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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
• On February 9, Shep Melnick and Joanne Linden went to the polls in Amherst, New Hampshire, to cast their ballots in the first presidential primary of 2016.
• During the same month, contributors were making donations in support of their favored candidates seeking the presidential nominations of the two parties. Travis Stanger, an Iowa high school student and part-time McDonald's cashier, made his monthly $3 donation to his candidate of choice. Meanwhile, hedge fund managers Paul Singer and Kenneth Griffin each gave $2.5 million to a candidate Super PAC.
• Blaring their horns, dozens of trucks paraded around the Rhode Island state capitol to protest pending legislation imposing tolls on tractor trailers to fund road and bridge repairs.
• In East Las Vegas, Laura Lozano was working a phone bank, urging Spanish-speaking voters to support her candidate's bid for the presidential nomination and explaining the complexities of how to take part in the upcoming caucuses.
• Hundreds of supporters gathered during the annual Kentucky Right to Life Rally to watch Governor Matt Bevin sign the first piece of legislation of his administration, an informed consent abortion bill.
• Outside the Twin Cities in Minnesota, a group of neighbors formed the Stockholm Township Concerned Citizens Group, hoping to force Forsman Farms to scale back or drop plans to build a new facility that would house more than a million chickens.
• Resident leaders for Mitchell-Lama developments sent letters to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in support of affordable housing in the city.
• More than fifty people signed up to speak at a packed Seattle City Council briefing to give policymakers their views on how to best fight homelessness.
• Maple syrup producer groups from New England and the Upper Midwest as well as the International Maple Syrup Institute and the North American Maple Syrup Council lobbied the Food and Drug Administration to protest the mislabeling by major manufacturers of processed food containing imitation maple syrup.
• Stephen J. Ubl, president of the heavy-hitting trade group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America or PhRMA, which spent $18.4 million on lobbying in 2015, worked to counter increasing criticism from doctors, consumer advocates, and politicians about the soaring prices of name-brand drugs.
Democracies require mechanisms for the free expression of political voice so that members of the public can communicate information about their experiences, needs, and preferences and hold public officials accountable for their conduct in office. Working individually or collectively, they can communicate their concerns and opinions to policymakers in order to have a direct effect on public policy, or they can attempt to affect policy indirectly by influencing electoral outcomes. They can donate their time or their money. They can use conventional techniques or protest tactics. They can work locally or nationally. They can even have political input when, for reasons having nothing to do with politics, they affiliate with an organization that is politically active. As shown by the examples above, during the short days of mid-winter, 2016, Americans exercised political voice in all these ways.
In this volume, we explore how Americans use political voice to let public officials know what is on their minds and to generate pressure to respond to what is being said. But we are concerned not just with political voice but with equal political voice. Robert Dahl famously said: "A key characteristic of a democracy is the continued responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as equals." Later, in another context he argued that "all human beings are of equal intrinsic worth ... and that the good or interests of each person must be given equal consideration." If citizens are not equally able or likely to make efforts to let public officials know what they want or need, then some people will wield a megaphone, and others will speak in a whisper. Inequality of political voice has been a persistent and growing aspect of American democracy.
We examine inequalities of political voice — in the participation of Americans as individuals and in the activities of organizations that represent their interests — from a variety of perspectives. Among other topics, we consider:
• Equal Political Voice in a Democracy: What we mean by political voice and whether equal political voice matters in a democracy (Chapter 2);
• The Civic Voluntarism Model: How inequalities in individual political activity are rooted in differences in such resources as time, money, and civic skills; in such psychological orientations to politics as political interest, knowledge, and efficacy; and in the processes of recruitment by which friends, workmates, neighbors, and fellow organization and church members ask one another to take part politically (Chapter 3);
• Unequal Voice among Individuals: How active and inactive individuals differ with regard to their education and income, their race or ethnicity, and their gender (Chapter 4) as well as to their preferences, needs, and priorities for government action (Chapter 5);
• The Role of the Internet: How the possibilities for political participation on the Internet affect underrepresentation among the young or those of lower socioeconomic status (Chapter 6);
• Social Movements and Recruitment to Participation: How processes of political mobilization, whether rooted in protest movements or in ordinary interactions at work, in organizations, or religious institutions, affect inequalities of political voice (Chapter 7);
• Unequal Voice among Organizations: How inequalities of political voice among individuals are reinforced by the multiple forms of activity by organizations active in Washington politics (Chapters 8 and 9);
• Growth of Economic Inequality: How economic inequality has grown in the past thirty years, leaving some people with enormous resources and others with very few resources for the exercise political voice, and how public policies have contributed to those economic outcomes (Chapter 10);
• Changing Political Inequality: How inequalities of political voice have changed in an era of both increasing economic inequality and tinkering with procedural arrangements that govern politics (Chapter 11);
• Possibilities for Reform: Whether various procedural political reforms hold the potential to alleviate participatory inequalities (Chapter 12).
This book relies, in the main, on the analysis of participation by individuals and organized interests, but we place the subject in the broader context of the American political tradition and the contemporary increase in economic inequality.
Political Voice, Equal Political Voice, and Democratic Accountability
The exercise of political voice includes any activity undertaken by individuals and organizations "that has the intent or effect of influencing government action — either directly by affecting the making or implementation of public policy or indirectly by influencing the selection of people who make those policies."
Political acts vary in their capacity to convey information about what citizens want and need. The vote is a notably blunt instrument of communication. Although winning candidates often claim a "mandate," in truth they usually have only an imprecise understanding of what was on the minds of the voters who placed them in office. In contrast, the many forms of direct expression of preferences — a sign at a demonstration, an e-mail to a senator's office, a prepared statement at a meeting of the local zoning board — can communicate clear and, in some circumstances, quite specific messages. Organized interests are especially likely to communicate detailed information when they contact public officials, and this information frequently helps in the process of policy formation, although it presents a particular point of view.
Political acts also vary in the pressure they can bring to bear on policymakers to listen and respond favorably to what they are hearing. When individual or organizational activists command valued resources — for example, campaign contributions, blocs of voters, political intelligence, or access to other powerful political figures — targeted public officials usually feel less free to ignore the accompanying messages. The senator engaged in a tight campaign for reelection, the state legislator drafting a tax bill, and the mayor confronting protests over an incident of alleged police brutality all have incentives to pay attention to activist publics.
THE LEVEL AND DISTRIBUTION OF POLITICAL VOICE
Public officials, journalists, and political scientists often worry about low levels of citizen participation in politics — especially if voter turnout is not high. We sympathize with these concerns. A vigorous civic life in which citizens are active as individuals and in organizations confers many benefits. For example, for individuals, political engagement can be educational — cultivating useful organizational and communications skills and broadening their understanding of their own and others' best interests. For the political system, citizens who have ample opportunities to express their political views are more likely to accept government actions as legitimate. Those concerned with well-functioning democracy have reason to monitor the level of individual and organized activity and to be uneasy if it decreases.
Still, we are primarily concerned with equality of political voice rather than with its quantity. Equal political voice does not require that everyone takes part. We know that scientific polls can provide a representative picture of public opinion by surveying only a small fraction of the population. Similarly, equal political voice follows if there is proportionate input from those with a variety of politically relevant characteristics and circumstances: for example, economic well-being; race or ethnicity; religious commitment; sexual orientation or identity; veteran status; immigrant status; or being a Medicare recipient, a student at a public university, or an employee of a defense contractor. Analogously, equal voice is achieved if varying attitudes on issues ranging from gay rights to the minimum wage to the regulation of coal mining to trade policy are expressed proportionately by political activists.
The individuals and organizations active in American politics are anything but representative in these ways. Those who are not affluent and well educated — that is, those of low socioeconomic status (SES) — are less likely to take part politically and are even less likely to be represented by organized interests. What is more, for as long as we have had the tools to measure political involvement, there has been continuity in the kinds of individuals and organized interests represented in politics. Inequalities of political voice are deeply embedded in American politics. Although public issues and citizen concerns may come and go, the affluent and well educated are consistently overrepresented.
EQUAL VOICE — EQUAL CONSIDERATION
One of the hallmarks of democracy is that the concerns and interests of each citizen are given equal consideration in the process of making decisions that are binding on a political community. As we shall demonstrate repeatedly in the pages that follow, the disparities in political voice across various segments of society are so substantial and so persistent as to preclude the minimal democratic requirement of equal consideration by decision makers. Public officials cannot consider voices they do not hear, and it is more difficult to pay attention to voices that speak softly. If some stakeholders express themselves faintly and others say nothing at all, there is little or nothing for policymakers to consider. As Lindblom and Woodhouse comment: "If poorer, less educated minorities participate less, their judgments about what problems deserve government's attention will attain less than proportionate weight in the process of partisan mutual adjustment."
Because politics involves conflict among those with differing preferences and clashing interests, it is inevitable that politics will not leave all contenders equally satisfied with the outcomes. Yet it is not only feasible but desirable for all to be heard and for everyone's views to be considered on an equal basis.
Equal voice is not an absolute prerequisite for achieving equal consideration. Public officials have mechanisms besides participatory input from individuals and organizations for learning what is on the minds of citizens. They can, for example, consult polls or follow the media. And the influences on policy include many additional factors — ranging from an incumbent's values and ideology to partisan pressures to a desire to take a political career up a notch — other than policymakers' perceptions of what the public wants and needs. These other factors may substitute for equal voice. Still, if votes, campaign contributions, e-mails, lobbying contacts, comments on proposed agency regulations, or amicus briefs come from an unrepresentative set of individuals and organizations, equal consideration will be compromised and government policy will likely reflect the preferences and needs of the active part of the public.
MEASURING INEQUALITIES OF POLITICAL VOICE
Equal voice seems essential for democracy, but because voice can be expressed in so many ways, there is no fully satisfactory way to assess degrees of inequality across acts measured in different metrics. We can compare the political input from a small protest with only ten demonstrators to one that is a hundred times bigger. But how do we compare the weight of a protest that attracts a crowd of 1,000 to the weight of 1,000 votes or 1,000 e-mails?
To complicate matters further, political acts vary in the extent to which activists can multiply their volume. At one extreme, within limits, votes have equal weight. We are each allowed only one per election contest. But the principle of one person, one vote does not obtain for other kinds of participation. Individuals are free to write as many letters to public officials, work as many hours in campaigns, or join as many political organizations as their time and commitment allow. When it comes to the extent to which the volume of activity can be multiplied, contributions to political campaigns and causes present a special case. Although there are no legal constraints on the number of phone calls a citizen can make to public officials or the number of marches a protester can attend, the fact that there are only twenty-four hours in a day imposes an implicit ceiling. In contrast, some lingering campaign finance laws to the contrary, there is no upper limit on the number of dollars that a person with a big bank account can contribute.
Individual and Collective Political Voice
Implicit in the concept of equal political voice is equality among individuals. In the vast political science literature concerned with public opinion and political participation, the individual is the main actor in the democratic system. However, the voice of a single individual is usually fairly weak. When individuals are coordinated within organizations, they can be a more potent force. Political voice in America is often the voice of organized interests speaking loudly and clearly.
Political participation by the public and by organized interests are often studied separately from one another with different frameworks and methods. When it comes to inequalities of political voice, however, they are two faces of the same thing. We consider politically active organizations of many kinds:
• Membership associations of individuals: for example, unions like the Teamsters, professional associations like the American Medical Association, and citizen groups like the Sierra Club;
• Trade associations like the National Restaurant Association that bring together firms in an industry;
• State and local governments that have residents but not members; and
• Memberless organizations like corporations, hospitals, and even universities, which do not have members in the ordinary sense but have important sets of stakeholders.
In considering political voice through organizational activity, we ask the same questions about political organizations that we ask about individual citizens: What interests do they represent through what kinds of activity, and how equal or unequal is that representation? The results for organized interests parallel the findings for individuals and show the extent and durability of political inequality in America.
WHO IS SPEAKING WHEN AN ORGANIZATION SPEAKS?
When individuals exercise political voice, they are representing themselves, and there is no ambiguity as to who is speaking. However, questions about representation immediately arise with organizations. Individual membership associations presumably communicate the interests of their members. But whose interests? Those of the executives who run the organization? The staff that support them? The board to whom they are accountable? The rank and file membership? If so, which ones among the rank and file? The old or the young? The most privileged or the least?
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Excerpted from "Unequal and Unrepresented"
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