Lessig proposes publicly-financed elections; a 7-year ban on former members serving as
lobbyists, and, in the wake of the Citizens United decision, a constitutional amendment that would give Congress the power to regulate campaign finance. These changes are needed, Lessig argues, because
The US Congress has become the
Fundraising Congress. And it answers--as Republican and Democratic
presidents alike have discovered--not to the People, and not even to the
president, but increasingly to the relatively small mix of interests
that fund the key races that determine which party will be in power.
This, unfortunately, is true. It is one reason why this organization is engaged in educating the public on new ways for more people to participate in political life. New forms of deliberative democracy, new means of funding elections through large numbers of small donor contributions, whatever it takes to restore integrity to American democracy.
In the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in the Citizens United case to invalidate certain restrictions on corporate spending in election and issue campaigns, Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres suggest in the Washington Post today that Congress can nonetheless take steps to keep politics in the hands of literal people, rather than figurative ones:
...Many suppose that the court has made it impossible for Congress to restrict corporate speech. But this is wrong. While Congress can't issue a broad ban on all companies, it can target the very large class that does business with the federal government and ban those companies from "endorsing or opposing a candidate for public office."
Over a weekend last November in Lansing, 314 Michigan residents gathered to discuss what should be done about the state's economic woes. After hearing from Governor Jennifer Granholm, they met in moderated small groups to talk, and in large forums to pose the small groups' questions to panels of experts. When the Michiganders were polled afterwards, the number willing to make some surprising choices had risen to a majority.
Following up on popular dissatisfaction with the UK political system following the parliamentary expenses scandal and in advance of possible elections this May, the UK Power2010 political reform campaign convened a national face to face Deliberative Poll of 200 people during January 9-10. The agenda came from over 4,000 online submissions that were boiled down to 58 ideas on how to improve the political system.
The 29 ideas that received 50% or more support in the Deliberative Poll are now the subject of a five-week online poll that closes on February 22. The top five ideas chosen in the online poll will be adopted as the centerpiece of Power2010's national non-partisan campaign to get parliamentary candidates to pledge their support for political reform. You can view all 29 ideas and their current standing in the online poll by clicking here. As of this writing the reform ideas in the lead are proportional voting, abolition of national ID cards, and adoption of a written constitution.
Happy new year. If you are like me, you have had your fill of news stories on the political disappointments of the decade past. It's time to look ahead to how we will govern in the teens. A number of new Deliberative Polls offer promise that people in the U.K., Argentina, Japan, Poland, Brazil and Michigan will find new ways to participate better in shaping their own futures.
Next weekend, January 9-10, Power2010 will hold a national face to face Deliberative Poll in London. The agenda comes from thousands of online submissions to their web site about how to improve the political system. A national online sample, recruited by YouGov, representative in both attititudes and demographics will meet face to face in London to choose the highest priority reforms. Those top priorities will then be used in a national non-partisan campaign to get candidates in constituencies around the country to pledge their support. The project is unique in combining online submissions with face to face deliberations by a scientific sample (with a control group). It is also unique in taking a sample from virtual space, transporting it to London and having it deliberate face to face. Results should be available next week at Power2010.
And coming later this month are the results of a Deliberative Poll in Michigan, on the economic crisis there.
Deliberative Polling is one of several forms of deliberative consultation that is gaining interest among policy makers. Click here to listen to a BBC Radio 4 program, Beyond Westminster, that discusses Deliberative Polls and local applications of participatory budgeting and citizens juries in Britain and the reactions of policy makers to actual applications.
Deliberative Polls are town hall meetings in which more than shouting is heard.
"The naked transparency movement marries the power of network technology to the radical decline in the cost of collecting, storing, and distributing data. Its aim is to liberate that data, especially government data, so as to enable the public to process it and understand it better, or at least differently....
"Without a doubt, the vast majority of these transparency projects make sense. In particular, management transparency, which is designed to make the performance... of government agencies more measurable, will radically improve how government works.
"But that is not the whole transparency story. There is a type of transparency project that should raise more questions than it has--in particular, projects that are intended to reveal potentially improper influence, or outright corruption....
"The problem...is that not all data satisfies the simple requirement that they be information that consumers can use, presented in a way they can use it. "More information," as [Harvard Professor Archon] Fung and his colleagues put it, "does not always produce markets that are more efficient." Instead, "responses to information are inseparable from their interests, desires, resources, cognitive capacities, and social contexts. Owing to these and other factors, people may ignore information, or misunderstand it, or misuse it. Whether and how new information is used to further public objectives depends upon its incorporation into complex chains of comprehension, action, and response....
"What does the fact of a contribution to a member of Congress mean? Does a contribution cause a member to take a position? Does a member’s position cause the contribution? Does the prospect of a contribution make a member more sensitive to a position? Does it secure access? Does it assure a better hearing? Do members compete for positions based upon the contributions they might expect? Do they covet committee assignments based upon the contributions that the committee will inspire? Does Congress regulate with an eye to whether its regulation might induce more contributions?
"There is little doubt that the answer to each of these questions is, in some sense and at some time--remember those qualifiers!--yes. In a series titled Speaking Freely, published by the Center for Responsive Politics, you can find testimony from many former members from both parties to support each of those assertions. Everyone inside the system knows that claims about influence are, to some degree, true. It is the nature of the system, as we all know.
"But there is also little doubt that it is impossible to know whether any particular contribution or contributions brought about a particular vote, or was inspired by a particular vote. Put differently, if there are benign as well as malign contributions, it is impossible to know for any particular contribution which of the two it is. Even if we had all the data in the world and a month of Google coders, we could not begin to sort corrupting contributions from innocent contributions."
We all know the aphorism, An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought. Lessig provoked me to find out who said it. It was an honest politician, um, by his own definition of the term.
Therein lies the problem, and the solution, with respect to our system of political campaign finance. Lessig demonstrates how difficult it is for anyone to determine this particularly political variety of honesty without being able to read the mind of the politician in question. If the politician is denied the transparent knowledge of his or her sources of political campaign finance, we have put him or her on the same footing as the rest of us.
"The genius of Repair California's approach is twofold. First, it steers clear of "social issues"....Second, the [constitutional convention] delegates would be chosen randomly from the adult population....To have faith in such a process requires a faith in the good sense and sincerity of ordinary people -- a faith that just about everybody professes. The beauty part is that no one can know what the delegates would come up with -- which is why the idea has won such broad support."
The method is otherwise known as a citizens' assembly, which lately has been tried twice, unsuccessfully, by two Canadian provinces seeking to reform their electoral processes. The key features of a citizens' assembly of this kind are that, by design, it cannot be captured by interest groups, since none of any variety receive representation, and it is truly representative of the population, since its membership is large and randomly chosen.
Would it work? The experience of Ontario and British Columbia is that voters will not rubber stamp what the convention puts before them for a vote; the groups who are perceived winners and losers will not fail to campaign strenuously to influence their fate. But Californians are accustomed to having their hands on the steering wheel of power, via the initiative process. A process that disenfranchises narrow interests in favor of those taking the broadest view may resonate. California is a state whose formerly progressive and now much-amended constitution has come to rival its freeways as a symbol of gridlock.
Our political system is struggling under the threat of WMD, by which I mean weapons of mass distraction. Killer sound bites of misinformation circulate in the blogosphere and are carried via talk radio and cable news. They are spread by intense partisans, particularly eager to disseminate through self selected events like town halls and internet quick votes.
Jim goes in even-handed fashion on to cite examples of this kind of WMD, deployed on the political left and right, to support this claim.
All of which highlights the relevance of his latest work, When the People Speak. Among other things, I'm looking forward to the book's round-up of Jim's latest work in creating Deliberative Polls, which might also be characterized as WMDs. In this instance the D stands for Democracy.
Lately, interest groups and the alienated have turned town halls on health care reform into made-for-mass-media shouting matches. Jim Fishkin writes in the New York Times about a scientific method that ensures more people are heard.
"The Congressional town-hall-style meeting, which developed as a
cost-effective way for time-pressed members to hear from constituents, also rests on an illusion: that a district of 650,000 potential voters
can be represented by the unscientifically self-selected who decide to
show up. Instead, these amorphous, unpredictable meetings have become
open invitations for interest groups and grass roots campaigns to
capture the public dialogue.
"But there is a way of organizing
town halls that would offer lawmakers representative and informed
feedback about their constituents’ major concerns: a deliberative poll.
Whereas ordinary polls represent the public’s surface impression of
sound bites and headlines, deliberative polls bring together a
scientifically selected microcosm of a lawmaker’s constituents under
conditions conducive to thinking about issues. In effect, an entire
Congressional district really can be put in one room."
Deliberative Polls are town hall meetings in which more than the shouting is heard. To learn more about Deliberative Polls, how they work, and how they have been used, use the links on this page and visit the Center for Deliberative Democracy homepage at Stanford University.
With retirement comes reflection. Stepping forward today in favor of campaign finance reform are Pamela Finmark and William Chalmers. Now that their political consulting and "donut" fundraising days now firmly behind them, they write in the Los Angeles Times that
"...the great Internet myth circulating today says...that online donors are democratizing the campaign finance system. They aren't. They are just putting a little more money into the system. The major donors are still the key to candidate survival....
"So what can we do? The best solution we have heard of is called the "patriot dollars" plan, put forth by Yale law professors Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres. Basically, it eliminates all hard contributions to candidates. Period. Instead, each voter is given a $50 ATM card so that he or she can literally vote with their dollars and contribute their $50, in part or in whole, to their choice of federal candidates. Simple enough. Let's do the math. We spend about $5 billion to $6 billion collectively on all federal elections. If the approximately 131 million who voted in November also had voted with $50 worth of patriot bucks, the donations would have equaled -- surprise -- $6.5 billion! That money would cover presidential, Senate and congressional races."
From the Pew Internet and American Life Project: [As of June 15, 2008,] "At this point in the campaign, 8% of internet users (representing 6% of all adults) have donated money to a candidate online. This is a notable increase from the 3% of internet users (representing 2% of all adults) who had donated money online the first time we asked this question in our fall 2006 survey."
Update: The Obama campaign's success came on all fronts, not just from small donors, per this debunking report from Michael Malbin of the Campaign Finance Institute.
"Although an unusually high percentage (49%) of Obama's funds came in discrete contributions of $200 or less , only 26% of his money through August 31 (and 24% of his funds through October 15, according to the most recent FEC reports) came from donors whose total contributions aggregated to $200 or less. Obama's 26% compares to 25% for George W. Bush in 2004, 20% for John Kerry in 2004, 21% for John McCain in 2008, 13% for Hillary Clinton in 2008, and 38% for Howard Dean in 2004.... The fact is that Obama's financial juggernaut broke records at all contribution levels. The reality does not match the myth, but the reality itself was impressive."
Not to be left out of the discussion is Bob Bauer, counsel to the Obama campaign and the leading election law attorney for the Democratic Party. He argues that CFI's parsing of small donor categories is skewed to favor its vision for reform. "Even if one curiously believes that every donation above $200 is a large donation, or that someone giving repeatedly in small amounts totaling more than $200 in the aggregate is a large donor, the fact remains that Obama could not have raised the funds he did without this unprecedented pool of voters donating in the aggregate less than $1,000 (the maximum allowable donation per election is $2300). And in the category of contributions of $1,000 or more—the category of donors that CFI describes as "large"—Obama’s total by CFI’s calculation was merely 33% of the whole, to be compared to McCain’s 53% or Kerry’s 44% or Bush’s 57%."
