CitizenSovereignty.org

How to Revive Campaign Finance Reform

Mark Schmitt writes at DemocracyJournal.org about how campaign finance reform has run into the ditch, and about how it can heaved out, by the many, many hands of a small donor democracy.  Mark's historical analysis of the reform movement is really interesting; more important, his six prescriptions are on the mark. 

Encourage the healthier developments in politics, don't fight them:  The reformers' recent battle over whether and how to extend the campaign finance laws to Internet-based political activity was harmful to the cause.  On balance, the demonstrated growth of small donor democracy over the Internet, and its potential, outweighs the demonstrated and potential harm of circumvention of campaign finance restrictions through Internet-based political advertising.

Political organization is good:  The reformers' drive since 2004 against the so-called 527 organizations likewise alienated erstwhile allies, this time in the nonprofit sector.  In a nation of "joiners", fighting against the right of political association is not a winning strategy.

Don't overtax the "corruption" rationale:  The criminalization of politics is a vicious cycle that serves democracy ill.  More important to fighting corruption, and more uplifting to our politics, is to find ways to fund more challengers.  Unopposed elections engender more venality than any deficiency of ethics and election law.

Accept that there is a place for private money in politics:  This is one of the important -- and few -- ways in which political involvement can extend beyond the vote for most people. High-matching public funding systems multiply the value of a matching contribution, helping to offset the unequal distribution of wealth.

Don't dismiss the libertarian arguments:  It's not enough to say "money isn't speech."  Find a way to generate more speech, not less.  Libertarians, by the way, are wrong to say disclosure alone is enough -- time, attention and the resources to sort through disclosed information are scarce.  Most people don't know who is their Congressman, much less her backers.

Expand, don't restrict:  The industry that is political campaigning is one of our smaller ones.  How much money is enough to spend on selecting our leaders?  If your goal is better government, it makes no sense to rule out the possibility that we should be spending more.

Jan 07 News

Farhad Manjoo writes in Salon this week about “…the best campaign finance proposal you’ve never heard of.”

In Omagh, Northern Ireland on January 27, the first Deliberative Poll in a deeply divided society found common ground for non-sectarian improvement of schools. “Hearts and Minds” is a twenty-five minute BBC report on the DP and education there, in streaming video.

A Deliberative Poll in Rome on January 8 clarified budget priorities for the region.

National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation

Can California use deliberative democracy to overcome political polarization and address its challenges?  A conference organized by Common Sense California this February will look for the answer.  More details are at the blog of the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation.

Shareholder Rights - Through Deliberative Polling

Click on the link to listen to Ian Ayres on NPR's Marketplace about how shareholder rights can be advanced by Deliberative Polls.

Patriot Dollars & Poverty

From the New York Daily News today:

Next month, the Mayor's Commission on Economic Opportunity will release a strategy to reduce poverty in New York City. This is the first in an occasional series of outside-the-box recommendations to the group.

One of the best ways to fight poverty is to give politicians a direct monetary incentive to pay attention to the interests of ordinary New Yorkers.... 

Greek Revival

The Financial Times today profiles Jim Fishkin and a Greek revival: of deliberative democracy.

Fishkin, a political scientist at Stanford University in California and the University of Texas, is a man seized with a big idea, which he believes is large enough to be of global importance. He thinks that this idea - which goes by the name of deliberative democracy - addresses one of the large public anxieties of our times: the rapidly eroding popular support for the main variants of democratic politics, evidenced by a decline in voting, in party membership, activism and loyalty, in interest in public affairs in the news media, in trust in politicians and in democratic institutions.

George Papandreou of PASOK described why his party used a Deliberative Poll to choose a mayoral candidate this way.

One of the big things we in politics face is the abstention of the people from politics. We don’t put the complexity of the issues to them. When we do ask them their opinion, we do so in a superficial way. What this does is to go back to an ancient Greek concept - and carries the idea that everyone is equal. But it does it with a scientific method so that we get close to an idea of what society as a whole is saying.

Bill Corbett

After Randall v. Sorrell

Duke Law Professor Walter Dellinger, a former acting Solicitor General, writes in writes in Slate that the Supreme Court's decisions this term on election law suggest reformers should be looking away from expenditure limits.

Give every registered voter a voucher for a few hundred dollars (or a few thousand—this would still be a bargain) to be used for whatever state, local, or federal candidate the citizen wished to support. She would send in her voucher to her favorite campaign, which would submit it to the U.S. Treasury for payment. There would be no limits on private spending, but its influence would be greatly diminished by the flood of everyone's money.

Bill Corbett

Primary democracy

A California judicial election this week had a result worthy of a Seinfeld episode: a bagel store entrepreneur defeated a highly-rated, twenty-year state court judge.  The outcome is attributed to three things: the self-financed winner's bigger campaign war chest ($100,000 to $42,000); the incumbent's foreign name (Janavs) and accent; and, taken almost for granted, popular inattention to the obscure race.  The Election Law Blog and the Los Angeles Times story tell more about this capricious result.

Over on the other coast, a New York state appeals court this week conducted an extraordinary two hour hearing in a lawsuit, brought by reform advocates, against state laws that give party leaders control over judicial candidate selection.  The New York Daily News thinks the reformers are going to win.  But if they do, and elections to the state courts become more like the rest of our elections, will the cautious among us henceforth seek permission to approach the bagel counter?

It just so happens that last Sunday in Greece, the birthplace of democracy, a Deliberative Poll was used to head off such a dilemma.  George Papandreou, leader of the opposition party Pasok, wrote an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune describing the DP and, indirectly, events of the next few days in California and New York as well.

"Citizens who do participate [in primary or other elections] do not always have the time or motivation to become properly informed about candidates' positions or topical issues.  People often vote on the basis of name recognition and a superficial impression of sound bites broadcast through the news media.

"So what is the alternative?  In most countries, parties that do not use the mass primary usually leave the nomination of candidates to party elites.  Democratic reformers face an unsatifactory choice between primaries and elites - between politically equal but relatively uninformed masses, or better-informed but unequal party players.

"Is there a way out of this dilemma?  Is there a way to include an informed and representative public voice in the nomination process?  A solution can be found in the practices of ancient Athens, where hundreds of citizens chosen by lot would regularly deliberate together and make important public decisions."

The use of a Deliberative Poll to determine a political nomination is a first; but DPs and other deliberative democracy tools are increasingly in use to make political decisions.  The most prominent example is that of the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly in 2004, which led to a plebiscite on whether to adopt a proportional electoral system; a DP was used in a southern Chinese town last year to decide how to spend its infrastructure budget. 

Judicial elections in the United States are becoming more like the rest of our politics, with campaign money playing a prominent role.  Unless that changes, Lady Justice may someday wind up exchanging her scale for a disposable Greek coffee cup.

Legislators & Deliberation

The Policy Consensus Initiative, an eight-year-old organization led by current and former legislators and government officials and headquartered in Oregon, has published Legislators at a Crossroads: Making Choices to Work Differently.  A snippet:

Legislators are beginning to recognize the role of convening as a way they can take action, or facilitate action, without waiting for the legislature to act.

It's short, just twelve pages, and a good introduction to flexible problem solving.

Bill Corbett

Democracy: Amercian v. Athenian

Jim Holt writes in the New York Times Magazine,

Our own government, to the Athenians, would look like an elective oligarchy. In fact, it was deliberately set up to ensure, as James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, "the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity, from any share" in it....Moreover, in one of the more devastating theoretical arguments against democracy, Anthony Downs observed that most citizens have no economic incentive to learn enough about what politicians do to vote intelligently. Nearly half of American voters acquiesce in their infantilization by not voting at all.

Should any of this make us yearn for Athenian-style demokratia, where citizens come together on terms of equality to reach consensus about the common good? An innovation in this direction has been proposed by James Fishkin, a political scientist at Stanford, and Bruce Ackerman, a Yale law professor. They envisage a new national holiday, called "Deliberation Day," a couple of weeks before each major election. On this day, voters would gather in groups as large as 500 and hash out issues together, like the ancient Athenians.

Take a look a this short article for a short history of the concept of democracy.  It is, more or less, what we make of it.

Bill Corbett