With just weeks until the American public chooses our next president, it is troubling to see headlines filled with dubious suggestions that our elections might be “hacked” or “rigged” when the likelihood remains so remarkably small. Even more disturbing is the possibility that these kinds of stories could undermine the election results if things don’t work out after election day.
The wonder of American democracy is that we resolve our conflicts with votes and laws, not tanks and guns. This tradition is possible only because we treat the other party as opponents, not enemies, and we respect the integrity of our democratic institutions.
If the margin is very close, we rely on our election system and our judicial system to use predetermined rules to bring the election to a settlement. The alternative to relying on elections and rule of law is unthinkable and should be rejected in the strongest possible terms. When the votes have been cast and ballots counted, we expect that losing candidates will make a phone call to congratulate the winner and then publicly acknowledge the will of the electorate.
Refusing to accept election results wholeheartedly and without reservation is not just wrong, it is un-American. Gracefully accepting defeat is one of the truly powerful moments in our nation’s political life. Both of the major party candidates should commit to doing so this year.
Before it’s too late, we must call on political, media, and civic leaders to make clear that this is not a game. When candidates lose elections, we expect that they will accept defeat and call for the American people to come together as a nation. Period.
For all of their enormous clout globally, Washington and the San Francisco Bay Area can be pretty insular places. It’s a dynamic that’s reinforced by the know-it-all attitude of the dominant professional class of each. Washingtonians working in governmental circles think nobody understands politics like they do, while Bay Area tech professionals claim to be transforming humanity through lines of code.
I recently had the opportunity to travel to the Bay Area in an effort organized by the Lincoln Initiative to bring these two dynamic but distant communities closer together. They actually have much more in common than it seems: Plenty of Bay Area technologists are deeply passionate about government and politics, while D.C. supports a vibrant and growing civic tech scene. But the bicoastal bubbles still have a lot to learn from one another.
The Lincoln Initiative invited me and other D.C.-types on a tour of several Bay Area civic and political tech firms, including Crowdpac and Brigade. The leaders of these start-ups demonstrated a deep commitment for improving American politics by making public participation easier and more satisfying. They have developed sophisticated new online tools designed to draw more people into the political system and make it easier to find and organize like-minded fellow citizens. The scale of their ambition to help Americans re-engage with the democratic system is inspiring.
I was struck along my tour by how the tools these firms were developing focused on a single critical problem within the current political system, whether it be the dominance of mega-donors in campaign finance or the difficulty of building networks of like-minded voters. In the context of the Silicon Valley bubble’s fondness for elevator pitches of business plans, this makes sense (Brigade’s Matt Mahan, for example, described Brigade as the “LinkedIn for politics.”)
But few in Washington would take the approach that the difficulties of effective governance at the federal level can be solved by a killer app. Our system of government is shaped by countless competing priorities and power dynamics. Simply adding more of something to (or taking it out from) the system is unlikely to generate much change in a modern democracy.
Democracy Fund’s Governance Program, for example, learned in the process of constructing our systems map that problems of campaign finance and civic engagement combine with other factors to affect the performance of the federal system in complex ways. As some D.C.-based civic tech firms and nonprofits believe, there may be greater leverage in improving the responsiveness of federal politics by focusing first on solutions that can strengthen government institutions. Without doing so, devising new online tools to amplify the public’s voice simply adds more noise to an already cacophonous system.
Congress can be a peculiar and frustrating place. The perspective of Washington insiders can help Silicon Valley create tools that align with how the institution really works and how members and staff do their jobs. With this awareness, the enormous technical talent present in the Bay Area can better be brought to bear on the challenges facing our democracy.
The work of bridging the bicoastal bubbles on civic tech by groups like the Lincoln Initiative is a great first step in this effort. Hopefully in the near future, techies can leave their own bubbles and head east.
“Want to attract more readers? Try listening to them.” That’s the headline on Liz Spayd’s debut as the New York Times’ new public editor. That she devoted her first column to the need to pay attention to readers’ views shows how central the idea of engagement has become for journalists.
She is building on an emerging trend. Mediashift recently published a series of articles called “Redefining Engagement,” inspired by a conference in Portland last October. (They provide a rich trove for anyone seeking to understand the movement.)
A Reuters Institute report looked at engagement and the 2015 UK elections. The Coral Project creates tools for engagement. An Engagement Summit in Macon, Georgia, in January that I attended produced this manifesto. And more and more newsrooms are naming engagement editors, as Elia Powers describes.
The Democracy Fund sees public engagement as a key element of its work to support vibrant media and the public square. And among the questions it has considered as it thinks about today’s engaged journalism is this: How is it different from civic journalism?
Many will remember—some with a touch of heat—the 1990’s movement known as civic (or public) journalism, which called for a rethinking of newsrooms’ relationships with their communities. Is today’s engaged journalism a new chapter of that movement? As someone who edited a newspaper during those earlier years, and who is now working as a senior fellow and consultant with the Democracy Fund, I’d say the short answer is yes – but: Engaged journalism is a much-evolved descendant, born into a radically changed landscape.
Civic journalism’s proponents felt that journalism was failing our democracy in important ways. Detachment from community was part of the reason. A working relationship with the community to help shape local journalism was key to the solution.
Wikipedia has a richly helpful entry on what it calls this “idea of integrating journalism into the democratic process.” It continues, “The media not only informs the public, but it also works towards engaging citizens and creating public debate.” The movement’s intellectual founding father, Jay Rosen, wrote that “public journalism tries to place the journalist within the political community as a responsible member with a full stake in public life.” The now dormant Pew Center for Civic Journalism said the practice “is both a philosophy and a set of values supported by some evolving techniques to reflect both of those in journalism. At its heart is a belief that journalism has an obligation to public life – an obligation that goes beyond just telling the news or unloading lots of facts. The way we do our journalism affects the way public life goes.”
One of the most important truths about civic journalism is that it came into being at a time when newsrooms were confident (many would say arrogant) in their top-down role as society’s primary sources of news. Moreover, their organizations were enjoying robust economic success. There was little thirst for prescriptions for improvement, however well intentioned.
More specifically, the movement’s opponents resisted it as a threat to journalism’s essential ethic of independence, and as a challenge to its time-honored allegiance to objectivity. (Not to mention the plain old comfort of operating by familiar patterns and enjoying a sense that it was newsrooms, not the critics, who understood what the public needed.) For whatever mix of reasons, by 1997, a survey of Associated Press Managing Editors found that only 7 percent of respondents strongly agreed that civic journalism was “an important way for many news organizations to reconnect with their alienated communities.”
And yet, there is this interesting truth: Within the two decades between then and now, the most basic principle of civic journalism has come into widespread usage. Virtually every newsroom has a richer conversation with its readers, viewers, listeners (or, in Rosen’s memorable phrasing, “the people formerly known as the audience”). In this way, civic journalism prevailed after all.
What changed over those two decades? Almost everything in the journalism world. Advertising became disconnected from news, leaving news organizations bereft of their principal means of support. Technology fractured journalism’s audiences. It also radically redefined roles, opening remarkable opportunities for the public as providers and creators of information. Trust in media continued to plummet. News organizations that once seemed to print money began to pile up debt. Newsrooms that had been averse to change began desperately looking for answers.
What did not change is concern about the health of our democracy. That concern, if anything, has deepened since the ‘90s, when it served as a primary motivation for civic journalism.
And so to 2016’s buzzword, “engagement.” What questions (or answers) does the experience of civic journalism offer its young relative? It would be a mistake to be too definitive about this. Engaged journalism is very much a concept in formation. Still, some fruitful points for examination present themselves:
Civic journalism was, by design, loosely defined. (Rosen himself called it everything from an argument to a debate, an adventure to an experiment.) It was a continual work in progress, repeatedly being invented in different ways by different partners. However intentional, the vagueness did at least lend a hand to those who chose to dismiss it.
It’s probably important for engaged journalism, too, to keep its parameters flexible enough to allow for different methods of practice among varied practitioners in diverse communities. Still, some clarity as to its primary goals and baseline practices seems essential in order to spread its message, create a vibrant cohort of practitioners, and gauge its impact.
If stubbornness and blitheness were a part of journalists’ resistance to civic journalism, so was the substantial question of how to be responsive while retaining independence. With a clear-eyed understanding of this valid concern, engagement enthusiasts will be better prepared to help newsrooms find ways to ensure that community-mindedness can coexist with, for example, investigative zeal. This fine Mediashift piece is a good place to start.
Civic journalism was presented to journalists largely as a recommendation for change in their behavior in relation to the community. Newsrooms today are far from the dominant force they were, and the position of the public has changed dramatically. The former “audience” has in its own hands the tools to shape the flow of information in the public interest. This new public role—along with new technologies and transparency and social-media tools, as well as growing interest from community partners such as libraries – means that engagement now holds the promise of something much broader than a change in newsroom practices.
Civic journalism asserted that journalism thrives only if community thrives – an implicit promise regarding the future health of journalism, yes, but not specifically about its business model. Today, engagement is offered by some proponents as precisely a business model. Indeed, in some applications it seems indistinguishable from audience development; a matter simply of building a user base. How well engagement can serve both goals remains to be seen. (While Philadelphia’s news outlet Billy Penn is not yet profitable, its engagement practices seem promising in that regard. In 2015, events accounted for about 80 percent of revenue.)
Civic journalism was no doubt weakened by the fact that newsrooms largely failed to reflect the demographics of their communities. This remains woefully true today, and engagement efforts that ignore this will surely be undermined. The proliferation of new startups and the ability of previously under-attended voices to be heard in social media offer promise.
Civic journalism bemoaned journalism’s “view from nowhere,” to use another of Rosen’s apt terms. Now, partly because of a growing emphasis on consumers’ appreciation of “voice,” partly because of critiques about false equivalency and about journalists’ failure to share all they know, journalists have gotten better at not being that voice from nowhere. It is clearer now that they are not disinterested observers. On its face, this offers promise for connection. But if journalists have gotten better at claiming their own voice, their talent and taste for listening to public voices seems less thoroughly developed. Taking advantage of the new tools of engagement will be essential.
Civic journalism was a reconsideration of journalism’s practice: Don’t stand off and deliver; ask the community to help shape your work. Engaged journalism, too, reconsiders journalism’s practice but, at its best, considers the new potential for not just journalists, but all citizens to collaborate in bringing about a more informed public. Journalists no longer have a lock on information. Members of the public are now their partners. As a consequence, greater attention is paid to the impact of journalism, to what about it attracts readers or drives them away, to how it affects people’s actions. Businesses, nonprofits and politicians can reach the public directly. Transparency is increasing, and accountability along with it. This could be a promising moment for a melding of legacy journalism’s best strengths, civic journalism’s commitment to community and the new culture of participation.
At this time of year, Americans remember what it means to be a free country, turning our thoughts to the approximately 2.1 million men and women in military uniform who serve to guarantee that freedom. This year is also an election year; many important races and initiatives will be decided on both primary and general election ballots.
June 27-July 5 is Armed Forces Voting Week, an observance that highlights—but in no way limits—the time to draw attention to voting for this group. We help honor our servicemembers when we work steadily to ensure they have timely information presenting clear steps to share in the freedom to vote—no matter where they are.
For this reason, Democracy Fund is proud to announce a new grant to the Military Officers Association of America Military Family Initiative (MMFI) for its Military Voter Education Project, a one-year, non-partisan voter education effort. The goal of the project is simple: Focus attention on valuable resources and information for military voters and their families.
Absentee voters must find and retain voting information months before Election Day—and it is unfortunately easy for voters to miss critical deadlines or directions; this is especially true for members of the military who are serving away from home. Distance affects the type of information they come across and pay attention to. Election administrators and voting advocates must rely on the most recent findings and data on how best to reach military voters with essential information about requesting, receiving, and returning their ballots in time for counting.
The study “Effects of Spouses on Voting in the Active Duty Military Population,” released in 2015 by the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) points to the unique link between marriage and the likelihood that a servicemember will cast a ballot. FVAP is the Department of Defense agency responsible for assisting military and overseas voters. The piece reveals that, in part, “being married lowers the opportunity costs associated with gathering election information. Once one married partner learns about some aspect of the election, sharing those voting resources and information is costless.” This led FVAP to conclude, “If spouses can provide information about … voting assistance resources, a marketing campaign directly targeting spouses of military members could potentially have a positive effect.”
That’s where MMFI can have a specific impact. MMFI holds that “nothing is more important to [our] national defense than the welfare of our military families” and has dialed into the needs of this particular group. The trust MOAA garners in this community, as the largest association of military officers, means it is in a unique position to disseminate information so that it is likely to be seen and retained by many groups, including spouses. MOAA also will work with additional partners to reach the enlisted community with the same level of energy and attention, because there is no division in our armed forces—they are all united in the same mission.
Over the next year, we look forward to seeing military voters and their families connect with distinct marketing aimed at equipping them with voter information. We hope we will see more citizens choose to participate in the election process because they feel empowered to do so.
This week we are excited to announce the newest addition to the Democracy Fund team – Srik Gopal, Vice President of Strategy, Learning, and Impact. In this new role, Srik will help lead the Democracy Fund’s systematic approach to making democracy work better. His extensive background and leadership in strategy and evaluation make him the perfect addition to our team.
Before joining us, Srik was Managing Director at social impact consulting firm FSG and co-led the firm’s Strategic Learning and Evaluation practice. At FSG, Srik worked with a variety of clients including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Omidyar Network, the National Academies, the Grand Rapids Community Foundation, and the city of San Francisco. He has specific expertise implementing strategy, learning, and evaluation from a systems and complexity orientation.
Prior to FSG, Srik spent a decade in leadership roles in the social sector, primarily in education. As Chief Impact and Learning Officer at New Teacher Center, a national education nonprofit, Srik worked to set up frameworks for impact measurement as well as systems and processes for data-driven learning and improvement. He previously worked on supporting whole systems change in education in his role as Director of Evaluation for the Ball Foundation.
Srik’s articles have been featured in Foundation Review and Organizational Development Practitioner, and he has blogged for sites including Stanford Social Innovation Review, The Guardian, Forbes India, and Markets for Good. He holds an MBA from the University of Michigan Ross Business School and a Certification in Advanced Evaluation Study from Claremont Graduate University. Srik has an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology.
Our team is looking forward to working with Srik on expanding our strategy and achieving positive impact for our American democracy. Welcome aboard, Srik!
After five years of grantmaking and on our second anniversary as an independent foundation, the Democracy Fund has a fresh look and updated program names. We hope these exciting changes offer a clearer and more energetic window into who we are becoming and into our efforts to ensure the American people come first in our democracy.
At the Democracy Fund, we know we are one actor in a field of passionate and committed advocates, experts, peer funders, and elected officials who care about making our democracy work better. We believe that the issues we work on are part of complex systems in which efforts to create change will have ripple effects, some intended and some unexpected. Progress must be made through multi-pronged strategies that reinforce one another and are sustained over time. Like our founder, eBay founder and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar, we hold a deep respect for the values enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Our republic has endured through periods of great stress in the past and we are confident that, with the dedication of committed Americans, our democracy will continue to rise to the occasion, solving the country’s most pressing challenges.
These beliefs, combined with our commitment to building bridges across partisan divides, are represented in our new logo’s forward-moving and alternating red, blue, and gray waves.
To date, we have committed more than $30 million in support of a healthy democracy. Our grantee partners range from the Bipartisan Policy Center and Pew Charitable Trusts to the Congressional Management Foundation, Cato, and Common Cause. We are humbled by the impactful and innovative work of our partners in each of our three core programs. We remain deeply committed to improving Congress, election administration, and local journalism, and today, we’re excited to share the new program names, which more transparently reflect the democratic values we strive promote:
Governance and Bipartisan Problem Solving is now Principled Leadership and Effective Governance. Led by Betsy Wright Hawkings, the Governance Program will continue to support approaches that help our elected leaders deliberate, negotiate, and serve the American people.
Responsive Politics is now Modern Elections and the Role of Money in Politics. Led by Adam Ambrogi, the Elections Program is working to advance bipartisan solutions that ensure the views and votes of the public come first in our democracy.
Informed Participation is now Vibrant Media and the Public Square. Led by Tom Glaisyer, the Public Square Program continues to support innovations and institutions that help people understand and participate in the democratic process.
We hope our new look and language reflect the Democracy Fund you have come to know, and we hope it makes our work as a foundation even more transparent over time.
The Elections Program at Democracy Fund proudly welcomes the Center for Civic Design as its newest grantee.
By virtue of its ultimate goal – “ensuring voter intent through design” – the Center for Civic Design seeks to improve the voter experience by designing election materials that are understandable to an electorate with diverse educational, personal, and cultural backgrounds and learning styles. Its expert leaders, Whitney Quesenbery and Dana Chisnell, not only improve voting through usability testing and applied design research but also develop tools and best practices for use by local election officials.
You might, however, be asking yourself, “why is the design of election materials important?” The most obvious answer can be summarized in two words: butterfly ballot. Okay, how about “Florida 2000?” “Bush v. Gore?” (Does the “v” count as a third word?)
When a voter accidentally skips or misreads a piece of important information, that oversight can quickly lead to a missed opportunity to cast a vote or have that vote count. Even with the growing trend toward digitizing some aspects of election administration (notably, the move to online voter registration and the adoption of e-poll books), let’s face it: most election processes still use paper forms that have a lot of required information packed into them. The likelihood of a voter skipping essential data fields is very high when presented on a paper form – especially when instructions look like a hodgepodge of technocratic mumbo-jumbo squished into irregularly-shaped boxes all seemingly sewn together WITH LONG STRINGS OF INSTRUCTIONS WRITTEN IN ALL CAPS.
I think you get the idea. When I was a poll worker trainer in California, a supervisor of mine once described the election process as “a big paperwork party.” Her point was two-fold:
1) On the administrative side, local election officials are required to distribute and process thousands of paper forms to and from voters (and poll workers – but that’s a story for another day). Every piece of paper received from voters helps officials determine important details like who’s eligible to receive which ballot, how many voters could show up to vote per precinct, or how many resources need to be allocated to polling places.
Here’s an example of information that must be communicated to voters from election officials in Minnesota. The Center for Civic Design and a team of volunteer experts around the country worked with the Secretary of State’s office to refresh its absentee balloting instructions after the 2008 election. As you can see, the difference is remarkable.
Minnesota Voting Instructions: BEFORE
Minnesota Voting Instructions: AFTER
2) From the point of view of citizens, most will receive and cast paper ballots. Those ballots can have several contests on them and come with a lot of instructions that voters need to see and understand in order to properly cast their ballot. Voters also encounter important materials like voter registration applications, envelopes containing official election materials, and voter information pamphlets.
One type of form that voters in most states must complete is the voter registration application. As you can see from the example below, the Center for Civic Design, working closely with collaborator OxideDesign Co., redesigned Pennsylvania’s voter registration form. Pennsylvania recently implemented online voter registration, but many of its voters still rely on the paper form to register. The paper form is designed to coordinate with the online form, letting voters choose the way of registering that works best for them. Which do you think is easier to read?
Pennsylvania Voter Registration: BEFORE
Pennsylvania Voter Registration: AFTER
The Center for Civic Design works with election officials, government and nonprofit organizations, and the public to achieve its ultimate goal of accurately capturing voter intent. Its leaders’ painstaking research and collaborative projects to improve the voter experience make the Center for Civic Design a fantastic addition to our portfolio. Welcome to the Democracy Fund team!
As we near the Democracy Fund’s two-year Independence anniversary, we are delighted to welcome new staff members to our team. With each new team member, we celebrate the opportunity to enfold new experience, diversity, and perspective to our efforts to ensure the American people come first in our political system. We are pleased to introduce the following new members of our team:
Josh Stearnswill be joining the Democracy Fund as Associate Director for the Informed Participation later this month. He currently serves as the Director of Journalism and Sustainability at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, where he currently leads the Local News Lab. Josh previously led national advocacy campaigns in support of freedom of expression and media diversity; most recently he served as the Press Freedom Director at Free Press, a national nonprofit fighting for all people’s rights to connect and communicate. As an award-winning journalist, Josh has published numerous reports on local news, public media, and media policy. He is a founding board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and served on the board of the Student Conservation Association. Josh has a B.A. in Writing from St. Lawrence University and a M.A. in American Studies from UMass Amherst.
Freddie Salas recently joined us as a Program Assistant with the Responsive Politics team. He most recently served as an AmeriCorps VISTA at the Fredericksburg Regional Continuum of Care where he worked to improve the organization’s services for the homeless and homeless veteran populations. Before joining AmeriCorps, Freddie volunteered with the Greater Fredericksburg Habitat for Humanity. He graduated from Virginia Tech with a B.A. in Political Science and a minor in Urban Affairs and Planning.
Emma Thomson joined our team as the Digital Communications Assistant in May. Before coming on board, she served as a Press Assistant for Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. Emma’s internship experience spans her range of interests, with previous positions in politics, public relations, and digital media. She graduated magna cum laude from The George Washington University with a B.A. in Political Communication.
Please join us in welcoming these new faces. The Democracy Fund is in the process of recruiting and hiring for several positions, and we will keep you updated as we continue to grow.
Democracy Fund’s President, Joe Goldman, recently wrote on our blog about some of the benefits and difficulties our organization has found while integrating a systems lens into our work. He noted how systems thinking, designed to help us grapple with complexity, can at times be awfully complex itself. As a member of the Impact and Learning team, I’ve been helping Democracy Fund make sense of what it means to be systems thinkers, and Joe’s words rang particularly true for me.
Working with the incredible systems and complexity coaches at The Omidyar Group, the Impact and Learning team has been supporting program staff in developing their systems maps, and shepherding their systems-based strategic planning processes. We’ve been alongside the teams grappling with what’s been hard—but we’ve also had a front-row seat to see the wins. Like our evaluator, I’ve seen our teams’ pride in their work, and try everyday to help the teams further recognize how much we’ve learned and how our systems skills have developed.
I had a strong moment of recognition of this progress recently when Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) released their Guide to Systems Grantmaking. This resource is designed to provide grantmakers and nonprofits a toolkit of essential systems assessment tools, frameworks, and best practices—and it is yet another piece of evidence of the growing community of philanthropies taking an interest in systems thinking. As it does on other topics, GEO can continue to be a convener for this group, collect our stories, and help us share our lessons learned.
GEO’s Systems Grantmaking Resource Guide suggests, just as we’ve found, that it takes time to understand and internalize a systems mindset. At first glance, I was overwhelmed by the wide variety of tools and practices it recommended. I learned of several new approaches I’m eager to play with in our work, augmenting the causal loop systems mapping we’ve started with. But, after I dug a little deeper, what struck me more was the complementarity and interconnection of these tools. I realized that we’ve already been engaging in many more systems practices than I’d been aware. SAT analysis, leverage points, and systemic action research are already part of our approach, flowing naturally from one another as we mapped systems. Even aspects of our grantmaking approach I had considered distinct from our systems work—our interest in scenario planning, for example—are logically tied to the systems thinking frame.
When introducing new staff to Democracy Fund’s systems practice, I describe it as fundamentally a sense-making process. While systems mapping is a great tool for new learning—particularly when designed, as our process has been, to be deeply participatory—it has also been powerful in helping to bring into sharper focus what we already knew and to align assumptions across our organization and with key partners. GEO’s Guide to Systems Grantmaking, it turns out, served the same purpose for me. It brought to life what has been hard to see in the sometimes tedious day-to-day of map-building: just how strong our systems muscles are becoming.
We’ve got a lot yet to learn to get to “expert” level on GEO’s self assessment, and I know the challenges our evaluator observed will continue into the future. But, armed with new tools and deeper connections to others in the field, I’m all the more confident we’ll get there.
In my years of service on Capitol Hill, I saw first hand that Congress is full of good people driven to make our world a better place. Yet for far too many Americans, Congress is not fulfilling its responsibilities as a representative body. Why? And can it be helped?
The Democracy Fund’s Governance Initiative spent much of the past year seeking to understand how Congress could better respond to the needs and demands of citizens. To explore how we might better understand the systems that drive Congress, we began with the framing question, “How is Congress fulfilling or failing to fulfill its obligations to the American people?”
It didn’t take long to conclude that the institution is failing to do so.
Using the work of our funding partner, the Madison Initiative of the Hewlett Foundation, as a base, we pursued the broad and substantive question of what dynamics are the most significant in contributing to this dysfunction. Through that understanding, we can start to piece together what can be done to address them.
To that end, we’ve published the first public iteration of our systems map, Congress and Public Trust. We have been gathering feedback from a wide-range of stakeholders, and welcome additional thinking and ideas.
Mapping Congress and Public Trust
Last Spring, we convened a group of experts on Congress—scholars, former members of Congress and staff, and active supporters of the institution—who helped us explore the key narratives that drive the system. A ‘core story’ quickly emerged.
With expanded access to and use of the Internet by the public, communications to Congress have dramatically accelerated. The money infusing politics intensifies the pressures on an institution ill-prepared to process, let alone interpret and meet them, further weakening congressional capacity and reducing satisfaction of both among members and the public at large. This has contributed to trust in the institution falling to an all-time low.
With growth in dissatisfaction, some citizens “double down” to increase pressure on leaders, but the public is increasingly “opting out” and disengaging from the system—leaving only the loudest, shrillest, and most polarizing voices to feed the hyper-partisanship characterizing our current politics. Congress, conceived in Article One of our Constitution as the leading branch of our federal government, is becoming irrelevant to an increasing number of Americans.
Our Congress and Public Trust map describes the factors that are intensifying this process, inside and outside the institution. A long stretch of voter dissatisfaction and important demographic shifts within the two-party system have led to increasing intensity of competition for majorities in Congress. This historic level of competition has led the parties to stake out more stark ideological differences, driving their partisan constituencies further apart philosophically. As the parties and their constituents have fewer ideas in common, hyper-partisan behavior within the electorate and among those elected to Congress increases, winnowing the possibility for compromise and dragging down congressional function.
At the same time, the institution’s ability to formulate thoughtful, cooperative policy solutions has diminished. Some members (and many challengers) have responded to decreased public satisfaction by running against Washington, demonizing the institution, and reducing the institution’s resources to the breaking point. Loss of institutional expertise exacerbated by increased staff turnover has weakened policy-making capacity and increased the influence of outside experts, some of whom also proffer campaign donations. In fact, money flows throughout our systems map, depicted by factors with green halos. Further research through creation of another systems map focused on money and politics is forthcoming and will be aimed at deepening our understanding of this phenomenon.
Where do we go from here?
OK, you say. We know Congress isn’t working well; public dissatisfaction is at an all-time high and politics is as nasty as it has ever been. This map basically depicts a death spiral. What do we do about it?
A systems map helps identify leverage opportunities—places where smaller levels of effort lead to disproportionate impact. And leverage opportunities inform strategy. As we work to identify leverage opportunities and develop strategy, several themes are emerging.
First, despite this story of profound dysfunction, there are bright spots within the system. Many members of Congress and their staffs still possess what we call “servant’s hearts,” meaning they are driven by a call to public service. We know staff and members want to be effective, despite being stuck in a cycle of diminished resources. We also see a bright spot in the ability of outside partners to help Congress become more efficient and effective—to “work smarter.” As a result, we are thinking about how we can best support and empower servants’ hearts across the institution by more effectively enabling substantive work and deliberation.
Second, we believe that the institution’s failure to respond to increasing communication is driving public dissatisfaction and disengagement. We cannot simply invite greater public engagement without making sure Congress has strengthened its ability to respond. Without these investments first, we risk further alienating those we are trying to re-engage.
We have to ask, therefore, how we can help Congress develop more efficient tools to listen to the public, process the overwhelming amount of information, and invite more interaction from constituent groups, all while better managing the volume of communications from advocacy groups.
Third, once Congress’s capacity to listen and respond to the public is increased, can we help members and staff build a more functional culture that responds less reflexively to fear, elevating the leadership strength of members and staff? Members currently have too little incentive to act beyond partisan teamsmanship. Are there interventions we can make to help alleviate some of the political pressure members feel and encourage them to better withstand hyper-partisan heat? Can we help them find courage to cooperate across the aisle and strengthen bipartisan relationships that offer a foundation for institutional progress?
Finally, the cost of running for office has risen exponentially, driven by pressures from the political system we call the “Political-Industrial Complex.” Our map clearly illustrates how the need to raise campaign funds ripples across the congressional system. Reducing the amount of time spent by members fundraising would free them to focus more on legislation and remove some partisan invective from their messaging. We also see a potential bright spot using emerging campaign techniques that rely on cheaper media, and are considering exploring whether, if accelerated, they could disrupt the dominance of the political-industrial complex by reducing money on the demand side of its predominant business model.
We are knee deep in strategy development work and have some distance to go. We expect that as we continue to learn our analysis will evolve. In fact, learning and evolution is the essence of understanding the system, because by definition, it is always changing. It is our hope that by collaborating with partners across the field, existing grantees, and most importantly, with Congress itself, the Democracy Fund can play a constructive role in helping strengthen the institution and our democracy as a whole.
You can explore the map and its elements here. As you do, we hope you will tell us how to better describe and illuminate the dynamics of the Congress and Public Trustsystem. Please email us at congressmap@democracyfund.org to share your feedback or related resources.
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