8

Change the System, Change the Candidates

In the three years encompassed by this research, negative portrayals of politics abounded. There were media frenzies over at least a dozen major and innumerable minor political scandals, at all levels of government. The federal government spent two weeks shut down over budget negotiations in October 2013 and came close to doing so again several times. Popular fiction is filled with portrayals of politicians as power-hungry, dishonest, ruthless, and/or corrupt; consider some of the most popular television shows in the past year, which feature such characters centrally, including ABC’s Scandal, Netflix’s House of Cards, and CBS’s The Good Wife (to say nothing of HBO’s Game of Thrones)—contrast these characters with the respected “noble public servant” characters of 1990s political dramatizations like The West Wing or The American President (or, to reach back to a far earlier era, Jimmy Stewart’s “Mr. Smith” in Frank Capra’s 1939 classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington). There are few revered figures in today’s electoral politics (beyond perhaps the First Lady, who is political but unelected), as news services continue to broadcast coverage of gridlock, hyperpartisanship, incivility, and the many other aspects of political life that feed into young eligibles’ negative perceptions of politics and its ability to produce positive change.

In the interviews, even those who felt that politics could have the potential to produce what they saw as positive change were skeptical of its ability to do so right now. Many who saw high costs explained their perceptions in more depth. Some felt that the level of partisanship, gridlock, and negativity would interfere with the ability of politics to produce what they saw as positive change. Melody, a law student who had previously held an internship in a government office, said definitively that she did not like politics. She clarified: “I liked my experiences working for the government, but I did not like politics. And there’s a strong distinction for me. I like doing things for my community and for my country … but to me politics is kind of what gets in the way sometimes.” Elena, another law student, did not see politics as being useful and wanted to do something that for her felt more connected to solving problems: “I just realized I wasn’t going to be happy unless I was doing something that felt socially important.”

Figure 8.1. “American-ish Government,” FoxTrot Comic Strip, September 29, 2013. Source: FoxTrot, by Bill Amend. Used by permission of Bill Amend and Universal UClick/Andrews McNeel Universal.

The law and policy students in my study were on the whole an extremely public- and civic-minded bunch. Their survey answers showed a deep level of concern about their country and their communities and about the public good in general. Talking with more than fifty of them in person, for about an hour each, and with some for up to two hours, I was impressed with their compassion and their desire for creating positive change in the world. They had already chosen a career path related to law, public policy, and/or politics and were in competitive institutions that are major breeding grounds for future politicians. So among Millennials, this is a reasonably good sample of eligible candidates—these should be the young people most interested of their peer group in possibly running. It is, as we say in social science, a “hard case”—if these particular Millennials seem deterred from running, we can probably expect the effects to be greater for the larger group.

With a few notable exceptions, however, a large portion of the sample did not see politics as the best path toward helping people or communities. Many saw politics as being ineffective or inefficient or both and thoughtfully enumerated for me the many rational reasons for their mostly low levels of political ambition. Many also saw great rewards in politics, but those who saw more rewards than costs were a small and unrepresentative group. They tended to be men rather than women and were already in a positive feedback loop of political participation and interest in politics.

On an individual level, it is fully rational for those I surveyed and interviewed not to want to run. As they could clearly see, campaigns today at almost any level of government are expensive in lots of ways. Campaigns are financially costly as well as being time-consuming and energy-intensive. An increasingly intrusive news media can make running quite uncomfortable, not only for the candidate herself but also for her family, friends, children, and neighbors. As a voting public, we often seem hostile to those who offer to represent us, distrusting them and/or their motives; the respect once accorded to public service seems all but lost. Unless some damn good rewards can compensate for these costs, it would be unreasonable to expect individuals to want to run. Yet the rewards are even more subjective than costs; one of the greatest rewards seems to be whether one thinks politics can solve important problems. That perception has motivated movements but seems mostly missing among most of those I studied. And with politicians generally held in low regard, the personal rewards (respect, power) are unable to compensate for the perceived lack of social usefulness of politics.

On a system-wide level, however, individually rational behavior is producing a larger irrational outcome. It is irrational on a societal level to be turning off those who could be excellent public office candidates and instead sending them running for the hills (that is, the private sector). The kinds of professions they sought to join instead of electoral politics—NGOs, think tanks, consulting, law firms, private-sector businesses—do noble and important work. Yet none of them can replace the state. Government is, Jane Mansbridge tells us, the only source of the kind of “legitimate coercion” we need to solve our large and persisting collective action problems.1

Other research has found that young people are generally “turned off” by the incivility, the gridlock, and other negative features of current hyperpartisan politics.2 Political scientists Lawless and Fox found the same in a massive study of high school and college students. They note the danger for democracy of alienating a whole generation: “With more than half a million elected positions, the US political system will thrive only if a large number of people aspire one day to run for office.”3 They suggest some important solutions, including encouraging young people to see politics as a “vibrant, effective way to engage with and improve their communities and society,” such as through political leadership programs, smartphone apps, and political video games.4 Generally, these researchers have given up hope that current generations of adults can change the way we do politics and are looking ahead to Millennials as the eventual solution.5

I think otherwise. It is up to us, I believe, to radically change their calculations about joining the system. My hope, in other words, is that if we know “the kids are watching,” perhaps we can begin to act more like adults.

The young people I surveyed and interviewed were smart, savvy observers of our current political, legal, and social systems and did not express only negativity. More than anything else, their words and definitions of politics expressed ambivalence. Several called it a “necessary evil,” or terms to that effect, and disliked the incivility and lack of compromise in current politics but thought that representative democracy was deeply important. I believe that the best way to make them think that politics is meaningful is to make current politics more meaningful. And that is up to us, not to them. They are not incorrect when they see high costs or middling rewards, but both of those can change.

We could lower the costs of running by putting into place reasonable campaign finance spending limits and public funding schemes, as most other advanced democracies already use. We could overturn Citizens United with a constitutional amendment saying corporations are not people and strictly limiting their ability to affect political races. We could give our leaders some leeway in terms of being human, needing time off, making slips of the tongue, and so forth, so that those contemplating candidacy did not have to think they would be facing “gotcha” media surveillance 24/7. We could accept that while some people like to argue and speak loudly, others don’t, and often the quiet ones have good things to say too—this would require the louder and more argumentative folks to keep quiet now and then, which would not be a bad thing (they might learn something).

On the rewards side, we could shun those who, like Donald Trump or Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, show blatant disrespect for others. High-quality young people would recognize and reward a renewed era of respectful politics, even (or perhaps especially) when we disagree. As Voltaire famously said, “I may not agree with a word you are saying, but I will fight to the death to defend your right to say it.” Simple respect and civility would go a long way.

But even more important is showing that politics can actually solve problems. As I am writing this, the city of Flint, Michigan, is suffering from lead-contaminated water that has been making children (and others) there sick. One set of solutions is nongovernmental, and the response has been heartening; Little League teams and other nonprofits around the country have been sending bottled water to Flint. On the other hand, heartwarming as these efforts to help may be, they are unfortunately not equal to the long-term task. No celebrity6 or nonprofit can send enough bottles of water to actually sustain a city.7 This is a problem necessitating a governmental solution, and currently the Flint mayor is fighting with the Michigan governor over the cost of replacing the city’s water pipes. Water, to my mind, is a classic public good—this is why we, the people, create and institute government. This is exactly the kind of problem that government should solve, but when politics (especially of the hyperpartisan variety) gets in the way of attempts at solutions, young people rationally see rewards that do not balance out the often-high costs.

The Big Picture

Imagine what would happen if, one Election Day soon, all the polling places were set up but everybody decided simply not to vote. Can’t you just see all those empty voting booths? Our democracy would collapse. Sovereign citizenship has its price as well as its privileges!

Now think, what if it weren’t everyone who decided to abstain, but just certain groups? Democracy would not fall apart if it were mostly older white men who voted, but its claims to legitimacy, justice, and representation would no longer hold in such a diverse country, in this twenty-first-century context. (As Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, when asked to explain why he wanted fully half of his cabinet to be women, “Because it’s 2015.”) We would be extremely concerned if women, racial minorities, and young people were mostly absent from the voting public, even if such exclusion stemmed from their own choices. Together, these are the rather large majority of our country’s citizens, after all.

We should be just as concerned when the political participation in question is running for office rather than voting. Democracy in the context of an extremely diverse population requires a diverse group from which we can draw representatives, but our candidate pools are very skewed by race, gender, class, and age.

I maintain strongly that political ambition is not something one is born with. I believe instead it is malleable and depends to a large extent on the perceptions people have about the kinds of goods and bads they might face if they were to run for office. Not surprisingly, in my qualitative and quantitative evidence from a group of highly ambitious, passionate, and intelligent young people, I found that those who seemed to see higher rewards and lower costs were more likely to want to run. Conversely, those who saw high costs and low benefits from running or serving in office did not (for some very good reasons) want to throw their hats into the ring anytime soon.

This understanding of political ambition is, I believe, more hopeful than previous versions. It means that if we could find a way to lower the costs and/or raise the perceived rewards of running, we could get to a more diverse and high-quality candidate pool. Perhaps most important, we need to find a way to help bright, community-minded Millennials think that politics is a good way to solve important collective problems.

My analysis has also shown that “candidate deterrence” effects are stronger for some types of candidates than others; in particular, women are currently more averse to running than men, and women of color (especially black women) are the least likely to want to run of all subgroups. Most of the under-representation of people of color comes from under-representation of women of color; this, to my mind, is the group to whom the greatest efforts should be targeted. With the future of the United States increasingly racially diverse, it is essential that women, and especially women of color, be at the policymaking tables. As is commonly said in Washington, D.C., “If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.”

Young people, women, and people of color are hardly genetically averse to politics; rather, these groups led the major social movements of the twentieth century. What the black civil rights, feminist, LGBT, and other movements managed to do was make politics seem important and useful to those who had been too long excluded from that arena. In a time of “anti-politics,”8 however, we must work doubly hard to overcome the (unfortunately reasonable) cynicism I saw in the graduate students I studied about politics, electoral politics in particular, and to rehabilitate the notion of politics as “public service.”

The data I have presented in this book paint a picture of candidate deterrence, where the bulk of those I surveyed and talked to want little to do with electoral politics. But the effects are not evenly dispersed; women are harder hit than men, and women of color are least likely to want to run. While everyone saw relatively high costs to running, women saw higher costs, both because they were more sensitive to the base level of costs and also because they saw additional costs that men did not see. The effect was exacerbated for women of color, who strongly expected to face racial as well as gender discrimination and who were least likely to think that politics could solve important problems.

This is likely no surprise to anyone who studies politics, race, or gender, yet I hope it can become a call to arms. At some indeterminate tipping point in this negative-feedback cycle we are in, the public sector will lose so much respect and legitimacy that it will no longer have the ability to address the kinds of long-term and overarching problems to which Mansbridge referred.9 We still have a chance to revive our democracy, to make it more fully representative and also stronger and healthier. For this to happen, we need new blood, of all different kinds. And the best way I can see to get it is to convince a new, diverse, and entrepreneurial generation that this system of government that it has taken us hundreds of years to set up and institute is worth their time, effort, and input. We need to decrease the costs of running, by constitutional amendment (if necessary) and also through revising social norms about privacy and respect for those who dedicate their lives to such public service.

Above all, we must convince young people, and especially young women, that without their voices and their support, true change in the system can never be possible. Despite the costs, politics needs them; politics matter. I firmly believe that our future depends on this.