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cultures of voting
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Cultures of Voting
Michael Schudson Department of Communication University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093-0503 6l9/534-2370 mschudso@weber.ucsd.edu December, l996
Imagine yourself a voter in the world of colonial Virginia where George Washington, James Madison, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson learned their politics. As a matter of law, you must be a white male owning at least a modest amount of property. Your journey to vote may take several hours since there is only one polling place in the county. As you approach the courthouse, you see the sheriff, supervising the election. Beside him stand two candidates for office, both of them members of prominent local families. You watch the leading landowner and clergyman approach the sheriff and announce their votes in loud, clear voices. When your turn comes, you do the same. Then you step over to the candidate for whom you have voted, and he treats you to a glass of rum punch. Your vote has been an act of assent, restating and reaffirming the social hierarchy of a community where no one but a local notable would think of standing for office, where voting is conducted entirely in public view, and where voters are ritually rewarded by the gentlemen they favor. Move the clock ahead to the nineteenth century, as mass political parties cultivate a new democratic order. Now there is much more bustle around the polling place. The area is crowded with the banners of rival parties. Election day is the culmination of a campaign of several months and many barbecues, torchlight processions, and "monster meetings." If you were not active in the campaign, you may be roused on election day by a party worker to escort you on foot or by carriage. On the road, you may encounter clubs or groups from rival parties, and it would not be unusual if fisticuffs or even guns were employed to dissuade you from casting a ballot after all. If you proceed to the ballot box, you may step more lively with the encouragement of a dollar or two from the party, not a bribe but a tangible acknowledgment that voting is a service to your party. With so many citizens on the parties' election-day payrolls, it is not difficult to see voting itself as a kind of part-time employment for the party. The parties' ticket peddlers, stationed near the polling places, distribute to you and other voters pre-printed party tickets that you deposit in the ballot box without having to mark them in any way. You cast your ballot not out of a strong sense that your party offers better public policies; parties are more devoted to distributing offices than to espousing programs. Your loyalty is related more to comradeship than to policy, it is more an attachment than a choice, something like a contemporary loyalty to a high school or college and its teams. Voting is not a matter of assent but of affiliation. Turn, finally, to the Progressive era as reforms cleanse voting of what made it corrupt, in the eyes of reformers, and compelling, in the eyes of voters. Here you will find a world recognizable to American voters of our own day. Reformers, who objected to campaigns of spectacle rather than substance, pioneer "educational campaigns" that stress the distribution of pamphlets on the issues rather than parades of solidarity. They pass legislation to ensure a secret ballot. They enact voter registration laws. They help create an atmosphere in which it becomes more common and more respectable for traditionally loyal party newspapers to "bolt" from party- endorsed candidates. They insist on official state ballots with candidates of all parties listed rather than party-provided tickets; some states even develop their own voter information booklets rather than leaving political education up to the parties. In this Protestant Reformation of American voting, the political party's ability to reward its faithful declines with civil service reform; its ability to punish with social disapproval fades as the privacy of the voting booth grows secure. Even the party's capacity to attract attention declines as commercial forms of popular entertainment begin to offer serious competition. Voting, in this new context, was transformed. What was an act of affiliation became an act of individual autonomy. Political reforms insisted on disaffiliation as the voter came to the polling place. Where it had been standard practice for parties to convey people to the polls, it was now forbidden in many states. Where party workers had distributed tickets, voters now stood in line to receive their official ballot from state-appointed officials. Where parties mustered armies of paid election day workers, many states now outlawed the practice. Where electioneering efforts accompanied voters right up to the ballot box, new regulations created a moat of silence within so many feet of the polling station. Reformers sought to enable autonomous voters to cast their votes unpressured by outside forces. What these three scenes of voting reveal is that this thing -- the vote -- is a changeable piece of human social behavior. Political scientists, political historians, and op-ed critics routinely employ the vote as a measure of the changing health of American civic culture: if voter turn-out goes up, the polity gets a smile and a hand-shake and is told to come back in four years. If voter turn-out goes down, the doctors prescribe a new diet, more civic exercise, and fiscal anti- depressants. But if the meaning of the vote shifts as markedly as I suggest it does, voter turn-out may not be so reliable a symptom as this suggests. Social scientists over the past half century have paid little attnetion to American voting practices and electoral laws. The notable exceptions have almost all been policy-related and can be listed on one hand: (l) an important, but esoteric, debate about the relative role of electoral law changes and political economic changes in explaining the decline of voter turn-out l890-l920;1 contemporary debate over the impact of voter registration laws in depressing voter turn-out;2 Supreme Court decisions emerging from the Voting Rights Act of l965 concerning the constitutionality of legislative redistricting to increase the chances for minority group representation ("racial gerrymandering");3 contemporary explorations of alternative voting systems to encourage or enable better representation of minority groups;4 and work in comparative political systems concerning what kinds of electoral procedures best suit deeply divided and polarized societies.5 Also worth mention is the current effort of the New Party, just argued before the Supreme Court in December (Timmons v. Twin Cities Area New Party), to restore electoral laws that make "fusion tickets" possible.6 Sociology has contributed an enormous amount to the study of American politics, but there is a sense in which it contributed too much. That is, as political scientists learned to study political behavior rather than legal and political institutions, they learned also to turn to sociological variables to explain their findings. Class, race, age, ethnicity, gender, region and other measurable demographic features of the voting population -- including more subjective attributes like "partisanship," have preoccupied a great deal of political science. This brought new levels of sophistication in analyzing election results. But it also obscured something important about voting that has to do with the culture of voting. My claim is simply this: politics is culture, too. Politics is a set of symbols, meanings, and enacted rituals. These symbols, meanings, and rituals, moreover, have changed dramatically in the course of American history, so much so that comparing "voter turn-out" in l996 to voter turn-out in l896 or l796 is to compare apples and oranges. There has been of late a certain nostalgia, at least among academics, for the good old days of late nineteenth century American politics when (outside the South) voters turned out in droves, citizens read (or at least bought) newspapers that printed long speeches by political figures and reported party rallies in detail, and widespread participation in marches, barbecues, and torchlight processions indicated that people enjoyed politics.7 But what was politics? At the national level, it was a self- perpetuating game for organizing the federal patronage. It was self- perpetuating in that most of the financial support for campaigning came from a type of extortion: candidates for office were obliged to make financial contributions to the parties and people rewarded with federal jobs in the post office, customs house, and elsewhere were "assessed" 3 percent of their salaries for the privilege of office- holding. It was a "game" in that the parties did not generally stand for anything but getting into office. The national government was, in Theodore Lowi's terms, "distributive" rather than "regulative" in its functions, and so parties divided "over spoils, not issues," as Richard Hofstadter put it. As Theda Skocpol neatly terms it, this was "patronage democracy" -- and little else.8 The idea that politics should be about policies and that parties should provide some clarity on policy by lining up on different sides of "issues" that they help to define is not a general truth about the world. It is a particular view of that peculiar sphere of human activity we call "politics" (a sphere, of course, whose boundaries have shifted dramatically over time). The Founding Fathers did not share this perspective. Their understanding was, generally speaking, that the populace need not have and really should not have strong views about policies and issues. Voters should support candidates of sound character and of strong familiarity with local needs and preferences. But once elected, representatives should be agents free to listen to the arguments of other representatives familiar with other local needs and preferences and should use their best judgment to deliberate on these matters to arrive at the public good. "Politics" of the policy-making sort should normally happen only in the legislatures. For the founders, then, electing representatives was supposed to be an activity that appears, from a twentieth century perspective, almost apolitical. Like an election of captain of a sports team, election meant choosing esteemed leaders, not settling on policies. So it was consistent for the framers of the Constitution to both champion representative democracy and oppose any kind of political campaigning or "electioneering." They could both support repoublican governmental forms and oppose the organization of political parties and the expression of political views by private voluntary associations. Politics was occasionally about issues, to be sure. Most obviously, elections in the l850s and especially in the presidential campaign of l860 concerned above all else the question of the extension of slavery into the territories. But even this, perhaps, makes the general point: the Democrats and Whigs in the l840s and l850s had tried to keep slavery off the agenda and it took finally a new party, the Republicans, to break into national prominence riding the issue of "free soil." An issue-oriented politics exploded, then, but the post- Civil War years saw a rapid return to the politics of organization rather than ideology. The emphasis on issues emerged with the formation of parties and their effort to appeal to a mass electorate. However, it did not become part of the canonical understanding of what politics means until Mugwumps and Progressives challenged political parties at the end of the nineteenth century. Their efforts were symbolized and strengthened not only by the parties' move to conduct "campaigns of education" rather than campaigns of enthusiasm, but by reforms like the initiative and referendum, and by the increasing tendency of presidents from Theodore Roosevelt on to identify themselves with specific legislative programs. Most political commentary today operates within the culture of Progressivism and assumes what we might term the Progressivist fallacy -- that politics equals policy. This is one view of politics. But other views not only have been powerful in the past but persist in other domains of our social worlds today. Think of electoral activity that has no evident relationship to policy of any sort -- elections of team captains, elections in schools of class presidents or student councils, elections in fraternities and sororities, most elections of school boards and many elections of local government, elections in professional associations, elections in the "Sociology of Culture" section. Sometimes candidates for office in such elections feel obliged by Progressivist ideology to concoct some pseudo-policy views, but only under the most unusual circumstances would any voter in these elections make a decision on the basis of such statements. This raises questions about what kind of a human activity is "the political." Certainly some of the organizations at the heart of the political are strange sociological beasts, none moreso than the political party. In the United States, the leading parties do not require membership dues or attendance at meetings or anything other than, at most, a declaration of affinity (formally required in voter registration in some states but not in others). The parties have generally had very slight ideological coherence. They have been machines for competing for office and for organizing elections and they have evoked a surprisingly high level of loyalty, even as, simultaneously, citizens who pledge allegiance to one party or another are inclined to accept the widespread view that parties stand in the way of a truly self-governing democracy. I point out the peculiarity of our sense of formal, institutionalized political life without offering any clear answer to the question of what kind of a human experience "politics" is. But the general tendency of my historicist approach to these matters, clearly, is to say that there will be differences over time in what constitutes the "political" for people, socially constructed differences. I see real opportunity for sociologists to take up questions of the human subjectivity and the symbolic constitution of politics, topics that political science has, for the most part, failed to recognize.
Michael Schudson is Professor of Communication and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. His e-mail address is schudson@ucsd.edu. This article draws on research that will appear more fully in a forthcoming work (Free Press, l998) tentatively entitled, "The Good Citizen: Three (or Four) Eras of American Public Life." This article originally appeared in CULTURE vol. ll (Winter l997), the newsletter of the Sociology of Culture Section of the American Sociological Association.
1See the exchange among Walter Dean Burnham, Philip Converse, and Jerrold Rusk in American Political Science Review 68 (September, l974). 2See Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Why Americans Don't Vote (New York: Pantheon, l989). 3The landmark study is Abigail M. Thernstrom, Whose Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, l987). 4The most celebrated, if widely misunderstood, work on this topic is by Lani Guinier. See Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority (New York: Martin Kessler Books, Free Press, l994). 5Arendt Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, l977) and Arendt Lijphart, Democracies (New Haven: Yale University Press, l984). 6See New York Times, National Edition, Dec. 5, l996, Al2. 7The best account of late nineteenth century campaign practices is Michael McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, l986). Another fine account, for the elections of l864 and l868, is Jean Baker, Affairs of Party (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, l983). Both accounts are colored by the hope, which I do not share, that the nineteenth century success in generating political enthusiasm might offer clues to remedying the political malaise of our own time. 8Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, l948) p. l69; Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, l992) p. 72; and Theodore Lowi, "American Business, Public Policy, Case-Studies, and Political Theory," World Politics l6 (l964) 677- 7l5.
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