The Outstater
Democracy at Ground Level
APPLAUD AS WE DO the preference cascade that was the recent presidential election, a historic validation of the common sense of the common American, but at the local level, ironically, democracy still is problematic.
Any Indiana citizen can sign up for a tour of the Statehouse. These are scheduled through your district representative or senator. And, depending on time, you might be granted a few words with the legislator himself or herself, as the case may be.
But choose your words carefully because in a few minutes you will be gently but termanlly ushered to a photo area where you can be pictured with your representative — sort of like what might be set up at a wedding reception but without the sentimental value.
Treasure it nonetheless, for that will be the extent of your impact on Indiana policy. I can say that on the authority of a classic 2014 study from Cambridge University. The study, which has since been replicated and expanded, looked at 1,779 policy issues in the United States. The researchers examined how much impact the preferences of three classes of Americans had on policy change: 1) average citizens (50th income percentile); 2) affluent citizens (90th percentile); and 3) interest groups.
“Initially, the preferences of all three groups had an impact,” writes Alden Whitfield in Aporia Magazine.“However, this was due to the fact that they were highly inter-correlated. The authors therefore compared the independent effects of each group’s preferences. What did they find? Average citizens were largely irrelevant, interest groups seemed to matter a bit and affluent Americans had the vast majority of power.”
For you mathematicians, the correlation between the independent preference of those average citizens and eventual public policy was .05 — essentially nil, zip, zero.
Just as dismaying, a related study found that issues approved in election years tend to lose funding compared with others, as if the political class used them as campaign loss-leaders.
On top of all this, in Indiana the leadership of a super-majority — a political machine in effect — has extraordinary power to thwart even the most popular issue position, excluding pertinent bills from committee consideration or floor vote. And a legislator who votes against its wishes can be cut out of Party fundraising to face an overwhelming primary challenge.
Right here, allow yourself a big, long sigh.
There are blessed exceptions to the above characterization but you won’t need both hands to count them. Just know it was not so long ago that we sent representatives to Indianapolis as friends and neighbors, not hired mouthpieces. They would return on weekends to be grilled by knowledgable civic groups like the government committees of the Chamber of Commerce and the Jaycees on how they voted the previous week — intense exchanges, not staged “listening sessions” or “town halls.”
Somehow, we’ve got to get back to that if democracy is to retain any meaning — any meaning, that is, beyond an awkwardly posed portrait hanging on an office wall. — tcl
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