The seasons of politics: time to get involved
I remain hopeful for a change—but resigned to having to point out to people that they should pay more attention to politics when it is actually happening and it actually has an impact on their lives.
Longtime observer of Oregon and west coast politics. Political analyst for various media outlets, professor at Pacific University.
There are seasons in politics. The most attention is paid during the quadrennial elections—nothing like a national presidential election to grab the attention of millions of Americans.
But the real politics takes place between the elections. It is the hard task of actually governing. During these months (say, twenty or twenty-two months out of every two-year election cycle), the politics is left to our representatives, and voters do not really notice what is going on.
There are exceptions. With the rise of well-organized and/or well-funded interest groups, community members can be mobilized to react to the legislative process, but even that does not grab the attention of significant members of the polity. Since the creation of public meeting laws and requirements for public comment (most dating from the early 1970s), the truth is that even when hundreds or thousands of people send in messages or show up to testify, they are just a small percentage of those who have a real stake in whatever is at stake. When I talk with groups of government officials or employees, I always warn them that the ‘voice of the public’ they hear from is actually a small minority. If they really want to know how the public feels, they have to spend some money and take a good poll.
Part of the reason for this lack of attention is a concept we use in the study of politics—salience. This is simply a measure of how important an issue is to a particular person. If I am asked my opinion on global warming, I will certainly have one. But if global warming is about number seven on my list of top-ten issues, I won’t be paying that much attention to any legislative discussions about global warming. I will however, possibly, pay attention to my top two issues (taxes, say, and the quality of K-12 schools).
The result of all this is that legislators quickly learn to recognize shallow support for or against issues. Those of you who have taken phone calls or opened up written communications in legislative offices know what this is—the identical postcards that flood the incoming mail; the identically worded messages from callers. This form of “engagement” doesn’t qualify as real attention to the issues; the folks who click a button or repeat a script are not going to sway an official, especially when entrenched stakeholders are showing up at hearings and demanding one-on-one meetings with decisionmakers.
There is a pattern that develops. Those inside politics do their jobs, express their opinions, take votes, and implement policies. These insiders listen to the paid lobbyist, dedicated activists, and serial advocates who seemingly live in committee meetings. They receive the email campaigns and calls from phone drives, but end up listening to those who have always had their ear and who are really paying attention. And then, when it is election time, a fair number of voters are surprised at what occurred while they were involved in their own lives. This is one of the realities that has contributed to a growing distrust of government (among many, many reasons).
What is to be done?
There are proposals to require civics education in high schools. In Oregon, the Classroom Law Project is pushing for such a requirement in the Oregon legislature. I like this, but so much depends on how it is taught. My own experience in southern Oregon was that the civics teacher had me teach my peers—my dad was a county commissioner, and I was somebody who paid a lot of attention to how the political system worked.
This isn’t the first time Oregonians have pushed for civics in the classroom. In the early 1970s there were proposals (by Vic Atiyeh, among others) to require classes on taxation and government spending in high schools. The tax revolt was gathering steam in Oregon, and the public clearly was supporting expensive programs (like building more jails and prisons) while demanding that taxes be cut.
And Oregon isn’t the only state that’s contemplated civic education and engagement. In the United States we have the ‘laboratories of democracy’—policies tried out among the fifty states. No state has figured out how to get people to really pay attention to the actual world of politics—when decisions get made and policies take form. And with the transfiguration of the media world, even those of us who follow these processes find it more and more difficult to keep up with what is going on in places like Salem or our own city halls and county seats.
Closing the gap between what officials hear and what the people want is complex. First steps, it seems to me, involve governments doing realistic research into what their constituents want and how they want that delivered. If this takes a regular budget item to pay for consistent polling or interest groups or whatever, it needs to happen.
But the key to it all is the public wanting to engage, wanting to pay attention, wanting to play a role aside from casting a ballot every couple of years. In the past, Oregon and the United States had very low voter engagement levels, then they got higher and higher. We are now in a 60+-year slow decline. Will it take some kind of crisis to drive people to pay attention? Oregon’s turnout in World War II was actually pretty low (a drop of 12.9% in 1942 voter registration; but then a gain of 12.6% for 1944), but it grew as the post-war boom took hold and people saw what government needed to do—build all those schools, pave all those roads, begin to manage population growth, and, in a wonderfully Oregon sort of way, allow everybody to go to the beach for free.
I remain hopeful for a change—but resigned to having to point out to people that they really should pay more attention to politics when it is actually happening and it actually has an impact on their lives. Politics may have seasons, but engagement should be year-round and lifelong.
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