When my colleagues and I at the Columbia Journalism Review began the Swing States Project—critiquing and seeking to improve the quality of coverage in nine key states during the 2012 campaign—we weren’t sure quite how we would be received. Nobody likes a backseat driver, after all, and morale in many newsrooms—especially those owned by “legacy” media companies—is not necessarily high at the moment. To be sure, we ended up with our share of angry emails, tweets, and phone calls from journalists around the country who felt our critiques hadn’t quite found the right line. But we were pleased to discover that, far more often than not, reporters and editors were open to what our team of correspondents had to say—even when it was critical. They were keen to employ suggestions about how local TV station records can reveal who’s spending big money to swing election results, and eager to learn best practices for beating back political misinformation. When local reporters came across outstanding journalism, they would often share it with our writers, and of course, they appreciated it when we praised their good work. Most gratifying of all, we encountered journalists who engaged with our critique of their work—who pushed us to be better critics, and who were ready to be pushed to better serve their communities. Much has been said and written—including, fairly recently, at CJR.org—about the diminution of public-affairs coverage at the state and local level. The numbers showing a decline in reporters and in story counts are indeed grim, and, as we observed firsthand during 2012, coverage in many markets is patchy. But we also saw plenty of examples of “laurel”-worthy coverage, and an appetite for resources, tools, and know-how that will allow journalists to cover politics and policy better. As our initiative has evolved in 2013 into the United States Project, we have tried to meet that appetite. Our correspondents in the Mountain West, the Great Lakes, the Midwest, the mid-Atlantic, California, Florida, and Texas monitor coverage of federal, state, and even city issues in their regions, highlighting stellar work and identifying missed opportunities. They cover the experimentation in editorial and business-side models to support this sort of journalism in a challenging economic environment. And they are building networks of reporters with which they share resources, reporting strategies, and story ideas. Along with our regional roster, we have five “national” contributors—writers on the healthcare, tax and budget, money-in-politics, and factchecking beats, plus a roving reporter. Their subject-area expertise is a resource for our entire team, and they regularly produce primers on coverage of complicated subjects—like the rollout of the new health insurance “exchanges,” or how to tell when your congressman is skirting ethics laws to enjoy a lobbyist-sponsored junket—designed to be of use to state and local political reporters. Going forward, we expect to find new harmonies both among the regional roster and between the regional and national teams. As we look ahead to the 2014 elections and the many policy battles to be fought (and covered) before then, our goal is that the project will serve as a second layer of editorial support—providing practical guidance and constructive criticism, and exhorting journalists around the country to set ambitious standards for their work. For many years, CJR’s motto was “Strong press, strong democracy.” It’s not just the “press” anymore—but the old aphorism still applies.
Type: Blog
7 Submissions Worth Watching at Looking@Democracy
There are just a few days left to vote on the submissions for the MacArthur Foundation’s Looking@Democracy competition. $100,000 in prizes are available for short, provocative media pieces that either tell a story about why government is important to our lives or tell how we might together strengthen American democracy. Almost 400 entries have been submitted. I certainly have not viewed them all, but I did look at quite a few. I found myself drawn to the videos that explore how different types of people can come together and find common ground, as well as a few very well made videos from organizations that I respect. Here are 7 submissions that you may want to take a look at while voting is still open (until May 16):
- Reinventing Democracy Through Participatory Budgeting: A brief video that explores how participatory budgeting has empowered people in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere. Participatory Budgeting is an innovative process in which community members directly decide how to spend part of a public budget. It gives ordinary people real power over real money, letting them work with government to make the budget decisions that affect their lives.
- The Chamomile Tea Party: The Chamomile Tea Party was formed in 2010 by designer Jeff Gates to work towards a more effective dialogue about the future of America. To this end, graphic designer Jeff Gates has been remixing World War II propaganda posters with new text about the rancor so prevalent in American political and cultural discourse.
- Bring It to the Table: “Bring It to The Table” encourages Americans to stop blaming the ‘other side,’ examine their own assumptions, and take responsibility for strengthening our democracy. This project is an online platform, series of short videos, and community engagement campaign aimed at bridging political divides and breaking down partisanship. It is meant to spark a movement of citizens leading the charge for civil discourse.
- Purple Couples on Red/Blue Union: Meet five red/blue couples whose plight mirrors America’s: divided by politics, wedded to a shared future. But unlike red/blue politicians, purple couples realize they can’t wriggle out of this bind. When they square off, sparks fly. They stick by their guns (sometimes literally), but they move forward, together. The videos are a project of PurpleStates.tv.
- Living Room Conversations: A video showing how the founder of MoveOn can cometogether in conversation with the founder of the Tea Party Patiots. A project of LivingRoomConversations.
- Civic Hacking in Pursuit of Democracy: This video from the Sunlight Foundation tells the story of a nascent community of civic hackers who are building apps and tools that benefit their communities and changing the face of democracy using open government data.
Kudos to the MacArthur Foundation for attracting some interesting and compelling art about our democracy.
Campaign Finance Research and Experiments
The Democracy Fund approved two new research grants earlier this year that will help us to better understand more about how certain campaign finance reforms work in practice, as well as the potential role of technology to improve the regulation of campaign financing. A $300,000 grant to researchers from Fordham University, Columbia University, and Binghamton University will support an innovative set of field experiments that aim to shed new light on the relationship between money and our political system, as well as how well reforms like increased disclosure and the use of public funds to match small donations work. The Democracy Fund chose to support this research because we believe that the data on many critical questions about money in politics remain unclear. The unique application of field experiments offer reformers, policy makers, and the courts with definitive answers to some of these questions that lie at the heart of current legislative and judicial debates. The two-year research project is led by Professors Don Green of Columbia University, Costas Panagopoulos of Fordham University, and Jonathan Krasno of Binghamton University. Green is a leading pioneer in the application of field experiments to the realm of elections, campaigns, and our democracy. A $50,000 grant to Reinvent Albany will support research into how regulators in New York State could use technology to modernize the reporting and compliance of campaign finance contributions under a proposed small-donor matching system that is being considered in Albany. Working with a team of local technologists and experts, the Reinvent Albany team will assess the needs of candidates, regulators, and the public as it develops recommendations for how technology may be able to streamline the process, encourage greater accountability, and foster a stronger campaign finance system The Democracy Fund chose to support this research project because we believe it will offer unique insight into the bipartisan application of technology to improve how our campaign finance system operates. In the coming months, we look forward to updating you on the progress of these two exciting new grants.
Recognizing and Rejecting Patterns of Deception
During the 2012 election, FlackCheck.org flagged two different kinds of recurrent deceptions to put candidates on notice and increase public understanding of the substance of presidential campaigns. The first featured fabulations such as ‘Romney opposed abortion even in cases of rape and incest’ and “Obama ‘gutted’ the work requirement in welfare reform”— that persisted in the face of debunking by the major fact checkers. The second drew on campaign rhetoric to illustrate “patterns” – including false logic and misleading uses of language— that campaigns use to invite false inferences or propel audiences toward unjustified conclusions.
Two statements made by Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich exemplify what we mean by a pattern of deception. In late 2011, Gingrich claimed that “I balanced the budget for four straight years…” and last summer Clinton said, “I gave you four surplus budgets for the first time in more than 70 years…”
Instead of crying “false” (because their level of self-congratulation is unwarranted) or “partially true” (because each did play a role in balancing budgets), the Detecting Patterns of Deception page identifies the misleading move that Clinton and Gingrich share as “Overestimating an Individual’s Power.” Each is claiming full credit for balanced budgets when the plaudits should be shared with many others, ranging from the Congressmen who supported the deficit reduction packages of two administrations to the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy and those who created the tech boom of the 1990s. Efforts to reject misleading moves and deception have been around for a long time. Since Aristotle defined thirteen fallacies, theorists have fashioned primers to protect audiences from seductive errors in reasoning and machinations that cloud judgment. Flackcheck’s Detecting Patterns of Deception page has followed this tradition, defining and illustrating 28 deceptive patterns clustered into six categories: Overestimating Power, Misleading Language, Misleading Audio-Visual Cues, Not Telling The Whole Story, False Logic, and Hypocritical Attack. With this work, we are targeting those too young to have developed the strong partisan reflexes that produce confirmation bias. We expect that regular exposure to the Detecting Patterns of Deception page will teach even those who rationalize their own side’s excesses to spot the sorts of recurrent moves that would have made Machiavelli proud. In the ‘more difficult but doable’ category of goals, we expect that our explanations will increase our audience’s understanding of how these inference-forging moves mislead. A tougher objective aspires, over time, to translate recognition and understanding into disapproval. In the “maybe under some circumstances” box, we hope (but with longer odds) that among at least some of our audience, our process of labeling, defining, explaining, and illustrating will lead them to reject the deceptive pattern regardless of the ideology of the candidate or cause employing it. Put more technically, the Detecting Patterns of Deception pilot project assumes that IF: a) We craft clear definitions that schematize the relationships among our Patterns of Deception, b) Identify cogent exemplars from both left and right to populate those schemas, and c) Over time familiarize those who have not yet formed strong partisan attachments (i.e., high school and first year college students) with the categories embodied in the labels, the explanations of why each is problematic, and illustrations of the misleading moves from both left and right, THEN WE WILL: d) Enhance audience political acuity by increasing recognition, understanding of the misleading nature, disapproval and rejection of misleading moves in ongoing campaigns and issue debates regardless of their source and do so without activating cynicism. To see how well the categories illumine the gun control debate take a look at the rhetoric we’ve labeled “out of context”. “overgeneralization,” “ad hominem,” “slippery slope”, “red herring”, “false categorical” and “guilt by association.”
Congratulations to Face the Facts USA
One of our grantees Face the Facts USA has just wrapped up its daily facts. Check out the infographic below to get a sense for what they have accomplished so far.
In just eight months, the Face the Facts team found creative ways to educate the public about 204 facts that are at the center of political discussion. They covered everything from our nation’s debt to the state of our infrastructure and education system. Face the Facts also hosted a wide array of different types of forums to give people a chance to engage with the information more deeply, including Google Hang Outs, interactive cable television events, and one-on-one discussions. The facts were disseminated on 70 radio stations, 75 news web sites and cable channels, and in over 400 McClatchy Tribune publications. The Face the Facts team talks about what they hope they have accomplished so far on this brief video. Congratulations to everyone involved!
Our Approach to supporting an Informed Electorate
Previously in this space, Joe introduced our grantees working on making the political system more responsive and fostering bipartisan problem solving. In this post I’d like to talk about some of the initial grants we have made towards creating a more informed electorate, a number of which also support our other objectives. Government “by the people” depends on voters having the information and skills needed to govern. Media must combat misinformation, expose voters to different points of view, and inform the public debate. New technology must provide the public with better access to information and better filters for making sense of the news. Our education system must equip citizens with the skills required to decipher the messages they hear from political leaders and through the media. In order to begin to develop our approach in this area, the Democracy Fund has supported research along with a small number of other projects to create a more informed electorate. The research we have supported through the New America Foundation has focused on how the media can correct misinformation and hold political leaders accountable for what they say. Additionally, the New America Foundation research has experimented with how media can expose people to alternative points of view and increase the civility of public engagement online. Parallel to this research, we have supported the following projects:
- Blogginghead.tv’s Good Fight project, cultivates respectful dialogue across ideological divides by inviting prominent journalists and intellectuals to take part in civil dialogues and places the videos of these dialogues on the websites of partisan media outlets. The objective of the Good Fight is to break people out of ‘echo chambers’ and to model civil discourse. We have just passed the mid-way point in this grant and are learning a lot about the different ways audiences respond to such dialogues.
- CJR’s United States Project (formerly the Swing States Project) helps local reporters do a better job covering politics and policy. During the 2012 campaign, CJR placed media critics in key states across the country to encourage local media to improve their coverage of the campaigns. Now that the election is over, they have added national correspondents to the team. This work has been well received by the community of political journalists and editors across the country and the external assessment we have commissioned indicates that it has encouraged journalists to improve how they cover issues.
- Face the Facts, a collaboration between GW University and America Speaks, has sought to insert exhaustively researched and vetted facts into the national conversation through partnerships with online media outlets, radio, and television stations. This has been supported by a set of public engagement tools (quizzes and dialogue tools) to engage the audience more deeply. While the integration of public engagement practices, online technology, and broadcast television is at a relatively early stage we expect to learn a lot from this project about how to incorporate such innovations into our future work.
- Flackcheck, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, has sought to identify deceptive and misleading advertising, while supporting television stations and others to counter these deceptions. Among other things, Flackcheck has produced parody videos to raise public awareness about the types of deceptions that are taking place. It has also worked directly with local stations to encourage them to reject deceptive 3rd party ads. In parallel, Flackcheck has provided guidance to stations to support news reporting that educates viewers about deceptions within ads that are being broadcast.
- The Healthy Democracy Fund has developed an innovative reform to ensure that voters can make more informed choices about ballot measures. The Citizens Initiative Review convenes random groups of citizens to deliberate about ballot measures and share their assessments with voters via the official state voter guide. To learn more, you can read a recent blog post by Professor John Gastil that describes his evaluation of the Citizens Initiative Review.
We expect to extend the number of people and organizations with which we work to address opportunities to increase the diversity of viewpoints to which the public is exposed as well as foster more sustainable and effective journalistic institutions. Additionally, the Democracy Fund will continue to seek out new innovations in technology and media.
What We’re Reading
At the Democracy Fund, we’re constantly reading the latest research, reports, and analyses to learn about the challenges facing our democracy and what we can do about them. Over the coming months, I’ll use this space to share links to some of these publications. (If you are interested in news and updates from our grantees, please visit the News Page.)
- Participatory Budgeting in Year Two: Reinvigorating Local Democracy in NYC (Huffington Post) Melissa Mark-Viverito, NYC Council Member, 8th District, discusses the second year of Participatory Budgeting in New York City while highlighting the process and successes from Year One. Related stories: Vallejo Participatory Budgeting Video (Pepperdine University School of Public Policy, Davenport Institute for Public Engagement and Civic Leadership) – CA Forward has produced a short video on the participatory budgeting process currently underway in Vallejo, CA. The City of Vallejo is the first US city to undertake a city-wide participatory budgeting process. The Spread of Participatory Budgeting Across the Globe: Adoption, Adaptation, and Impacts (Journal of Public Deliberation, Vol. 8, Issue 2) This special issue of the Journal of Public Deliberation brings together leading scholars and practitioners of PB in order to expand our understanding about why PB programs are being adopted, how governments are adapting the rules and principles to meet different policy and political goals, and the impact of PB on civil society, state reform, and social well-being.
- 2012 American Values Survey (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press) The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has released a new report examining partisan polarization surges from 1987-2012. Overall, there has been much more stability than change across the 48 political values measures that the Pew Research Center has tracked since 1987. But the average partisan gap has nearly doubled over this 25-year period – from 10 percentage points in 1987 to 18 percentage points in the new study.
- Most Believe at Least One Political Conspiracy Theory (Political Wire) A new study from Fairleigh Dickinson University finds that 63% of registered voters buy into at least one political conspiracy theory, with 36% who think that President Obama is hiding information about his background and early life, 25% who think that the government knew about 9/11 in advance, and 19% who think the 2012 Presidential election was stolen.
- Red Brain, Blue Brain: Evaluative Processes Differ in Democrats and Republicans (PLoS ONE) A recent study of young adults suggests that liberals and conservatives have significantly different brain structure. As shown in the study, although the risk-taking behavior of Democrats (liberals) and Republicans (conservatives) did not differ, their brain activity did. Democrats showed significantly greater activity in the left insula, while Republicans showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala. In fact, a two parameter model of partisanship based on amygdala and insula activations yields a better fitting model of partisanship than a well-established model based on parental socialization of party identification long thought to be one of the core findings of political science.
- The Exaggeration of Political Polarization in America (The Monkey Cage) Andrew Gelman of the Monkey Cage responds to a new paper from Jacob Westfall, et. al. addressing the Americans’ perceptions of polarization between Democrats and Republicans. The study uses data collected in the American National Election Studies between 1970 and 2004 to examine Americans’ perceptions of polarization between Democrats and Republicans. Respondents reported their own attitudes on partisan issues, such as whether the government should increase spending and provide more services, and they estimated the attitudes of Democrats and Republicans.
- This Isn’t the Petition Response You’re Looking For (WhiteHouse.gov) Citing cost (an estimated $850,000,000,000,000,000), lack of interest blowing up planets, and a largely ignored security flaw in design, the White House has chosen not to pursue a proposal to construct a Death Star for the United States. Instead, we should focus on increasing careers in math and science, and support of exploratory programs for NASA.
- Is civics in crisis? Or just changing its shape? (Ethan Zuckerman – My Heart’s in Accra) Ethan Zuckerman responds to criticism of a spoof of “Jaywalking,” where students at Olympia High School in Olympia, Washington made a video called “Lunch Scholars,” in Jan, 2012. The video has been largely citied as an example how unprepared American youth are to compete in the global economy as well as underscoring the lack of civic knowledge in US schools.
- Journalism for Democracy (Nieman Journalism Lab) Herb Gans, on journalism, 86 years old and losing none of his insight “Because the popular news media limit themselves to covering top-down politics, they often pay little if any attention to the political processes that swirl under and around the bulwark. Only rarely do they report directly on the problems of and dangers to American democracy.”
BPC Launches Commission on Political Reform
The Bipartisan Policy Center, a Democracy Fund grantee, will launch its Commission on Political Reform on Wednesday, which will seek to understand the causes and consequences of America’s partisan political divide and recommend reforms to help Americans achieve shared national goals. Watch the webcast of the launch here (March 6 at 1 pm eastern). The commission will be co-chaired by former Senate Majority Leaders Tom Daschle (D-SD) and Trent Lott (R-MS), former Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME), former Senator, Governor and Secretary Dirk Kempthorne (R-ID), and former Representative and Secretary Dan Glickman (D-KS). The co-chairs will be joined by 25 other Americans, including volunteer and religious leaders, veterans, business executives, academics, state and local elected officials and journalists. “Democrats and Republicans are not just more divided ideologically, but less collaborative in practice than at any time in our careers. Even more troublingly, we suspect that the divide is not limited to Washington; that much of America is now riven along party lines, goaded to partisanship by increasingly shrill voices in politics, the media, and well-funded interests on both sides,” wrote Snowe and Glickman in an op-ed for USA TODAY. The commission will hold a series of “National Conversations on American Unity” starting on March 6, 2013 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library in California. Throughout the next year the commission will also host forums in other cities across the country, including: Philadelphia; Columbus, Ohio; and Boston. In 2014, the commission will present recommendations to the American people in three areas: electoral system reform, congressional procedural improvements, and promoting public service. The public can join the conversation by visiting www.bipartisanpolicy.org/CPR or following the commission on Twitter: @BPC_Bipartisan #EngageUSA. Check the website daily for new blogs and videos featuring the commissioners, information about upcoming Twitter Q&A sessions, and facts about bipartisanship. Questions and comments from the public will be incorporated into the “National Conversations on American Unity” in real time starting on March 6. Commission on Political Reform Co-Chairs: Tom Daschle, Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader (D-SD); Co-founder, BPC Dan Glickman, Former U.S. Representative (D-KS) and Secretary of Agriculture; Senior Fellow, BPC
Dirk Kempthorne, Former U.S. Senator (R-ID), Governor and Secretary of the Interior; President and CEO, American Council of Life Insurers
Trent Lott, Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader (R-MS); Senior Fellow, BPC
Olympia Snowe, Former U.S. Senator (R-ME); Senior Fellow, BPC Commission on Political Reform Members:
Hope Andrade, Former Texas Secretary of State (R)
Molly Barker, Founder, Girls on the Run
Henry Bonilla, Former U.S. Representative (R-TX); Partner, the Normandy Group
John Bridgeland, Former Director, White House Domestic Policy Council; Former Director, USA Freedom Corps; President and CEO, Civic Enterprises
John Donahoe, President and CEO, eBay Inc. Susan Eisenhower, Chairman of Leadership and Public Policy Programs, Eisenhower Institute; President, Eisenhower Group, Inc. Floyd H. Flake, Former U.S. Representative (D-NY); Pastor, Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral Mark D. Gearan, Former Director, Peace Corps; President, Hobart and William Smith Colleges Heather Gerken, J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law, Yale Law School Michael Gerson, Former Speechwriter for President George W. Bush; Columnist, The Washington Post
Charles Gonzalez, Former U.S. Representative (D-TX)
Jennifer M. Granholm, Former Governor of Michigan (D) Antonia Hernandez, President and CEO, California Community Foundation Karen Hughes, Former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs; Worldwide Vice Chair, Burson-Marsteller
Victoria Kennedy, Co-founder, Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate
Chris Marvin, Managing Director, “Got Your 6” David McIntosh, Former U.S. Representative (R-IN); Partner, Mayer Brown LLP Eric L. Motley, Ph.D.Former Special Assistant to President George W. Bush; Vice President, the Aspen Institute Deborah Pryce, Former U.S. Representative (R-OH); Principal, Ice Miller Whiteboard
Reihan Salam, Lead Writer, National Review Online’s “The Agenda”
Kurt L. Schmoke, Former Mayor of Baltimore (D); Vice President and General Counsel, Howard University Margaret Spellings, Former U.S. Secretary of Education (R); President and CEO, Margaret Spellings and Company
Diane Tomb, President and CEO, National Association of Women Business Owners
Ronald A. Williams, Former Chairman and CEO, Aetna Inc; Founder, RW-2 Enterprises, LLC
Elaine Wynn, Director, Wynn Resorts
Guest Post: The Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review
Local and statewide initiatives and referenda give citizens the opportunity to vote directly on legislation, but voters often lack the information they need to make informed choices. The State of Oregon has created a potential remedy for this situation, called the Citizens Initiative Review (CIR), which convenes a group of average citizens together to evaluate ballot measures and share their recommendations with the voting public. Healthy Democracy, the innovative organization behind the CIR, is a grantee of the Democracy Fund. My colleagues and I recently completed an evaluation of the 2012 CIR process in order to understand its quality and impact. Last fall, the CIR Commission, which was established by the Governor in 2011, convened panels of 24 randomly-selected, demographically representative Oregon citizens to spend a full week examining two different ballot measures. One initiative proposed reforming the corporate tax system and the other would have authorized the construction of private casinos in Oregon. At the end of their deliberations, each panel produced a one page CIR Citizens’ Statement that went into the official Voter’s Pamphlet that the state mailed to every registered Oregon voter. The panels’ judgments ultimately matched the election outcomes, with voters ending a corporate tax refund and declining to authorize private casinos. Among other things, our research team found that:
- A majority of Oregon voters were aware of the CIR.
- Roughly two-thirds of those who read the CIR Statements found them helpful when deciding how to vote.
- Those who read a CIR Statement learned more about the ballot measures than those who read other portions of the official Voter’s Guide.
For me, the most interesting finding is the impact of the CIR on voter knowledge. As the CIR Commission’s webpage explains, the Oregon process “is an innovative way of publicly evaluating ballot measures so voters have clear, useful, and trustworthy information at election time.” So, we wanted to find out whether the CIR actually does increase voter knowledge and voters’ confidence in the facts that they learn.
To answer that question, we chose to conduct an online survey. When contacted in the final weeks before the election, some survey respondents were shown a CIR Statement and others were shown nothing. We then asked respondents to assess whether 10 factual statements pertinent to the ballot measure were true or false. Respondents frequently expressed uncertainty and chose the “don’t know” response, but many did claim to know whether each statement “definitely” or “probably” was true or false. Those who read the CIR Statement outperformed the control group on nine of the ten knowledge items. Those who had read the CIR recommendations answered, on average, twice as many knowledge items correctly—again, with “don’t know” responses being more common that inaccurate ones. Real Oregon voters who had not yet read the Voters’ Pamphlet gained more knowledge from reading the CIR Statement than from either equivalent doses of paid pro/con arguments or the official Explanatory and Fiscal statements.
You can download the full report to learn more about our evaluation findings. Though the Oregon CIR is not a panacea for all of the weaknesses of the initiative and referendum system, our findings—along with those from our 2010 evaluation report—do support the view that everyday citizens can produce high-quality deliberation on complex policies and give their peers accurate and useful information to consider before voting. Moreover, it’s clear that by distributing those results through the official Voter’s Guide, the Oregon CIR reaches and influences large numbers of voters in Oregon. Yale democratic theorist Robert Dahl wrote in On Democracy (1998),
One of the imperative needs of democratic countries is to improve citizens’ capacities to engage intelligently in political life . . . In the years to come . . . older institutions will need to be enhanced by new means for civic education, political participation, information, and deliberation that draw creatively on the array of techniques and technologies available in the twenty-first century.
The Oregon CIR appears to be one such institution, ingeniously using citizens themselves to inform the judgments of their peers. The one hitch is that the CIR does not receive any state funds, so it remains unclear whether it will continue to thrive—or spread to other states—in future years. John Gastil (jgastil@psu.edu) is Professor and Head of the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Pennsylvania State University and the Director of the Penn State Democracy Institute. His most recent books include the co-edited volume Democracy in Motion: Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement and The Jury and Democracy, both by Oxford University Press.
A More Responsive Political System
In my last post, I introduced our grantees working to foster greater bipartisan problem solving in our political system. This time, I’d like to talk about some of the initial grants that we have made towards creating a more responsive political system – the newest program area of the Democracy Fund. At the Democracy Fund, we believe that our political system must be responsive to the priorities and needs of the American public. While organized interest groups are easily heard in the halls of Congress, the general public has fewer avenues to ensure that its priorities are reflected in the policy making process. We need to find ways to make government more accountable to the public and less accountable to political donors. In order to begin to develop our approach to this area, the Democracy Fund has supported research along with a small number of pilot projects. Examples of research that we are supporting include:
- An initiative by the Campaign Finance Institute in partnership with the Bipartisan Policy Center to work with a diverse group of scholars in order to better understand what we do and don’t know about how our campaign finance system works and the relationship between money and our democracy. This initiative will produce a research agenda that can inform the broader policy conversation on the issue.
- Another research program by the Meridian Institute is examining how a diverse group of stakeholders from across the political system think about the role of money in out political system in order to find new ways to support bipartisan dialogue and problem solving on the issue.
- Research by the Committee for Economic Development seeks to understand the attitudes and views of business about campaign financing and the US political system. This research will help us to understand whether and how business leaders might bring fresh, new perspectives to the polarized discussion about this issue.
Additionally, the Democracy Fund has supported pilot projects aimed at creating a more responsive political system. In particular, the Center for Public Integrity’s Consider the Source program is using investigative journalism to help the public understand how donors are influencing our political system. The Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Flackcheck.org has encouraged television stations to reject deceptive SuperPac ads (a program that also addresses our goal of informed participation.) In the coming months, the Democracy Fund will announce additional research that we will be supporting. We’ll also start sharing news of grants to support the strengthening of our electoral system to encourage participation. As we learn from these initial grants and develop our broader, long-term strategy in this areas, we’ll share more here on the blog.