National Deliberative Democracy

Abstract

In the United States, in most presidential elections, fewer than 50 percent of the eligible U.S. population votes; in non-presiden tial and off-year elections, turnout routinely falls to 25 or 30 per cent.1 Voting is, however, the tip of the iceberg. Even if people did vote, it is unlikely that they would be able to vote intelli gently as current levels of civic education are abysmal by any standard. In the 1989 political education survey only 29 percent of Americans could name their representative in Congress, only 25 percent could name their state's senators, only 34 percent cor rectly identified which branch of government declares war, only 24 percent correctly identified the state as the chief benefactor of education, only 12 percent correctly identified the percentage of black people in the country, and only 10 percent correctly iden tified the year of women's suffrage.2 This does not only apply to general political knowledge, but also current national politics. In 1989 only 3 percent of respondents could correctly identify Bush Senior's Attorney General. In 1977 only 3 percent of respon dents could correctly identify Carter's secretary of the treasury. In 1989 only 9 percent of respondents could correctly identify the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The list goes on and on.3 To form intelligent opinions on even moderately complex issues requires more information than this. Why are people this ignorant and apathetic in the face of hoards of readily available information? Anthony Downs offers the most convincing argument. He proposes that people suffer from rational ignorance, that the costs of getting informed: to do the legislative tracking, to learn all of the relevant politicians, to learn all the issues, etc., is enormous. Yet the benefits of learning this information are miniscule, practically nonexistent. The effect that single vote can have on an election is basically, zero; in national election Downs compares it to voting on whether the sun will come up tomorrow, no matter what you pick, it will not affect the answer.4 As Joseph Schumpeter says, who incidentally is one of the main defenders of liberalism, without the initiative that comes from immediate responsibility, ignorance will persist in the face of masses of information howev r complete and accurate.5 Do ns and Schumpeter implicitly state that in order to c nge this level of apathy and ignorance, in order to create more citizenry, one must change the underlying power structures that produce this ignorance. By making each person essentially individually powerless, we also encourage them to rational ignorance. In order to make them rationally knowledgeable we need to give the individual person the power to influence policy. Paralleling the decline in knowledge, community and com munity organizations have been on the decline since around 1950 in the United States. Between 1973 and 1994 the number of men and women who took any leadership role in any local organization was cut by more than 50 percent. In 1975, 64 per cent of Americans attended at least one club meeting, by 1999 that figure had fallen to 38 percent. Membership may be drop ping, but the number of active members is dropping even faster. Increasingly organizations just want your money, not your time, and do not foster the feelings of community once felt.6 Once again, systematic explanation has to be at the heart of this problem. Maybe, however, the lack of civic knowledge and loss of community by the public can be somehow made up by elected representatives. Maybe this implicit tradeoff is worth it if we could show that representatives can create such great policies that the public does not need to be informed. The problem is we can ot show that; in fact, we can show quite the opposite. Congress routinely passes what can only be called special inter est group legislation, legislation that offers no concrete benefit to the people generally, but great benefits to small constituen cies. The classic example is the mohair subsidy. In 1954 mohair was deemed a vital strategic commodity because it was used in military uniforms. As result the government subsidized wool p oducers with over $100 million in handouts (over half of which we t to 1 percent of producers.) Of course, it only made the industry less efficient. Over the course of time, the military stopped using natural wool in its uniforms, but the subsidies con tinue until this day. Or perhaps we could talk about cotton. There are only twenty-five cotton producers in the United States, but they receive subsidies worth $2 billion. Multiply this by 100,000 and you have sense of how much legislation passes that is bla tantly bad for the country at large.7 As the journalist Rauch says,