Unofficial Actors and Their Roles in Public Policy PDF

Unofficial Actors and Their Roles in Public Policy CHAPTER 5 Chapter at a Glance Individual Citizens Interest Groups Social Movements and Mobilization Types of Interest Groups Political Parties Think Tanks and Other Research Organizations Communications Media Subgovernments, Issue Networks, and Do...

Unofficial Actors and Their Roles in Public Policy CHAPTER 5 Chapter at a Glance Individual Citizens Interest Groups Social Movements and Mobilization Types of Interest Groups Political Parties Think Tanks and Other Research Organizations Communications Media Subgovernments, Issue Networks, and Domains Prying Open Policy Networks Exploiting the Decentralization of American Government Going Public Conclusion Key Terms Questions for Discussion, Reflection, and Research Additional Reading Having reviewed the important official participants in the policy process in chapter 4, we now turn to the unofficial actors. These actors are unofficial because their participation in policy making is not fully specified in the Constitution. But the First Amendment contains a set of core political rights—freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly (that is, to form groups), and “the right . . . to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The way that people, groups, and the press participate in public life has evolved and grown with the nation. While some actions are controversial—those of unpopular groups and lobbyists come to mind—and some participants in the policy process arouse considerable annoyance among other actors, it is also true that our democratic system of policy formation and implementation could not function without them. As you consider these actors, consider how changes and reforms to the constitutional order—and to the nature of politics—would alter their roles and behaviors. 130 UNOFFICIAL ACTORS AND THEIR ROLES IN PUBLIC POLICY Individual Citizens Many studies of the policy process seem to be disconnected from the activities and preferences of individual citizens. This is because most analysis focuses on policy making undertaken at the group level, with various groups vying for attention, influence, and power. Politics in the United States is primarily a group process, and groups often make their preferences very clear, because they deal regularly with important issues of policy. By contrast, opportunities for individual participation seem to be intermittent, at best. We hold elections for national office every two years, and not every office is up for election every year. Furthermore, even when important issues are on the agenda most Americans do not vote, although in some presidential elections turnout exceeds 50 percent. But in state, county, city, and town elections, voter turnout is very low. For example, I am writing this paragraph a few months after our local school board elections in Wake County, North Carolina. There were two slates of candidates with sharply contrasting visions of how the schools should be run, yet voter turnout was quite low—about 11 percent of the eligible electorate. The election significantly changed the composition and policy preferences of the school board and the policies that the new board majority is proposing are sufficiently controversial that a number of the 89 percent of the electorate that failed to show up on election day are now mobilizing to oppose the new board’s ideas involving school diversity and scheduling. Of course, a portion of that 89 percent is pleased with the outcome. The analytical problem for social scientists is quite simple: with turnout so low, it is impossible to draw solid conclusions about what overall public preferences are in an election. Even elections with high turnout—over 50 percent—cannot be said to broadly reflect public preferences. People who do vote tend to be older, whiter, and wealthier than nonvoters, so voters are not really representative of broader public opinion. As low as voter turnout can be, even fewer Americans find other ways to participate in politics and policy making, follow many issues very closely, or admit to being very well informed on issues. Of course, a staple of national debates over political knowledge and engagement is the argument that many Americans don’t know who represents them in Congress or their state legislatures. In the end, we can say that the overall level of political attention and participation—including voting and other activities—is remarkably low.1 Furthermore, to the extent that any political participation is evident in American politics, it is usually shown in voting. Even then, decisions on who to vote for may be influenced only indirectly by public policy preferences. Low participation rates in elections have led to widespread concern among citizens and democratic theorists that a majority of potential voters do not express their opinion on important matters of the day. This long-run trend may reflect voters’ growing alienation from the political system and the decisions made in it. The 2008 election, however, saw an increase in electoral turnout over the previous presidential election (Figure 5.1). 131 132 CHAPTER 5 Figure 5.1 Election Turnout, President and House of Representatives Source: Infoplease Database, http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781453.html. Historically, low levels of voting are also related to low levels of participation in other political activities. More Americans vote than write to elected officials, attend public meetings or hearings, circulate petitions, join groups and lobby officials, or even engage in peaceful protest activities. For example, a 2003 survey of college undergraduates conducted by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University found that only 26 percent said they had attended a political rally or demonstration and only 32 percent said that they had signed a petition or participated in a boycott. A 2006 report funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 17 percent of young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five had participated in none of nineteen possible political activities. At the same time, a plurality of the young people polled believed that government is generally wasteful and ineffective. Related to these results is the remarkably low level of knowledge about basic politics, particularly among the most uninvolved people. For example, only a bare majority—53 percent of respondents—knew that one had to be a citizen to vote in national elections.2 The 2008 elections and the health care debate may have increased group mobilization slightly, but it is unclear whether there really is a long-term change in participation, or whether most Americans are really following the details of the debate very closely. Expressions of concern about low voter turnout and a lack of political participation generally are based on the belief that UNOFFICIAL ACTORS AND THEIR ROLES IN PUBLIC POLICY broad-based political participation is a key feature of a healthy democracy. But one cannot simply look at political participation as voting—there’s a wide range of ways that people in different communities, socioeconomic strata, age cohorts, and other categories participate.3 And we know that policy makers are sensitive to public opinion and the probability that their actions may arouse anger among enough people to make implementation difficult or to cause them to lose elections. Thus, in the end, we can say that the general public does not often participate in policy making. Notable exceptions are major social movements (described later in this chapter), such as women’s suffrage and civil rights movements, which mobilized millions of people to support major policy change. Given the low level of regular political participation, is there any way to figure out what individuals expect government to do? Political scientist Morris Fiorina suggests that the people want the most benefits at the least cost, and for other people to pay for the benefits we receive.4 In essence, we individually define efficiency as getting the most services for ourselves while paying the least taxes for that package of services. Of course, when everyone defines efficiency that way, conflict between groups is likely because all of us cannot gain the things we want from government and expect that someone else will provide them; that is, we would like the benefits focused on us, but the costs spread among many people. This way of thinking about policy is discussed in greater detail in chapter 7, where we consider policy types. Once again, the “who gets what” question in politics is starkly illustrated. From a normative, pro-democracy perspective, it is encouraging to know that people can be mobilized—that is, anyone can be persuaded to care about particular issues. The sometimes-raucous town hall meetings about health care reform in 2009 exemplified potential group mobilization, although these meetings still drew a very small fraction of the overall public. Nonvoters and relatively uninterested people can still be sufficiently motivated to write letters, join an interest group, or take other political action. People will often act when something threatens, or appears to threaten, their livelihood or their lifestyle, such as when new commercial development may disturb their neighborhood, or when government is unresponsive to local needs for education or public safety. While some people will mobilize to try to get the government to do something about a problem, other people will often organize to get the government not to do something—not approve a new mall, not create a national health insurance system, or not raise taxes. The decision to shut down a program or do nothing is policy as much as the decision to aggressively act is, and it is often true that blocking an action is more readily achieved than moving a policy idea forward. People may remain mobilized until the issue is somehow resolved, whether or not it is resolved to their satisfaction, and sometimes mobilization leads to the creation of interest groups. The open question in American politics is the extent to which these relatively distinct issues and mobilization episodes add up to what we might call “public opinion” or the “public mind.” Because these may all involve separate 133 mobilization. The process by which people or groups are motivated to take action—lobbying, protest, or any other form of expression—in response to an issue or problem. 134 public interest. The assumed broader desires and needs of the public, in whose name policy is made. The public interest is hard to define, but is something to which all policy advocates appeal. CHAPTER 5 issues and actors, and often involve issues of interest to only a small number of people, it is likely that the sum of all this activity is not really the same thing as “public opinion.” As Theodore Lowi argues in The End of Liberalism, American government became less concerned with vital issues of national importance as it became more involved with the distribution of benefits to particular interests.5 If this is true, then there is no single public interest, but rather sets of separate interests with separate publics and separate opinions about what should be done. This point should be stressed: It is very difficult to define and prove that a particular governmental action or policy would be in the broadest public interest, because there is so little agreement on what the so-called public interest really is. This does not, of course, prevent people from forming interest groups to pursue their own goals, whether or not they perceive them to be in the public interest. Interest Groups interest group. A collection of people or organizations that unite to advance their desired political outcomes in government and society. There are many different ways to organize these groups by types of interest (public/private, institutional, economic, and so on). Interest groups are important—perhaps central—to the policy process because the power of individuals is greatly magnified when they form groups. Interest groups of some sort have been a part of American politics since before the founding of the republic. James Madison, one of the key proponents of the Constitution, recognized this, and one of his reasons for supporting the creation of a federal union was the possibility of breaking down “faction”—that is, group-based interests—into geographically contained states and their subdivisions, to prevent the spread of populist ideas from overwhelming what the founders considered to be the more reasoned deliberation of the elected officials. Since the 1960s, the number of interest groups has rapidly expanded.6 Today, while many groups are local and deal with local issues, many interest groups and popular movements cannot be confined to small states or communities in the manner contemplated by Madison in Federalist 10. Clearly, our evolution from a group of states to a nation, aided by transportation and communication capabilities unimagined by the founders, has made it possible for groups to mobilize quickly on a regional or national scale. After all, news that took weeks to travel from New York to Pittsburgh can now move nearly instantly from New York to Pittsburgh—or to Los Angeles, Moscow, Tokyo, Beijing, or Baghdad. With this capacity to communicate, containing political conflict within one place is very difficult. Political ideas and information transcend local and national borders at a speed and volume unprecedented in world history. The American system of democracy, with its respect for freedom of association and speech, does not place great legal burdens in the path of those who wish to mobilize and form an interest group; the major barriers are not political, but are related to organization and resource: effective interest group activity is very expensive. Grassroots organizations form almost daily to pursue myriad goals, such as halting the construction of cellular phone towers in residential areas or promoting UNOFFICIAL ACTORS AND THEIR ROLES IN PUBLIC POLICY the formation of a new charter school. However, while anyone can form a group, its mere existence does not suggest that it will have any voice in policy making. As you may have experienced directly, some groups have considerably more power than other groups. Groups that represent powerful or privileged interests are partly responsible for Americans’ suspicion of interest groups or, as they are often called, “special interest groups.” In fact, some groups call themselves “public interest groups” to signal that they view their mission as a counterweight to these “special” interests. Other groups simply support positions that many find controversial, such as civil rights groups in the 1950s and 1960s, women’s rights groups in the 1970s and 1980s, and gay and lesbian rights groups today. There are several reasons for the differences in power between some groups and others, particularly within a particular policy area. First, as Howlett and Ramesh note, “One of the most important resources of interest groups is knowledge: specifically, information that might be unavailable or less available to others.”7 Legislators and bureaucrats draw on this information to help them make decisions; groups that are the most effective at channeling that information to bureaucrats and legislators often have an advantage in ensuring that their definition of the problem, and the range of potential solutions, is taken into account. Communication with key decision makers, in turn requires substantial resources that emergent groups may not have and that established groups often have in abundance. Money, knowledge, and information are related to the size of the group and the resources that it and its members can bring to policy conflicts. Some interest groups have very few members, and others have millions of dues-paying members. Large groups include the National Education Association, the Sierra Club, and the AARP.8 “All other things being equal, larger groups can be expected to be taken more seriously by the government.” Even more powerful groupings, called peak associations, “may be expected to be more influential than those operating individually.” The National Association of Manufacturers is a peak association in the business sector. The American Petroleum Institute, representing oil companies’ interests, and the Air Transport Association (ATA), which represents the major airlines, are also peak associations. But not all peak associations are big business oriented: the Sierra Club is a peak organization in the environmental movement, and the Consumers Union is a peak association in the consumer movement. Of course, many argue that these groups’ influence is nowhere near as great as business groups, because, simply, they have less money. As noted earlier, money is very important for interest groups, because it “enables them to hire permanent specialized staff and make campaign contributions to parties and candidates during elections.”9 A rough calculation of the political power of an interest group (and thus of one’s political influence as a group member) is derived from the size of the group’s membership. A group with 500,000 members is likely to have more clout (or at least be “louder” in some sense) than a group with 500 members. But this isn’t always the case, and we cannot assume that the larger group in this example is a thousand 135 peak associations or peak organizations. The largest and most influential groups in a policy domain. These tend to be the groups that lead other likeminded groups in advocacy coalitions. The American Medical Association and the National Rifle Association are examples of peak organizations. 136 CHAPTER 5 times more powerful than the smaller one. As social scientists have learned, it is very difficult to create a committed membership group unless there are incentives for people to join.10 Business interest groups, such as the National Association of Realtors, can be powerful because their members are vitally interested in the issues addressed by the group. If Congress proposed to reduce or eliminate the mortgage interest tax deduction, which allows people who own houses to deduct from their taxable income, the money they spend in interest on their home loans, real estate agents would take note because their livelihoods could be directly affected: fewer houses would be sold because the mortgage tax deduction works to subsidize home buying, particularly for the wealthy.11 However, a person interested in animal conservation may be less directly affected by changes in the Endangered Species Act. With no personal economic stake in endangered species, individuals might be less motivated to join the Sierra Club. Indeed, while some people join the Sierra Club because of a belief in the importance of the environment, others may join simply to feel like they support the cause and, primarily because of the benefits of membership, such as a glossy magazine and various social opportunities. Indeed, there are groups, like the American Automobile Association (AAA) or the AARP that people join almost solely for material benefits, such as discount towing or discount travel. Many of the members of these groups are only vaguely aware of the advocacy activities undertaken by these groups, supposedly on their behalf. Social Movements and Mobilization social movement. A broad-based group of people that come together to press for political or policy goals. A social movement is broader than an interest, often encompassing many groups and otherwise politically unorganized people. Recent social movements include the civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement. When groups of people mobilize and coalesce around a set of high-visibility issues, a social movement may result. A social movement involves far more people—although not all at a high degree of activity—than the membership of relevant interest groups. Social movements often involve a coalition of groups with similar goals, and other people support movements without a formal group affiliation. Recent social movements include the civil rights and women’s rights movements. In the 1960s and 1970s, and continuing today, women’s groups promoted policies to create equal pay in the workplace, access to abortion, more stringent laws governing sexual harassment, improved laws that reduce, to some extent, the stigma attached to rape victims, and so on. These actions are the result of citizens coming together and pressing for change, both within and outside official institutions. The civil rights movement is a classic example of a movement that lobbied or pleaded its case to government institutions—Congress, the president, and the courts—as well as appealing to the “court of public opinion.” Indeed, the imagery of the civil rights movement—the police dogs in Alabama and kids being escorted to school by federal troops, for example—appealed directly to Americans’ sense of justice and fairness. While not all Americans supported the enforcement of civil rights for minorities, there were certainly enough Americans to constitute an important social movement to press for policy and social change. The gay and lesbian rights UNOFFICIAL ACTORS AND THEIR ROLES IN PUBLIC POLICY movement might also be considered a social movement, against which many socially and politically conservative people have mobilized to oppose policies that offended their sense of morality and ethics. Social movements and their key issues wax and wane as the political conditions and the consequences of their work change. The examples given here are of liberal social movements, which are historically more common given the conservative tendencies of the American political system.12 However, in recent years politically conservative groups have also mobilized, often to counter perceived liberal gains. Conservatives (and religious groups, often with a conservative outlook) have mobilized against abortion, in favor of restoring school prayer, and against textbooks and teaching that contradict their political or religious values. Conservatives have also formed groups, to advance their views on welfare, economic regulation, and environmental protection. Clearly, there is no reason why conservatives or liberals cannot mobilize and press for change. Those that are successful will be those that respond to the current ideological, social, and political attitudes of the public; the truly successful among them will be led by people who know, intuitively or otherwise, how to gain political advantage and policy gains. When movements suffer political setbacks, they can sometimes recruit new adherents to their cause, but when goals are achieved coalitions often break up and the social movement loses momentum. Thus, while the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) continue to exist, the civil rights movement is less active and visible than it was forty or fifty years ago, as we saw in chapter 2. Types of Interest Groups There are many ways to categorize interest groups. One can distinguish between an institutional interest group, whose members belong to a particular institution, and a membership group, whose members have chosen to join. If you are a student at a university, you are a member of an institutional interest group—university students—because you share some interests with your fellow students, such as affordable tuition and quality education. If you join the National Rifle Association or your on-campus Public Interest Research Group, you are part of a membership group because you made the positive choice to join, rather than being a member simply because of your status in an organization or society at large. One can also contrast economic interest groups with public interest groups. While the difference between the two is sometimes rhetorical—after all, almost every group believes it is acting, directly or indirectly, in the broader public interest—there is also a more technical way to distinguish between the two. Public interest groups, such as environmental groups, Common Cause, and the like, seek to create broad benefits for the entire society, not simply their members. Indeed, it is difficult to allow only public interest group members to reap the benefits of, say, a cleaner environment without providing such benefits to others. While public interest groups would 137 institutional interest group. A group of people, usually not formally constituted, whose members are part of the same institution or organization. Students at a university are an example of such a group. Contrast with a membership interest group. economic or private interest groups. Groups formed to promote and defend the economic interests of their members, for example, industry associations. public interest groups. Groups formed to promote what its members believe is the broader public interest. 138 CHAPTER 5 like more people to join their causes, they also know that nonmembers constitute a potential force of supporters, and, as mentioned earlier, when many such people are mobilized, a social movement may result. In economic terms, we can say that nonmembers of public interest groups are free riders who benefit from the work of the group without contributing resources such as labor or money. Economic groups, on the other hand, seek to overcome the free-rider problem by creating benefits only for the members of their groups. For example, labor unions, particularly in “closed shop” states where all workers must pay dues to the union, work to provide wage and benefit agreements that help only the members of the union. By restricting benefits in this way, the union seeks to promote cohesion and to encourage others to join the union. Industry groups are clearly economic groups. They tend to be small groups in terms of the actual numbers of members, but they are powerful because they are collections of powerful economic interests that often enjoy considerable local, regional, or national political support. For example, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America enjoys considerable support in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina where many pharmaceutical companies and their jobs are located.13 Similarly, the American Petroleum Institute represents an industry that is very important to people in the major oil-producing states of Alaska, Texas, Louisiana, and Wyoming. Finally, we can consider professional and trade associations to be economic associations. Groups such as the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association seek to promote and protect the professional and economic interests of doctors and lawyers. They provide important benefits and services to their members, such as medical or law journals and continuing education. They also seek to protect the economic interests of their members. These associations play an active role in the education and licensing of doctors and lawyers, thereby seeking to keep the size of the profession relatively fixed. When their interests are threatened, they lobby elected and appointed officials; for example, the American Medical Association has been a traditional opponent of many plans for governmentsponsored health care programs for those without insurance, although their position has shifted in recent years.14 In both public interest and economic groups, people join because they gain some benefit. The challenge for public interest groups is to make clear what those benefits are to attract and keep members. As a rule, it is easier for economic groups to do this because their members have tangible economic interests at stake. Public interest groups, on the other hand, must appeal to motivations other than economics. Most public interest groups make an appeal to people’s desire to do good, augmenting it by material benefits like discounted nature tours, glossy magazines, calendars, and tote bags. These benefits may seem trivial, but they help to attract new members and promote group cohesion. Still, they are not as powerful as economic inducements in promoting group unity.15 Finally, it is important to note that many groups do not fit neatly into the public UNOFFICIAL ACTORS AND THEIR ROLES IN PUBLIC POLICY interest/economic dichotomy. In particular, the United States contains many religious and ideological groups that come together without being based on economics or a broader public interest mission. Rather, their mission is to promote their religious, moral, and ideological values among their members and, sometimes, in the broader society. These groups range from mainstream churches to fundamentalist congregations, and from the politically moderate to the politically extreme groups on both ends of the ideological spectrum. Such groups can become important players in the policy process, at least briefly, during times of social upheaval and crisis or when issues of morality and values are paramount. They often argue, of course, that their positions are in the best public interest, as do economic groups, who argue that their industries are comprised of responsible business firms that benefit all their stakeholders. Interest groups engage in a range of activities to make group members’ voices heard. Many groups engage in lobbying elected and appointed officials. The term “lobbying” has negative connotations, because it conjures up images of smokefilled rooms and secret dealings between shadowy lobbyists and less-than-honest officials, often accompanied by the exchange of cash in the form of campaign contributions, or, in less savory transactions, in the form of bribes and graft. This perception is reinforced by campaign contribution practices, which have led many people to believe that they are made to ensure friendly access to elected officials and to the decision-making process. This perception was explicitly cited by U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter in his decision in Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC,16 in which he noted: the cynical assumption that large donors call the tune could jeopardize the willingness of voters to take part in democratic governance. Democracy works “only if the people have faith in those who govern, and that faith is bound to be shattered when high officials and their appointees engage in activities which arouse suspicions of malfeasance and corruption.” United States v. Mississippi Valley Generating Co., 364 U.S. 520, 562 (1961). Attempts to influence government decision making are not, however, solely a function of campaign contributions, although campaign financing plays an important role in influencing decisions. After all, the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the right of people “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” and there is no prohibition on people gathering together in groups to petition the government, nor is there anything in the Constitution to suggest that one cannot, or should not, engage the services of experts to help us petition the government. Lobbying—the organized, continuous act of communicating with the government— is one way to petition government, not only for the redress of grievances, but also to encourage government to support particular interests with various benefits. People’s objection to lobbying may not be to lobbying per se, but rather to the perception that more political power is held by well-funded interest groups in 139 lobbying. The term applied to the organized and ongoing process of persuading the legislative or executive branches to enact policies that promote an individual’s or group’s interest. The term has taken on a negative connotation. 140 CHAPTER 5 Washington and the state capitals. Furthermore, and as Justice Souter hints, many people believe that there is some sort of quid pro quo operating in Congress with respect to campaign contributions. The most basic form of this idea holds that an interest group will meet with a member of Congress and say, “if you vote with me, I will give you this campaign contribution.” The other variant of this idea is the member of Congress saying “I will vote to promote your interest if you give me a campaign contribution.” In both cases the implication is that there is an exchange taking place that is unfair and undemocratic. The campaign contribution process is clearly more subtle. Attempts are made to at least make the process partially transparent; that is, certain amounts have to be reported, lobbyists need to register with state and local legislative offices, and so on. Of course, there are states, such as New York, where good government groups seek to promote transparent systems of tracking campaign contributions. But in New York, as elsewhere, even minor reforms cannot hide the fact that many stakeholders work to prevent information from being gathered and presented in a useful and timely manner.17 There remains a perception that votes can be “bought” by the most powerful groups. Still, the prevailing legal theory that often strikes down campaign reform legislation is the idea that the choice to spend money to advocate for a position is a form of constitutionally protected free speech. Indeed, as noted earlier, there is nothing in the first amendment to prohibit this form of expression, and, in some cases, the less politically powerful can find that their collective resources can be put to use to communicate with members of Congress. While lobbying sometimes carries with it tawdry overtones, it is important in the policy process because lobbyists provide important information to officials in the legislative and the executive branches. Elected officials generally have large staffs, and members of Congress have access to the work of the Congressional Research Service and the Government Accountability Office, two agencies that help Congress gather information and do its work. But interest groups can provide further information that is unknown or unavailable to elected officials. Such information has to be reasonably good—outright distortions and fabrications are likely to be exposed, and no elected official wants to use grossly inaccurate information for fear of damaging his or her credibility. Groups consequently try to feed good information to elected officials who may already be predisposed to the group’s position, hoping that their supporters can use information to make a better case for the group’s preferred solutions. Of course, not all groups have equal power and equal access to elected officials. There are many instances in American history in which elected officials were actively hostile to a particular group’s goals. A prime example is found in the history of the civil rights movement, particularly at the state level. Clearly, African Americans could not gain a fair hearing for redress of their grievances before the very state governments that passed and enforced segregationist laws in the first place. At the same time, a sufficiently large number of senators and representatives were unsympathetic to the civil rights cause, making policy change more difficult. UNOFFICIAL ACTORS AND THEIR ROLES IN PUBLIC POLICY The groups involved in the civil rights movement turned then to three strategies: mass mobilization, protest, and litigation. An example of mass mobilization was the 1963 March on Washington, sponsored by several civil rights organizations and featuring Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech; the 1955–56 Montgomery (Alabama) bus boycott, occasioned by the refusal of Rosa Parks to sit in the back of a city bus, was an example of both mass mobilization and nonviolent protest. The bus boycott actually triggered the creation, in 1957, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a very prominent civil rights organization. These actions were accompanied by litigation. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Inc. (known as the Inc. Fund), under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall, had, in the 1940s and early 1950s, begun to score successes in court. The Inc. Fund won cases to desegregate law schools and graduate education, but its most prominent victory was in Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” schools were in fact not equal. As discussed in chapter 4, other groups have used litigation to some advantage; those supporting abortion rights brought suit in Roe v. Wade18 as a way to eliminate abortion restrictions. While litigation has long been considered a last-ditch strategy and its efficacy has been questioned, the choice of litigation as a technique is an important example of venue shopping, in which groups pick the branch or agency of government that is most likely to give their concerns a sympathetic hearing.19 Protest marches are also a form of political participation. Protest marches are, of course, generally legal in democratic countries, and many large events, such as the March on Washington in 1963 gain legendary status. Even smaller events, such as the several anti-war rallies in 2003 before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a rally in Washington in 2009 to protest the Obama administration’s tax and health reform policies, and the protest marches that accompanied California voters’ adoption of Proposition 8, a measure designed to make gay and lesbian marriage illegal, can trigger great attention and can influence the immediate debate, even if they do not rise to historic status. Protests that turn violent or threaten violence may be labeled illegitimate by these causes’ opponents, and are often condemned by other supporters, because violent protest by definition breaks the law or threatens to do so. In the United States, where the rule of law is so highly valued, extralegal forms of political expression and protest are often condemned. Protest activities are inputs to the policy process that reflect the dissatisfaction of protestors and the people they represent. While the anti-war and civil rights protests of the 1960s may not have been the ultimate reason that the Vietnam War ended or that civil rights laws were passed, they were certainly part of the reason that policies changed. Many people attempt to delegitimize such protest activity if groups on the fringes of these events engage in the threat or reality of violence against people or property. But one cannot delegitimize an entire movement by the behavior of a few violent or rude protestors. In Seattle in 1999, where the World Trade Organization was meeting to discuss trade policy, many groups came together to peacefully 141 venue shopping. A term used by Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones to describe how groups choose which branch or agency of government to lobby or persuade; they will choose the venue where they believe their concerns will receive a sympathetic hearing. 142 astroturf group. An interest group that appears to have been formed by concerned citizens (that is, from the “grass roots”), but is actually sponsored by a larger interest such as a corporation or labor union. CHAPTER 5 protest various trade policies, but a small number of people engaged in violent acts, which led to heavy police response, all of which entirely overshadowed the meeting and made it unsuccessful. The violent actions of these protestors—even as they overwhelmed the meeting and the peaceful protests—should not justify ignoring the very real concerns that all participants in protest activity sought to highlight. In 2009, group action took what many believe to be an ugly turn during the several “town hall” meetings members of Congress held in their home districts during the August recess. Boisterous shouting and outlandish claims about the content of proposed reforms characterized several of these meetings. Some political commentators have noted that such behavior—often inspired by interest groups that some call Astroturf groups, or groups that appear to have emerged from the grassroots but in reality have not, crosses the line from the usual give-and-take of political debate and into the realm of bullying and intimidation. This is related to claims about the overall coarsening of public discourse in the United States, fueled by new media that elevate implausible stories—like the idea that President Obama was not born in Hawaii—into subjects fit for “mainstream” journalism. While it is important to place this sort of rhetoric and protest behavior into context—the sort of rhetoric used in the early days of the republic was surprisingly personal and coarse—it is also worthwhile to consider whether group activity has worsened the nature and function of policy making. And, as in the Seattle protests, we must not lose sight of underlying motivations: legitimate concern about the direction of public policy based on uncertainty about what direction policy will take. Political Parties Political parties serve important functions in the policy process.20 First, party labels provide voters with cues for voting. Voters know, in general, that Republicans tend to be more socially conservative and distrustful of “big government” than Democrats, while Democrats generally favor government programs that “level the playing field” for all people. Second, political parties provide a rough way of transmitting political preferences from the electorate to the elected branches. The congressional elections of 1994, for example, in which the Republican Party took control of both houses of Congress, may have reflected in some ways a shift in the preferences of some of the voting public; one might make a similar argument for the 2008 presidential and congressional elections, which suggested a shift in partisan affiliations and ideological self-identification. Third, political parties help elected officials and their supporters create packages of policy ideas that can be used to appeal to voters and then to shape legislation. During the 1960s and 1970s, this was not a particularly important role of the parties, but the Republican House leadership in the 1990s used its “Contract with America” as a way of packaging ideas and differentiating them from the policies proposed by the Democratic Party. The political parties are crucial to the organization of the legislative branch. Con- UNOFFICIAL ACTORS AND THEIR ROLES IN PUBLIC POLICY 143 gress and the state legislatures elect their leaders along party lines, and committee assignments and other positions are made based on party affiliation (and seniority within the party). In this way, a rough connection is made between the ideological preferences of the electorate and policy-making apparatus of Congress. Theoretically, this enhances democratic accountability, although the organization of Congress along party lines has been controversial, particularly when very senior members in very safe districts wield disproportionate power over policy. Think Tanks and Other Research Organizations The emergence of complex problems and the need for greater analytic capacity than that possessed by the federal and state governments has led to the growth of independent research organizations, often called think tanks.21 Some of the most famous think tanks include the Brookings Institution, the Cato Institute, the Urban Institute, the RAND Corporation, and the American Enterprise Institute. Employing scholars and policy experts, these organizations provide information that policy makers and other influential people can use to make “better” policy. Many think tanks are associated with a particular ideological position: Brookings and the Urban Institute are center-left, the American Enterprise Institute is somewhat more to the right, and Cato is libertarian. Others, like RAND, are more closely associated with their methodological style; RAND uses very sophisticated scientific methods and statistical techniques. The last three decades have seen the emergence of more overtly ideological think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, which is explicitly conservative in its orientation, and the Urban Institute, which is consciously liberal. Other think tanks seek to blur their ideological orientation while obviously advocating positions with an ideological slant. One such example, once used by a student in one of my public policy courses, is the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA). A review of NCPA’s reports and of its board of directors (listed on its Web site, http://www. ncpa.org) reveals a conservative orientation. This is not to say that this is the only group that blurs its ideological leanings or that one should be concerned with the formation of such groups. And, in fairness, the NCPA site provides links to other conservative and liberal think tanks and values robust policy discourse among all positions. But any consumer of analysis from think tanks should have a good sense of the ideological leanings of the organization in question, so that they can be aware of ideological commitments or blind spots in the analysis. Other think tanks and research organizations are associated with universities and provide valuable input into the policy process. Such centers tend to be more scholarly and less ideological than some think tanks, and state and local governments often rely on them for expert advice. Indeed, one of the missions of public institutions of higher learning is to provide such politically and socially relevant research to units of government. They are often good sources of information and ideas for research on important policy issues. think tanks. Independent research organizations, sometimes ideologically neutral but often identified with a particular political perspective. 144 CHAPTER 5 Communications Media social media. Internet-based systems of information gathering and publishing that rely on the actions of a broad range of people, rather than the actions of a few reporters, to find and promote information. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other systems are examples. muckrakers. The investigative journalists of the early twentieth century, whose work exposed problems such as tainted food, dangerous working conditions, and bogus medicines. The term was coined by Theodore Roosevelt. Our nation’s founders knew that the news media—at that time, the print media and the very young newspaper industry—were important to politics and public policy; indeed, many of the founders had written newspaper articles and pamphlets, and they had a keen appreciation for the value of a free press in a democracy. They believed in press freedoms because the news media can serve as a “fourth branch” of government, thereby providing a check on the other three branches. This is known as the “watchdog” function of the media, in which it is assumed that the news media provide citizens with information about government that people can use to support or challenge policy decisions. Journalists and academics have reinforced the belief that the news media play an important role in informing citizens about issues and what their government is doing about them.22 The notion of a free press extends well beyond words printed on paper. The “press” today consists of traditional outlets such as magazines, newspapers, radio and television, but also extends to Web sites, blogs, social networks, and the like, all of which are involved, in one manner or another, in providing the public with information about policy and politics. Of course, these new social media are not all about the weighty matters of our time—after all, neither are newspapers and television news. But they are alternative media that have already changed the way in which news is defined, gathered, written, distributed, and consumed, all of which matters in the policy process. There are many historic examples of the news media exposing some of the troubling activities and shortcomings of business and government. In the early 1900s, crusading journalists called muckrakers aligned with progressive publishers and interests to expose the problems of child labor, tainted foods, and useless medicines. Later in the twentieth century came the revelations of wrongdoing by President Nixon and his staff, as reported in a series of stories by journalists Carl Bernstein and Robert Woodward in The Washington Post from June 1972 until Nixon’s resignation in 1974.23 The Pulitzer Prize for public service—awarded to newspapers for exemplary efforts in providing the public with vital policy and politics information—is often awarded to newspapers reporting some sort of policy failure or official wrongdoing. For example, in 1989 the Anchorage Daily News won the prize “for reporting about the high incidence of alcoholism and suicide among native Alaskans in a series that focused attention on their despair and resulted in various reforms.” In 1990 a small newspaper, the Washington, North Carolina, Daily News, won the prize for its reports “revealing that the city’s water supply was contaminated with carcinogens, a problem that the local government had neither disclosed nor corrected over a period of eight years.” The italicized portions of these quotes highlight how the media, along with other actors in the policy process, are interested in public problems. Large newspapers often win these awards. The Washington Post won in 1973 for UNOFFICIAL ACTORS AND THEIR ROLES IN PUBLIC POLICY its coverage of Watergate and again in 2008 for “the work of Dana Priest, Anne Hull, and photographer Michel du Cille in exposing mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, evoking a national outcry and producing reforms by federal officials.” In each of these citations24I have italicized the passage that indicates how the reporting led to reforms of public policy. But newspapers and TV networks are, in a business sense, suffering greatly during the financial crisis that began in 2008 and as a result of significant changes in news media consumption patterns. The causes of their recent financial problems include a sharp drop in advertising revenue in the recession and the huge decrease in classified advertising revenue occasioned by new media outlets such as Craigslist and in display advertising sold through companies like Google and Yahoo!. It is tempting to blame “new media” and the Internet for the decline of newspapers, and it is true that the new media are greatly changing peoples’ news consumption habits. But the decline of newspapers predates competition from the Internet. Overall daily newspaper circulation in the United States peaked in 1984. The total number of papers has steadily declined since 1940. In the early twentieth century, many cities had two or more newspapers; today, most cities have only one newspaper, and those few smaller to medium sized cities with two papers have recently become one-newspaper towns. Seattle lost the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Denver lost the Rocky Mountain News, both in 2009. As this was written, Boston was in significant danger of losing its only paper, The Boston Globe. The Detroit Free Press—in a city hard hit by the recession—is currently delivering the paper three days a week to subscribers, while publishing for newsstand sales daily. While the number of newspapers and their circulation are all on the decline—and their financial viability is in even greater danger than the data in Figures 5.2 and 5.3 suggest—the major national newspapers remain important. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal continue to be read in policy-making circles; The Wall Street Journal is a particularly important and respected source of business and economic news, and its editorial and opinion pages are a bastion of conservative thought. USA Today is a national paper launched by the Gannett Company in 1982 as a consciously colorful, entertaining national newspaper. All of these papers have active Web sites that offer content undeliverable in print, such as audio reports, podcasts that can be listened to at one’s leisure, extensive photos essays, videos, and interactive graphics that illustrate important trends. Many newspapers also underwrite blogs and provide opportunities for comment, although the tone of much commentary is often mean-spirited and surprisingly uninformed. And many newspapers continue to serve important regional audiences, such as the Los Angeles Times or the Chicago Tribune, and may well be the dominant print outlets in their states, such as The State (Columbia, SC), the Providence Journal, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Anchorage Daily News, the Portland Oregonian, and the Newark (New Jersey) Star-Ledger. But even the Star-Ledger is struggling, and its loss would constitute the loss of the state’s major source of news about leg- 145 146 Figure 5.2 Number of U.S. Newspapers, 1940–2008 Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism, http://www.journalism.org/node/1134. Figure 5.3 Newspaper Circulation, Daily and Sunday, 1940–2008 Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism, http://www.journalism.org/node/1134. CHAPTER 5 UNOFFICIAL ACTORS AND THEIR ROLES IN PUBLIC POLICY 147 Figure 5.4 Number of Daily Viewers of Evening Network TV News, 1980–2006 Source: Project for Excellence in Journalism, The State of The News Media 2007, http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2007/ narrative_networktv_audience.asp?cat=2&media=5. islative activity in Trenton, the New Jersey state capital. And, as noted earlier, all of these newspapers have a Web presence as well. Indeed, during a natural disaster, as was seen in New Orleans’s paper, The Times-Picayune’s dogged post-Katrina reporting, the Web site may be the only way to disseminate “print” news, at least for a short time. Television remains, however, the primary source of news for those Americans who consume news, but it too has lost consumers and its advertising base. The flagship broadcast of most TV networks was the evening nightly news broadcasts. You—or your parents and grandparents—may remember iconic news anchors such as Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather on CBS, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, John Chancellor, and Tom Brokaw on NBC, and Howard K. Smith, Harry Reasoner, and Peter Jennings on ABC. Today, however, broadcast network anchors are not household names the way they once were, and ratings are far below their historic highs of the early 1980s. In 1980 over half of U.S. households watched network TV news; by 2008 that number had been halved, as shown in Figure 5.4, and the nightly TV news audience had grown to be much older, on average, than the overall adult population. The nightly broadcasts are now less prone to cover breaking news, and are more prone to cover health, economic, and lifestyle issues. This is because most seemingly time-sensitive stories are covered intensively by cable TV and, in recent years, on the Internet; because “hard news” is more expensive to cover; and because audiences seem to like soft news. Network news is still important because the audience remains reasonably large compared with cable news, and the older 148 CHAPTER 5 viewership is more likely to vote than younger people. From a business perspective, however, it worries networks that their older news audience is somewhat less attractive to advertisers than the younger viewers. Younger audiences, to the extent that they consume news programming, prefer cable TV sources such as CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News to the “big three” networks. For many years, CNN was the dominant cable TV news channel, but it has been joined by the unabashedly conservative Fox News Channel, and MSNBC, a joint venture of Microsoft and the NBC network, which leans in a liberal direction. Few congressional offices are without cable TV, and, because these channels cover breaking political and policy news, they are followed very closely. Other cable TV outlets also play an important role, even though their audiences are quite small. C-SPAN is a set of several networks—including a radio station in Washington—established as a public service by the cable TV industry. C-SPAN devotes a considerable amount of time to unedited recordings and broadcasts of House and Senate activity as well as news conferences and other events hosted by interest groups. Much of this activity seems tedious and incomprehensible to those with little interest in politics, but political junkies and policy entrepreneurs avidly watch these networks; in many congressional offices, at least one TV is tuned to a C-SPAN channel at all times. Radio was once a primary source of news, but TV has supplanted its importance as a news source. Nevertheless, some larger cities have all-news radio stations, which tend to broadcast local news with traffic, weather, and sports. On these stations the same stories repeat throughout the day, so twenty-four-hour news stations are not airing twenty-four hours of new information. Most stations on the AM band have turned to talk radio (including news, sports, and other subjects), which has some news content. But some claimed that these stations have been given over to partisan and polarizing commentators. A notable exception to the radio news trend is National Public Radio (NPR), which offers several hours of news every day to its listeners, and whose audience has grown substantially since the mid 1990s; its welleducated and politically-aware audience has made NPR a respected and influential news source. Policy elites tend to listen to NPR. Many public radio stations carry news programs from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), a strong source of international news. Much of NPR’s listener gains from 1998 to 2008 came at the expense of nightly television news.25 Entertainment broadcasting can influence politics and policy making, such as when MTV mounts its “Rock the Vote” campaigns to encourage youth voting or when ESPN covers a sports scandal. Indeed, recent survey research suggests that people who watch late-night television shows such as The Tonight Show, the Late Show with David Letterman, and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show are better informed on basic political events than average Americans.26 What is in the media and how it is presented are important inputs to the policy process and are the subjects of policy making itself. Now that we have reviewed the many sources of news—and the breathtaking UNOFFICIAL ACTORS AND THEIR ROLES IN PUBLIC POLICY change in the news business in just the last five years—it is important to turn our attention to what effect the news has on politics and public policy. The particular importance of the media is in its agenda-setting function; that is, they help to elevate some issues to greater public attention. This function is very important, particularly in the major national news outlets used by key decision makers, such as Fox News, CNN, and the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. These sources can highlight the importance of certain issues and provide ideas and feedback to elected officials and bureaucrats. In political science terms, we can say that greater levels of news coverage are closely (but not identically) associated with greater levels of institutional attention to public problems. Moreover, the media’s influence goes beyond its ability to pressure policy makers to pay attention to problems. The news media can expand issues from narrow groups to broader audiences, thereby creating more pressure for change, or, to use E.E. Schattschneider’s term, can “expand the scope of conflict.”27 Less powerful groups and interests can gain access to media attention when their stories are sufficiently c