Setting the Agenda, Part III

Heather K. Gerken

Setting the Agenda for Scholarship on Election Reform
Part III: Providing Citizens Better Cues

This is the third part of a series arguing that academics and reformers ought to think harder about the "here to there" problem in the field of election law. Because it is so difficult to get election reform passed in this country, we should think harder about how to change the institutional terrain on which reform battles are fought in the hope of creating a more receptive environment for reform generally. Yesterday I talked about one of the central problems in electoral reform: the foxes are guarding the henhouse. Our system is run by partisan politicians, and they are reluctant to relinquish their power to set the rules by which they are elected. I also proposed a solution that problem: domesticating the foxes. Rather than ask politicians to act contrary to their self-interest, as academics and reformers typically do, we should imagine ways to align the interests of politicians with those of voters. The "here to there" solution is thus to harness partisan self-interest, one of the great engines of our democracy, in the service of reform.

Today I will focus on the flip side of the coin: the fact that election reform proposals get almost no traction with voters. We might not worry too much about partisan self-interest if voters were willing to put pressure on their representatives to do the right thing. But for a variety of reasons -- reform debates are too complex, too abstract, too distanced from substantive politics -- citizens rarely seem to care about election reform. If we want to change the terrain on which reform battles are fought, we must think systematically about how to get citizens more engaged.

One reason that citizens have a hard time getting behind election reform is that the issues are extremely complex. Substantive political questions, of course, are also quite complex. But here voters often have access to heuristics or cues provided by political elites to help guide their decisions (a union member, for instance, might trust a labor proposal backed by Democrats). Unfortunately, in the reform context, it is political elites -- those best able to provide useful cues -- who tend to oppose reform of any type; they hate to mess with the system that got them elected.

Consider, for instance, recent efforts to pass redistricting reform by initiative in California and Ohio. Reformers often look to the initiative process as a strategy for bypassing self-interested legislators and getting reform through. There was every reason to think this strategy would succeed in California and Ohio. After all, a majority of Republicans and Democrats agreed that legislators should not draw their own districts. Yet both proposals were defeated by substantial margins.

Part of the problem (as I have written here, here, and along with Chris Elmendorf here) were the cues available to voters at the time. Voters trying to sort through the merits of the proposal had lots of information about who was backing each one: in California, the most prominent backer was the (then-unpopular) Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger; in Ohio, the proposal was backed by a coalition of Democrats and unions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, California (with a strong Democratic majority) and Ohio (with a strong Republican majority) were unwilling to back the reform. A recent study suggests that the same holds true historically

The problem is obvious. The use of partisan cues is often a perfectly sensible strategy for citizens voting on complex substantive questions. But when it comes to election reform, relying on partisan cues means relying on self-interested legislators, who are likely to resist virtually any change to the status quo. Even citizens who don't trust legislators have a problem, as it is hard to know whom else to trust. The question, then, is how to provide voters better cues when they are voting on election reform.

Chris Elmendorf has done wonderful work on how we might introduce new, better cues for citizens into the reform process. Elmendorf argues that, contrary to the conventional wisdom among reformers, we do not need to create fully independent commissions with plenary authority over election administration in order to improve the health of our democracy. Instead, he shows that advisory commissions with the power to propose legislation -- like those that exist in Australia, Canada, and England -- can be quite effective in pushing reform through the process despite their lack of formal lawmaking authority. Not only can advisory commissions put issues on the public agenda but, if run properly, they can provide what Elmendorf terms an "integrity cue" to voters. Put simply, advisory commissions can serve as something akin to a "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" for voters as they sort through the difficult policy questions involved in electoral reform. And, of course, if the public comes to trust the advisory commission, politicians suddenly have an incentive to vie for its blessings and do the right thing.

Another intriguing strategy for realigning the interests of politicians and voters is citizen commissions. One potential problem with the typical advisory commission, which is composed of experts and nonpartisan elites, is that it is vulnerable to at least two types of challenges from disgruntled politicians trying to stymie reform: (1) that a commission composed of experts is undemocratic; and (2) that commission members are not really neutral. Indeed, these were precisely the grounds on which the reform proposals in California and Ohio were attacked.

Citizen commissions are virtually immune to such attacks. Who, after all, is going to claim that a randomly chosen body of voters is undemocratic or that everyday citizens have a partisan axe to grind? Consider one concrete example of how the creation of an advisory citizens' commission can change the reform dynamic, described in one of the papers linked above. When a "Citizens' Assembly" was created to propose electoral reform in British Columbia, the two major parties opposed the proposal but were afraid to speak out against the Assembly. The best they could do was maintain a virtual radio silence on the subject. A citizens' advisory commission not only provides a helpful cue to voters, but can introduce a new dynamic into reform debates by elites.

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Here, then, is another set of questions for those academics and reformers interested in the "here to there" question. Election reform is a complex topic. If we want to improve the institutional terrain on which reform battles are fought, one way to do it is to think more systematically about the ways in which we can provide citizens better and more trustworthy cues to help them sort through these debates.
Posted 8:54 AM by Heather K. Gerken [link]