies, the process appears closer to the ideal of direct democracy than the present system. Because they would constitute yet another layer of representation, the assemblies would nevertheless suffer some from of the problems detailed in chapter 3. In effect, the proposal creates another layer of government but does not fundamentally change the process by which average voters select and influence representatives. No doubt the assemblies would give even greater influence to their most active constituents, but that would further increase the influence of the most influential.
John Burnheim has proposed a different system of direct government. Like the Vermont shire system, Burnheim's "demarchy" shifts considerable power away from federal and state governments to local authorities. Demarchy decentralizes power not only vertically but also horizontally: whereas the shire system would have powerful local governments to manage the business of each town and shire, demarchy splits up those local powers for each major public function. The local transportation bureau and the hospital board, for example, would govern themselves separately. Moreover, the public officials who managed these agencies would not be elected; instead, a random lottery would periodically select representatives from among the citizens who used each public good.[3]
The idea of direct legislation has become popular in many countries, however, and it is, in some ways, practiced in the United States. Many states permit citizen-sponsored referenda and initiatives. Through an initiative, voters can propose a legislative measure or a constitutional amendment by obtaining the required number of signatures on a petition. A referendum gives voters the chance to approve or reject a policy
Unfortunately, referenda and initiative elections suffer from the same maladies that plague elections for public office. For instance, surveys have found that "as many as one-third to a majority of those voting" report feeling "uncomfortable about voting because they needed more information or more time to discuss the issue or to read the voter pamphlet more carefully, or found that the statement was too hard to read and comprehend."[6] When an initiative on the ballot receives little notice, voters may have nothing to base their vote upon other than the confusing wording of the initiative itself. In relatively high-visibility referendum elections, such as the recent votes on affirmative action and the civil rights of homosexuals in Western states, average voters are likely to have much more information, although much of it may be misleading, deceptive, or simply inaccurate.[7] For these elections to work properly, they would have to be far more deliberative in character, and chapter 7 suggests a way in which states might improve the initiative and referenda processes.
Even when initiative elections work properly, however, they do not provide a substitute for representative government. They can complement indirect democracy with periodic opportunities for direct citizen involvement in policy decision making, but few consider the initiative process a practical method for conducting all of the public's legislative business. This reality brings back into focus the difficulty of ensuring effective electoral relief from bad representation, and the remainder of this chapter examines different proposals for meeting that challenge.
ALTERNATIVE VOTING SYSTEMS
Democratic reformers committed to representative government flnd fault, not with the notion of representation, but with aspects of particular
CUMULATIVE AND PREFERENTIAL VOTING
Even modest changes in this basic design can sound shocking to Americans, although such variations are usually designed to ensure more political equality. When President Clinton nominated Lani Guinier for the position of assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1993, Republicans (and some Democrats) vilifled her for supporting alternative voting systems. Guinier's critics decried her views on civil rights and elections as "anti-democratic" and dubbed her the "Quota Queen." Just a month after naming her, Clinton withdrew her nomination, with the explanation that he had reread her writings and disagreed with her views.
What had Guinier advocated that caused a political battle and cost her the nomination? With regard to representative government, Guinier had endorsed a system called cumulative voting. As she described it, "Under cumulative voting, voters get the same number of votes as there are seats or options to vote for, and they can then distribute their votes in any combination to reflect their preferences. Like-minded voters can vote as a solid bloc or, instead, form strategic…. coalitions to gain mutual beneflts."[8]
The advantage of such a system is that it ensures signiflcant minorities some representation in government bodies. In a winner-take-all system, a subgroup of the public might cast one-third of the votes yet never win an election. Cumulative voting reduces the likelihood of creating a permanent minority by permitting voters to cast all of their votes for one candidate instead of requiring those votes to be spread across separate races for each seat. Guinier gives the example of
Other deviations from the winner-take-all model are common outside the United States. Preferential voting is practiced in the Irish Parliament, the Australian Senate, and even on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, city council. This system also has candidates run for several seats at once, but rather than voting multiple times, each voter picks a firstchoice candidate, a second choice, and so on. If a candidate receives more first-choice votes than are needed to win a seat, those surplus votes (chosen at random) get transferred to the backers' second choices. Also, the candidate with the fewest votes has his or her backers' ballots all transferred to their second choices. This process is then repeated, looking for any candidates who have enough first- or second-choice votes to win a seat, and so on. In practice, roughly seven in eight voters end up backing a winning candidate.[10] Again, the point of such a system is to ensure that voters are represented.
Cumulative and preferential voting both have the virtue of empowering small blocs of voters. Nevertheless, these systems do not address the basic problem underlying ineffective electoral competition against unrepresentative incumbents. They provide no deliberative process whereby voters formulate their interests more clearly (other than perhaps a vague identity as a minority voting bloc), and they do not aid voters in making systematic candidate evaluations. Moreover, these systems might not even make use of those interests. By making electoral victory possible for candidates supported by less than a full majority, these systems might invite some new candidates into the electoral process, but money and personality would continue to play powerful roles in elections.
UNIVERSAL REPRESENTATION
In their book Reinventing Congress for the Twenty-First Century, Sol Erdman and Lawrence Susskind argue that party politics and
Since each member of Congress is elected by a majority vote of citizens whose political priorities directly conflict, most legislators shy away from dealing with real priorities. Instead, they try to represent some simplistic common denominators that the majority of local voters might accept— whether or not these commonalties have substance or coherence. Thus, one legislator defends his district's obsolete arms factory, although it harms the economy and security of the world his constituents inhabit. Another advocates less government and a balanced budget, but without any reduction in locally popular programs.[11]
They propose that the U.S. House of Representatives switch to a system of "universal representation." In this system, a large pool of candidates run for the House, and each voter selects a first-choice candidate, a second choice, and so on. Once all the ballots are collected, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is dropped, and the votes are transferred to those voters' second-choice candidates. This process of elimination continues until 250 candidates remain. In a follow-up election, each of the 10–15 percent of voters who had none of their choices elected would get to vote again and select one among the remaining 250 candidates. Finally, each of the 250 representatives receives a "voting strength" proportionate to the number of citizens who voted for him or her. In a way, this system is proportional representation, except that voters cast their ballots for speciflc individuals rather than political parties.
Erdman and Susskind argue that universal representation would give even greater power to minorities and ensure more public accountability than do other electoral systems. "Since universal voters would have many choices of candidates," they argue, "representatives would feel far greater pressure than they do now to address the priorities of their constituents…. Congressmen and women would have voters at their backs [and] scores of challengers on the sidelines."[12] By creating a likeminded constituency for each representative, elected officials would have less difficulty knowing and representing the interests of their constituents.
Erdman and Susskind's system has other important features, such as streamlined information transmission to help voters learn about candidates and public flnancing for voter education and some forms of campaigning. They imagine that the most highly motivated voters would spend several hours, or even days, evaluating the list of congressional
Would this system result in a better pool of candidates, more selfaware voters, and better candidate evaluations? Would representatives who failed to represent the interests of their backers face quick electoral defeat under it? It is hard to guess exactly how such a system would function and whether it might transform the values, skills, and habits of the electorate. Because it links representatives to substantive voter preferences, rather than parties or geographic districts, it might inspire voters to deliberate upon their own views and to choose a representative carefully. Unless the implementation of the system transforms the political process itself, however, it is likely that like cumulative and preferential voting, universal representation will not serve the interests of most of those citizens who either do not vote or vote based on inadequate candidate evaluations. The systems complicate the act of voting considerably, and that makes informed voting even more difficult.
Moreover, the questionnaire-matching method of voting in Erdman and Susskind's system could make it even harder to defeat incumbents who failed to represent the public's genuine interests. Depending on its structure, the survey questionnaire would probably institutionalize nondeliberative opinions rather than promoting more deliberative policy judgments and voting decisions. Also, so long as lazy voters' questionnaire responses remained stable, the voters would continue to elect candidates who gave matching answers, regardless of their actual actions as elected officials. The computer might try matching voter questionnaires with the actual votes cast by public officials, but who would program it to judge the implications of those policy votes?
PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION BY PARTIES
Regardless of the voting system, the less sophisticated voter must have a way to make an intelligent vote, because such voters exist in abundance in all large-scale quasi-democratic political systems. Most countries address this problem by simplifying rather than complicating voters' electoral decisions through the party-list form of proportional
Relative to the winner-takes-all system, PR has the advantage of electing public officials sympathetic to minority interests. In the United States, even when the supporters of a third political party are numerous, their geographic dispersion is likely to ensure their electoral defeat in every district. Under a PR system, such parties would win seats in proportion to the size of their memberships. If 5 percent of Americans strongly identified with the Libertarian Party and voted accordingly in a congressional election using the PR system, 5 percent of the members of the House of Representatives would be Libertarians. The other voting methods described earlier have this same advantage of minority representation, but the PR system is much simpler.[14]
Does proportional representation ensure effective electoral action? The answer to that question is complicated by the fact that voters do not elect individual representatives in the party-list version of PR. Voters shift allegiances to new parties, not new candidates, so the electorate evaluates entire parties, not candidates. Presumably, voters can better match their interests with a party platform than with individual candidates, and it may even be easier to track and evaluate the performance of a party in parliament than that of an individual representative. If a party is part of a majority coalition in a PR system, for instance, a voter can easily judge whether it has made environmental remediation a top priority. By contrast, because of the limited power of individual representatives in the present U.S. system, voters might mistake legislative failure for a lack of effort or interest on the part of a well-meaning representative.
The PR system also aids collective rejection of unrepresentative incumbents by making a single voter more powerful: for an elected body with 400 members, if only one-quarter of 1 percent of the electorate shifts allegiance away from an unrepresentative party, that party loses a seat. In the United States, a change in representation requires a sufficient number of disenchanted voters to move an incumbent's vote total below that of at least one challenger, and that can require a synchronized shift of 10 or even 30 percent of the vote.
MODEST ELECTORAL REFORMS
All of these systems, however, suffer from a problem of circumstance in addition to any errors in design. As Lani Guinier's experience demonstrated, major departures from the winner-take-all voting system can frighten or even enrage many Americans. Though a dispassionate discussion of these systems might win them more support, Americans have become attached to the notion of district representatives. Over time, the winner-take-all district system has become a tradition, and a wholesale departure from that system is unlikely in the near future. Thus, many electoral reformers have turned their attention to making changes within the basic framework of the existing system. In the remainder of this chapter, I review suggested changes in the number of terms an incumbent can hold office, the way campaigns are flnanced, how candidates present themselves during elections, and what information citizens obtain before voting.
LIMITING TERMS IN OFFICE
Perhaps the simplest reform proposed in recent decades is term limits. Advocates of term limits have argued that the failures of American government stem from long-term incumbency. As discussed in chapter 3, incumbents have tremendous advantages over challengers both by virtue of their office and because of the fund-raising ability that their office affords them. Elected officials grow dependent on campaign contributions, which ensure reelection, and consciously or not, they begin to represent the interests of contributors rather than those of their constituents. According to term-limits proponents, if elected officials were limited to a flnite number of terms in office, they would be out of office before they lost touch with the general public. Whenever an official reached his or her term limit, the next election would be guaranteed to bring into office a new representative.[15]
The simplicity of their design and their indisputable ability to remove incumbents from office has made proposals for term limits popular across the country. Public opinion is quite favorable toward term limits, and more than half of the states in the United States have set limits for the number of terms that their state legislators can remain in office.[16] Under these laws, elected officials can hold seats for only six to twelve years, although many individuals have found that they can successfully leap from one body to the other (in roughly the same geographic district) to double the length of their political careers.[17]
The term-limits approach to reform has various drawbacks. A 1995 U.S. Supreme Court ruling found that congressional term limits would require a constitutional amendment, so this approach will be difficult to extend above the state level. Aside from this barrier, term limits inevitably result in a decline in the average experience and skill of lawmakers. When grappling with the minutiae of complex policy debates, such inexperience may foster dependence on permanent (and unelected) legislative staff, as well as on seasoned lobbyists. Prior experience does not necessarily improve an elected official's moral judgment, but it does prove useful when crafting legislation and navigating the legislative process. In a few years, states will be able to take stock of the impact of term limits and better understand their impact on legislative competence.
The more serious problem with limiting terms is that this reform does not directly address the central problems introduced in the first chapter. In essence, the term-limits approach gives up on the problem of effective electoral rejection of unresponsive incumbents.[18] Instead of making incumbents accountable or even just vulnerable, this reform removes them altogether after just a few years in office. Elected officials are removed from office by time, rather than public protest. Framed in the model presented in chapter 2, a system of severe term limits admits that citizen vote and voice are powerless, and to avoid a downward spiral into civic neglect, the system instead gives citizens periodic competitive elections between new candidates.
When viewed in these terms, it is clear that the term-limits proposal is far from an automatic flx for the problems of low public trust and questionable representation. Term limits only remove long-term incumbency from the list of possible causes. To succeed, term limits would have to do more: they would have to transform the nature of campaigns, such that victors are more representative of the public's deliberative interests and citizens come to recognize and appreciate their improved representation. Even advocates of term limits do not claim such farreaching effects.[19] Proponents hope that term limits will restore public trust in government, but the successful enactment of term limits in numerous states has done nothing to halt the decline in public confldence.[20]
CHANGING THE ROLE OF MONEY
Other reformers have focused more closely on the role of money in American political campaigns. As illustrated in chapter 3, elections have become increasingly expensive. From 1972 to 1974, contributions
Those serious candidates who do run for office, with the exception of some independently wealthy individuals, also alter their behavior during campaigns because of their dependence on major donors. Candidates spend long hours trying to raise funds, and that fund-raising takes time away from contacting voters. Rather than meeting with citizens and considering their interests, many candidates spend more time meeting with potential contributors and modifying their policy positions or priorities to win contributions. The logic behind this behavior is simple: in one well-scheduled hour, a candidate for U.S. Congress might be able to earn ten or twenty votes through direct contact with undecided voters at a meeting, at their doors, or on the phone. Meeting or talking with donors, however, a candidate might be able to raise enough money to buy advertising that sways hundreds of votes. Since the candidate's opponent generally takes the latter approach, a candidate who relies upon direct contacts rarely wins in such elections. As even the most local races become more media-savvy and cable television facilitates advertising to narrower geographic and demographic target audiences, the incentives for larger budgets (and more fund-raising) increase even in small-scale elections.[23]
To encourage more contact with voters and less fund-raising, some political reformers have argued for public flnancing for all major elections. The idea of taxpayer money replacing political action committee and individual contributions is not decidedly un-American: presidential campaigns are funded, in part, by citizens who voluntarily check a box on their federal income tax forms. Advocates of public flnancing argue that virtually all other elections would beneflt from full or partial government funding. Survey data suggest that, depending on the design of the system, the electorate might support such an idea. For instance, a 1996 Gallup poll of likely voters found that 64 percent favored a
More modest proposals, some of which have become state or local law, recommend that the state provide matching funds and other perks to candidates who conform to strict campaign flnancing guidelines. In a Washington Post opinion piece, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein argue for a system that encourages small in-state donations in U.S. House and Senate elections. Under this plan, a federal fund would match any in-state individual contribution of $100 or less by placing a 10 percent tax on all contributions over $500. Candidates who followed these rules and obtained sufficient small in-state donations would then receive free air time, "contingent on the candidates them selves delivering the messages.[26]
Pushing candidates toward small contributions, however, may simply result in different fund-raising strategies by candidates and more independent expenditures by political action committees and other interest groups, which are difficult to regulate effectively and constitutionally. Paradoxically, limited public flnancing or systems that make it more difficult to amass campaign contributions could have the perverse effect of making campaigns less competitive. A study of U.S. House and Senate campaigns from 1978 to 1994 found that "the critical flnancial determinant of election outcome is not how much the top spender invests in a campaign, but whether the other serious candidates have sufficient funds to get their message to the voters." In 1994, the average budget of winning House candidates was $738,117, but most proposed spending caps are much lower. In this view, incumbents start with large advantages based on public visibility, constituent service, and campaign experience, so challengers need to be able to raise as much money as possible to reach voters.[27]
One more approach to campaign flnance reform tries to reduce fund-raising pressure by providing candidates with the most expensive campaign resource—air time. The League of Women Voters Education Fund, along with groups as diverse as the conservative American Enterprise
Even if campaign flnance reforms create more competitive races, that would not necessarily change the quality of the decisions that voters make. Just as the term-limits laws enacted in many states create a mandatory but mindless turnover in elected officials, more competitive elections might replace more incumbents, but the reforms do not improve the accuracy with which voters time those replacements. For this reason, a public flnancing scheme might prove to be nothing more than a rich person's term limit, which removes incumbents from office through costly elections without promising a superior replacement.
IMPROVING CAMPAIGN DISCOURSE
By removing the pressures of fund-raising altogether, full public flnancing proposals at least have the potential to expand the pool of qualifled candidates and increase the percentage of campaign energy devoted to voter contact. Even increases in the quality of candidates and the quantity of voter contacts, though, do not ensure a corresponding increase in voters' ability to recognize and reject unrepresentative elected officials through campaign deliberation. In the view of some reformers, only direct efforts to improve the deliberative quality of campaigns will solve the collective electoral action problem. If voters receive more high-quality information and watch fewer misleading or confusing campaign ads, the electorate will better understand the candidates and make more informed choices on their ballots.
Many critics of contemporary campaign discourse point to the prominent role of negative ads. In the American political vernacular, a negative ad is any written or broadcast campaign advertisement that criticizes an action or quality of an opponent. A negative ad might remind voters that an incumbent voted for a tax increase, or an attack ad could focus on the criminal background of a candidate's family. The purpose of negative ads is to win elections by winning over undecided voters, persuading an opponent's supporters to switch allegiance, or causing undecided or opposing voters not to vote.[29] There has been some debate about the third of these effects, but both experimental and fleld studies of attack ads show that such advertising often results in a modest (5 percent) drop in voting for a given election.[30]
More reflned critiques of campaign discourse distinguish between substantive criticisms and illegitimate attacks. One form of illegitimate attack is the outright falsehood or misleading statement. Some mass media responded to these ads in the 1990 election by reporting on the ads themselves. This "adwatch" approach aimed at scrutinizing campaign ads and revealing any false or exaggerated claims that candidates made to voters. Unfortunately, two studies of the adwatch response suggest that it is not always effective: a study of a 1992 Pat Buchanan attack ad on President George Bush found that viewing an adwatch caused voters to discredit the ad somewhat; however, a study of an attack ad in the 1992 North Carolina gubernatorial campaign found that by rebroadcasting the negative ad, the adwatch format can enhance the intended effect of the ad.[31]
A more extreme response is to ban or prohibit all misleading ads, whether they be on the attack or on the defensive. In the 1998 Ohio gubernatorial race, for example, a county judge granted a request by the Democratic candidate, Lee Fisher, to ban a television ad created by his Republican opponent, Bob Taft. Fisher's request pointed to two statements in Taft's ad. First, Taft's ad used a partial quotation from a Cleveland newspaper article explaining that Taft had campaigned in favor of a proposed tax increase on a public ballot but "didn't raise the taxes himself." Taft's ad responded to a Fisher attack by quoting, "Taft didn't raise the taxes…. " Second, Taft counterattacked by claiming that as a state senator, Fisher had cast the "deciding vote" that raised Ohio's income tax in 1983. Fisher argued that any senator's vote for the measure, which passed 17–16, could have been the "deciding" one, which Taft later acknowledged.[32]
Notwithstanding that some judges may make rulings such as the Ohio ban on misleading ads, the First Amendment bars such action as an infringement upon free speech, and the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently ruled against any such restriction. The Court's position is a sound one, because permitting judges to rule on the quality of political discourse invites unwarranted censorship and unduly politicizes the judicial branch. In the Ohio case, the defendant responded to the ruling by attacking the judge's neutrality (the judge had contributed $125 to the plaintiff's campaign). In this way, the main consequence of involving judges in partisan contests may be to undermine the legitimacy of the judiciary.
A more modest approach to unruly and manipulative campaign discourse is to work for voluntary codes of campaign ethics. In 1996, a Maine public library joined with a public policy institute to encourage the state's ten candidates for federal office to agree to a voluntary Code of Election Ethics. By signing the code, candidates agreed to follow four principles: honesty, respect, responsibility, and compassion. Box 1 shows the full text of the agreement, which combines broad guidelines with speciflc rules.
| SOURCE:http://www.campaignconduct.org. |
| Honesty and Fairness |
I shall emphasize my views, beliefs, and experiences. I am committed to an open and public discussion of issues and to presenting my record with sincerity and frankness. I shall not use or agree to let third parties use subtle deceptions, half-truths, falsiflcations, or such practices as push polling. If such practices are used by third parties without my approval, I shall repudiate it immediately and publicly upon my knowledge of its occurrence. Factual claims made by my campaign will be supported by publicly available documents provided by my campaign office. |
| Respect |
I shall avoid demeaning references to my opponent and demeaning visual images of my opponent. I shall respect my opponent. I shall not use or allow to be used personal attacks, innuendo, or stereotyping. |
― 84 ― |
| Responsibility |
I shall ensure that my campaign staff and campaign supporters will observe these principles of fair campaign practices. I take full responsibility for all advertising created or used on my behalf by staff and supporters. I shall conduct my campaign openly and publicly, discussing the issues as I see them, presenting my record and policies with sincerity and frankness, and criticizing without fear and without malice the record and policies of my opponent and his or her political party that merit such criticism. I will not condone or allow third-party advertising which does not meet the principles contained in this document. If such practices are used by third parties without my approval, I shall repudiate it immediately and publicly upon my knowledge of its occurrence. |
| Compassion |
| In the conduct of my candidacy, I shall show compassion at all times for my opponent. I shall remember that the campaign process is fundamental to representative democracy and that my behavior in the campaign affects the integrity of our society. |
The Maine Code inspired similar efforts, such as the Project on Campaign Conduct, sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts. With the project's assistance, the candidates in Washington State's second congressional district reached agreement on a similar code of conduct. In return, the candidates' ads can display a logo that depicts the shaking of hands and says, "Honesty, responsibility, fairness" and "Hold us accountable.[33]
The advantage of such codes is that they are voluntary, pose no threat to the freedom of political expression, and put pressure on holdouts to agree to reasonable standards for campaign conduct. In this way, they might promote substantive debate on relevant issues, and that would help voters accurately evaluate candidates and make better-in-formed choices. If they make campaigns more deliberative, they might also attract a higher-quality pool of candidates, many of whom had avoided running for public office because of the unduly hostile climate of past campaigns.[34]
The weakness of the voluntary codes is the fact that they come with no enforcement. In Maine, for example, many federal candidates returned to vicious attack ads in the final weeks of the campaign despite
GUIDING VOTERS
A different approach is to provide voters with more high-quality information, rather than trying to improve the quality of the messages that the candidates themselves produce. Returning to the epigraph from Samuel Popkin that opens this chapter, "If voters look for information about candidates under streetlights, then … the only way to improve elections is to add streetlights." If civic activists flnd attack ads distasteful, they can offer voters an alternative source of information about the candidates.
In Ohio, for example, voters did not have to rely on the attack ads exchanged by the two leading candidates in the 1998 gubernatorial election. Any voter who visited a public library, the Internet, or any number of coffee shops and public spaces could pick up a copy of the Ohio Voters Guide put out by the League of Women Voters. A quick glance at the fourth page showed voters the candidates' educational backgrounds, occupations, and relevant professional and voluntary experiences. The candidates also provided written answers to two questions, "How would you increase economic stability for all Ohioans?" and "Do you support a permanent, stable funding source for the House Trust Fund? Why or why not?"
Many voters flnd publications like the Ohio Voters Guide useful. A study of a similar voting guide in Bernalillo County, New Mexico, found that as many as a third of the registered voters in the county at least glanced at the guide before voting.[36] For many voters, a League of Women Voters guide is the only readily available source of information in low-intensity elections, such as those for state legislature or district judge. Poll workers often see voters walk into the voting booth clutching a printed guide, and those voters may read as they vote or refer back to selections they have already marked in their guides.[37]
Though voting guides can be helpful, they often contain vague or distorted information. The Ohio questions mentioned above illustrate two
For this and other reasons, the state of California prints and distributes an official voting guide with state funds. Once candidates submit their statements to the editors of the California Voters Guide, opponents can challenge the statements, and state judges rule on whether those challenges reveal factual inaccuracies. Despite public mistrust of government, the California secretary of state's office has found that the state-sponsored Guide has considerable influence on California voters. All of them receive it, and as many as one-third read and use it.[38] Writing from personal experience, I recall walking door-to-door during one election in San Diego and receiving a puzzled response from a voter when I tried to give her information about a congressional candidate. "Why would I need this?" the voter asked. "I'll just read the Voters Guide." (The irony is that congressional races are not, in fact, in the state's Guide.)
No matter what the quality of a guide's questions and answers, printing costs create space limitations that prevent detailed portraits of all of the candidates running for public office in a major election. On the Internet, no comparable limits exist. Project Vote Smart, the Democracy Network, and many other organizations have produced elaborate websites with several pages of information (and links to other sources of information) on each election. Some of these on-line voting guides permit interactive candidate evaluation: voters can answer a series of questions and compare their responses to candidate answers, just as Erdman and Susskind describe in their vision of universal representation (presented earlier in this chapter). These on-line guides can even provide up-to-the-minute information, including adwatch-style critiques of candidate claims and daily campaign flnancing updates to reveal any untoward contributions that happen to arrive just before election day.[39]
Though only a relatively small percentage of voters currently use these on-line guides, as Internet use increases among the general population, they will probably come to play at least as important a role as their paper-and-ink forerunners. These guides will also become more
Finally, some newspapers have begun to change the basic framing— or "master narrative"—of their state and local campaign coverage by deemphasizing attacks and counterattacks and focusing on the real concerns of their readership. As the journalism scholar Jay Rosen explains in the case of the 1992 election coverage provided by the Charlotte Observer, the newspaper "succeeded in changing the master narrative from the story of how the campaign was won to a new story: the story of citizens voicing their concerns, and listening to what candidates said about them." Stories report on the experiences and aspirations of local communities, then connect local issues to the candidates running for public office. Other papers followed the example of the Observer, Rosen explains, because "everyone in journalism is tired of the horse race as a master narrative.[40]
What is different about this form of campaign reform is that it addresses the most fundamental requirement for effective electoral rejection—the development of voters' policy views. Attempts to regulate campaign discourse or provide more information on the candidates take for granted that the voters already know what they want from their elected representatives. Chapter 3 demonstrates that, in fact, most voters do not understand government and politics very well and often fail to link their underlying values to even general policy preferences. By talking with voters and reporting those conversations in their newspapers, journalists simulate the face-to-face deliberation that helps citizens develop and recognize their interests. In this way, a newspaper can help its readers by both arriving at evaluative criteria and applying those criteria systematically to candidates.
Were all voters newspaper readers and all newspapers supportive of this innovative form of public journalism, American elections might produce different results. Unfortunately, neither of those preconditions exists, nor are they likely to. Newspapers are businesses, and if those businesses decide that such coverage boosts advertising revenue through an expanded affiuent readership, then papers might change their coverage. There is no strong evidence to that effect, but it is not an inconceivable evolution.
The more fundamental problem is that newspaper readers are already and will always be the most informed and sophisticated voters.[41] Other voting guides, whether printed or on the Internet, have the same drawback. A study of the California voting guide, for instance, found that 92 percent of users were regular voters even in primary elections. The majority of users had a bachelor's degree, with 28 percent of all users having obtained a graduate degree. This is not to say that such a guide has no beneflt: over two-thirds of the users surveyed found the voting guide "very helpful."[42] The problem is that conventional voting guides and innovative newspaper coverage of elections do not reach the average citizen. Ironically, these rich sources of political information reach the voters who need them the least.
DELIVERING INFORMATION TO THE VOTERS WHO NEED IT MOST
For the electorate to reject unresponsive representatives, it is critical that even the less-attentive voters judge candidates effectively. Not only do these voters need better candidate information the most, they are also sometimes the most pivotal subgroup of the electorate. Because voters of low and moderate sophistication are less attached to political parties, they are often more independent. In close races, these swing voters can decide the outcome of an election. In the 1998 New York Senate race, for instance, polls conducted a month before election day showed Republican Senator Alfonse D'Amato in a statistical tie with his Democratic opponent, Charles Schumer, with 10 percent of voters undecided. Just a week before the election, the results were the same, with the same percentage undecided.[43] Though voter turnout and other factors influenced Schumer's victory, his modest victory margin suggests that the undecided voters determined the outcome of the election. To take another example, a study of the 1992 general election in California found that late voters were the least partisan. Seventy-one percent of those who made up their minds before the election was well under way voted for candidates from the same party in the presidential and two U.S. Senate races that year. Only 56 percent of those who selected candidates during the campaign voted along party lines, and only 35 percent of those making a last-minute decision did so.[44]
If these critical voters do not have a reliable and efficient mechanism for candidate evaluation beyond simple partisanship, their electoral choices are unlikely to ensure accountability. Incumbents will win reelection