5. Public Expression
In American Politics
As it is essential to liberty that the government in general should have a common interest with the people, so it is particularly essential that the [House of Representatives] … should have an immediate dependence on and an intimate sympathy with the people.The Federalist, No. 52 (attributed to James Madison)
From 1970 to 1977, Richard Fenno traveled with and interviewed eighteen members of Congress to study their interaction with local constituencies. Fenno discovered that successful representatives devote considerable energy to developing positive relationships with the most active residents of their districts. The most time-consuming activity for a congressional office is constituent service, which includes everything from helping a small business navigate the tax code to rushing a visa application for a forgetful traveler. At district meetings, moreover, representatives spend much of their time with individual citizens and groups of constituents. Members of Congress use these services and meetings to build up the name recognition, general favorability, and positive personality attributions that win votes in low- and mediumintensity elections. Fenno observed the representatives present themselves "in such a way that the inferences drawn by those watching will be supportive." The representatives themselves called these inferences "trust." According to Fenno, a constituent who trusts a representative is saying:
I am willing to put myself in your hands temporarily; I know you will have opportunities to hurt me, although I may not know when those opportunities occur; I assume—and I will continue to assume until it is proven otherwise—that you will not hurt me; for the time being, then, I'm not going to worry about your behavior.[1]
To earn the trust of their constituents, successful representatives meet regularly with their constituents and gladly respond to speciflc concerns that have only minor policy implications. When future voters speak in a whisper about local or even private concerns, the representative listens carefully because a constructive response can earn that voter's trust and, come election day, support. These representatives seek to build up the loyalty of voters, because the greater their loyalty, the less likely they will be to attempt collective electoral rejection. Instead, when a loyal constituent has a substantive concern about a policy decision that may harm his or her interests, the loyal citizen uses some form of public voice.
When these direct contacts take the form of a letter, for example, congressional representatives reply using any of a number of available computer programs that generate relevant and often detailed responses. One Wisconsin congressman, Republican Scott Klug, permitted a reporter to scrutinize his mail operation in 1992, and the reporter found that Klug's staff had thousands of sentences and paragraphs it could piece together for any given reply. On the topic of agriculture alone, there were more than nine hundred separate responses.[2] As more and more citizen input comes in the form of e-mail, citizens (and interest groups that organize them) are increasing the speed and volume of their correspondence and increasing the likelihood that replies will be automatic and standardized.[3]
Some letter writers might appreciate a form reply, but this is not the kind of responsiveness that is central to the model introduced in chapter 2. In that model, effective voice causes substantive changes in the behavior of an elected representative.[4] In contemporary American politics, many public and private institutions aim to give voice to public concerns. In this chapter, I examine four different forms of public voice: public opinion polls, public hearings, talk radio, and direct lobbying. These forms of voice are by no means exhaustive of the institutions that citizens can use for political influence, but they illustrate the range of mechanisms the public uses to make itself heard.
In evaluating these modes of expression, it is useful to consider the characteristics of a fully democratic public voice.[5] When thought of as a collective entity made up of many individual perspectives and concerns, the public's voice should have four basic qualities in a democratic political system: voice should be representative, deliberative, articulate, and influential. The public's voice is representative when it brings into harmony the many voices among subgroups of the larger public, or
PUBLIC OPINION POLLS
When citizens contact their representatives, they normally speak as individuals or members of a subgroup of the larger citizenry. By letter, phone call, postcard, or e-mail, an individual asks to be heard among all other voices. Public opinion polls, which purport to speak for the whole, in the form of a stream of percentages, are an unusual but popular form of public voice. In Numbered Voices, the political communication scholar Susan Herbst explains that only in the modern era has our political culture equated the abstract concept of public opinion with a speciflc form of measurement—the mass opinion survey. Previously, straw polls, crowd counts, and other methods were used to gauge public opinion. Public opinion surveys have become conventional because they are more consistent with the Western cultural obsessions with rationality and quantiflcation.[6]
SURVEYS AS REPRESENTATIVE AND ARTICULATE VOICE
Many observers, including Herbst, have criticized public opinion polling as a form of public expression, but well-designed polls have one dramatic advantage over nearly all other forms of voice: they provide a representative portrait of the public's views. This is a result of both the design and the conducting of polls. Most modern public surveys in America are conducted by telephone, by mail, or through door-to-door interviews, and these survey methods usually provide relatively
A more subtle reason for the representativeness of mass opinion polls is the intimate setting of a survey interview. Whether face-to-face, on the phone, or via mail, survey respondents have a privacy quite unlike more public forms of voice. The interviewer assures the respondent that all responses are confldential and that the researchers will report only aggregate results or anonymous verbatim responses. For many respondents, this allows a candor that they rarely consider appropriate or socially acceptable. Respondents also understand that the survey gives them a certainty that their voices will be counted among others. An inarticulate or reserved citizen called on the phone by an interviewer suddenly has a chance to speak honestly and directly to all who care to listen without fear of reprisal or recrimination. The result is that mass opinion polls sometimes uncover a balance of public opinion that political life obscures. Michael MacKuen gives a straightforward example of this phenomena in one American city:
St. Louis is a Catholic town. It is also pro-life. All three members of Congress and both Senators are pro-life. Members of the state legislature have continuously voted measures intended to circumvent Roe v. Wade. When an enormous sign advertising that "God is Pro-Life" was argued to be larger than allowed by city ordinance, the city council ruled it was not advertising but instead a work of art. That St. Louis is pro-life is a simple social fact. Yet, public opinion surveys of the area show that residents of St. Louis are much like Americans in general, marginally favoring the pro-choice position.[8]
MacKuen sees the implications clearly: "When portions of the public are silenced, then politics may ignore their preferences and plainly violate elementary democratic norms. Being unable to open discussion, current losers cannot even hope to persuade fellow citizens for the future."[9] By contrast, when public opinion polls thrust contrary views into
Were public opinion polls representative in their sampling of public opinion but inarticulate in their expression of it, they would have little value. Part of what makes polls so valuable is that they provide succinct statements of the public's views. When interviewers ask their questions in a straightforward manner and provide respondents with simple, balanced response scales, one can succinctly summarize the survey results. For example, in 1994, the National Opinion Research Center asked Americans, "Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?" Seventy-four percent said that they favored use of the death penalty, 19 percent opposed it, and 6 percent said they didn't know or gave no response. Though the meanings of words shift over time, one can have some confldence that support for this form of penalty has increased since 1974, when the same question resulted in 63 percent supporting "the death penalty for persons convicted of murder.[10]
Some polling organizations have tried to make poll results even more policy-relevant by routinely linking their questions to speciflc public policy proposals and injecting their poll results into ongoing debates. One of the most ambitious efforts in this spirit was the ten-year experiment conducted by the Americans Talk Issues Foundation (ATI). ATI conducted a series of studies on diverse domestic and foreign policy issues in an effort to "know and to disseminate what the public itself wants for governance."[11] By asking probing sets of questions with varied wording, ATI found that very large majorities of the public supported numerous policies that had not yet been adopted or even entered the public debate. For example, the ATI found strong public support for using the United Nations as the primary response mechanism in cases of international aggression, limiting campaign contributions to residents of representatives' own districts, and adopting uniform international standards for toxic waste. Though ATI's surveys have not always had the desired impact, this may stem in part from the idiosyncratic, iconoclastic style in which it presents itself and its results. In any case, the ATI surveys provide a detailed record of the general public's views on important public issues.[12]
CRITICISMS OF PUBLIC OPINION SURVEYS
Conventional polling is by no means a perfect method of eliciting the public's voice, although only some of its failings are inevitable. Public
Another problem with even elaborate surveys is that they measure public opinion without extensive deliberation. Typical surveys last fewer than thirty minutes and address many issues in rapid succession. A survey might ask a set of five-to-ten questions on an issue to get a general sense of the public's views, or a survey might ask a single question to address a broad issue. Surveys that try to go into greater depth on a concrete policy debate sometimes devote ten minutes to an issue and juxtapose policy questions with a relatively long preface to give respondents background information. A few exceptional surveys go one step farther and give interviewers scripted lines that permit them to engage in a structured debate with respondents, such that one response elicits a counterargument and follow-up question from the interviewer. For instance, a national survey on the government's role in preventing job discrimination used counterarguments to shift respondents' views: when initially asked if the government should "see to it that blacks get fair treatment in jobs," two-thirds supported government action; after hearing both liberal and conservative counterarguments to respondents' initial policy choices, the net result was only 42 percent support for government intervention to prevent job discrimination.[13] Such surveys reveal the importance of delving beneath surface-level public opinion, but they cannot simulate sufficient discussion to measure the public's fully informed or enlightened interests adequately. Without deliberation, public opinion polls risk oversimplifying the public's views and misrepresenting both the depth of disagreement and potential common ground.
Ironically, it is the danger of willful and careless misrepresentation that makes this most representative form of public voice hazardous. In some cases, the public survey sample is nonrandom. Though familiarity with sample bias may make the public and the media more cautious in
Though a sample may be randomly drawn, its responses may still mislead because of the way in which the survey questions were asked. Volumes have been written on the methods by which pollsters misrepresent public opinion through biased questions, tricky phrasings, unbalanced response scales, and clever item-ordering. Political campaigns, for example, sometimes give opponents unflattering descriptions in their surveys, then claim imminent victory by revealing their candidate's strong showing in the biased poll. (Campaigns are rarely forthcoming about the full wording and methodological details of their surveys.) The apparent public support for the Republicans' 1994 "Contract with America" was also based upon willful misrepresentation of public opinion, although that egregious case included distortion even of the poll results themselves.[14] More commonly, however, survey results are misleading because of poorly worded questions, typifled by Alan Kay as equivalent to: "Would you like a free lunch?"[15]
In the long run, these biases in survey sampling, question design, and the reporting of results undermine the credibility of even well-crafted surveys. This has a direct effect on the influence of public opinion polls, which are hamstrung by the common perception that one cannot trust survey results. Every time public officials and citizens learn of fraud or deception in a poll, especially when they discover it firsthand, it makes them less likely to believe the next survey flndings they read or hear. Given the widespread use of biased and false surveys in political and commercial ad campaigns, it is not surprising that considerable skepticism has accumulated regarding surveys as a whole. More indirectly, this skepticism may erode response rates in surveys, as the most cynical subgroup of citizens becomes unwilling to participate when asked to do so. This could result in a genuine bias in survey samples over time.[16]
On the other hand, some critics fault public opinion surveys for being too powerful. Some critics argue that surveys can foreclose inclusive
Another criticism is that surveys limit the range of ways in which the public expresses its views. Anointed the one, true king of public opinion measures, random-sample surveys make even large-scale demonstrations and civil disobedience seem unrepresentative, if not irresponsible. By mediating citizens' opinions through forced-choice questions and statistical summaries, surveys also dampen the strength and volume of the public's voice, which can speak more boldly at a rally or in a public meeting. In this view, a political system should recognize survey research as nothing more than one among many worthy methods for measuring the public's sentiments.[19] Benjamin Ginsberg points out that the commercial and political origins of poll data compound this problem:
Given the commercial character of the polling industry, differences between the polls' concerns and those of the general public are probably inevitable. Polls generally raise questions that are of interest to clients and purchasers of poll data—newspapers, political candidates, government agencies, business corporations, and so on…. Because they seldom pose questions about the foundation of the existing order, while constantly asking respondents to choose from among the alternatives deflned by that order, … polls may help to narrow the focus of public discussion and to reinforce the limits on what the public perceives to be realistic political and social possibility.[20]
Notwithstanding that some academic and interest group surveys address questions that commercial and government polls ignore or avoid, there is merit in this view. Public opinion surveys can create a representative and articulate public voice, but they have difficulty spontaneously
FACE-TO-FACE MEETINGS WITH ELECTED OFFICIALS
In a sense, public opinion polls bring together the numerous, discordant voices of a large public into a statistical arrangement. Sometimes the voices come together in a harmony of public consensus; sometimes the survey juxtaposes opposing views in a clear counterpoint. The orchestration permitted by closed-ended questions and quantitative summaries, however, can obscure the real dynamics and diversity of public voices on a given issue. A public hearing or meeting can bring these many voices into a single room and record their interplay.
When this exchange of ideas and perspectives is inclusive of different perspectives, and involves attentive listening and clear articulation, it often amounts to genuine public deliberation. A sincere meeting between a school board and a group of concerned parents can change the way both parties view an issue, as well as how they see one another. Careful discussion and debate can cause people to critically examine the problem they face, their own perspectives, and the views of their opponents. This leads citizens toward a more enlightened understanding of their interests and a more accurate understanding of the policy problem under discussion. This, in turn, can lead to an articulate presentation of the public's shared and divergent interests.[21]
In practice, many public meetings fail to achieve deliberation. The public hearing is an especially notorious form of public dialogue. Often required by federal, state, or local statutes, public hearings give citizens the opportunity to express their concerns and address questions directly to public officials. At a typical hearing, citizens take turns speaking before a panel of government agency employees and elected officials. The experience of Thomas Webler and Ortwin Renn, who have witnessed countless hearings in the United States and abroad, suggests that neither citizens nor policymakers value the public hearing process:
To a citizen, the thought of attending a public hearing immediately conjures up negative images. Citizens often picture the public hearing process as disempowering. Typically, attendance is slight. To regulatory officials, experts, and project sponsors, the public hearing hall is a battle zone. Legal obligations
― 99 ―must be met, hopefully without raising the hackles of the local populace. A well-attended meeting is bad news.[22]
Webler and Renn suggest that public hearings usually fail to produce deliberative and influential public deliberation both because of their timing within the policymaking process and the "structure of discourse within the public hearing process."[23] When public officials schedule hearings late in the process after they have reached a preliminary (or final) decision, the hearing only permits citizens to complain or implore a change in plan. Under those circumstances, the process becomes adversarial, because citizens perceive that those "hearing" their input have already chosen to ignore it. A former county council member in Maryland explained that elected officials are no less cynical about hearings:
One of my fellow council members would occasionally start a public hearing by announcing that he already knew what position each witness would take. And he was usually correct. I flgure I spent nearly 2,000 hours in formal public hearings over the last eight years. It was not time well spent. Public hearings may give the appearance of public involvement, but they are unsatisfactory to citizen and official alike.[24]
The structure of discourse at public hearings is a more subtle problem. Even when an elected official convenes a hearing before making a decision, the typical public hearing encourages a nondeliberative process by restricting public expression to a series of statements and limiting official response to periodic counterpoints. Hearings also tend to have unduly technical issue framings that make it difficult for wellmeaning citizens to address officials in their own language.[25] Daniel Fiorino, the director of the Waste and Chemical Policy Division at the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, acknowledges that when agency hearings are held, they "usually do not allow interested parties much of a chance to engage in full discussions with the agency and other parties or to influence the outcome" on issues before the agency.[26]
One increasingly common form of quasi-hearing is what public officials call a "town hall" or "town meeting." Officials invite the general public to these meetings to discuss a particular issue, and depending on the topic, timing, and advance publicity, the meeting rooms typically become either empty meditation chambers or rousing political theater houses. When attendance is light, there can be a pleasant informality at such affairs, but there is little discussion. The attendees include friendly party activists, one or two strangers who saw a note in the paper, and possibly a fretful lobbyist who has had trouble getting a one-on-one
Other town halls draw large crowds and often result in bedlam.[27] When a group of elected officials in Madison, Wisconsin, held a public meeting in 1990 to discuss responses to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, hundreds of antiwar protesters dominated the meeting. In one impassioned speech after another, citizens demanded that their representatives take any actions they could to prevent a full-scale war between Iraq and the United States. "All of the oil in the Persian Gulf is not worth the life of one American man or woman," exclaimed one veteran from Green Bay. When an Army officer from Whitewater spoke in support of President Bush, the crowd hissed, booed, and heckled her. In the end, however, the overwhelming opposition to war swayed none of the hawkish representatives present. One congressman even dared to defend his unchanged position. Republican Scott Klug, who had taken office just weeks before by carrying suburban towns and areas outside of Madison, argued that the public in attendance did not represent the views of voters in the surrounding areas. "I would have liked to have done this in Cross Plains or Stoughton," he said. Given poor weather and treacherous highways, the meeting was dominated by antiwar activists, he believed, because few outside the city of Madison were able to attend.[28]
Residents of Minnesota gave similar antiwar speeches at a series of town meetings held by another newly elected representative, Democrat Paul Wellstone. The liberal senator agreed with the paciflst sentiments of the speakers he heard, and he used the meetings as the basis for an editorial released to the nation's newspapers. In the Seattle Times, Wellstone's comments ran under the headline, "Minnesota Message: War on Iraq Would Be a Terrible Mistake." In the editorial, Wellstone explained that in response to his meeting announcements, "large crowds overflowed auditoriums in the cities of Minneapolis, Duluth, Rochester and St. Cloud and in the rural communities of Chisolm, Virginia and Marshall." The meetings were not "scientiflc opinion polls," but they served as a "lightning rod that attracted those with strong feelings about our nation's policy in the Gulf." Wellstone's editorial describes the speciflc pleas of diverse attendees but never acknowledges any disagreement with his antiwar position. These meetings provided political ammunition for Wellstone, but they did not demonstrate a deliberative and influential public voice.[29]
Not all public meetings resemble these extreme examples. Even if one looks only at the town meetings on the Gulf War, at least one member of Congress appeared to be swayed by such gatherings. The Virginia Democrat James Moran had argued that war with Iraq was justifled, but he reversed his position following a public meeting in Alexandria. After the meeting, Moran told a reporter that he was surprised to hear the antiwar sentiment in a district peppered with military bases. "There's a balance we in Congress have to strike between leadership and representation," Moran explained. "I'm convinced the vast majority of the constituency that elected me to represent them is not prepared to go to war."[30]
Few public meetings prove both deliberative and influential, but almost none are also representative. The voices that might have swayed Representative Moran were not heard from every corner of his district; rather, the few electric cries he heard were drawn by the "lightning rod" of a public meeting. He did not hear the flickering thoughts and soft voices of less involved, aroused, or mobile constituents because they did not take part in the public meetings. Many people, in fact, rarely resort to any form of active public expression, whether it be writing a letter to the editor or demonstrating in front of a government building. Most public representatives recognize this fact and, like the Wisconsin congressman mentioned above, dismiss contrary sentiments expressed at public meetings on those grounds. As an anonymous county commissioner remarked to one investigator, "I think frequently you get your vocal minority there instead of a balance of opinion."[31] Even if the vocal minority's voice proves influential, it does so at the cost of being unrepresentative.
TALK RADIO
Face-to-face public meetings of citizens hardly make a sound compared to the clamor of daily debates in the mass media. For some democratic theorists, this is as it should be. As Benjamin Page argues, the sheer size and technological complexity of modern society
almost certainly necessitate a division of labor in political expertise, policymaking, and communication. This is why we have professional policy experts, at universities, research organizations, and elsewhere, who deliberate about policy in a multitude of small groups of their own. It is also why we have professional politicians and why we have a representative, rather than direct, democracy.[32]
In a sense, Page argues, the United States and similar nations rely upon a representative system of public deliberation. Thus, "The perennial problem of how to ensure that legislators properly represent their constituents has an analogue in the … problem [of] how to ensure representativeness by professional communicators," who include "reporters, writers, commentators, and television pundits, as well as public officials and selected experts from academia or think tanks.[33]
Even advocates of representative deliberation, however, acknowledge that this system of public expression does not always function properly. As I argue in chapter 3, the mass media, intellectual elites, and public officials often pursue agendas that conflict with the public's interest.[34] Page recognizes one problem in particular:
The most prominent journalists, television commentators, and public officials tend to have much higher incomes than the average American and to live in very different circumstances. On certain class-related issues, it seems possible that these professional communicators may interpret events in ways that do not take the public's values into account and may recommend policies contrary to those values.[35]
Because of this class difference, representative deliberation sometimes fails when there is little or no disagreement among policy elites, such as when the United States has a bipartisan foreign policy. Under these circumstances, the public often remains unaware of an important issue or its ramiflcations for the general population, and public tragedies like the wholesale collapse of savings and loan associations in the 1980s can follow a period of elite consensus, media indifference, and public ignorance.[36]
Even in these situations, the mass media can solve their own problems by providing alternative communication outlets, such as talk radio. To illustrate the importance of this form of public voice, Page offers the example of the Zoe Baird nomination. President Clinton had nominated Baird to be attorney general, and her conflrmation appeared likely, despite the revelation that she and her husband had hired two illegal aliens to help with driving and baby-sitting. Baird's bipartisan support eroded, however, and Clinton withdrew her nomination after a flrestorm of public opposition. The criticisms of Baird flowed through call-in radio programs that encouraged listeners to talk about current issues. Callers to programs across the country were outraged that a law-breaker would serve as the highest-ranking law-enforcement official. Baird's decision was sympathetically viewed by fellow members of the elite, but not by the general public. As one Boston talk-show host
If talk radio is an important forum for the expression of the public's voice, the next question concerns who takes part in this form of discussion. As anyone who has listened to talk radio knows, the host's perspective is more important than those of the callers, because the on-air personality sets the topic and tone of a show.
Although Jerry Brown, the former Democratic governor of California, created the We The People Radio Show, successful liberal hosts are rare in the upper echelons of talk radio. Political conservatives, however, have large followings. Table 8 shows that there is not one clear liberal among the most popular shows in the nation. The top-rated political programs include only conservatives, some of whom proudly wave the flag for the Republican Party (Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, Michael Reagan), while others express conservative views without the party label (Dr. Laura, Art Bell, Jim Bohannon). One might mistake Howard Stern and his forerunner, Don Imus, for quasi-liberals because of their openness to unusual points of view. These "shock jocks," however, rarely dwell on political matters. Stern, Imus, and their innumerable local imitators devote their shows to perverted or simply strange guests and topics, and when their talk becomes political, they identify themselves as libertarians as much as anything else.
Not only do the hosts of the political talk radio programs in the United States consistently present issues from a conservative perspective, they are also notorious for their intolerance of opposing views. The on-air personalities of Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy, two of the most successful and trend-setting conservative hosts, include a macho arrogance inhospitable to sustained counterargument and self-criticism. There is no spirit of debate in Limbaugh's aptly chosen book titles, The Way Things Are and The Way Things Ought to Be. On his radio program, Limbaugh's assertions never face serious criticism, even though many of his most outrageous and frequently repeated claims have been debunked in mainstream newspapers and popular writings, such as Al Franken's best-selling tongue-in-cheek rebuttal, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot. Passing up an opportunity for lucrative national television exposure, Limbaugh declined Franken's invitation to debate the proposi tion that, in fact, he is a "big fat idiot.[38]
| Listeners (Millions) | Host | Political Ideology | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| SOURCE: Ratings estimating total number of cumulative weekly listeners come from Talkers Magazine’s (1988) sampling of Arbitron reports. Talkers updates the list every six months at http://www.talkers.com/talkaud.html. Program descriptions come from hosts' promotional materials and program summaries. | |||
| 15.8 | Rush Limbaugh | conservative | Most influential national host; strong Republican supporter; coined the term feminazi |
| 14.5 | Dr. Laura Schlessinger | conservative | America's "Mommy" gives a "Judeo-Christian" perspective; strongly anti-gay; co-wrote The Ten Commandments: The Signiflcance of God's Laws in Everyday Life (1998) |
| 93 | Howard Stern | libertarian | This "shock-jock," a.k.a. the "king of all media," has run for office as a libertarian; quite sex-obsessed |
| 6.3 | Art Bell | quasiconservative | Discusses parapsychology and alien abductions; more antigovernment than pro-Republican |
| 6.3 | Dr. Joy Browne | nonpolitical | Relationship advice program |
| 5.0 | Don Imus | libertarian (if anything) | This "shock jock" promotes himself as "the man who says whatever hideous things pop into his head" |
| 5.0 | Jim Bohannon | conservative | Self-described as a "militant moderate" but celebrated by the Heritage Foundation as a conservative |
| 5.0 | Bruce Williams | nonpolitical | General advice program |
| 3.3 | G. Gordon Liddy | conservative | Made famous by his role in Watergate; strongly pro-Republican and conservative |
| 2.5 | Ken and Daria Dolan | nonpolitical | Financial advice program |
| 2.5 | Dr. Dean Edell | nonpolitical | Health advice program |
| 2.5 | Michael Reagan | conservative | Son of President Ronald Reagan; pro-Republican |
Conservative though the hosts may be, talk radio's listeners appear to be diverse. A comprehensive survey of national talk-radio audiences since 1989 suggests a proflle that defles the stereotype of the white, male, conservative "ditto-head." Because the survey is methodologically schizophrenic—integrating focus groups with mall surveys and caller interviews, its exact audience estimates are unreliable, but it suggests that talk-radio audiences are surprisingly diverse. Arbitron data, which collapse news and talk-radio listenerships, indicate that 57 percent of adult news/talk listeners are men. A more methodologically rigorous but geographically narrow survey of radio listeners in San Diego, California, found that the frequency of listening to talk radio was unrelated to every major demographic variable. In other words, talk-radio listeners come from all bands of the demographic and political spectrum, even though the talk-radio listenership overrepresents conservatives.[39]
Research also suggests that those who call talk-radio programs come from diverse backgrounds. A study of callers in Prince's County, Maryland, for example, sought to learn the makeup of talk-radio users in a county that had a relatively large African-American middle-class population. The investigators found that social class did not predict call-in use, even though past research had shown it to be a factor in general media use. In addition, call-in use was unrelated to perceptions of public officials' responsiveness and trustworthiness. Instead, those who called talk-radio programs were distinguished by their high levels of political self-efficacy. Those with greater confldence in their ability to take meaningful political actions were more likely to pick up the phone and interact with talk-radio hosts.[40] In other words, the people calling talkradio programs come from a wide variety of backgrounds but tend to have a degree of political self-confldence.
This minimum of diversity and political initiative give talk radio some potential as a medium for repressed public expression, but the hosts and program formats of the top-rated programs make talk radio an inhospitable setting for liberal political viewpoints. Conservative and libertarian voices closed out of mainstream debates may make themselves heard through these programs, but progressive and liberal ones do not. The expansion of talk radio may provide avenues for these voices, but those views may not be suited to the macho, aggressive character of talk radio in its present incarnation.
More generally, the talk-radio format that has taken hold in American political culture does not permit open-ended political deliberation. No popular program attracts listeners through the to-and-fro of honest
LOBBYING AS A MEANS OF ARTICULATION AND INFLUENCE
Each of these forms of public voice—opinion polls, public meetings, and talk radio—present officials with the views of the citizenry, but they have relatively little direct influence on the policymaking process. Politicians do read newsworthy polls, attend pivotal public meetings, and notice when talk radio has generated an uproar, but those forms of voice rarely receive more than recognition. There may be many reasons for this unresponsiveness, but the analyses of voting in chapters 3 and 4 suggest that the primary problem is that public voice is not tethered to a credible threat of collective rejection of unrepresentative incumbents. Individual citizens may threaten to vote for an opponent if their advice goes unheeded, but an elected official has no reason to believe that the average voter can organize a successful opposition campaign.
By contrast, effective lobbying can change actual votes on upcoming legislation, and it can prod officials to change what bills they introduce or what causes they champion. By "lobbyists," I mean the full universe of influential interest groups, which includes policy institutes and think tanks (e.g., the American Enterprise Institute, Brookings Institution, Heritage Foundation) and, more commonly, special- and public-interest groups (e.g., the American Medical Association, American Association of Retired Persons, National Right to Life Committee, Mothers against Drunk Driving, People for the American Way, Conservative Caucus, National Federation of Industrial Businesses League, Sierra Club). Often, the actual individuals and firms representing these interests are professional lobbyists and public relations mercenaries (e.g., Hill & Knowlton), and it is increasingly common for lobbyists and their firms to represent multiple interests.[42] Before examining why these groups and their lobbyists have success influencing elected officials, it is useful to briefly relate the criteria for political voice to the practice of lobbying.
Influential though it may be, lobbying is far from the democratic ideal of voice. Lobbyists and advocacy groups generally present narrow or partisan viewpoints, earning them the name "special interests." Some public-interest groups do advocate policies supported by the general public, but even those rely upon their professional experts for guidance more than on random samples of the public or diverse grassroots memberships. More generally, lobbying is not a representative form of public voice because its influence depends largely upon the wealth that funds it.[43]"One dollar, one vote" is a closer approximation to lobbying's ethic of representation. Even the most influential individualdonor lobbyists are not evenly distributed across different social groups: a recent study of federal campaign contributions of $200 or more crossreferenced donor zip codes with census data and found that donations disproportionately came from predominantly wealthy, white zip codes.[44]
In addition, lobbying is not an inclusive, deliberative form of public voice. The most public-spirited interest groups sometimes promote public dialogue on an issue by convening public meetings or engaging in televised debates, but the purpose behind such activities is to increase the amount public support for a preset policy position. Persuasion through argument is an important part of the deliberative process, but orchestrated public discussions often become manipulative. For example, Murray Edelman argues that policy advocates attach themselves strategically and psychologically to a particular plan of action and then cast about for problems that justify their prefabricated solutions. Thus, an organization might promote public meetings to discuss a problem only to lead the public to support a particular solution.[45]
Most interest groups lack even internal deliberation. As Jane Mansbridge observes, "Few interest associations in the United States or Europe institutionalize any formal deliberative processes among their membership, let alone deliberative processes designed to promote identiflcation with the public good." Mansbridge's own research on the movement for an Equal Rights Amendment found that "even in this democratic and public-spirited movement, the elites never learned what the grass-roots activists would have formulated as good public policy if both elites and activists had taken part in a more extensive process of deliberation.[46]
Lobbying does not usually involve a representative and deliberative public voice, but it does present an articulate one. Lobbyists focus on concrete agendas and speciflc policies. If defeating a single amendment
Aside from the fact that it is clear and realistic, why does a lobbyist's request receive a response? The exit, voice, and loyalty model suggests that the lobbyist must be making a credible threat of collective rejection of an incumbent. Most policymakers are busy people, and although they might appreciate the technical assistance and professional experience of a lobbyist on an issue, in the long term, lobbyists would have little tangible influence if they did not give elected officials a more powerful reason to heed their voices. The reason that lobbyists give, often implicitly, is that they have the power to influence electoral outcomes in incumbents' own districts. Whether in the form of a public-interest nonproflt organization, a private special-interest association, or a partisan political organization, lobbyists can shape elections in three ways: through campaign contributions, independent expenditures, and voter organizing and mobilization.
Standing behind many lobbyists are political action committees (PACs), which can contribute up to $5,000 per election to a candidate for federal office. A group such as Handgun Control Inc. can give a candidate $5,000 in the primary and another $5,000 in the general election, to be spent at the candidate's discretion. Indirectly, Handgun Control can encourage unaffiliated individuals and other PACs to make similar contributions, so it may leverage a much larger total contribution. Many congressional candidates receive the maximum legal contribution from multiple members of a family whose commercial or ideological interests are represented by a single lobbyist or lobbying organization. At $1,000 per person, this can mean $10,000 or more per election from a single family. Even more indirectly, PACs and individuals
Indirect spending, however, can prove even more powerful. To aid its lobbying efforts, an organization can directly attack or praise candidates, and some incumbents respond to the promise or threat of such action. For an incumbent who has irked powerful interests, turning to competing interests can become the only way to fend off those attacks. The example of the Republican Congressman Philip English is instructive. English won a close race in 1994 for Pennsylvania's Twenty-First District seat, which is anchored in Erie. With only 49 percent of the vote in 1994, and a district that had given President Bush just 34 percent of the vote in 1992, English had to triple his campaign funds to win reelection in 1996, and he took all the direct contributions he could get. Favorable ads run by the American Hospital Association and the U.S. Chamber of Congress bolstered English's position, but those ads had to counter a strong series of attacks sponsored by the AFL-CIO. The Almanac of American Politics notes that "during one 20-hour stretch in November, more than 500 political ads aired on Erie television" and that noncandidate organizations "appear to have spent at least $1.4 million, and quite possibly more" on the race.[50] In the end, English won with 106,875 votes to 104,004 votes for his Democratic opponent. For local, state, and national public officials like English, the lesson is clear: lobbyists have the potential to spark an electoral defeat, and they often have the power to prevent one. Indirect expenditures are a clear manifestation of that power.
Other lobbying organizations have both money and members. Behind them stand not only a well-funded and media-savvy public relations arsenal but also a large membership and a skilled organizing staff. One of the most striking examples of this lobbying tool is the membership
Sometimes political groups go much farther than the AARP and other mainstream lobbying organizations. Civil disobedience and other forms of protest can prove effective mechanisms of expressing dissent if the actions are timely, well-attended, and articulate. Even protest, however, has the same problems of other forms of lobbying: the participants in protest politics are unrepresentative of the general public. Those who participate in protest politics, as well as other demanding forms of political expression, are disproportionately white and wealthy.[52]
Whether the voice of a lobbyist is backed by people or money, much of its influence derives from the ability to shape electoral outcomes. Other factors contribute to the influence of a given lobbyist: real policy expertise, reflned social skills, cordial or intimate relationships with officeholders, and even powerful moral persuasion can have an independent influence on policymakers. Nonetheless, it is the implied threat of retaliation (or promise of aid) that makes elected officials more responsive to lobbying than other forms of public voice.
LISTENING FOR AN AUTHENTIC PUBLIC VOICE
Whatever their failings may be, public opinion polls can create a relatively representative and articulate recording of the public's voice. Public
This creates a dilemma for even the most well-intentioned public official. After an ideal democratic election, a representative remains uncertain about the needs and concerns of his or her constituency, let alone the larger public as a whole. The best of all possible elections give offices to individuals who understand and respect the general interests of their constituents, but without periodic guidance, elected officials have difficulty knowing how to act in the public's best interest. Officeholders can not represent the public's policy judgments to their decision-making body until the public presents those concerns to them. In practice, policymakers often act without knowing how the general public might view an issue, and citizens who flnd fault with such actions routinely state their views after the fact by criticizing officials for the actions they have taken. On a given issue, an elected official might hear the public's voice as a warning, a request, praise, criticism, or simply a notice. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that public officials respond to lobbyists, who underscore the real consequences of following their advice and offer a measure of genuine policy expertise.
The situation might be different if the public could express itself in a way that was representative, deliberative, and articulate. If an elected official heard such a voice and knew it was genuine, he or she might be inclined to respond to it. At the present time, however, no such voice exists. "The biggest problem facing Americans is not those issues that bombard us daily…. The crisis is that we as a people don't know how to come together to solve these problems. We lack the capacities to address the issues or remove the obstacles that stand in the way of public deliberation," lament Frances Moore Lappé and Paul Martin DuBois.[53]
Contemporary American politics lacks this means of discovering and articulating the interests of the general public, but some democratic reformers believe they have found it. The following chapter introduces these ideas and judges their effectiveness as a means of creating a representative, deliberative, articulate, and influential public voice.