A Journal of the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center
DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA
Winter 2016
Established in 1979 by the Oklahoma Regents for Higher Education and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center is a nonpartisan institution devoted to instruction and scholarship related to the United States Congress. The mission of the Center is defined broadly in terms of academic inquiry into the history, structure, process, personnel, and policies of the Congress, and the relationship between the Congress and other agencies and actors in the American political system. In the most general sense, the Center is concerned with the problems of modern representative democracy, as exemplified by the Congress. In pursuit of this goal, the Carl Albert Center performs four principal functions. The first is the development of academic programs in congressional studies at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, which are sponsored in cooperation with the University of Oklahoma’s Department of Political Science. At the graduate level the Center offers a four-year, specialized fellowship program leading toward the doctoral degree. Each Fellow receives a fully financed program of study. At the undergraduate level the Center sponsors a research fellowship program designed to foster collaborative research between faculty and undergraduates. Second, believing that professional research is the foundation upon which its academic programs rest, the Center promotes original research by faculty members and students into various aspects of politics and the Congress. The Center encourages publication and provides its faculty and students with institutional and financial support to travel for research purposes and to present research findings at professional conferences. The third function of the Center is the development of resource materials related to the Congress. The Center’s Congressional Archives, which are among the largest in the country, include the papers of more than fifty former members of Congress. Such prominent Oklahomans as Speaker Albert, Dewey F. Bartlett, Page Belcher, Mickey Edwards, Glenn English, Robert S. Kerr, Sr., Fred Harris, Steve Largent, Dave McCurdy, Mike Monroney, Tom Steed, Mike Synar, and J. C. Watts have donated their papers to the Center along with such distinguished non-Oklahomans as Dick Armey, Helen Gahagan Douglas, and Carl Hatch. Fourth, the Center actively strives to promote a wider understanding and appreciation of the Congress through various civic education programs. The Center sponsors conferences, speakers, television appearances, and the biennial Julian J. Rothbaum Distinguished Lecture in Representative Government. The Center also publishes Extensions, a journal which focuses on issues related to the Congress. Taken together, these diverse aspects of the Carl Albert Center constitute a unique resource for scholarship and research related to the United States Congress.
The Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center Director and Curator Cindy Simon Rosenthal Associate Director Michael H. Crespin Regents’ Professor Ronald M. Peters, Jr. Director of Administration Katherine McRae Assistant Director for N.E.W. Leadership Lorna Vazquez Assistant Curator Nathan Gerth Archivist Rachel Henson National Advisory Board David E. Albert Richard A. Baker David L. Boren John Brademas Richard F. Fenno, Jr. Joseph S. Foote Joel Jankowsky Thomas J. Kenan Dave McCurdy Frank H. Mackaman Thomas E. Mann Chuck Neal Michael L. Reed Catherine E. Rudder Hon. Tom Cole 4th District, Oklahoma ex officio Managing Editor, Extensions Debra Levy Martinelli Graphic Designer, Extensions Brandy Akbaran University of Oklahoma Printing, Mailing and Document Services
A Journal of the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Editor’s Introduction
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Democracy in America
Special Orders
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Winter 2016
Cindy Simon Rosenthal
Political Inequality and American Democracy Larry M. Bartels
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The Trevails of American Democracy in the Tea Party Era
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Historical Roots of Democracy 2016
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Theda Skocpol
James T. Kloppenberg
For the Record Whittington Delivers 2015 Rothbaum Lecture News from the Center Katherine McRae
On the cover: Image courtesy of Photospin.com. Extensions is a copyrighted publication of the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center. It is published twice each year and distributed free of charge. To receive copies of Extensions, or to obtain permission to reprint, please contact Katherine McRae at (405) 325-6372 or e-mail to mcrae@ou.edu. Extensions also may be viewed on the Center’s website at www.ou.edu/carlalbertcenter.
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Editor’s Introduction
DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA Cindy Simon Rosenthal Editor’s Note: Extensions editor Ronald M. Peters Jr. is on sabbatical. Carl Albert Center director and curator Cindy Simon Rosenthal is standing in for him for this issue.
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residential election cycles seem to simultaneously invoke pessimism and optimism about the future. I recall my first opportunity to vote in 1972 and the excitement and anticipation I felt. The primaries that year marked historic firsts for women as Representative Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) and Representative Patsy Mink (D-HI) announced their candidacies becoming the first women of color to run for the Democratic presidential nomination. But the general election turned out to be not much of a contest as incumbent Republican President Richard M. Nixon won in a landslide over Senator George McGovern, who had won the Democratic nomination as an anti-war, progressive candidate. As we enter into the 2016 presidential election, I again feel the twin emotions of pessimism and optimism. The sense of personal insecurity grows unabated in the wake of international and domestic terrorist attacks. The multiple conflicts in the Middle East seem to defy understanding. Global economic and environmental challenges loom large. Here at home, the level of trust in the national government remains near all-time lows, while economic inequality is at an all-time high and growing. Daily we are assaulted with headlines of violence seemingly next door. The Pew Center analysis on “Political Polarization in American Life” reports that Americans live in “ideological silos” divided on our preferences about almost everything – neighborhoods, marriage partners, media consumption and religious views.1 Our partisan divisions make it difficult to even talk about the big issues of our time – climate variability, economic inequality, race relations and immigration. Indeed, we appear to inhabit two Americas, and Charles Dickens’ opening
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paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities is eerily apt. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. 2 Of course, Dickens was writing about London and Paris during the turmoil of the French Revolution, not about American politics. But the shadow of the French Revolution was hanging over American debates about our fledgling government and ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Heartfelt optimism was chastened by a sense of doom. In this caldron, the idea of democracy was being debated, and that debate continues today. This issue of Extensions takes as its title a variant on the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center’s biennial Julian J. Rothbaum Distinguished Lecture in Representative Government delivered this past fall by Professor Keith E. Whittington, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University. It also borrows from Alexis de Tocqueville’s seminal tome, Democracy in America, which explored the conditions of democracy as he found it in 19th-century America. 3
Whittington titled his three lectures “The Idea of Democracy in America” and transported his audience across the sweep of the 19th century to explore three key debates about democracy set in the context of a particular point in time. His first lecture harkened to the same period Dickens described, and Whittington returned throughout the lectures to the recurring pessimism and optimism that Americans have expressed as we grapple with the idea and practice of democracy over time. It is striking to me how these two distinct reflections on the condition of American popular government – separated by 180 years, an American civil war, two world wars, economic crises of various forms, and domestic policy challenges – remind us of the enduring strengths and persistent challenges of democracy in America. In his first lecture, “The Birth of a Democracy or a Republic?”, Whittington focused on debates at the founding. Examining newspapers from 1768 to 1800, he analyzed the discourse in 300 individual articles to discern the answer to such questions as: Was democracy used as a “smear word” in the public discourse? Was the United States aspiring to be a republic or a democracy? Were the terms used in positive or negative ways or as synonyms? He concluded that the pre-revolution discourse associated democracy with republican government in positive ways but that understanding became more negative as Americans witnessed the excesses of the French Revolution. The genius of the Constitution writers, particularly James Madison, embraced republican principles and harnessed democratic impulses by creating representative institutions constrained by the rule of law. Maintaining this balance
would not be easy, warned Madison in Federalist No. 10:4 “… democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they are violent in their deaths.” Indeed, the debate continues. Whittington argued that historians have tried to “flatten” the distinctions between republicanism and democracy, while modern-day conservatives have tried to make the distinction too great. Certainly we see evidence of the distortion of the views of the founders in some of the rhetoric of the Tea Party movement, a topic that Harvard University Professor Theda Skopol addresses in this issue of Extensions. In his second lecture, “The Challenge of Mass Democracy,” Whittington focused
pessimism and optimism about democracy. The pessimism derived from a view that the machinery of democracy was breaking down because of corrupt politicians and voters who were characterized as unqualified and ignorant. Drawing on evidence from a new form of journalism (e.g. long-form essays and magazines dedicated to ideas), Whittington discussed the institutional reforms offered to deal with unqualified voters and corruption among political professionals. He argued that the debates of this period resonate today and that we should remain both pessimistic and optimistic about our collective understanding of democracy in America today. Our contributors in this issue continue this exercise in reflection and focus on the state of democracy in the second decade of the 21st century. While our authors were not privy to the Whittington lectures, I am struck by the resonance between their
disconnect between the congressional responsiveness on policy issues and the public opinion of ordinary Americans. He argues that the apparent correlation between constituent preferences and their representatives’ voting behavior is mostly spurious. Digging deeper, he finds that congressional officeholders are more attune to the views of their wealthiest constituents and largely ignore their low-income constituents. For Bartels, democracy in America is deeply challenged by this political inequality. Theda Skocpol of Harvard University focuses her concern for democracy on the hold that the ultra-conservative Tea Party movement and ideological think tanks have exerted on the Republican Party. Like Bartels, Skocpol sees the influence of money skewing the policy stances of Republican presidential candidates away from that of most Americans. She worries that the mismatch of voter preferences
REFLECTIONS ON THE CONDITION OF AMERICAN POPULAR GOVERNMENT - SEPARATED BY 180 YEARS, AN AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, TWO WORLD WARS, ECONOMIC CRISES OF VARIOUS FORMS, AND DOMESTIC POLICY CHALLENGES - REMIND US OF THE ENDURING STRENGTHS AND PERSISTENT CHALLENGES OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA. on the Civil War and Reconstruction. In this period, he emphasized that the “idea of democracy” shifted to new questions: Could slavery ever be compatible with republican government? Could secession be construed as an act of democratic governance? How should we understand the exercise of majority rule in the service of tyranny, violence and efforts to curtail suffrage to freedmen? Whittington argued that the answers to these questions were both sectionally defined in public discourse and increasingly partisan. Particularly because of the essential move to expand suffrage, Whittington concluded that the main challenge of Reconstruction was to prevent a failure of democracy when majority rule could be turned to minority tyranny. In his final lecture, “The Crisis of Democracy in a Gilded Age,” Whittington focused on 1870 to 1900 and argued the period offered evidence to fuel both
concerns and particular themes evident in the 19th century. In his contribution, James Kloppenberg of Harvard University notes that many of the divides that afflict our contemporary politics were presaged in American history. In particular, he explores the early relationship of government and church in New England, which muted dissent and enforced conformity. Kloppenberg also points to Tocqueville‘s worries that the gulf separating North from South was growing ever wider in the 1830s and that voluntary associations so important for democracy were often extremely exclusionary. Nonetheless, Kloppenberg ends on an optimistic note, drawing evidence from a Wellesley, Massachusetts, town meeting where the impulse to democratic participation is alive and well. Focusing in particular on the United States Congress, Larry Bartels of Vanderbilt University writes of the growing
and positions espoused by elected political leaders threatens the health of our democracy, especially when aided by low voter participation that loosens the bonds of accountability over officeholders. There is little argument across the ideological spectrum that many ills afflict our democracy. How we resolve the question of what poultice will offer palliative relief, let alone a cure, remains before us.
Notes 1. Pew Research Center. “Political Polarization in American Life.” June 12, 2014. Accessed at http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/ political-polarization-in-the-american-public/, 20 November 2015. 2. Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. Dover Publications: Mineola, New York. 1999. 3. de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Schocken Books, New York. 1961. 4. Hamilton, Alexander, John Jay, and James Madison. The Federalist Papers. Random House, New York. 1999.
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Special Orders
POLITICAL INEQUALITY AND
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY Larry M. Bartels | Vanderbilt University
Larry M. Bartels is co-director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions and May Werthan Shayne Chair of Public Policy and Social Science at Vanderbilt University. His 2008 book, Unequal Democracy, won the Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the year’s best book on U.S. national policy. He also is the author of Presidential Primaries and the Dynamics of Public Choice, which received the 1988 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for best book on government, politics or international affairs.
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Representatives' conservatism (DW-NOMINATE scale)
he preeminent scholar of policy preferences and the behavior implications for American democracy modern democracy, Robert of their elected representatives. 3 The today. I begin where the modern empirical Dahl, argued that “a key results of this scholarly work are often literature on political representation characteristic of a democracy” interpreted as providing “evidence began, with members of Congress and is “the continuing responsiveness of the for strong effects of public opinion their constituents. government to the preferences of its on government policies” and even “a citizens, considered as political equals.”1 sanguine picture of democracy at work.”4 Congressional While political theorists have generally But in the light of recent scholarship, that Responsiveness resisted an exclusive or mechanical focus interpretation seems both scientifically 11 on responsiveness to citizens’ preferences and politically naïve. as a benchmark of democratic My aim here is to briefly summarize Figure 1 shows the relationship performance, most have acknowledged that Figure recent scholarship and its Opinion and between the voting behavior of members 1: Constituency that political leaders “must not be of the House of Representatives Represenatives' Roll Call Votes, 2011-2013 found persistently at odds with the in the 112th Congress (2011-2013) wishes of the represented without and the policy preferences of 1.4 Republicans good reason.”2 their constituents. I summarize Democrats 1.2 Most ordinary citizens likewise representatives’ roll call votes seem to view “the will of the (on the vertical axis) using Keith 1.0 people” as a crucial desideratum Poole and Howard Rosenthal’s for democratic policy-making. In a DW-NOMINATE scores 5 and 0.8 2012 YouGov survey, for example, the policy preferences of their 0.6 a majority of Americans endorsed constituents (on the horizontal the view that “the will of the people axis) from the 2010 and 2012 0.4 on most issues is pretty clear, and Cooperative Congressional Election politicians should just follow it” Study surveys with responses to 0.2 (53 percent agreed; 19 percent a dozen issue questions on topics disagreed). However, an even ranging from climate change to 0.0 larger majority in the same survey the Iraq War and from domestic -0.2 rejected the notion that “the current spending to a path to citizenship political system does a good job for undocumented immigrants. 6 -0.4 of representing the interests of all Overall, there is a strong Americans, rich or poor, white or positive relationship between -0.6 black, male or female” (19 percent constituents’ opinions and their agreed; 62 percent disagreed). members’ roll call votes—more -0.8 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 This understanding of liberal districts tend to have democracy has inspired much more liberal representatives, Constituents' conservatism (CCES issue scale) empirical research over the while more conservative districts Figure 1. Constituency Opinion and past half-century examining the tend to have more conservative Representatives’ Roll Call Votes, 2011-2013 relationship between Americans’ representatives. But it would be
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hasty to interpret this correlation (and many others like it in the scholarly literature on political representation) as “a sanguine picture of democracy at work.” On one hand, if our normative interest is in congruence between the preferences of constituents and the roll call votes cast by their representatives, then Figure 1 is rather uninformative, since there is no way to define what DW-NOMINATE score should count as being congruent with the preferences of any given district; the scales are simply incommensurate.7 On the other hand, if our interest is in “the continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens,” as Dahl suggested, then the simple correlation between constituents’ preferences and representatives’ behavior in Figure 1 is insufficient to judge whether or how much constituents’ preferences actually influence their representatives’ behavior. Two obvious alternative explanations for legislators’ roll call votes suggest themselves immediately—their own ideological convictions and their partisan loyalties. The substantial differences in voting behavior between Republicans and Democrats in recent Congresses suggest that one or both of these forces matter immensely. Indeed, it is clear in Figure 1 that the statistical relationship between constituents’ opinions and their members’ roll call votes is quite modest once members’ own partisanship is taken into account. The difference in expected behavior between a Republican and a Democrat representing constituents with identical views (of which there are many in the broad center of the distribution of districts) is much greater than
the difference in expected behavior between a Republican representing the most liberal district in the country and a Republican representing the most conservative district in the country (and likewise for Democrats). These drastic differences in the behavior of Republicans and Democrats representing very similar districts
THESE DRASTIC DIFFERENCES IN THE BEHAVIOR OF REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS REPRESENTING VERY SIMILAR DISTRICTS DEMONSTRATE THAT CONSTITUENTS’ POLICY PREFERENCES DO LITTLE, DIRECTLY, TO CONSTRAIN THE BEHAVIOR OF MEMBERS OF CONGRESS.
demonstrate—contrary to much elegant theorizing about elections and political accountability—that constituents’ policy preferences do little, directly, to constrain the behavior of members of Congress. 8 The picture looks even less rosy when we recognize that the rather modest relationship between constituents’ preferences and legislators’ roll call voting patterns (within parties) evident in Figure 1 may not owe much to egalitarian responsiveness of the sort stipulated by Dahl. For example, if members of Congress responded only to wealthy campaign donors, Figure 1 might look much the same, since the Republican districts with the most conservative citizens probably tend to have the most conservative Republican donors as well (and similarly for Democrats). Political extensions | Winter 2016
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Figure 2: Estimated Responsiveness to Income Groups by the House and Senate, 2011-2013
Responsiveness (change in DW-NOMINATE score)
scientists—who are generally The most detailed study and proudly skeptical regarding in this vein, by Martin Gilens, Low-income 7 causal interpretations of matched national survey Middle-income simple empirical correlations— data on public preferences High-income 6 seem eager to treat this regarding hundreds of specific particular correlation between policy proposals over more constituency preferences and than 20 years to subsequent 5 roll call votes as evidence of policy outcomes. The results responsiveness, which to me were even more skewed than reflects a strong pre-scientific those summarized in Figure 4 commitment to an idealistic 2.13 A follow-up piece by Gilens “folk-theory” of American and Benjamin Page extended democracy. this work, emphasizing its 3 It does not take much implications for broad theories poking below the surface to of American politics. “When 2 find troubling evidence that the the preferences of economic apparent relationship between elites and the stands of constituents’ preferences and organized interest groups are 1 their representatives’ behavior controlled for,” Gilens and Page in Figure 1 is mostly spurious. concluded, “the preferences of Simply differentiating the the average American appear 0 views of high- and low-income to have only a miniscule, nearHouse Senate constituents suggests that zero, statistically non-significant Figure 2. Estimated Responsiveness to Income legislators respond—insofar impact upon public policy … Groups by the House and Senate, 2011-2013 as they respond at all—to the When a majority of citizens affluent much more than to the disagrees with economic elites poor. For example, a statistical or with organized interests, analysis allowing for disparities in leaves more leeway for responsiveness they generally lose.”14 responsiveness by U.S. senators in the to affluent constituents. In any case, Separate work by Elizabeth Rigby early 1990s found that “senators’ roll affluent constituents’ views appear and Gerald Wright and by Patrick Flavin call votes were quite responsive to the to have a very substantial impact on found substantial disparities in apparent ideological views of their middle- and their senators’ voting behavior, while responsiveness to public preferences high-income constituents,” but that middle-income constituents seem to at the state level as well.15 Yet another “the views of low-income constituents have much less influence and poor analysis, by Lawrence Jacobs and had no discernible impact on the voting constituents (in the bottom one-third Page, found that the foreign policy behavior of their senators.”9 of the income distribution) seem, once preferences of U.S. policy-makers were Figure 2 summarizes the results of again, to have no influence at all on unaffected by the views of the general a parallel analysis of responsiveness their senators’ roll call votes.12 public once the strong and consistent by House members and senators in influence of business leaders and the 112th Congress.10 The left panel experts was taken into account.16 Political Inequality shows the estimated influence of low-, Unsurprisingly, these depressing in America middle-, and high-income constituents, findings have generated considerable respectively, on the roll call votes of scrutiny and occasional resistance.17 their House members. The results Lest readers fear (or hope) that Nevertheless, the convergence of suggest that House members were the disparities in responsiveness results from independent studies almost twice as responsive to affluent documented in Figure 2 are somehow and the remarkable extent of bias constituents as to those in the middle anomalous, it is worth noting that they portray should be alarming to and bottom of the income distribution.11 a variety of studies over the past anyone who views Dahl’s criterion The right panel shows the decade, using a variety of data and of egalitarian responsiveness as an corresponding estimates of research designs, have provided striking important indicator of the health of responsiveness by U.S. senators. Here, evidence that the apparent “strong American democracy today. Moreover, the differences in responsiveness effects” of public opinion identified even those who are willing to settle for across income groups are vastly larger in earlier research on representation what Gilens and Page referred to as than for House members. Perhaps mask severe inequality in political “democracy by coincidence”—ordinary this difference reflects the greater responsiveness—a conspicuous citizens getting their way only because importance of campaign funds, and violation of Dahl’s stipulation that they happen to agree with the affluent thus of campaign donors, in the Senate government should respond to the people whose opinions really count— than in the House. Perhaps the lesser preferences of citizens “considered as should be troubled by the fact that the degree of party discipline in the Senate political equals.” preferences of rich people and poor
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people diverge markedly on many important political issues, implying that unequal influence will produce skewed policy outcomes.18 One of the most important unanswered questions in recent work on unequal responsiveness is whether the opinions that matter politically are those of a fairly broad stratum of affluent citizens (say, the top one-third or one-fifth of income earners, as in my studies or Gilens’) or those of a much loftier stratum of top wealth-holders invisible in typical opinion surveys. Just as the apparent influence of the general public in much research on representation has turned out to reflect, in significant part, the unmeasured influence of affluent citizens, the apparent influence of the merely affluent may reflect the unmeasured influence of a much smaller set of top wealth-holders. Unfortunately, detailed evidence regarding the political preferences of the truly wealthy is extremely scarce. However, a pilot study led by Page provided evidence of striking differences in policy preferences between a small representative sample of multi-millionaires in the Chicago area and the broader affluent public. While that project shed no direct light on the political influence of the wealthy, the policy agenda in Washington at the time was suspiciously consistent with their distinctive preferences for deficit reduction and low taxes even at the cost of cutting spending on Social Security, Medicare, education and other popular government programs.19
A Crisis of Inequality, Or Democracy as Usual? Is American democracy today in the midst of an acute crisis of political inequality? One plausible interpretation of the findings reported by Gilens, Page, and others is that the responsiveness of the American political system to the views of ordinary citizens has been significantly eroded in recent years by escalating disparities in wealth, the large and growing role of money in financing political campaigns and buying access to the policy-making process, hyper-partisanship, or some toxic mixture of these and other factors.
The fact that Senate responsiveness seems to be even more unequal in 2011-2013 than it was in the early 1990s (allowing, as best one can, for differences in measures) would seem to support that view. However, political scientists lack consistent evidence regarding disparities in political influence over substantial periods of time, and even diligent mining of the historical record will not likely provide a solid basis for systematic assessment of the extent of political inequality before the era of ubiquitous opinion polling. It is easy to suppose that other eras of American politics were quite different, but that supposition may reflect an overly romanticized view of the past more than any actual change in the character or quality of American politics and government. Recent electoral patterns seem little different from those of most
democracies. Here, too, it is easy to imagine that the contemporary United States is an outlier, and that other affluent democracies conform much more closely to the textbook model of egalitarian policy responsiveness. However, at present we have no solid grounds for thinking so. Indeed, what little scholarly work has been done on political inequality in other affluent democracies suggests that severe biases in political responsiveness extend well beyond the United States, and are surprisingly impervious to differences in political cultures and institutions. 23 Much more work along these lines will be necessary to determine whether elected officials in the contemporary United States are anomalous in their apparent disregard for the preferences of middle-class and poor citizens. A better understanding of
ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT UNANSWERED QUESTIONS IN RECENT WORK ON UNEQUAL RESPONSIVENESS IS WHETHER THE OPINIONS THAT MATTER POLITICALLY ARE THOSE OF A FAIRLY BROAD STRATUM OF AFFLUENT CITIZENS OR THOSE OF A MUCH LOFTIER STRATUM OF TOP WEALTH-HOLDERS.
earlier eras. 20 Congress today is highly polarized along partisan lines, but probably no more than it was through most of the 19th century. 21 Historically, partisan polarization has often been accompanied by apparent unresponsiveness of Congress as an institution to the views of ordinary citizens. 22 Thus, detailed studies of earlier eras—if they were possible— would likely produce findings much like those for the contemporary era. Another, perhaps more fruitful source of perspective on the contemporary American system is the experience of other affluent
how and why democracies vary in their responsiveness to the views of ordinary citizens—if indeed they do— can and should be crucial for thinking about prospects and strategies for meaningful democratic reform in the United States and elsewhere. Would more rigorous regulation of campaign finance, higher turnout at the polls, proportional representation, stronger labor unions, or less polarized political parties make a significant dent in political inequality? At the moment, we simply don’t know. Until we find out, it seems incumbent upon us to entertain the possibility that severe inequalities extensions | Winter 2016
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in responsiveness are endemic in democratic political systems, presenting a fundamental challenge not only to American democracy today, but to democracy, period.
Notes 1. Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (Yale University Press, 1971), 1. Dahl elaborated this criterion and explored the social and institutional conditions promoting equal responsiveness in several subsequent works, including Democracy and Its Critics (Yale University Press, 1989), On Democracy (Yale University Press, 1998), and On Political Equality (Yale University Press, 2006). 2. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (University of California Press, 1967), 210. 3. Prominent works in this vein include Warren E. Miller and Donald E. Stokes, “Constituency Influence in Congress,” American Political Science Review 57 (1963), 45-56; Christopher H. Achen, “Measuring Representation,” American Journal of Political Science 22 (1978), 475-510; Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, “Effects of Public Opinion on Policy,” American Political Science Review 77 (1983), 175-190; and James A. Stimson, Michael B. MacKuen, and Robert S. Erikson, “Dynamic Representation,” American Political Science Review 89 (1995), 543-565. 4. Robert Y. Shapiro, “Public Opinion and American Democracy,” Public Opinion Quarterly 75 (2011), 982-1017. Shapiro went on to discuss unequal responsiveness as an aspect of “limited democracy,” citing a “need for more research on this.” 5. Poole and Rosenthal summarize the voting behavior of legislators in each chamber in each Congress using two orthogonal dimensions analogous to the dimensions produced by an exploratory factor analysis. I focus here on their first dimension, which does the lion’s share of the work in accounting for members’ roll call votes in the contemporary Congress. For extensive discussion and applications of the scaling algorithm, see Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, Ideology and Congress (Transaction Publishers, 2007). Data and documentation are available from the Voteview website, http://voteview.com/. 6. The Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) was fielded by the internet survey firm YouGov using opt-in recruiting, but with matching and weighting to produce representative samples of adult U.S. citizens. There were a total of 52,464 respondents in 2010 and 51,661 in 2012; the combined sample size in each congressional district ranged from 88 to 515 and averaged 239. Additional information regarding the CCES surveys is available at http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/ cces/home. 7. The most careful attempt to match legislators’ specific roll call votes with the preferences of their constituents found that Republican members of Congress were considerably more conservative than their constituents while Democrats were considerably more liberal than their constituents. See Joseph Bafumi and Michael C. Herron, “Leapfrog Representation and Extremism: A Study of American Voters
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and Their Members in Congress,” American Political Science Review 104 (2010): 519-542. 8. Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton University Press, 2016), chap. 2. 9. Larry M. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton University Press, 2008), 260. 10. A more detailed description of this analysis will appear in a revised edition of Unequal Democracy to be published by the Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton University Press in 2016. 11. The distinct estimates of influence are sufficiently precise to make it rather unlikely that these differences are due to chance; the estimated ratio of low-income influence to high-income influence is .49 (with a standard error of .33), while the estimated ratio of middle-income influence to high income influence is .55 (with a standard error of .37). 12. The estimated ratio of low-income influence to high-income influence is .01 (with a standard error of .17), while the estimated ratio of middle-income influence to high income influence is .19 (with a standard error of .21). 13. Martin Gilens, “Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness,” Public Opinion Quarterly 69 (2005), 778-796; and Martin Gilens, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton University Press, 2012). 14. Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics 12 (2014), 564-581. 15. Elizabeth Rigby and Gerald C. Wright, “Whose Statehouse Democracy? Policy Responsiveness to Poor Versus Rich Constituents in Poor Versus Rich States,” in Peter K. Enns and Christopher Wlezien, eds., Who Gets Represented (Russell Sage Foundation, 2011), 189-222. Patrick Flavin, “Income Inequality and Policy Representation in the American States,” American Politics Research 40 (2012), 29-59. 16. Lawrence R. Jacobs and Benjamin I. Page, “Who Influences U.S. Foreign Policy?” American Political Science Review 99 (2005), 107-123. 17. For example, Yosef Bhatti and Robert S. Erikson, “How Poorly Are the Poor Represented in the U.S. Senate?” and Christopher Wlezien and Stuart N. Soroka, “Inequality in Policy Responsiveness?”—both in Peter K. Enns and Christopher Wlezien, eds., Who Gets Represented (Russell Sage Foundation, 2011), 223-246 and 285-310. 18. Stuart N. Soroka and Christopher Wlezien, “On the Limits to Inequality in Representation,” PS: Political Science & Politics 41 (2008), 319-327; Martin Gilens, “Preference Gaps and Inequality in Representation,” PS: Political Science & Politics 42 (2009), 335-341. 19. Benjamin I. Page, Larry M. Bartels, and Jason Seawright, “Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans,” Perspectives on Politics 11 (2013), 51-73. 20. Larry M. Bartels, “Electoral Continuity and Change, 1868-1996,” Electoral Studies 17 (1998), 301-326. 21. Moreover, standard calculations of partisan polarization may overstate the extent of substantive political divisions in the current era by comparison with the past. It is worth
recalling that the New Deal era, which does not look highly “polarized” by Poole and Rosenthal’s measure, was intensely conflictual. As V. O. Key, Jr., noted in his classic Public Opinion and American Democracy (Knopf, 1961), a remarkable 45% of the public (and 83% of Republicans) in 1936, at the height of FDR’s popularity, believed that “the acts and policies of the Roosevelt Administration may lead to dictatorship.” David A. Bateman, Joshua Clinton, and John Lapinski discussed the pitfalls of using congressional roll call voting indices to measure ideological conflict in “A House Divided? Political Conflict and Polarization in the U.S. Congress, 1877-2011” (https://my.vanderbilt.edu/joshclinton/ files/2015/10/BCL_AJPSInitialSubmit.pdf ). 22. Larry M. Bartels, Joshua D. Clinton, and John G. Geer, “Representation,” in Richard Valelly, Suzanne Mettler, and Robert Lieberman, eds., Oxford Handbook of American Political Development (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 23. Larry M. Bartels, “The Social Welfare Deficit: Public Opinion, Policy Responsiveness, and Political Inequality in Affluent Democracies.” Presented at the 22nd International Conference of Europeanists, Paris, July 2015 (http://www.piketty.pse.ens.fr/ files/Bartels2015.pdf ).
DO FACTS MATTER?
Information and Misinformation in American Politics ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
JENNIFER L. HOCHSCHILD AND KATHERINE LEVINE EINSTEIN A democracy falters when most of its citizens are uninformed or misinformed, when misinformation affects political decisions and actions, or when political actors foment misinformation—the state of affairs the United States faces today, as this timely book makes painfully clear. In Do Facts Matter? Jennifer L. Hochschild and Katherine Levine Einstein start with Thomas Jefferson’s ideal citizen, who knows and uses correct information to make policy or political choices. What, then, the authors ask, are the consequences if citizens are informed but do not act on their knowledge? More serious, what if they do act, but on incorrect information? $29.95 HARDCOVER · 248 PAGES ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
VOLUME 13 IN THE JULIAN J. ROTHBAUM DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES
Analyzing the use, nonuse, and misuse of facts in various cases—such as the call to impeach Bill Clinton, the response to global warming, Clarence Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court, the case for invading
Iraq, beliefs about Barack Obama’s birthplace and religion, and the Affordable Care Act—Hochschild and Einstein argue persuasively that errors of commission (that is, acting on falsehoods) are even more troublesome than errors of omission. While citizens’ inability or unwillingness to use the facts they know in their political decision making may be frustrating, their acquisition and use of incorrect “knowledge” pose a far greater threat to a democratic political system. Do Facts Matter? looks beyond individual citizens to the role that political elites play in informing, misinforming, and encouraging or discouraging the use of accurate or mistaken information or beliefs. Hochschild and Einstein show that if a well-informed electorate remains a crucial component of a successful democracy, the deliberate concealment of political facts poses its greatest threat.
THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY INSTITUTION. WWW.OU.EDU/EOO
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THE TREVAILS OF
Photo credit: Martha Stewart
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY IN THE TEA PARTY ERA Theda Skocpol | Harvard University Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard University. She is the co-editor of Reaching for a New Deal: Ambitious Governance, Economic Meltdown, and Polarized Politics in Obama’s First Two Years (2011) and co-author of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (2013).
D
emocracies can be considered healthy when almost all citizens exercise voice at the ballot box and by contacting officeholders, when public debate is marked by tolerance and social inclusion, when representatives respond to the majority, and when government tackles important national and community challenges. With these criteria in mind, the health of U.S. democracy looked to be improving half a dozen years ago. Elections in November 2008 saw the highest voter turnouts since the mid1960s, with rising participation among young, minority, and lower-income citizens who had often stayed away from the ballot box. Despite sharp disagreements about policy specifics, both Republican and Democratic candidates debated real challenges facing the country – including ways to bolster the economy, address climate change, reform taxes, and broaden access to health insurance coverage.
Racial tensions certainly sparked during a 2007-08 campaign that featured the first African- American aspirant to the presidency. Yet the ultimate winner, Democrat Barack Obama, assembled a truly rainbow coalition of white, black and brown Americans; and during the months immediately after his victory, many
to prove that government could tackle pressing national challenges. Facing a sudden and dire financial crisis, they passed emergency recovery measures that averted a second great depression and put the United States on the road toward gradual economic recovery. In addition, Democrats devised legislation and regulations to address new environmental and workplace rules, reforms in financial regulation and college loans, and, of course, a comprehensive national health reform. In our 2011 book, Reaching for a New Deal, Lawrence Jacobs and I assembled a team of political scientists and political sociologists who analyzed the major policy shifts attempted during the early Obama presidency, tracking successes and shortfalls within and across various policy areas.1 Contributors concluded that, despite outright defeats in some areas and congressional roadblocks in others, major shifts in direction for federal taxes, regulations, social spending, and health policy were accomplished. However, the policy changes carried
POLITICAL SCIENTISTS EXPECT THAT PARTIES FACED WITH LOSSES SUCH AS THOSE EXPERIENCED BY REPUBLICANS BETWEEN 2006 AND 2008 WILL MODERATE - THAT IS, MOVE TOWARD THE CENTER OF THE POLICY SPECTRUM TO ATTRACT MORE SUPPORT FROM MEDIAN VOTERS.
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Americans from diverse social backgrounds seemed genuinely proud that the country had apparently surmounted the worst of its racist past. Famously, comedian Steven Colbert declared U.S. racism dead: “RIP, 1776-2008.” He was engaging in dark humor, of course. Starting in January 2009, President Obama and Democrats in control of both houses of Congress took actions
through in the early Obama years led not to new heights of political popularity as Democrats had hoped, but instead provoked fierce opposition. Observers in late 2008 had trumpeted the possibility that Barack Obama might well pull off what Time magazine called a “New New Deal” on the cover of its November 24, 2008 issue – referring to the idea that Obama and his Democratic allies might use major federal policy shifts to fuel an electoral realignment that would boost the political fortunes Democrats for years to come. But as Obama and Democratic congressional majorities endeavored to redirect federal policies in 2009 and 2010, they did so in the face of growing Republican opposition as well as blowback from conservative populists mobilizing at the grassroots and operating from wellresourced centers of corporate and ideological power. Political scientists expect that parties faced with losses such as those experiences by Republicans between 2006 and 2008 will moderate – that is, move toward the center of the policy spectrum to attract more support from median voters. But that is not at all what has happened with the Republican Party in the Obama era. Instead, hardline conservatives have gained enormous new leverage and GOP officeholders and candidates have moved steadily toward the far right in one issue area after another, staking out policy positions that, according to national opinion polls, are not popular with most Americans. (See Figure 1) Yet contrary to median voter models, Republicans have not been punished at the polls for departures from majority opinion, and neither party has moved to the center. True, the GOP did not succeed in making Barack Obama a one-term president; Obama was solidly reelected in 2012 as Democrats also made gains in the Senate. But Republicans, especially right-wingers, made huge gains in the congressional elections of 2010 and 2014; and across dozens of U.S. states, Republicans also took firm control of governorships and often built supermajorities in state legislatures. Since 2014, the Democratic president in the White House has confronted Republican
Pushed From the Right, GOPers in Congress and the States Block Policies Most Americans Want ... • RAISING THE FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE to at least $10.10 an hour — favored by 71 percent of Americans (CBS/NYT 2015).
• PAID SICK DAYS AND LEAVE FOR PARENTS AND CAREGIVERS — supported by 85 percent of Americans (CBS/NYT 2015).
• COLLECTIVE BARGAINING RIGHTS FOR PUBLIC SECTOR WORKERS — supported by 64 percent of Americans (Bloomberg 2011).
• KEEPING AND IMPROVING HEALTH REFORM — 43 percent of Americans want law retained or expanded; another 11 percent want it cut back. Only 31 percent want health reform repealed (Kaiser Family Foundation 2015).
• EXPANDED SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFITS — favored by 72 percent of Americans (National Academy of Social Insurance 2014).
• NEW SPENDING ON UNIVERSAL PRESCHOOL — 69 percent of Americans would vote for such a law (Gallup 2013).
• INCREASED PUBLIC FUNDING FOR INFRASTRUCTURE — 72 percent of Americans would vote for a law that increased spending on jobs repairing infrastructure (Gallup 2013).
Figure 1.
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by AgnosticPreachersKid via Wikimedia Commons
Tea Party Tax Payer Protest, Washington, D.C.
opponents in control of the House and Senate in Congress and in full control of the legislature and governor’s seat in 23 states across the country compared with seven states under full Democrat control. Except in a few areas where President Obama can take constitutional action by executive regulation, major policymaking is now at a standstill. Incapable of addressing major challenges facing the country, including climate change, infrastructure development, and immigration. The U.S. national government falls short on one clear test of democratic health, and many state governments are similarly stymied by gridlock and polarization. On the participatory side there is equal reason to worry about declining democratic health. Voter turnout for the presidential election in 2012 was down slightly from 2008 levels (53.6% compared to 56.8%). But turnout in 2010 plummeted to a paltry 37.8%, and turnout dipped to an even lower 36.3% in 2014. Researchers at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University attribute the declines to restrictive voting laws adopted in dozens of state legislatures, many dominated by Republican majorities. These restrictions make election participation harder, not easier, especially for young, minority and
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low-income voters. Little more than five years after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, the only thing clearly on the rise in U.S. elections is the role of big, secret money contributions from corporations and other organizations and from superwealthy donors pursuing preferred ideological causes. According to a New York Times survey in 2015, 84 percent of Americans agree that big money has too much influence in politics. In national surveys (among them the Pew Research Center, National Election Studies, Gallup, ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times, and CNN Polls) , substantial majorities of Americans express distrust in government and disgust with the state of our politics. Young Americans, in particular, seem increasingly inclined to view democratic politics as a tawdry, ineffective arena in which to pursue their civic aspirations. To be sure, social movements on the right and left engage many volunteer participants. But especially on the left, youthful movement activists such as those involved in the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter mobilizations do not see electoral politics or elected representative government as a meaningful routes to accomplishing social reform.
Overall, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the last eight years have brought a contradictory and unstable combination of political results – effective government policymaking in a number of areas, but also growing citizen distrust and disgust with government, declining voter engagement, and markedly increased ideological and partisan polarization. Equally worrisome, highly politicized ethnic and racial tensions are also on the rise. The Republican Party has fallen back on a core base of older, white voters whose racial fears are whipped by a steady diet of ideological programming on Fox News and conservative talk radio. And the field of GOP presidential contenders for 2016 prominently features “outsider” candidates who unabashedly tout nativist, anti-immigrant appeals. In the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency, the United States seems light years away from Colbert’s quip about “Racism 1776-2008, R.I.P.” If racism had a foot in the grave seven years ago, it has risen from the dead with force as the United States heads into yet another contentious presidential-election year.
The Tea Party Eruption, Ultra-Right Advocacy, and GOP Radicalization If we ask what contributes to such contradictory tendencies in U.S. democracy, the eruption of “the Tea Party” in early 2009 offers an important part of the answer. Of course far-right activism taps into phenomena that long pre-date Obama’s presidency. More recently, these same forces also have morphed into somewhat different forms – including the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump and the rise of a network of political organizations orchestrated by Charles and David Koch and several hundred other wealthy donors who work with them. I will shortly get to these current transmogrifications of far-right influences on the Republican Party and U.S. politics. But first it makes sense to remind ourselves that the post 2008 period has as much claim to be labeled “the Tea Party era” as it does to be called “the Obama Era.”
Obama’s presidency and the rise of the Tea Party and other far-right forces tugging on the Republican Party have been inextricably intertwined. Only weeks after Obama moved into the White House and Democrats took control of both chambers of Congress, CNBC television commentator Rick Santelli called for new a Tea Party to oppose the Obama administration. Over coming weeks and months, Tea Party protests spread across the country, as older white men and women dressed up as Colonial protestors to decry government tyranny and federal legislation about health reform, climate change and economic recovery. Right leaning media outlets took up their cause, and previously-established professionally-run, free-market advocacy groups like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity jumped on the bandwagon. By 2010 and 2011, GOP candidates were tailoring primary and general election messages to angry and fearful conservative voters who said they sympathized with the Tea Party. Why did this Tea Party eruption happen and how can we understand its dynamics and clout? Several years ago, Vanessa Williamson and I published our book The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, 2 which used a full panoply of research from interviews and local observations to media and website analysis and tracking of national surveys to explain the dynamics of this radical movement. We showed how bottom-up and topdown forces intersected to give the Tea Party leverage over the Republican Party and allow various right-wing advocacy and funding groups to build push national politics sharply to the right. In grassroots initiatives from 2009 to 2011, volunteer citizen activists created hundreds of local Tea Parties meeting regularly to plot public protests and place steady pressure on GOP organizations and candidates
at all levels. About half of all GOP voters sympathized with this Tea Party upsurge, especially older, white, conservative-minded men and women who fear that “their country” is about to be “lost.” Many commentators have presumed that grassroots Tea Partiers reject all government spending, but in fact their ire is focused on mass immigration and new extensions of taxpayer-funded social programs like Affordable Care Act for low and moderate income working-aged people. In the face to face interviews we did with grassroots Tea Partiers, Vanessa Williamson and I learned that most of them considered public spending on Social Security, Medicare and military veterans to be legitimate, and indeed many of them benefit from these programs or expect to do so soon when they retire. Tea Partiers see these government programs as “earned” by “hardworking Americans”
GOP as entirely grassroots driven. Major news outlets including The New Yorker and The New York Times along with academic studies have documented the links between the Koch brothers and the tobacco lobby, among others, who have funded Tea Party organizations and used angry grassroots Tea Party protests to expand their email lists and boost longstanding policy priorities that are not the same as those at the grassroots. For example, behindthe-scenes funders push Republicans to shrink social spending including privatization and cut backs to Medicare, Social Security, and Veterans Administration programs, even though grassroots conservatives like these programs. Wealthy conservatives whip up Tea Party popular sentiments while also pushing to eliminate or block regulations on business, including any government steps to reduce carbon
THERE HAS NEVER BEEN ANY ONE CENTER OF TEA PARTY AUTHORITY AND THE ENTIRE GAGGLE OF GRASSROOTS AND ELITE ORGANIZATIONS AMOUNTS TO A PINCERS OPERATION THAT WIELDS MONEY AND VOTES IN PRIMARY ELECTIONS TO EXERT POWERFUL LEVERAGE ON REPUBLICAN OFFICEHOLDERS AND CANDIDATES. like themselves but they demand crackdowns on immigrants and cutbacks in public benefits for the poor and younger people. They are fiercely opposed not only to Democrats but to any Republicans willing to compromise with Democrats and President Barack Obama. Social scientists like Christopher Parker at the University of Washington have documented that racially prejudicial attitudes are more common among Tea Party sympathizers than other Americans, including other conservatives. But it would be a mistake to think of the rightward forces pushing on the
emissions in an effort to counter global warming. Starting in 2009, groups such as FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, the Club for Growth, and Tea Party Express (a renamed conservative GOP political action committee) leapt on the grassroots protest bandwagon. More recently, the Senate Conservative Action Fund and Heritage Action have greatly bolstered the capacities of far-right forces to influence Congress. Indeed, conservative funders and ideological policy shops ramped up their activities significantly after many Tea Partysupported Republicans were elected to
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by Freedom Fan via Wikimedia Commons
Tea Party protesters walk towards the United States Capitol during a taxpayer march in Washington, D.C.
Congress and state legislatures in 2010 and 2014. Grassroots conservatives may provide votes to elect Republicans they hope will deport immigrants, get rid of Obamacare, and (given that many Tea Partiers are also Christian conservatives) eliminate access to abortion, but when those Republicans assume office they are also pressured by prominent campaign contributors to slash taxes and eliminate government regulations and even very popular social programs. There has never been any one center of Tea Party authority, and the entire gaggle of grassroots and elite organizations amounts to a pincers operation that wields money and votes in primary elections to exert powerful leverage on Republican office-holders and candidates. Media pundits regularly report on whether “the Tea Party” is gaining or losing popularity in public opinion polls. But Tea Party and other far-right influences do not depend on general popularity at all. Even as Tea Party support has dropped to its lowest level ever (Gallup Poll in October 2015), the clout of far-right voters and advocacy groups and funders has grown in DC as evidenced by the role played by the Liberty Caucus in the recent House speaker’s race. Such forces hold ever stronger sway over Republican Party legislators and candidates, when far-right activists, sympathizers and funders knock off
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seemingly unchallengeable Republicans – such as then-Republican Charlie Crist in Florida in 2010, or long-time GOP Senator Bob Bennett in Utah in 2010, or iconic Republican Senator Richard Lugar in Indiana in 2014. High profile defeats grab politicians’ attention and lead most Republicans to start leaning right in key policy battles. Various ideological tracking organizations on both the right and the left keep close counts of where each legislator stands on “key votes” – down to votes on amendments and the tiniest details of parliamentary procedure. The 2010 and 2014 elections were clearly high marks for Tea Party funders and voters. Amid high public frustration at the slow economic recovery, only two of five U.S. voters went to the polls, skewed toward older,
white, wealthier conservatives. Low turnout allowed fired up Tea Party Republicans to score many triumphs in the U.S. House of Representatives and many state legislatures. After such footholds are gained, they are not easily reversed. Once solid blocs of Tea Party-supporters or acquiescent legislators are ensconced in office, congressional insiders and outsiders challenge the authority of the GOP’s congressional leaders. For example, during the summer of 2013, Tea Party darling Texas Senator Ted Cruz called for a renewed allout crusade to kill Obamacare, even after it was assured legal survival by the Supreme Court and the 2012 presidential outcome. Aggressively self-assured with a take-no-prisoners style, Cruz staged a 21 hour filibuster and led House Republicans to take a harder line than originally preferred by Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). The result was the government shutdown and debt brinkmanship. Supporters say Boehner was “reluctant,” but what difference did that make – he went along. The same alliance of money, ideological think tanks and low voter participation can be seen at the state level. In dozens of states where Republican lawmakers hold power, members of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) introduce and often pass model bills to slash taxes and business regulations, cut social spending, restrict union rights, and create new impediments to voter participation. ALEC members,
THE 2010 AND 2014 ELECTIONS WERE CLEARLY HIGH MARKS FOR TEA PARTY FUNDERS AND VOTERS. AMID HIGH PUBLIC FRUSTRATIONS AT THE SLOW ECONOMIC RECOVERY, ONLY TWO OF FIVE U.S. VOTERS WENT TO THE POLLS, SKEWED TOWARD OLDER, WHITE, WEALTHIER CONSERVATIVES.
usually conservative Republicans, pursue such policy shifts from within legislative chambers, while far-right advocacy groups run advertisements, hold public protests, and seek to mobilize voters in support of the most conservative Republican candidates. The combination of insider-outsider tactics work even when most citizens do not approve of the far-right policy goals, because elections for state and local officeholders often happen with very low voter turnout. In the 2015 Kentucky gubernatorial race, for example, Tea Party Republican Matt Bevin won a contest in which only about 30% of eligible voters participated.
Tea Partyism Triumphs and Dissolves as the Label Fades Back in 2011, commentators took for granted that “the Tea Party” had considerable popularity and clout. Following Obama’s reelection in 2012, however, pundits were primed to declare the Tea Party over and pointed to the declining popularity of the label: Because most Americans tell pollsters they do not like the Tea Party and its tactics, “democracy is self-correcting” and the GOP will have to pivot back to the “median voter,” explained Noah Feldman in his Bloomberg assessment of “how the Tea Party will die.” Others placed greater emphasis on the supposed new will of business interests and moderate Republican Party elders to recapture control of the Republican Party. But far-right populist pressures on the GOP persist, and Republican Party officeholders and candidates – including presidential candidates – continue to worry about their right flanks. As a result, moderate-minded American citizens often have their policy preferences ignored, and voters in general find themselves turned off by deadlock and partisan polarization in Congress and national public debates. Analysts and citizens who are concerned about the Tea Party need to realize that shifts in opinion polls do not amount to political change. Democrats, Independents, and many
non-Tea Party-minded Republicans may disavow the more extremist sentiments being expressed on the 2016 presidential campaign trail, but far right forces remainpowerful in Republican politics nationally and in most states, often after winning in low-turnout elections. Both populist and elite ultra-conservatives are in the battle to stay, determined to defeat hints of moderation in the GOP and head off possibilities for bipartisan compromises. Analysts and many election consultants believe that moderation is necessary for any Republican or Democrat hoping to compete for the presidency in the larger, more diverse electorate that usually turns out in presidential election years. Although both major parties include groups trying to tug candidates away from appeals to the middle of the electorate, the problem is currently much more acute for Republicans, whose candidates often compete in primary elections to see who can espouse the most extreme stands. What then is the state of democracy in America today? Unfortunately, millions of middle-of-the-road Americans may give up in disgust in the face of manipulation of democracy and our persistently deadlocked and hobbled government.
Notes 1. Skocpol, Theda and Lawrence Jacob, editors. 2011. Reaching for a New Deal: Ambitious Governance, Economic Meltdown, and Polarized Politics in Obama’s First Two Years, New York: Russell Sage Foundation. 2. Skocpol, Theda and Vanessa Williamson. 2013, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. New York: Oxford University Press.
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HISTORICAL ROOTS OF DEMOCRACY 2016 James T. Kloppenberg James T. Kloppenberg is Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University, where he teaches courses on European and American thought, culture, and politics from the ancient world to the present. He has written extensively on the rise and fall of social democracy in Europe and America. Kloppenberg’s most recent book is Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
A
merican democracy is in trouble. Fewer people are voting. The major parties are drifting ever further apart. Thanks to redistricting, only a few seats in the United States Congress are now considered competitive. The gap separating the richest from the poorest Americans, greater than it has ever been, continues to grow. The poorest Americans shun politics, and almost all of those above them on the income scale oppose extending benefits to the “undeserving” poor. The United States imprisons a higher percentage of its population than any other nation in the world, and black males constitute a disproportionate number of those incarcerated. Disclosures of systematic racial discrimination, thrown into stark relief by multiple police shootings, have inspired African Americans to insist that, all the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, Black Lives Matter. As the number of observant believers continues to decline, religious denominations polarize into increasingly combative conservative and progressive wings. Suicide rates among less educated white males, impoverished and hopeless, are rising. Although violent crime has decreased in recent decades, Americans feel increasingly vulnerable. A wave of mass shootings has renewed calls for gun control, as well as more strident defenses of the right to bear arms. The news media fuel partisan passions with around-the-clock hyperbole, and the public segregates itself into silos where people live, buy,
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in 1835 and 1840. Tocqueville not only identified and diagnosed many of the maladies afflicting us, he thought the remedies could be found in what he called “the cradle of American democracy,” the New England town meeting. Why?
Founding Covenants in New England
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
and think alike. Americans worry that they face a hostile world in which their nation’s military power and the power of its ideals are diminishing. A majority of Americans complain that the nation is on the wrong track, but they have starkly different ideas about what the right track would be. Severe as such problems are, all of them are rooted in American history.1 If we want to understand their sources and grapple with them, we should look again at Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, a text that has shaped understandings of American democracy ever since its publication in two volumes
English Puritans brought the idea of self-rule with them to New England in the 1620s and 1630s. They were fleeing the Church of England, which they believed was slipping back toward the ecclesiastical form, liturgical practice, and obscurantist theology of Roman Catholicism that had sparked the Protestant Reformation a century earlier. John Calvin in particular had emphasized gathering small communities of believers into self-governing congregations that would enjoy the freedom to live in accordance with God’s will. Committing themselves to obey God’s covenant meant subservience to his law; determining the meaning of that law was to be the work of those who constituted these communities and joined together to form the first English colonies in New England. The Pilgrims who signed the Mayflower Compact (1620) in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, committed themselves to “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation.” To that end, and for the “Glory of God and the
Advancement of the Christian Faith,” they came together to “enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience.”2 Those who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony further north followed the same pattern. As new towns fanned out from the original settlements in Charlestown and Boston, they, too, wrote charters establishing the principle and practice of self-government in accordance with divine law. In 1636, for example, the heads of the families who founded the town of Dedham, ten miles southwest of Boston, expressed a similar sentiment and established a similar form of government: “In the fear and reverence of our Almighty God,” they pledged “amongst ourselves and each other to profess and practice one truth according to that most perfect rule, the foundation whereof is everlasting love.” The Dedham Covenant, like those of most early settlements in New England, stipulated that only those who agreed to its terms would be welcome in the town. Others were free to settle elsewhere. If disagreements arose, they were to be settled by mediation, and all town members would “become freely subject unto all such orders and constitutions” as are to be “made now or at any time hereafter from this day forward.” That phrase – become freely subject – expresses an idea central to 17th-century New England towns. Once individuals voiced their consent, they bound themselves to obey the authority of the community. That was the meaning of autonomy, the acceptance of selfimposed law. Like the other founding covenants, the Dedham agreement was meant to cover not only the laws but also – and even more crucially – the spirit infusing the interactions of the townspeople: “As well for loving and comfortable society in our said town as also for the prosperous and thriving condition of our said fellowship, especially respecting the fear of God, in which we desire to begin and continue whatsoever we shall by his loving favor take into hand.”3 As was true in all these early covenants, those who founded Dedham were constituting a church and a town in conformity to God’s
law, but very much on their own terms: It was the signatures of the townspeople that gave the covenant its legitimacy and gave those whom they elected the authority to enforce the laws they made. The gears seldom meshed as smoothly in practice as the founding documents of New England towns indicated that they should. The similarity among the compacts signed in these years, however, is striking. When settlers headed north from the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1639 to establish the town of Exeter, in what is now New Hampshire, for example, they specified that those
The covenanting communities of Puritans that authorized the creation of congregations and town governments took themselves and their collective will too seriously to accept dispassionately either dissent or secession. They believed that disagreements, although inevitable, had to be resolved rather than allowed to fester. Such discord, they feared, would eventually erode the bonds of sympathy that united them, enabled them to trust each other, and thus made possible their institutions of self government. 5 Notwithstanding the founders’ commitment to consensus, conflicts
LOCAL GATHERINGS OF CITIZENS OFTEN RANCOROUS, HAD ALREADY ACQUAINTED AMERICANS WITH THE DIFFICULT BUSINESS OF GOVERNANCE. BY THE TIME THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION WAS SUBMITTED TO THE PEOPLE FOR RATIFICATION, THEY HAD BEEN ARGUING ABOUT POLITICS FOR DECADES, AND IN PARTS OF THE NEW NATION FOR A CENTURY AND A HALF. chosen to exercise authority must “rule and govern” according to God’s will, and the people in turn “will submit ourselves to be ruled and governed” by laws made “with the consent of the people.”4 Another group of emigrants from Massachusetts, led by the eminent minister Thomas Hooker, created the colony of Hartford along the banks of the Connecticut River. Their “Fundamental Orders of 1639” specified that the people would choose their officials and maintain control over them. Like many other Puritans, Hooker found scriptural warrant for his conclusion that “the foundation of authority is laid … in the free consent of the people,” which he described as the “cement” that “soldered” together both the religious and civil bodies. But the intolerance of dissent for which the Puritans today are notorious was as central to their world as their commitment to self-government.
proved to be pervasive in practice, and those in power invoked their authority to stifle the complaints of disgruntled minorities. It was their commitment to the covenant, constraining and intolerant as it often proved to be, that made these communities willing to empower their congregations or popular assemblies to govern in the first place. As crucial as the ideas animating these founding documents was the experience of selfrule that they made possible. By coping with conflict, more often resolved in the 17th century by imposing order from above than by accommodating differences, these early New Englanders struggled to deal with the disagreements that they knew human sinfulness would breed, but that they hoped their commitments to equity and reciprocity would enable them to resolve.
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From Covenants to Early Governance The dynamic that culminated in the separation of England’s North American colonies and their coming together as the United States of America originated in similar local assemblies. John Adams, still an obscure young attorney chosen by the town of Braintree in 1765 to state its grievances to its elected representative in the General Assembly, adapted the arguments he had made in the preceding two years according to the sentiments expressed by his fellow townspeople. Throughout the colonies, town or county gatherings generated hundreds of proclamations stating the colonists’ various grievances. Between the outbreak of hostilities in the spring of 1775 and July 4, 1776, such documents provided not only the templates for declaring
and northern states began to outlaw slavery. Throughout the South, however, commitments to slavery hardened in the crucible of the Constitutional Convention. By the end of the 18th century, resolving this fundamental conflict had been deferred, and in the coming decades an uneasy truce was struck on the principle of white male supremacy. When Tocqueville visited the United States in 1830-31, the nation was just beginning to take stock of the consequences of that decision. Democracy in America opens by drawing a sharp contrast between the North and South that Tocqueville traced to the colonies’ origins. Because Virginia, founded by adventurers and settled by n’er-do-wells, quickly became dependent on the forced labor of African slaves, all whites came to consider themselves superior to all blacks, and work itself
a set of institutions and dispositions that “leapt full-grown and fully armed from the middle of the old feudal society.” Such achievements, however, came at the price of enforced conformity, a paradox that Tocqueville traced to the unique confluence of the Puritans’ religious zeal and their political independence. 6 Tocqueville’s description of early New England democracy, particularly his rapturous descriptions of citizens’ participation in town meetings, service on juries, and cooperation in civic projects of all kinds, reflected the accounts offered by some of the most prominent citizens he met while in Boston, including former President of the United States John Quincy Adams, Josiah Quincy, president of Harvard College, and Jared Sparks, a historian who later became president of Harvard. Administering government at the local level, Tocqueville contended,
TOCQUEVILLE’S DESCRIPTION OF EARLY NEW ENGLAND DEMOCRACY, PARTICULARLY HIS RAPTUROUS DESCRIPTIONS OF CITIZENS’ PARTICIPATION IN TOWN MEETINGS, SERVICE ON JURIES, AND COOPERATION IN CIVIC PROJECTS OF ALL KINDS, REFLECTED THE ACCOUNTS OFFERED BY SOME OF THE MOST PROMINENT CITIZENS HE MET WHILE IN BOSTON, INCLUDING FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, JOSIAH QUINCY, PRESIDENT OF HARVARD COLLEGE, AND JARED SPARKS, A HISTORIAN WHO LATER BECAME PRESIDENT OF HARVARD. independence but also, in Adams’s Thoughts on Government (1776), the framework for the new state constitutions written during the early years of the War for Independence. Local gatherings of citizens, often rancorous, had already acquainted Americans with the difficult business of governance. By the time the United States Constitution was submitted to the people for ratification, they had been arguing about politics for decades, and in parts of the new nation for a century and a half. They disagreed with each other about a multitude of issues. In New Jersey, women could own property, and as a result they could vote. In an increasing number of northern states, free blacks could do the same,
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was dishonored by its identification with slavery. New England, by contrast, attracted families of well-educated and devout Puritans animated by ”austere” religious principles and “the most absolute democratic and republican theories.” These settlers established towns with lively political institutions and a striking degree of economic equality: “From the first, what was striking about their gathering on American soil was that here was a society with neither great lords nor commoners, indeed, one might almost say with neither rich nor poor,” at least in relation to European nations. In this society, “homogeneous in all its parts,” emerged a democracy beyond anything imagined in the ancient world,
following his informants’ lead, kept citizens involved in the public sphere. Their shared experience in voluntary associations of all kinds, coupled with the widespread circulation of many small newspapers, moderated opinions and forestalled the emergence of potentially dangerous rivalries between parties or religious denominations. Despite its general tone of approbation, the first volume of Democracy in America concluded with some sober observations. Americans in the early 19th century could get along with each other because no deep divisions had yet emerged, but Tocqueville worried that the gulf separating North from South might
eventually grow so wide that the ethic reciprocity would vanish and the union itself dissolve. The dangerous and deepening differences could be traced to slavery. Because racial distinctions would persist even if slavery ended, free blacks would never escape the stigma of their enslavement. That argument, which Tocqueville first encountered in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Tocqueville found confirmed in his travels. He offered as proof the hardening racism he encountered outside the South: “Nowhere is intolerance greater than where servitude was unknown.” Neither intermarriage nor a return to Africa seemed plausible to Tocqueville; unlike Frederick Douglass but like many whites in his day (and ours), he could not envision a multi-racial democracy. Nor did he see any viable “intermediate” condition for blacks between the slavery they hated and the equality that he believed whites would never permit. Thanks to slavery, white Americans were growing apart: “The Southerner’s upbringing all but ensures that he will be arrogant, quicktempered, irascible, violent, ardent in his desires, and impatient of obstacles, but easily discouraged if triumph is not immediate.” The Northerner, by contrast, forced by circumstances to be self-reliant, discovers early in life “the natural limit of his power.” Knowing that he cannot command the compliance of others, he learns that he must persuade them, and thus he becomes “patient, reflective, tolerant, slow to act, and persevering in his designs.” In Tocqueville’s account of sectional tensions, the lifeblood of democracy, commitments to equality, autonomy, and mutuality seemed to be draining away, and the poisonous hatreds that caused the Civil War, still discernible in 2015, appeared to be rising.7 Ominous as that prospect was, the second volume of Democracy in America took on an even darker tone than the conclusion of the first, primarily as a result of the time Tocqueville spent in England. There he witnessed for the first time rapid industrialization, and he worried that its consequences threatened the preconditions necessary for democracy: social and economic equality, self-rule for all, and a commitment to something other than material self-interest. Whereas equal conditions and religious devotion had combined to nourish self-government in early America, Tocqueville now feared
that a mad scramble for money would only intensify an already worrying form of majority tyranny and stifle all public spirit. Whereas Americans had learned from experience that attending to the common good was in the long-run interest of everyone, the emerging culture of materialism blurred that understanding and undermined the civic spirit that had inspired individuals to join together in shared undertakings. Americans had
readily explained to Tocqueville that “selfinterest properly understood” led them “to help one another out” and “sacrifice a portion of their time and wealth for the good of the state.” That distinctive American quality, however, now seemed
Englanders’ anti-Catholicism to the widespread opposition to German immigrants in early 18th-century Pennsylvania, forms of xenophobia helped turn English Protestants into Americans. Nationalism in the United States was grounded not only on avidly proclaimed commitments to self-government but on an equally passionate racism that displaced Indians and subjugated Africans. In more recent times, the Ku Klux Klan and its descendants, the neighborhood protection associations that enforced residential segregation throughout the nation even after the Civil Rights movement had dismantled Jim Crow, provided avenues channeling civic pride in less than savory directions. Tocqueville saw the problem, and he was explicit about distinguishing violent manifestations of community sentiment from those he considered not only valuable but necessary conditions for the rise and persistence of democracy. Beyond urging Americans to live up to the Christian ideals they claimed to cherish, however, he did not see how they could dislodge the animosities that threatened to make democracy impossible. Yet Tocqueville concluded his second volume with two more hopeful observations. First, he admitted that his own perspective, shaped as it was by his birth into one of France’s most privileged aristocratic families, was different from that of “man’s creator and keeper,” who values “the greater well being of all” persons above “the singular prosperity of a few” lucky enough to be born in the right circumstances.
to him endangered either by the ancient vice of egoism or by its even more sinister modern variant, “individualism,” a word Tocqueville coined to describe the deliberate isolation of the self from community. 8 As government expanded to fill the civic vacuum formerly occupied by participation in voluntary associations, and self-governing citizens lapsed into a torpor of petty pleasure-seeking, he feared that the result would be a triumph of vulgar money-making and the decline of democracy into despotism. Another problem also bothered Tocqueville. Some of the most venerable of those voluntary associations so important for democracy were selfconsciously exclusionary. From New
Second, although he denied that nations could halt the progress of democracy, Tocqueville affirmed that they could determine its shape: “Providence did not create mankind entirely independent or altogether enslaved. Around each man it traced, to be sure, a fatal circle beyond which he may not venture, but within the ample limits thus defined man is powerful and free, and so are peoples.”9 Like any self-respecting historian, Tocqueville resisted the temptation to predict the future based on the past, and I will follow his lead. Yet a silhouette of our own predicament emerges from Democracy in America. Participation gives way to consumerism, moderation to dogmatism, and persuasion to
Alexis de Tocqueville (courtesy, Library of Congress)
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accusation and denunciation. In place of equality and fellow feeling, we have unprecedented inequality and mistrust of the undeserving “others” among us, particularly those of different races, nations, or religions. Where once we thrived on barn raisings and engaged in conversation with people unlike ourselves, we are now bowling alone and screaming at each other in cyberspace. At least in principle, though, we remain sovereign. As Rousseau might put it, if we Americans are still born free, why are we in chains? If our nation remains a democracy, why can we not identify the sources of the problems we face, sources apparent to Tocqueville almost two centuries ago, and address them?
The Town Hall Meeting in 2015 One of the most sustained efforts to reinvigorate American democracy occurred around the turn of the 20th century, when Progressives introduced novel reforms, including the referendum and recall, the direct election of U.S. Senators, and, in the former Confederacy, the laws establishing rigid racial segregation that came to be called Jim Crow, which whites insisted would rid the South of “corruption.” One of the innovations of these years was known as the city manager plan, which promised to end the reign of political machines by taking power from ward heelers and empowering highly trained civil servants. According to many progressives, including Jane Addams and others connected with social settlements established to help communities of struggling immigrants, boss rule had corrupted urban democracy. Many Americans, throughout the nation, thought that the antidote was “good government” by nonpartisan managers. I will conclude by focusing on the persistent tension between that model and the older tradition of town government that attracted Tocqueville’s attention and admiration. One of those early New England towns founded in the 1630s, Dedham, eventually grew large enough to spawn two others, Needham (in 1711) and Wellesley (in 1881), the latter of which my family has called home for 35 years. Wellesley still enjoys a form of government known as representative
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town meeting, which relies on citizen volunteers elected to serve and deliberate on the issues facing the town. The urgent issue in 2015, which would have intrigued Tocqueville, is whether to alter the town bylaws to empower an appointed town manager to perform many of the tasks currently done by citizen volunteers. Arguments for and against this proposal have circulated for months, and they have been the subject of spirited debates in multiple town meetings. Tocqueville would have recognized the reasons offered for maintaining the status quo. A contemporary of the early 20th-century Progressive reformers, the German sociologist Max Weber, would have understood the call for change. Although Weber considered himself a partisan of democracy, he nevertheless predicted that in the modern age instrumental rationality – by which he meant reasoning on the grounds of efficiency or predictability – was likely to supplant reasoning according to tradition or principle. Professional managers, according to this way of thinking, are preferable because they are not swayed by the often irrational lure of customs or the often emotional appeals of citizens committed to their own beliefs. Since managers see more clearly, at least from the standard of instrumental rationality, they calculate costs and benefits more precisely, and they can be trusted to exercise authority more rationally than the people themselves. That trade-off, the exchange of messy, time-consuming citizen control for clean, crisp managerial expertise, has been the subject of endless, and occasionally rancorous, disagreement among the citizens of Wellesley. After months of deliberation, the issue has not yet been resolved, in part because many townspeople acknowledge that both sides have persuasive arguments. In addition to the substantive disagreements that Tocqueville worried might fracture the ethic of reciprocity on which democracy depends, Americans have been arguing for a century about whether they should continue to engage in political activity themselves, and trust their own judgment, or whether they should hand those decisions to expert managers deemed capable of resolving disagreements and making decisions efficiently. In the town of Wellesley, at least, the jury is still out. If Tocqueville
was right about what made democracy in America possible in the first place, and if we harbor any hope of restoring the ideal equality and the practice of civic engagement, we should hope that, even if Weber proves right about the irresistible appeal of instrumental rationality in the short run, the debate itself will never end.
Notes 1. This articles draw on arguments advanced in James T. Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 2. The Mayflower Compact in The Federal and State Constitutions Colonial Charters and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America, ed. Francis Thorpe (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909), p. 1841. As Jason Maloy points out in The Colonial American Origins of Modern Democratic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 100, Robinson’s idea of a popular compact derived not only from Proverbs 11: 14, “in the multitude of counsellors there is safety,” and from “a radically populist reading of Matthew 18:17,” but also from a maxim of Roman law: quod omnes tangit ab omnibus comprobetur, “what touches all should be approved by all.” 3. The Dedham Covenant is reprinted in The Early Records of Dedham, Massachusetts, ed. Don Gleason Hill, 7 vols. (Dedham: Office of the Dedham Transcript, 1892), 3: 2-3. For detailed analysis, see Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), pp. 4-22. The Dedham Covenant, now also available online, plays a large part in Lockridge’s interpretation of Dedham’s early incarnation as a “Christian Utopian Closed Corporate Community.” It is worth noting that Lockridge emphatically denies the presence of democracy in Dedham. 4. “Agreement among the Settlers” is printed in Remarkable Providences, ed. John Demos, rev. ed. (1972; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), pp. 230-231. 5. Proverbs 11:14. For Hooker’s election sermon of 1638, see Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society 1 (1860): 20. Commentators who associate democracy with toleration of dissent and diversity have a different conception of order, authority, membership, will, and liberty than did Thomas Hooker. For him the compact that established the town of Hartford, like the covenant establishing the town’s Puritan congregation, could survive only if the cement of mutual dependence remained the spirit soldering together individuals’ disparate inclinations. Self-government required such unity. Thomas Hooker, A Survey of the Summe of ChurchDiscipline (London: Printed by A.M. for John Bellamy, 1648), Part I, p. 50; and see the discussion in Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (1956; New York: Harper and Row, 1964), pp. 44-47. 6. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Olivier Zunz, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004), pp. 36-40. 7. Ibid., pp. 395, 433. 8. Ibid., pp. 565, 611. 9. Ibid., p. 833.
For the Record
WHITTINGTON DELIVERS 2015 ROTHBAUM LECTURE
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ward-winning author and Princeton University professor Keith E. Whittington delivered three lectures on “The Idea of Democracy in America” at the University of Oklahoma Oct. 20-22 for the 2015 Julian J. Rothbaum Distinguished Lecture in Representative Government. The biennial Rothbaum Lecture series was endowed in 1981 by family members Irene Rothbaum and Joel Jankowsky in honor of Julian J. Rothbaum (1913-2003), who was a successful businessman, civic leader, loyal supporter of the university and lifelong friend of Speaker Carl Albert. Whittington presented “The Birth of a Democracy or of a Republic?”, “The Challenge of Mass Democracy,” and “The Crisis of Democracy in a Gilded Age.” He is expected to revise and extend his remarks for publication by the University of Oklahoma Press. In addition to his lectures, Whittington attended lunches with faculty and students, and presented to faculty at the
OU College of Law. As part of a dinner to honor Rothbaum’s legacy, the lectureship and Whittington, OU Provost Kyle Harper and Carl Albert Center director Cindy Simon Rosenthal joined Whittington in a question and answer session on democracy and constitutionalism. Whittington, who holds the William Nelson Cromwell Professorship of Politics at Princeton, has published widely on American constitutional theory and development, federalism, judicial politics and the presidency. His book Political Foundations of Judicial Supremacy: The Presidency, the Supreme Court, and Constitutional Leadership in U.S. History (Princeton University Press, 2006), won the C. Herman Pritchett Award for best book in law and courts and the J. David Greenstone Award for best book in politics and history. His work also includes Constitutional Construction: Divided Powers and Constitutional Meaning (Harvard University Press, 1999), Constitutional
Interpretation: Textual Meaning, Original Intent, and Judicial Review (University Press of Kansas, 1999), American Constitutionalism (Oxford University Press, 2012) (with Howard Gillman and Mark A. Graber) and Judicial Review and Constitutional Politics. His book, American Political Thought: Readings and Materials,” is in press and he is completing Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present. Whittington has been a John M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow, American Council of Learned Societies Junior Faculty Fellow, Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center and Visiting Professor at the University of Texas School of Law. He is a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences. More information about the Rothbaum Lecture book series is available at www.oupress.com. continued on next page
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Clockwise from the top: Joel Jankowsky; 2015 Rothbaum Lecture Series dinner honoring Keith E. Whittington; Carl Albert Center director Cindy Simon Rosenthal, Whittington and OU senior vice president and provost Kyle Harper; Joel Jankowsky, David Jankowsky and former Oklahoma Gov. David Walters; Rosenthal and Joel Jankowsky; Ron Peters Jr., Carl Albert Center graduate fellow alumnus Matthew Field and Rosenthal. 22
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For the Record
NEWS FROM THE CENTER Katherine McRae | Director of Administration
From left: Nathan Gerth, Michael Crespin, Cindy Simon Rosenthal and Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.)
On Nov. 24, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) visited the Carl Albert Center and archives where he heard about current
is scheduled to give a presentation at OU in April 2016.
Center’s collections. The results of their efforts are available at http://water. cacexplore.org.
projects and toured the Speaker’s Office exhibit and archives office. When the archives needed to replace a U.S. flag in the Speaker’s Office exhibit this past fall, Cole’s office readily provided a flag that was flown over the U.S. Capitol building to use in the display. Michael Jay Barber, the 2015 winner of the Carl Albert Dissertation Award for best dissertation in legislative studies, was recognized at the American Political Science Association meeting in September in San Francisco. Barber, assistant professor at Brigham Young University, won for his dissertation “Buying Representation: The Incentives, Ideology, and Influence of Campaign Contributions on American Politics.” He
Teaching
“Making Modern America: Discovering the Great Depression and New Deal,” an OU Presidential Dream course, benefited from the efforts of archivists Nathan Gerth and Rachel Henson, who led a workshop on archival research skills and introduced students from the class to the archive for group projects. View the resource website assembled for this class at http:// newdeal.cacexplore.org.
Director Cindy Simon Rosenthal again offered an archives-based course, “Congress and the Constitution,” which has provided new opportunities to leverage the resources of the Congressional Archives to engage undergraduate students with courserelated research that builds different archival skills. In fall 2015, the course focused on development of the Clean Water Act of 1972 and explored issues of federalism and intergovernmental policy dynamics. Students curated their own webpages, conducted geocoding of documents, and discovered unique historical documents among the
Archives The archive has a new online presence for users to explore online multimedia exhibits and thematic subject guides for its collections. Visit continued on next page
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the online exploration space at www. cacexplore.org. The Center’s exhibit on water policy, “WATER: Congressional Representation to Protect a Precious Resource,” continues to travel the state of Oklahoma. It showcases many interesting documents from the archive. Since July, the exhibit has been to Lawton, Anadarko, Ada, Ardmore, McAlester, Cherokee and Clinton. See where the exhibit is now and where it’s headed next at http://ou.edu/ carlalbertcenterH2O.
Documents showcased at the WATER exhibit
Archives staff continued processing the papers of the late U.S. Rep. Mike Synar, who served eight terms in Congress (1979-1995). More than 7,000 records, encompassing about one-half of the collection, have been created. Work will continue until processing is complete in spring 2016. The archives acquired the papers of Michael P. Flanagan, who represented Illinois’ 5th Congressional District from 1995 to 1997 and served on several House committees. William Wilson also recently donated a set of rare negatives featuring candid photographs of the 1976 bicentennial celebration. Nathan Gerth and Rachel Henson attended the Congressional Papers Roundtable meeting at the Society of American Archivists’ Conference in Cleveland, Ohio in August. Henson is serving on the Association of the Centers for the Study of Congress Program Committee for its upcoming annual meeting in Boston on May 11-13. Gerth is assisting with planning the annual meeting of the Society of Southwest Archivists and will serve on
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the host committee for the meeting in Oklahoma City on May 18-21.
Women’s Leadership Initiative In October, the N.E.W. Leadership program was honored for the 14th year with The Journal Record’s “Program Making a Difference” award for its work in inspiring and empowering women to become leaders in public service and elected office. N.E.W. Leadership alumni Madison Miller, Charlotte Mitchell and Audra Brulc accepted the award on behalf of the program at The Journal Record’s Woman of the Year gala on Oct. 1. Applications are being accepted the N.E.W. Leadership conference to be held in May 2016. The conference is open to undergraduate women from across Oklahoma who are interested in getting involved with politics and public service. The five-day residential conference offered at no cost to participants will feature prominent Oklahoma women officeholders, public administrators, community advocates and business leaders. The application deadline is March 11, 2016. Visit www.ou.edu/wli to apply or for more information. WLI graduate assistant student Alexandra Bohannon was selected as a 2015-2016 Research Fellow for the Oklahoma Policy Institute. The program recognizes high-achieving students pursuing research topics related to public policy. Bohannon, from Chickasha, Oklahoma, also received the Joyce and Edmond Peters Scholarship in 2015. She expects to earn her master’s degree in public administration with a public policy concentration in May 2016.
Civic Engagement Fellows Blessing Ikpa, Jessica Roberts and Jon Torres are the 2015-2016 Civic Engagement Fellows. Once again, the fellows led OU’s award-winning efforts in the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education’s annual voter registration contest. In its size category, OU won first place for the number
of out-of-state students registered and placed second for the number of in-state students registered. In 2015, the Fellows and volunteers registered 822 voters, 217 more than in 2014. In September, the Fellows represented OU at Harvard University’s National Campaign Conference, which brings together students from more than 20 universities around the country to discuss the civic engagement work on their campuses. This year’s topic increasing voter registration on campuses. As part of their civic engagement efforts, the Fellows also hosted debate watch parties for the Sept. 16 Republican debate and the Oct. 13 Democratic debate – in partnership with OU residence hall Adams Center and OU Housing and Food Services. Ikpa wrote a blog in November for Harvard’s Institute of Politics describing the Fellows’ student voter registration efforts, debate watch parties and “Politics and Pizza” events, which hosted speakers from local politics or other community organizations. Read more at www. iop.harvard.edu/blog/student-vote2016-university-oklahoma. Ikpa, from Norman, Oklahoma, is a senior majoring in criminology-sociology and human relations. She is a 2015 alumna of the N.E.W. Leadership program.
Community Scholars During the fall semester, six undergraduate students participated in the Community Scholars program, a public service learning opportunity. The students worked 20 hours per week in a nonprofit or public agency in the Norman area, where they developed professional experience and skills and learned how organizations function and interact with the broader community. The students also attended weekly seminars and briefings with leaders from the nonprofit and public service sectors. The 2015 Community Scholars and their assignments were: Andrew Allen – Emergency Management Center, City of Norman Meng Cheng– Aspiring Americans, a nonprofit promoting educational opportunity for low-income K-12 students
Leah Clemenson – Food and Shelter Inc., Norman, a homeless service provider Joseph Davis – Cleveland County Habitat for Humanity Madeline Oujesky – Planning and Development Department, City of Norman Evan Walker – Bridges, a social service agency supporting youth living independently
Alumni Carl Albert Graduate Fellow alumnus Craig A. Williams (Ph.D. 2001) serves as chief of staff to Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan Jr. Williams previously was director of policy and U.S. government affairs at the biopharmaceutical company Amgen. He also served as former Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich’s deputy chief of staff from 2004 to 2007, focusing on health care and education issues. Former Carl Albert Graduate Fellow Jon Mott (Ph.D. 1998) is the chief learning officer at Learning Objects Inc. His previous experience includes directing learning and professional development professionals for TD Ameritrade. He also served as an adjunct professor and focused on academic technology at Brigham Young University for more than 10 years. On Nov. 30, Daniel Pae was sworn in as the 2015-2016 president of the OU Student Government Association. Pae is a former Carl Albert Capitol Scholar and Undergraduate Research Fellow. The recipient of a Cortez A.M. Ewing Public Service Fellowship, Pae will travel to Washington, D.C., in summer 2016, where he will intern in a congressional office or public agency. Pae is a junior majoring in economics and political science.
Visiting Scholars Tony Madonna, associate professor of political science and Russell Teaching professor at the University of Georgia, visited the archives to research the Thomas Gore and Robert Owen collections for information regarding filibuster reform. David Oakley, U.S. Army officer and Ph.D. candidate at Kansas State University, used the Dave McCurdy
collection to conduct research regarding tension between intelligence agencies and the U.S. Department of Defense.
Undergraduate Research Fellows Alexis Apodaca, Emerson Hoagland, Jessica Owens, Emily Sarbacker, Cliff Tracy and Samuel York are the Center’s 2015-2016 Undergraduate Research Fellows. These students conduct research tasks for faculty mentors. During the spring semester, students write a paper and are encouraged to present their research at OU Undergraduate Research Day. Apodaca was selected for the White House Internship Program. She will intern in the Office of Management and Administration from January to April 2016. A junior from Phoenix, Arizona, Apodaca is majoring in human relations and public affairs and administration.
Presentations
Volunteer In late summer, Carl Albert’s grandson Luke Albert spent time as a volunteer at the Center. He helped in the archives with listening and coding tapes
of Speaker Albert’s speeches, shadowed center director Cindy Simon Rosenthal and helped with the center’s campus voter registration effort.
Director Cindy Simon Rosenthal presented “Follow the Water: Digital Humanities in a Congressional Archive” on Sept. 15 for Digital Humanities @ OU Day. Associate director Michael Crespin spoke at The University of Iowa Public Policy Center’s symposium “Political Discourse: The Impact of Redistricting, Campaign Finance, and the Media” on Dec. 4. The day-long symposium examined the issues of redistricting, campaign finance laws and how the media report on politics.
Interview
Crespin and Carl Albert Graduate Fellow Jessica Hayden presented “Building an Electoral Record: The Increase in Procedural Traceability in Congress” at the 2016 meeting of the Southern Political Science Association Jan 7-9.
April 14, 2016 - Michael Jay Barber, 2015 Carl Albert Dissertation award winner May 2016 - N.E.W. Leadership Institute June 2016 - Congress and History Conference
On Oct. 13, associate director Michael Crespin was interviewed by a reporter with Oklahoma City’s CBS affiliate, KWTV, regarding prospective candidates to succeed John Boehner as Speaker of the House of Representatives. http://m.news9.com/Story. aspx?story=30253286&catId=112032
Upcoming Events
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The Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center 630 Parrington Oval, Room 101 Norman, Oklahoma 73019-4031 (405) 325-6372 http://www.ou.edu/carlalbertcenter
Non-Profit Organization U.S. Postage
PAID University of Oklahoma
Visiting Scholars Program The Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center at the University of Oklahoma seeks applicants for its Visiting Scholars Program, which provides financial assistance to researchers working at the Center’s archives. Awards of $500-$1000 are normally granted as reimbursement for travel and lodging. The Center’s holdings include the papers of many former members of Congress, such as Speaker Carl Albert, Robert S. Kerr, and Fred Harris of Oklahoma, Helen Gahagan Douglas and Jeffery Cohelan of California, and Neil Gallagher of New Jersey. Besides the history of Congress, congressional leadership, national and Oklahoma politics, and election campaigns, the collections also document government policy affecting agriculture, Native Americans, energy, foreign affairs, the environment, and the economy. Topics that can be studied include the Great Depression, flood control, soil conservation, and tribal affairs. At least one collection provides insight on women in American politics. Most materials date from the 1920s to the 1990s, although there is one nineteenth-century collection. The Center’s collections are described on the World Wide Web at http://www.ou.edu/carlalbertcenter and in the publication titled A Guide to the Carl Albert Center Congressional Archives (Norman, Okla.: The Carl Albert Center, 1995) by Judy Day, et al., available at many U. S. academic libraries. Additional information can be obtained from the Center. The Visiting Scholars Program is open to any applicant. Emphasis is given to those pursuing postdoctoral research in history, political science, and other fields. Graduate students involved in research for publication, thesis, or dissertation are encouraged to apply. Professional writers and researchers are also invited to apply. The Center evaluates each research proposal based upon its merits, and funding for a variety of topics is expected. No standardized form is needed for application. Instead, a series of documents should be sent to the Center, including: (1) a description of the research proposal in fewer than 1000 words; (2) a personal vita; (3) an explanation of how the Center’s resources will assist the researcher; (4) a budget proposal; and (5) a letter of reference from an established scholar in the discipline attesting to the significance of the research. Applications are accepted at any time. For more information, please contact: Archivist, Carl Albert Center, 630 Parrington Oval, Room 101, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019. Telephone: (405) 325-5835. FAX: (405) 325-6419. E-mail: cacarchives@ou.edu
The University of Oklahoma is an Equal Opportunity Institution. www.ou.edu
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extensions | Winter 2016
Extensions is a copyrighted publication of the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center. It is distributed free of charge twice a year. All Rights Reserved. Extensions and the Carl Albert Center symbol are trademarks of the Carl Albert Center. Copyright Carl Albert Center, The University of Oklahoma, 1985. Statements contained herein do not necessarily reflect the views of the Carl Albert Center or the regents of The University of Oklahoma.