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Campaign Finance Reform

ANNOUNCER: 'Think Tank' is made possible by Amgen, recipient of the Presidential National Medal of Technology. Amgen, helping cancer patients through cellular and molecular biology, improving lives today and bringing hope for tomorrow.

Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Elections can be a mystery and a mess. As we get close to Election Day, one key to the mystery turns on turnout. The outcome of every election depends on who shows up. It’s said that too few Americans vote, that turnout will be very low in 1996 and that it’s a damn shame. Is that true?

Joining us to discuss the matter are Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Center for Research on the People and the Press; Benjamin Ginsberg, director of the Center for Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of 'Politics by Other Means: The Declining Importance of Elections in America'; Roger Davidson, professor of government at the University of Maryland and coeditor of 'The Encyclopedia of the United States Congress; and Ruy Teixeira, director of the politics and public opinion program at the Economic Policy Institute and author of 'The Disappearing American Voter.'

The question before this house: What if we held an election and everybody came? This week on 'Think Tank.'

The ancient Greeks cast their votes with pebbles, or psephos. That word for pebbles forms the root of the word psephology, the study of elections. Today there is some disagreement among psephologists regarding the health of American elections.

For example, America is the oldest democracy in the world and democracy’s global champion, yet experts predict that only about half of those eligible to vote for either Bill Clinton or Bob Dole or Ross Perot will bother to cast their ballot. In the 1994 congressional elections, only 36 percent of voters showed up, just over a third. Indeed, when it comes to casting votes, America ranks near the bottom.

The new democracies do better. For example, last June, turnout in Russia was 65 percent. And in the recent Nicaraguan elections, poll attendance was 82 percent.

But there is another way to look at American turnout. The U.S. has more elections, including primary elections, than any other country, and America has more elected officials than any other country, about a half a million of them. We vote for sheriffs, sewer commissioners, insurance commissioners, judges, treasurers, mayors, dogcatchers, district attorneys, school boards, comptroller, consumer advocates, and on and on and on.

Moreover, more than any other country, we settle major policy questions through referenda. There will be about 94 citizen initiatives decided on Election Day 1996, a record high. And by the way, turnout is currently near its historical average for this century and actually picked up somewhat in the last two elections.

Some experts say that low turnout is a sign that citizens are turned off. But there are a few others who believe that low voter turnout might reflect general contentment.

First question let’s go around the room. Why is turnout in America low? What does it mean?

MR. KOHUT: Americans don’t feel modern generations of Americans don’t feel obligated to vote, as they once did. The postwar generations, especially the baby boom generation, doesn’t feel it’s their civic duty to vote. Their grandparents did. It also reflects civic disengagement. When we asked people knowledge questions about facts in the news, across the United States and other major democracies, the United States ranks as low on that measure as it does in turnout in relative terms.

MR. WATTENBERG: Ben Ginsberg.

MR. GINSBERG: Well, I have a different view. I think that the problem of turnout is not a problem of voters, but it’s rather a problem of the contending politicians and parties we have in the United States. The dirty little secret of American politics is that most politicians, and certainly the two major parties, don’t really want higher levels of turnout. If they did, they could mobilize it.

MR. WATTENBERG: Interesting. Roger Davidson.

MR. DAVIDSON: One of many reasons for lower turnout in the 20th Century, I think, is that politics is no longer a public entertainment. People don’t look to politics and political party organizations as sources of entertainment. We have too much else on our minds football and other forms of entertainment, that politics is not a civic entertainment, as it once was.

MR. WATTENBERG: Ruy Teixeira, Economic Policy Institute.

MR. TEIXEIRA: Well, there are basically two questions here. One is, why has turnout, you know, more or less gone down continually for the last 30 years? Another question is, in broad cross national perspective, why does turnout in the U.S. tend to be much lower than other advanced democracies? And I’ll just answer the second question. I think it has two very simple reasons. One is it’s harder to vote here. The costs are higher and we have a more difficult registration system. And secondly, there are a variety of things about the American political system that tend to produce lower levels of motivation among the electorate, you know, from lower sort of different electoral system to lower levels of party mobilization, or civic engagement stuff that Andy was alluding to.

MR. WATTENBERG: What about the idea that we mentioned in the setup piece that low voter turnout might just signify contentment? You know, the countries doing all right, the two parties aren’t that different, we’re a great country. You know, what are we having for dinner; how do I get a raise?

MR. DAVIDSON: Well, there are other forms of participation, and among those, the United States does considerably better than it does in voting: writing to members of Congress, giving money, going to meetings.

MR. WATTENBERG: Joining volunteer organizations.

MR. DAVIDSON: Volunteer organizations. And as you pointed out, this is not just federal elections, it’s state and local, school board and other kinds of meetings and elections that at a local level hit home to the daily lives of people.

MR. KOHUT: I think the longitudinal surveys on voter cynicism, how voters feel about Washington

MR. WATTENBERG: Longitudinal surveys mean

MR. KOHUT: We’re showing increasing public cynicism.

MR. WATTENBERG: Over the years.

MR. KOHUT: Over the years. The fact that Washington is poorly regarded, the fact that elected officials are increasingly distrusted just argues against the contentment argument.

MR. GINSBERG: Well, another sort of stake in the coffin in the thesis that it’s contentment that drives low turnout is if you try to measure contentment, a literal question about how happy are you, how satisfied are you or so on, and you correlate that with turnout, there’s no relationship statistically. So it certainly seems to suggest that contentment can’t be driving lower turnout if there’s no relationship between the two.

MR. WATTENBERG: Just the reverse, Ruy, aren’t the least contented people the least likely to vote?

MR. TEIXEIRA: Well, no. No, I mean not really. I mean there’s just not much of a relationship if you measure contentment. If you look at their material situation, the people who are least well off materially are much less likely to vote. But that doesn’t sort of the way that works isn’t through the level of

MR. WATTENBERG: Is it possible no one mentioned this thought, particularly in a presidential election, which is where you are concerned about turnout. The nature of our electoral system tells somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of the voting population that their vote in a sense does not matter because they are not in a swing state. So in other words, if I vote in D.C. or in Maryland, which is usually solidly democratic, or in Virginia, which is usually solidly Republican, my vote does not really mean a great deal as to who is going to be the next president because if Ohio and Pennsylvania and Michigan and Illinois go one way or the other way, that’s going to decide the election, those swing states.

MR. KOHUT: I don’t think voters are all that strategic.

MR. GINSBERG: Well, no, voters do think about those things, but I think that trying to puzzle out why people don’t vote from the motivations of voters is going at it the wrong way. I grew up in the great city of Chicago during the administration of Richard Daley. And he didn’t, you know, do polling to find out whether people were going to vote or not. He got them out there, he made sure they voted. In fact, he was so diligent that a group that we would today called the 'necrologically challenged' voted. (Laughter.) In fact, a lot of them probably worked in local city offices. But you know, this

MR. WATTENBERG: Right. They were both dead and working for Daley at the same time.

MR. GINSBERG: Well, a lot of them were probably in Danny Rostenkowski’s office. But be all that as it may, the point is that you get high levels of voter turnout, and I think this is true around the world, where you have strong political parties that see themselves as having a stake in bringing voters to the polls.

In the United States, we have weak political parties which in some instances aren’t all that excited about bringing large numbers of voters to the polls.

MR. TEIXEIRA: The evidence in the cross national analyses of this issue of comparative turnout rates is that both are important, that the sort of relatively weak party system in the United States produces lower levels of motivation, which produces lower turnout, and that the electoral system in the United States, with its sort of plurality, you know, sort of one person gets all the votes in certain states, you know, other states don’t really matter, I mean we have a different electoral system. That also depresses turnout, makes voting less meaningful for a lot of people.

MR. DAVIDSON: And voting is still more costly in this country in terms of what you have to do to get registered, even with the reforms that we’ve had in the past decade or so. In most of the countries that we compare ourselves with, it’s the government that takes the responsibility for registration.

MR. WATTENBERG: And they have universal registration for other reasons.

MR. DAVIDSON: For other reasons, yeah. In Germany, it’s the police that keep the records.

MR. WATTENBERG: I mean, everybody’s in the socialist countries

MR. DAVIDSON: And in other countries, it would be social security.

MR. WATTENBERG: And the government has given you a number and knows where you are at any given moment.

MR. DAVIDSON: That’s right.

MR. WATTENBERG: What your residency

MR. DAVIDSON: In our country, no matter how easy the procedures have become, the onus is still on the individual to

MR. GINSBERG: Yeah. Well, that’s some of it, and certainly historically it’s why turnout dropped in the United States so sharply at the turn of the century.

MR. DAVIDSON: We got concerned in the late 19th century with voter fraud and we wanted to end the 'necrologically challenged' votes, like in Chicago. And so we tightened up registration a little.

MR. TEIXEIRA: Well, in a sense, both things happened at once because as they instituted a personal registration system, which made voting more difficult, they were also I mean, part of what that was about was demobilizing these strong urban ethnic machines. But what was also

MR. WATTENBERG: Hold on one second. Under normal circumstances, why would it be in the best interest of the Democratic Party, allegedly the people’s party, the place where turnout is perceived to be a bigger problem than in the Republican Party

MR. GINSBERG: Why don’t they do it?

MR. WATTENBERG: Yes, why don’t they

MR. GINSBERG: Because it is not in the interest of many sitting Democrats. If you’re a member of Congress who wins handily with 20 percent of the possible electorate, why in the world would you invest heavily in mobilizing that other

MR. WATTENBERG: Well, but suppose you’re in a close race?

MR. GINSBERG: Ah, well, if it gets close, then the situation changes. But what we’ve had over the years in the United States is lots of sets of or rather, in recent decades, we’ve had lots of sets of safe seats, where no incumbent has any particular reason to want to boost turnout.

MR. DAVIDSON: But 1996 is an exception to that. We really have a two layer election. We have an election where the top of the ticket has generally been conceded to President Clinton, but we have an enormous number of very close senatorial and congressional seats. A report out just this morning indicated there were at least 12 Senate seats and 45 House seats that were too close to call.

MR. WATTENBERG: Now, some years ago, if I’m not mistaken, Ruy did apiece, a study, and I think other scholars have done it, that said that if everybody voted, the results wouldn’t change.

MR. TEIXEIRA: Right. That is correct. Yeah, by and large, you can take most elections in the United States, particularly at the presidential level, but even at the congressional level, where if you get turnout that’s too low, it starts to be more plausible that turnout would make a difference. But by and large, if everybody shows up if everybody did show up at the polls, you do a kind of simulation of it, in almost all cases, it doesn’t appear to affect the outcome.

MR. WATTENBERG: In other words, you do this by polling the people who didn’t go.

MR. TEIXEIRA: Right. You ask the nonvoters what their preferences would have been if they showed up, and then you add those people into the actual voting pool, and you don’t wind up with something that’s very different.

And just as an example, I mean somewhat related to this from 1994, it was frequently argued that one of the things that hurt the Democrats, or a decisive factor and a very important factor in their defeat in 1994, the Democrats’ in 1994, was low mobilization of Democratic leaning voters or Democratic leaning constituency groups or Democratic leaning demographic groups.

I simulated what would have been the results if there was a massive mobilization of Democratic leaning nonvoters in that election, in 1994. And the most that that could have explained about the drop of the Democratic congressional vote was about 10 percent of it. So the question is

MR. WATTENBERG: Ten percent would have changed a lot of congressional seats.

MR. DAVIDSON: In most races, 10 percent is a big number.

MR. TEIXEIRA: Well, but on the other hand, turnout drop-off is not correlated with Democratic defeats in 1994. It’s just hard to make the case. It sounds plausible and it’s hard to make the case.

MR. GINSBERG: Except it’s so hard to know on the basis of retrospective polling. When you ask people, how would you have voted

MR. KOHUT: No, no, but it’s not retrospective polling. It’s polling that’s contemporary.

MR. GINSBERG: Well, it’s asking people, how would you have voted had you voted?

MR. KOHUT: Just a second. If you look at the polling in 1994, which asked both unregistereds, registereds who did not had a low probability of turning out and the registereds who had a high probability of turning out, you get pretty good measures of the relative impact of varying levels of turnout. And Ruy’s figures are right, but I think his conclusion is wrong.

There was a two point swing. It was a 52-48 Republican plurality which changed the control of the House. And if all registered voters had voted in that election, it would have been at least even. It would have been 50-50 or even 51-49 in the Democratic direction, and that would have made the difference between the Republicans winning control and the Democrats maintaining control. You’re right, though, it’s one of the few cases. The only case in a presidential basis, I think, is 1968.

MR. WATTENBERG: Let me just read you off a row of numbers by ethnic breakdown. White voters, 64 percent of those eligible vote. Blacks, 54(percent). Hispanics, 29 (percent). Now, Blacks would tend to be overwhelmingly Democratic. Hispanic voters would tend to lean Democratic I don’t know, 60-40.

So wouldn’t, then, higher turnout across the board in fact help Democrats because their groups are lower?

MR. KOHUT: If it follows the usual pattern, yes.

MR. TEIXEIRA: Absolutely. The question is never, would it help the Democrats, when you’re talking about mobilization of these groups. The question is how much? That’s where the rubber hits the road in terms of this question. I mean, is it a little or a lot? And most analyses tend to show, yes, it would help, but only a little, and it doesn’t typically account for the kind of Democratic debacles you had in 1994 and 1988.

MR. GINSBERG: Well, it seems to me that you have to take a step back. You can’t assume that a given group’s demographics are going to predict how it votes because it’s always been that way. If someone were to go out to mobilize Blacks, Hispanics, whatever, in larger numbers, the issues and appeals that they would use to do so might very well change the relationship of that group to the political process.

MR. KOHUT: You know, one of the elements in this turnout question is also demographic, and that’s the age factor. You know, we started allowing 18,19 and 20 year olds to vote in 1972, and typically younger people vote at very low rates. So part of the reason why the turnout ratios are so low between ’72 and 1996, or 1992, is that we have more young people in play than we did in the 1950s and ’60s.

MR. WATTENBERG: This is a pretty successful country politically. I mean, you know, we’re the longest lasting democracy. There is certainly plenty of communication nowadays. There is all the information out there. Around the world, people look to the United States as sort of a model of how a democracy should work. Is this a big deal that we don’t have a big turnout?

MR. DAVIDSON: It doesn’t look good, but it’s not a real big deal, I think, in part because there are other forms of participation that continue to excite people’s interests, and not only at the federal level, but at the state and local level as well.

MR. KOHUT: I’m not so sure about that. I mean, aren’t we isn’t there a lot of talk among political scientists about the decline in civil engagement, bowling alone and all of that?

MR. DAVIDSON: There’s actually an argument over that. Some people feel that there’s this bowling alone, that people aren’t

MR. WATTENBERG: Bowling alone somebody explain that.

MR. DAVIDSON: There’s a thesis that people are not working in neighborhood or community groups. There’s not the sense of connectedness. That’s a term that Ruy has used in a different context.

MR. TEIXEIRA: If in fact participation in other forms is making up where the problem was produced by low turnout, if you actually look at the, you know, sort of demographic skew in other forms of participation besides voting, it’s actually much more heavily skewed even than voting, which is already class skewed.

MR. DAVIDSON: Yes. Yes, right.

MR. TEIXEIRA: So the problem with turnout and participation in general is not that, for example, an election outcome will be changed if everybody shows up at the poll. It’s rather, what signals are

MR. GINSBERG: That’s exactly right.

MR. TEIXEIRA: agenda setting elites and people in Congress and the president getting? They’re heavily class skewed. That’s a problem. The agenda that’s set in other words, who are you going to pay attention to in thinking about what policies to put on the table in an act? You’re going to pay attention to what you observe in the pool of people participating in the system. That’s heavily class skewed. It’s skewed against people who are poor and have less education and so on. And if you look beyond turnout to other forms of participation, like campaign giving and so on, it’s even worse.

MR. WATTENBERG: How does that square with your other theory that if everybody voted, the results wouldn’t change?

MR. TEIXEIRA: Right, but we’re not talking about election outcome. We’re talking about the policy agenda.

MR. GINSBERG: And the kinds of appeals that have to be made in a given electoral environment. But I think it’s more than that. I think that voting you know, look, the fact that only 50 percent of the American public is going to vote in the next election rather than 80 percent, that in and of itself is not a big deal. But it’s important because of what it suggests about the American political process. It’s a symptom rather than a disease in and of itself. It’s a symptom of the fact that for the last 30 years, contending politicians have been telling us that the other side is a bunch of scum and no goodniks, and you know, they’ve convinced us. I think it’s a symptom of civic malaise, not a cause.

MR. WATTENBERG: Yeah, but the phenomenon of politicians calling each other scum has an ancient and honorable tradition behind it.

MR. GINSBERG: Oh, very honorable.

MR. WATTENBERG: You know, I mean that goes back to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. And I mean, you know, there is no election

MR. GINSBERG: Well, it’s been episodic in our politics. You know there was a time when politics stopped at the water’s edge. Now everybody gets their feet wet.

MR. TEIXEIRA: Well, some of the highest turnout campaigns in American history were some of the dirtiest, back in the late 1800s, so I don’t know, you have to be cautious, I think, about the dirt/low turnout relationship.

MR. KOHUT: Oh, I don’t think it’s so much only negative campaigning. I think there are other symptoms of this disengagement the decline in newspaper readership, now the decline of viewership of network television news.

MR. WATTENBERG: Yeah, but balanced by the increase in cable watching. I mean you have five, six public affairs channels. Twenty, 30 years ago, everybody was saying the magazine business is going out of business. Now you’re smothered in a sea of new magazines.

MR. KOHUT: Ben, there’s an infinitesimal attentiveness to public affairs, which we measure on an every two month basis. We measure interest in the major news stories. It’s much lower than it was in the 1960s and ’70s. When you ask people information questions about current events and you compare these levels to the levels that the Gallup poll or the Roper poll found in the 1950s and ’60s, you find shockingly low levels, and lower levels than you found 20, 30 years ago. And it’s mostly among the younger generations of people. Younger people are always less engaged than older people.

MR. GINSBERG: I think that’s right, and let me add one other point in terms of symptomology here. Low voter turnout is a symptom of a political process which is not organized to engage citizens in politics. In 19th century America, the political process was organized in such a way that the public at large was engaged and involved in the political process.

MR. WATTENBERG: It was fun. That’s your point.

MR. GINSBERG: Not that it was fun, but that the way that politicians saw, the route they saw to power, the route they saw to building support for policies was mobilizing voters through party machines, whatever.

MR. DAVIDSON: I think fun had something to do with it.

MR. WATTENBERG: You think what?

MR. DAVIDSON: I think fun had something to do with it, because the political parties, in mobilizing their troops, provided entertainment. They provided marching bands and choirs and baseball clubs. Even in the 1930s, there were thousands of political clubs in Manhattan, in New York City. There are few, if any, today.

MR. WATTENBERG: Now you have 50 channels to surf through.

MR. DAVIDSON: Now in an era of ESPN and all of the other entertainment, politics is marginalized.

MR. GINSBERG: Well, that’s part of it.

MR. TEIXEIRA: Politics is pretty boring to most people, except forklike crazy people like us. (Laughter.)

MR. WATTENBERG: All right, just let’s wrap this up. Should everybody vote?

MR. TEIXEIRA: Sure.

MR. WATTENBERG: Why?

MR. TEIXEIRA: Why not? I mean, it’s one way it’s the most elementary form of political participation. I think people should participate in politics. I think, moreover, that it’s good if people not only show up on Election Day, but they kind of follow things as they’re going on, they’re engaged in the political issues. I think it would be a more lively and interesting political debate and sort of system if more people participated.

On the other hand, do I think people should vote because I would tell them, incorrectly, that their vote is going to decide the outcome of the election? No. But I think there are other reasons why people should participate, and it would make it a less class skewed system by definition, right? If everybody showed up, there wouldn’t be any class skew in participation. It might have a good agenda setting effect.

So I say sure, absolutely, show up.

MR. DAVIDSON: I’d like to see everybody vote, but I think we should remember that elections are very gentle, blunt instruments. And I would also like to see more and more people participate in a variety of other ways even though they are, some of them, more skewed in a socioeconomic scale than voting itself.

MR. WATTENBERG: Ben?

MR. GINSBERG: My wife’s grandparents voted in Chicago for 10 years after their death, and I think we should follow their examples. (Laughter.)

MR. KOHUT: I think this is the minimum level of civic participation, and if everyone was so inclined, it would really change politics in a way that’s not reflected, for the better.

MR. WATTENBERG: That we can’t envision.

MR. KOHUT: For the better.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay, everyone. Vote early and often. Thank you, Andrew Kohut, Roger Davidson, Benjamin Ginsberg, and Ruy Teixeira. And thank you. With election season almost over, we at 'Think Tank' will not forget politics and public policy, but we will also be turning our gaze far afield. We plan to visit exciting new topics and revisit important old ones from the worlds of science, business, culture, and history. Coming soon, oceanography, Theodore Roosevelt, Darwin versus religion, music, and American culture.

And so it is more important than ever that we hear from our viewers. We want to know what programs and what guests you would like to see, and of course what you think about 'Think Tank.' Please send comments and questions and suggestions to New River Media, 1150 17th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. Or look us up through the PBS Web site at www.pbs.org. Click Think Tank on the menu of Popular PBS Series, and then click on the Send Us Mail button on the Think Tank page.

For 'Think Tank,' I’m Ben Wattenberg.

ANNOUNCER: This has been a production of BJW, Incorporated, in association with New River Media, which are solely responsible for its content.

'Think Tank' is made possible by Amgen, recipient of the Presidential National Medal of Technology. Amgen, helping cancer patients through cellular and molecular biology, improving lives today and bringing hope for tomorrow.

Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

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