This chapter is taken from the forthcoming book By Invitation Only: The Rise of Exclusive Politics in the United States, by Steven E. Schier, c 2000 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Posted here by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
. . . the critical element for the health of a democratic order consists in the beliefs, standards and competence of those who constitute the influentials, the opinion-leaders, the political activists in the order. . . . If a democracy tends toward indecision, decay and disorder, the responsibility rests here, not with the mass of the people.-- V. O. Key (1961, 558)
American politics today is plagued by paradox. In an era when direct, participatory democracy seems ever more popular, the public dismayed at its consequences. The popularity of what James Madison termed "direct rule by the people" is everywhere evident. Polls reveal the public supports abolition of the undemocratic electoral college in selecting presidents. Direct policymaking by initiative and referendum thrives in many states (Cronin, 1989, 51). Interest groups enjoy a great vogue as a means of popular participation, their number mushrooming in recent decades (Baumgartner and Leech, 1998, 103). One might expect this wave of participation would produce greater popular content with government and its operations.
Not so. Certain forms of direct popular participation in government have become more fashionable, while popular disaffection from government has grown as well. Table I charts the rise of interest groups in Washington and the growing number of Americans who believe government is "controlled by a few large interests." Why would this perception grow as the number of interest groups rose greatly and the number of Americans joining and active in groups grew as well? The interest group world of Washington in the mid-twentieth century indeed featured "a few large interests" -- big business, big labor, veterans' organizations and farm groups had far fewer rivals for access and influence than they have now (Baumgartner and Leech, 1998, 110-111). Times have changed. A national survey in 1989 found that 79 percent of Americans are members of groups and 48 percent reported affiliation with a group that takes political stands (Verba, Scholzman and Brady, 1995, 63, 50). Today, "groups 'r' us" (Rauch, 1994, 48). Over a thousand corporate trade organizations now have Washington headquarters. Environmental groups, virtually nonexistent in DC in 1950, are numerous and influential. The largest membership group represented in Washington today, the American Association or Retired Persons with over thirty million members, did not even exist in 1950. The 1970s witnessed the formation of many public interest and social justice groups and movements, many still very active in Washington. In 1959, political scientist Charles Lindblom claimed that "every important interest has its watchdog" in policymaking (Lindblom, 1959, 85). That is truer now than when he wrote it. Yet the public emphatically does not see it that way. Why?
[ TABLE I HERE ]
Table I illustrates another odd paradox of our politics. Despite all this participatory effort, increasing proportions of Americans believe that elected officials do not care what they think. This perception collides with the scholarly picture of officeholders continually "running scared" of popular opinion and attempting to be as responsive as possible (King, 1997). Table II adds a further dimension to this curious situation. Alongside the growth in groups and rising level of public education is a drooping trend in voter turnout. Political scientists have long held that higher education promotes a person's likelihood of voting (Campbell, et. al., 1960; Nie, Junn and Stehlik-Barry, 1996). Rising education levels may stimulate group activity, but certainly not voting. Why not? Political scientists have sound explanations for the rise of interest groups and the decline of voting despite rising education levels, as future chapters make clear (Nie, Junn and Stehlik-Barry, 1996).
[ TABLE II HERE ]
This book focuses upon a broader phenomenon evident in the data above, a phenomenon consistent with many recent findings of political science research. Over the past thirty years, political activists and operatives have perfected activation strategies for efficiently stimulating participation by the parts of the public most likely to become active for them given an appropriate stimulus. Campaigns target the undecided and less than firmly committed voters with ads and phone calls in the final weeks of an election campaign. Interest groups through phone and mail contact those members most likely to respond with activism. The message delivered through these strategies seeks to influence an incentive held dear by a political decisionmaker: reelection, or power over legislation, budgets and policy implementation. The result is a complex and frequently tawdry battle among a multitude of national groups and officeholders. Richard Neustadt describes current Washington policymaking as
Warfare among elites, waged since the 1960s in the name of causes, not compromises, fueled by technology, manned by consultants, rousing supporters by damning opponents, while serving the separate interests of particular candidates and groups at times. . . . They try incessantly to win a given election,to promote or to stop a given legislative provision, regulation, appointment,contract, or executive decision in diplomacy and defense (Neustadt, 1997, 187).
Activation strategies occur because elites -- officeholders, campaign consultants, interest group operatives -- have limited resources. They cannot contact everyone in the nation about their agendas. Given limited time, money and expertise, it is only rational to identify likely supporters as accurately as possible and stimulate them to help you as efficiently as you can. Much of our national politics results from activation strategy. In Washington, everyone is doing it. Who does it best greatly determines who governs.
Activation strategies contrast with an earlier form of inducing popular participation, electoral mass mobilization by political parties. This mode predominated during election campaigns during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, declining greatly in presence and effectiveness after 1950. Party mobilization involved geographically based, partisan appeals for voters. Party organizations sought power through elections, and offered voters a variety of material, social and issue benefits in return (Wilson, 1995, 30-56). Traditional partisan mobilization was a crude tool, operating via personal and print communication. Precise targeting technologies were not yet invented. Unable to efficiently identify those most likely to become active, party leaders blanketed entire neighborhoods with partisan appeals. Instead of narrowcasting to the active, parties broadcast to the masses. Parties sought to lower information costs for low-knowledge voters by advocating a simple party-line vote. Many voters willingly obliged, producing higher turnout than strategic activation has produced in recent decades (Ginsberg and Shefter, 1990, 3). Party elites had to encourage rule by popular majorities in order to gain power.
Activation strategies, in contrast, mobilize strategic minorities while cloaking the effort in a misleading guise of popular rule. The "legitimating arguments" come, as we will see, from the proponents of participatory democracy. Washington operatives use strategic activation of their people as an example of direct rule by the people, conflating a faction of the public mobilized by an elite with majority opinion. This is not misleading if their people in the aggregate resemble the people. They usually do not.
THE PATTERNS OF ACTIVATION STRATEGIES
Those who respond to activation strategies are often an unrepresentative lot. Only a small fraction of the public makes up America's activist population. For many interest groups, strategic activation simply involves "rounding up the usual suspects" who by making theirs views heard in government give the illusion of widespread popular sentiment. Most of these activists come from an elite stratum of the public whose members are far more politically sophisticated than the average citizen. Activists have much more knowledge of and interest in politics than their fellow citizens.
W. Russell Neuman found the public divides into three groups with varying degrees of political sophistication. Twenty percent of the public are "a self-consistent and unabashedly apolitical lot." (Neuman, 1986, 170). The apoliticals very seldom vote and are not ashamed of their apathy. Most citizens are found among the seventy-five percent comprising Neuman's "mass public" who are "marginally attentive to politics and mildly cynical about the behavior of politicians, but they accept the duty to vote, and do so with fair regularity" (1986, 170). Those most likely the targets of activation strategies by interest groups are the activists, comprising only five percent of the adult population with uniquely high levels of political involvement and sophistication (1986, 170).
Other recent studies reveal the unrepresentative characteristics of political activists. Steven Rosenstone and John Mark Hansen find that "the pool of political activists is enormously unrepresentative of the population, no matter how many people are involved" (1993, 235). The authors identify "governmental activists," those who attempt to influence governmental officials, and "electoral activists," those who are active in elections beyond voting. Both groups are much more educated and affluent that those who are less active. The political activity with by far the lowest education and income skew is voting, much less unequal in its incidence than attending meeting, writing legislators, working on campaigns or attempting to influence the voting of others (1993, 234-237). A landmark study of political participation by Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman and Henry Brady found a similar pattern. The authors create a measure of "participatory distortion" for a variety of activities. This compares average characteristics of activists who engage in various political activities with the average of the public at large (1995, 468). Corroborating Rosenstone and Hansen, the authors discover that voting produces the least distortion, but campaign contributions the most.
The evidence is clear. No other political activity is a representative of the public will as voting. One reason why other activities -- writing letters, attending protests, joining groups, giving money -- are less representative is that they result from strategic activation. Verba, Schlozman and Brady find that whites and high-income individuals report many more invitations to participate in politics than blacks, Latinos and low-income individuals (1995, 150-153). Though American has a profusion of interest groups, the pattern of activism skews the resources of groups towards advantaged individuals, whatever their issue agenda.
Rosenstone and Hansen present the underlying logic for this pattern of strategic activation. One must understand the costs and benefits individuals perceive when deciding whether to participate. All of us are members of "social networks" involving friends, family, neighbors and co-workers. Since all of us seek acceptance from fellow network members, we are inclined to take cues from them. Social networks share the cost of acquiring political information and create social expectations for political participation or nonparticipation. Groups and campaigns try to spur activism directly through contacting individuals and indirectly by encouraging network members to encourage participation among fellow networkers. Groups and campaigns, given their limited resources, try to induce activism as efficiently as possible.1
Given this drive for efficiency, Rosenstone and Hansen list the tendencies of activation strategies. First, campaigns and groups are most likely to contact people they know. The cost is low, and probability of success is high. Second, people at the center of social networks are more likely strategic targets. They are easier to identify and more likely to be effective. Third, those most effective at producing political outcomes are more likely strategic targets. Fourth, those likely to respond by participating are more likely strategic targets (1993, 30-31). This logic produces the skew in activism revealed in the preceding paragraphs. The logic of strategic activation produces a self-sustaining stratification of political activity in which a small proportion of the public is effectively and constantly induced to participate directly in politics. The current vogue of participatory democracy is both a consequence and a cause of this activation syndrome.
THE PARTICIPATORY JUSTIFICATION
The term "participatory democracy" can encompass a variety of political arrangements. A more participatory democracy can result from increased use of reforms such as initiative, referendum and recall and through more "grassroots" political activity. Some go further and argue that new technology permits direct popular voting on policy as the norm in government (Budge, 1996). Both incremental and radical participatory reformers draw inspiration from Jean Jacques Rousseau, a prominent early participatory theorist. In his famous Social Contract, Rousseau argued that the people as a whole are sovereign and all laws must flow ultimately from assembled meetings of the people: "The sovereign, having no other force than the legislative power, acts only by laws; and since the laws are only authentic acts of the general will, the sovereign can only act when the people is assembled" (Rousseau, 1978, 98).
Rousseau has more in common with incremental rather than radical participatory reformers. He favored daily rule by an elected "aristocracy" with occasional popular meetings to ratify the results (1978, 86). Current advocates of participatory democracy tend to share Rousseau's aversion of representative government, which he termed an inadequate substitute for the sovereign "general will" of the people (1978, 101-104). Representatives cannot represent the general will, because that only resides in the people and sovereignty cannot be transferred (1978, 102-4). A similar critique of representative government informed the thinking of another major source of current participatory thinking, the progressive movement of early twentieth century America.
Progressives argued that the corrupt behavior of elected representatives in certain cities and states amounted to an abuse of sovereignty. The source of corruption lay in the party machines that used control of government as a means to enrich their supporters (Mackenzie, 1996; Ginsburg and Shefter, 1992). The progressive movement created a new electoral regime to weaken party control and strengthen participatory democracy. Civil service reform ended government employment through partisan patronage. The secret ballot and registration requirements lessened party-sponsored fraud and coercion at the polls. Primary elections weakened party organization control of nominations. Replacing party column ballots with office-bloc and nonpartisan ballots increased the difficulty of following partisan cues in the voting booth. The initiative, referendum and recall allowed for popular, participatory circumvention of party-controlled legislatures (Cronin, 1989, 38-59). The widespread adoption of these reforms lessened partisan mobilization and boosted participatory mechanisms that would encourage the advent of activation strategies.
Leading progressive reformers justified their actions in the name of direct, participatory democracy. Governor Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin advocated the direct primary based on a simple normative principle: "Go back to the first principle of democracy. Go back to the people." (Lovejoy, 1941, 36) Governor Hiram Johnson of California claimed the initiative, referendum and recall "give to the electorate the power of action when desired, and they do place in the hands of the people the means by which they may protect themselves." (Lee and Berg, 1976, 98) Individual voters could protect themselves from the predations of corrupt parties and interests that can flourish in representative institutions. By making participation more complex and difficult, however, progressive reformers increased the cost of mobilizing popular majorities and made rule by activated minorities more possible and thus more widely attempted. Chapter two develops this point further.
The turbulence of the 1960s brought another wave of participatory fervor into American politics with the rise of many "movements" of aggrieved citizens - women, gays and lesbians, African Americans, and opponents of the Vietnam war. Many political theorists, sympathetic to these movements wrote in support of participatory democracy. Jack Walker argued that such movements help society in many ways; they "break society's log jams . . . prevent ossification of the political system . . . prompt and justify major innovations in social policy and economic organization." (Walker, 1970, 244)
Carol Pateman, a leading participatory theorist of the time, admitted that participatory democracy asks much of individual citizens, but that the results of participation can be grand: "One might characterize the participatory model as one where maximum input (participation) is required and where output includes not just policies (decisions) but also the development of the social and political capacities of each individual, so that there is 'feedback' from output to input." (Pateman, 1970, 43) Participation produces more able, better citizens, an argument Pateman shares with John Stuart Mill and other earlier democratic theorists (Mill, 1910, 217). Pateman's study of worker self-management in Yugoslavia led her to conclude that participatory mechanisms increase citizen knowledge and efficacy. Since participation makes better citizens without threatening regime stability, more participatory democracy is needed (Pateman, 1970, 49).
Benjamin Barber continued the theoretical defense of participatory democracy into the late twentieth century. Barber argued that American citizens were apathetic because they were powerless, not powerless because they were apathetic. Our "thin democracy" of representative institutions and elite interest groups produced this powerlessness (Barber, 1984, 3-26). The antidote is "strong democracy" incorporating progressive participatory structures and more: national town meetings, neighborhood assemblies, office holding by lottery, national initiative and referendum, and other reforms (1984, 273-298). The goal is to create more knowledgeable, active and public-spirited citizens: "Only in strong democratic community are individuals transformed. Their autonomy is preserved because their vision of their own freedom and interest has been enlarged to include others; and their obedience to the common force is rendered legitimate because their enlarged vision enables them to perceive in the common force the working of their own wills" (Barber, 1984, 232).
Barber's vision is indeed beguiling, but it must be examined in light of the realities of America's current system of strategic activation. Participatory theorists ask more of citizens in order that citizens might contribute more the quality of our collective political life. Participatory contributions require time and information gathering and processing costs. For a minority of more educated and informed citizens, the information-gathering costs of participation are lower. Further, the benefits of participation will not be valued equally by citizens. More educated and informed -- "properly socialized" -- citizens will value the personal benefits of participation more than those who have been less inculcated with civic virtues. The market for participation is very cost-sensitive. This sensitivity gives rise to activation strategies. These strategies don't aim at the improvement of the commons as a primary goal (and as participatory theorists would wish), but instead serve to further narrower group or campaign goals.
The arguments of participatory theorists, however, give a grand normative justification to the pursuit of meaner goals through strategic activation.
Jeremy Richardson explains some broader implications of the market specialization resulting from political activation:
Just as consumer products and services have become more differentiated andspecialized in response to more sophisticated consumer demands, . . . participation in the political process is increasingly linked to specialized or 'attentive' publics, specialized issues and specialized participatory organizations. This trend may not be solely due to a more sophisticated and better-educated citizenry. Just as with products and services in the marketplace, there are entrepreneurs who seek market opportunities for political participation. New issue-related organizations emerge, not just because of existing public concern about an issue, but also because organizational entrepreneurs emerge who see opportunities to create new organizations (and careers for themselves) by mobilizing public support and funding for interest groups around new issues which they place on the political agenda. . . . These new "entrepreneur-driven" organizations are increasingly important in setting the political agenda to which political parties, as well as governments and legislatures, have to respond. (Richardson, 1995, 124)
These are not the results foreseen or desired by participatory advocates. The current plethora of entrepreneurs and issue-based organizations exists alongside a larger group of passive citizens. Entrepreneurs carve up the public into targets of activation opportunity, rather than mobilizing most citizens into a fully participatory democracy. An exploration of the origins of activation strategies reveals their participatory shortcomings.
THE ORIGINS OF ACTIVATION STRATEGIES
Why the widespread use of activation strategies at the end of the twentieth century? Their onset is not a mysterious dispensation of fate. Instead, it became rational and efficient for individuals to pursue opportunities for political influence through the narrow scope of activation instead of the broader framework of traditional partisan mobilization. Thee large phenomena account for the shift: (1) the decline of party influence in the electoral process and among voters, (2) the proliferation of interest groups since 1960, and (3) transformations in the technology of politics that greatly contributed to (1) and (2). Together these changes created an environment in which entrepreneurial politicians and group leaders relentlessly activate fragments of the public to vote and press demands upon government.
Over the last hundred years, elections in America gradually transformed from party-dominated to candidate-dominated competitions. Old-style party mobilization grew from party dominance over the key campaign resource of the time: labor. Government patronage delivered armies of party workers during the election season. "The capacity of party chairmen to offer government jobs in return for party support was a major resource relied upon by party organizations." (Rose, 1997, 53) The passage of civil service reform at the national, state and local levels, beginning with the national Pendleton Act in 1883, gradually drained away from parties the control of labor essential for organizational muscle in pre-electronic election campaigns. The advent of the direct primary, a participatory reform mentioned above, was another major blow to party electoral power. By losing the power to bestow nominations, party organizations lost control over their candidates. Candidates, in turn found themselves individually responsible for attracting voters. "The introduction of the direct primary encouraged candidates to develop their own campaign organizations, or pseudo-parties, for contesting primary elections." (Herrnson, 1988, 26) By mid-century, primaries were ubiquitous in elections for state and national office. Party organizations found themselves possessing few of the desirable resources for electoral competition and no controlling authority over the identity of their candidates. The national campaign finance legislation of the 1970s reinforced this pattern by sharply limiting party spending on behalf of candidates and structuring legal fundraising and accounting for contributions around the campaigns of individual candidates (Sabato, 1984, 276-286).
In addition to declining power in the electoral process, parties also suffered in the hearts and minds of voters. Beginning in mid-century, voters began to split partisan tickets more frequently. The percentage of self-identified independents rose from 23 percent in 1952 to 33 percent in 1996 (Center for Political Studies). Further, the proportion of Americans having no views about either of the major parties grew steadily in the late twentieth century (Wattenberg, 1996, 50-73). With depleted resources, parties also found voters less willing to consider or accept partisan messages. Individual candidates, ever sensitive to voter preferences, responded by running campaigns with less partisan and more individualist themes.
In the 1980s, national and state parties adapted to their reduced circumstances, by enhancing their role as service providers for their candidates (Coleman, 1996, 371). Party organizations raised money and sub-contracted for polling and advertising on behalf of their candidates. By targeting money and services strategically, the national parties could maximize their impact on elections. This involved helping most in the small group of hotly competitive House and Senate races, while remaining only minimally involved in other races (Herrnson, 1988, 109). Such activities kept party organizations relevant in electoral competition, but hardly dominant. State and national parties provide a far smaller share of campaign resources to their candidates than they did one hundred years ago, and they have far less control over who runs under their party labels.
One major consequence is the steady decline in the number of people who report being contacted by a party during an election campaign (Rosenstone and Hansen, 1993, 162-177). This contributed to declining participation in elections.
At the same time, however, increasing numbers of Americans reported contacting governmental officials. While electoral politics shrivels, governmental politics thrives (Rosenstone and Hansen, 1993, 71-125). This paradox becomes less puzzling when one examines the second force behind the rise of activation strategies, the proliferation of interest groups.
To understand the group proliferation in Table I of this chapter, it helps to comprehend the reasons why groups form. Any explanation must begin with Mancur Olson's landmark work, The Logic of Collective Action (1965). Olson argued that when individuals seek material benefits in the form of collective (nondivisible) goods from government, group organization is often difficult because of the "free rider" problem. That is, individuals may not join the group because they will receive the collective good anyway if the group forms and succeeds. This spawns entrepreneurial activity by group leaders to provide selective benefits for joiners (or impose selective costs upon those who don't join). Hence the abundance of large membership interest groups offering special benefits (travel tours, magazines, insurance) for members. Similar entrepreneurial activity results in attracting that smaller group of individuals motivated press their views about ideology or particular issues. Satisfying these "expressive" goals has become an entrepreneurial activity of recent decades (Salisbury, 1990, 210). The rise of many movement and cause groups in myriad issue areas attests to the success of entrepreneurs offering expressive benefits.
But why now? What prompted the burgeoning of entrepreneurial group formation in recent decades? G. Calvin Mackenzie (1996, 59-60) provides a roster of likely reasons. Three major structural transformations of society and politics in the mid-twentieth century helped to create the more proximate causes of group formation. First, the rise of an education and affluent middle class created a huge set of consumers of group benefits. Activating more knowledgeable and affluent citizens is easier because they get the message more readily and have more resources to devote to supporting the message. The costs of activation became lower, contributing to its proliferation.
Second, party decline, discussed above, provided new opportunities for entrepreneurial activity. With weakened party identification, entrepreneurs could more readily create commitments for group-based goals, and find more resources to do so with the decline of party dominance of electoral resources. Third, new technologies made communication with prospective members less costly -- quicker and more efficient. While print and personal conversation dominated during the early partisan era, now multiple communication and targeting technologies allow entrepreneurs to efficiently locate potential supporters and make the pitch to them. Technological change is such a major force propelling activation that it receives extended treatment below.
Given party decline, widespread education and affluence, and new technology, more specific political circumstances helped to drive group growth. National government involvement in domestic problems expanded in the 1960s, creating new issue areas ripe for group formation -- environmental, urban, and poverty issues among them. Concurrently, and in part because of governmental expansion (Costain, 1992), new movements of previously marginalized groups -- African Americans, Latinos, women, and gays and lesbians -- further broadened the issue agenda of national politics. With more issues gaining popular currency, additional group formation became possible. This wave of entrepreneurial activity among group and movement leaders lowered the information costs for future entrepreneurs by showing them how group formation was done -- how to target with which technology and message. Mackenzie calls this the effect of "contagion" (Mackenzie, 1996, 60). The spiral of group organization, one begun, fed on itself.
Under this onslaught, some established, large organizations began to suffer fragmentation. Heintz, Lauman, Nelson and Salisbury (1993) find that farm groups fragmented in the 1970s and 1980s into more specialized organizations. Why? "Larger associations tend to take positions that minimize internal conflict, thus encouraging specialized interests to develop independent strategies" (1993, 376). "Peak" business organizations such as the National Organization of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce found themselves advocating along side over a thousand specialized business trade associations by the 1990s.
By the end of the century, an issue-oriented citizen desiring to participate in national politics had no shortage of interest group options. And groups might seem more a more appealing venue than political parties. "Parties offer a wide-ranging program of policies which may include some policies to which the individual is opposed or at least unsympathetic. An alternative is to join or donate resources to a pressure group . . . espousing either a single-issue or a related set of issues - thus avoiding the need to accept policies and programs to which one is opposed" (Richardson, 1995, 126). Group entrepreneurs perfected a variety of grassroots recruitment and activation strategies --employing material and expressive incentives -- to identify and utilize potential supporters (Facheaux, 1994).
Changes in technology, a third big structural change, shaped the particular activation behaviors by entrepreneurs in the less partisan, more group dominated environment. Partisan politics of decades ago thrived on the military-style mobilization of party workers in election campaigns. Reformers took this control of labor in elections away from party organizations, and new technologies arose that could be widely dispersed and employed in elections and in lobbying government. Technology made money more important than labor in elections, and primary nominations made individual candidates the central money-raisers of the new campaign system (Lowi and Ginsburg, 1998, 289-301). As independent entrepreneurs, candidates began hiring their own pollsters, direct mail firms, advertising consultants with the money they raised. The primary campaign expense became TV time for aids tailored carefully to the sensibilities of "swing" voters.
The "few large interests" that dominated Washington in mid-century suffered a similar fate to that of party organizations. Traditional lobbying (Hrebnar, 1997, 79-117) involved personal contact between established Washington interest representatives --usually lawyers -- and lawmakers, bureaucrats and administration officials. This highly skilled labor was in relatively short supply and expensive to purchase. New technology changed dramatically the arts of advocacy in Washington, and greatly lessened the advantages of traditional lobbying. Direct mail could target possible members and communicate with supporters, as could satellite television, phone calls, web pages and faxes. Activating loyal members to directly contact their legislators proved more effective than merely hiring Washington lawyers. Washington law firms had to adapt to the new technology and grassroots tactics it spawned. Many now use grassroots tactics (Plebani, 1997).
The new technology lowers the costs of activation. Identifying supporters and communicating with them is easier than ever before in national politics. The technology is also widely available and transportable. One can arrange state-of-the-art communication from anywhere in the country. All this should stimulate group formation and the uses of activation. With ever more activators operating, competitively successful activation becomes more difficult, particularly when each individual candidate or organization has limited resources. Hence activation involves narrow, precise targeting of the public in order to be successful. Gone are the days when large partisan organizations could monopolize resources for mobilization and engage the general public broadly at election time. The new modus operandi involves slicing surgically into the public to bring out just the right segment to vote in an election or make a spiel to government. The content of such messages is crucial. That content has changed in recent decades as citizen attitudes altered.
CAMPAIGN AND INTEREST GROUP MESSAGES
Successful activation turns mainly on accurate identification of the appropriate audience and appropriate tone and content for that audience. Candidates and interests use messages that they estimate are most likely to succeed with their targeted segments of the public. Hitting the right target with limited resources involves differentiation between those more or less likely to become active. Activation thus serves to reinforce the stratification of public activity and knowledge about politics. The intended audience also must find the tone and content of the message persuasive. Activation also reflects the configuration of attitudes about politics, politicians and the political system among the target audience. Those attitudes are often post-partisan, cynical and critical of established authority.
The core logic of activation involves nudging those with the greatest marginal propensity to become active into motion. This is the part of the public with the greatest motivation to learn about politics. Motivation to learn results from a constellation of traits: interest in politics, a personal sense of political efficacy (a belief that activism is worthwhile and produces benefits) and a sense of civic duty (Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996, 214). Education is the key facilitator of such motivation. Education reduces the costs of gaining and processing political information in several ways. More educated people can sort through relevant information with less effort, and receive socialization that inculcates in them a sense of the benefits of political knowledge (Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996, 190).
Another key effect of education is its placing of individuals in social networks of similarly educated individuals (Nye, 1996, 11-39). Some networks are closer to political life than others. Norman Nie, Jane Junn and Kenneth Stehlik-Barry identified a measure of "network centrality," a simple additive scale of how many political leaders and member of the media are known by individuals questioned in a national survey. They found 48 percent of the public knew none, but 19 percent know three or more (1996, 48). Education correlated positively with network centrality (1996, 49), and voting and other forms of political participation were stimulated by network centrality (1996, 67-68).
By this evidence, about one-half of the public are difficult candidates for activation. They rank lower in education and occupy social networks far from politics and power. Any activation strategy with such a group is likely to be high cost and involve modest results. Within the nineteen percent in more central networks, activation can work much more effectively. Careful targeting, however, is crucial with this elite group because they are likely to have fixed views on a number of issues -- only a fraction of them may be susceptible to a particular activation message from a candidate or interest group. Interest groups use grassroots strategies to hit those in networks most inclined to participation. Campaigns are more likely to target moderate-knowledge voters who are undecided. One cannot understand the messages without examining the precise part of the stratification pyramid of political interest and motivation targeted by them.
A broader aspect of activation entails the political atmospherics surrounding the creation of appropriate messages. The "political environment" helps to shape the substance of activation (Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996, 216). At century's end, certain attitudinal tendencies of the American public structure that environment. Partisanship among the public is weak. Voters split tickets frequently, the number of strong partisans in the electorate has declined, and a growing proportion of Americans has no feelings - positive or negative - about political parties (Wattenberg, 1996, 58-72). Parties are losing their association with candidates and major public issues in the public mind (Wattenberg, 1996, 89). Partisan appeals are far less useful for candidates than in the past, and interests have little incentive to couch their message in explicitly partisan terms. The precise targeting of activation permits campaigns and interests to tap other targets of motivation than the broad and increasingly weak labels of partisan affiliation.
The public also evidences high levels of political alienation, lacking trust in politicians and political institutions. Joseph Nye, Philip Zelikow and David King suggest several reasons for the rise of citizen distrust: Vietnam and Watergate, the ideological polarization of partisan elites, the rise of adversarial national media and television's contribution to declining partisanship and its negative political advertising (1997, 269-270). The authors also credit the rise of "post-materialist" political values with increasing popular alienation.
Post-materialist values, identified and tracked in forty-three nations by political scientist Ronald Inglehart over several decades, include "elite challenging" political values (Inglehart, 1997, p. 221). As more citizens begin to take prosperity for granted, attitudes critical of conventional political authority arise. Individuals look beyond immediate material concerns and seek self-expression and self-realization as personal goals. They become critical of the traditional participatory forms of partisanship and voting, and seek newer participatory venues. This is particularly the case with highly educated, high-income individuals - those most prone to hear the siren song of activation in the first place. They have higher incomes but not higher perceptions of subjective well being, making them a receptive audience for negative political ads and grassroots activation by interest groups. Inglehart finds rising levels of political interest and newer forms of political participation across many advanced democracies in recent decades, evidence of a growing post-material political style (Inglehart, 1997, 293-323).
Audience characteristics, then, shape activation messages. Political motivation is clearly stratified, making identification of target publics possible at the middle (by candidates) and high end (by interests) of the motivation continuum. Among those likely to vote or participate beyond voting, partisan messages are less useful. Alienation from government makes negative messages about candidates and government more successful. Rising post-material attitudes offer rich opportunities for those who seek to activate higher income and education individuals for participation beyond mere voting. Activation has come into its own not just because of improved techniques by those who would induce it, but also because the public increasingly looks beyond conventional political participation to make its points with governments. Group proliferation and grassroots participatory politics occurs as an increasingly alienated public seeks new modes of participation to challenge suspect governmental elites.
In this environment, candidates traffic in advertising that is highly personal or carefully targeting to particular issues resonant with swing voters (Sabato, 1984, 111-197). The 1996 reelection campaign of President Clinton was a state-of-the-art effort aimed at activating key groups of swing voters with carefully scripted issue messages (Stengel and Pooley, 1996; Morris, 1997). Partisanship had little to do with it. A cynical public frequently is receptive to negative advertising during campaigns, as the early Clinton ads attacking Dole revealed. Negative ads have the unfortunate effect of discouraging voting (Ansolabehere and Iyengar, 1995, 99-115). Those with lower information and education also rely most heavily on television for information about politics. The negative tone of political advertising and news sharpens their disaffection with politics (Robinson, 1975, 101). Strategic activation, in its message and tone, often drives away those already at the margins of civic life. Participatory activation, as practiced in America at the end of the century, increases political stratification and popular alienation.
CONSEQUENCES OF ACTIVATION
The implications of ubiquitous activation strategies, hinted at above, are multiple and disturbing. Activation flourishes because the politically sophisticated find it an efficient means to influence over what government does. Since this perception is widespread, activation flourishes throughout America's political system. The frequency of activation means its effects upon American politics are pervasive. With activation comes advocacy of more participatory forms of citizen activity. In assessing activation's consequences, we must also consider those of the participatory ethos it spawns.
Groups and campaigns must target well to activate effectively. That means carefully separating the "wheat" from the "chaff." The wheat are those who are likely to act in response to the right mix of messages and inducements. The chaff are those who won't respond unless more drastic and expensive activation measures occur. Activation, through its lack of emphasis on those who don't participate in politics, reinforces and worsens political stratification in America. Americans vary greatly in political knowledge (Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996) and sophistication (Neuman, 1986). Activation perpetuates and reinforces these differences within the public. By preaching to potential converts, campaigns and groups help to set limits on mass involvement in politics.
The narrow strategic focus of activation makes majority rule at best an incidental byproduct of this system. Candidates seek to win election by targeting a small group of swing voters, in search of a plurality of those who vote, not a majority of all citizens. Groups have little incentive to command majority opinion if they can prevail without it -- and they often can. Elected officials pay particular attention to "attentive publics," the minorities actively engaged in issues of the moment (Arnold, 1992, 60-68). The power of these public lies in their ability to get the message out to larger numbers of their fellow citizens comprising the "inattentive public" about what government is doing. Additional activation can make life difficult for incumbents. R. Douglas Arnold notes that lawmakers only have to consider the larger group of the inattentive public if two circumstances obtain: if an issue might rouse the inattentive public and if a faction of the attentive public stands ready as "instigators" to activate them (Arnold, 1990, p. 70).
Even if instigators must activate broadly to succeed, majority opinion may or may not come to bear on the decision. Efficient activation often avoids mobilizing majorities by "appealing to elected officials over the heads of the public" (Baer and Bositis, 1993, 55).
Another consequence of participatory activation is the hyperpluralism evident in the corridors of government. Jonathan Rauch explains how the incentives for group organization and activation have grown in recent decades: "The interest group industry pays rising returns on investment and enjoys falling costs; its potential base [includes] a practically unlimited pool of capital; its technological base grows ever more sophisticated; it is supported and staffed by an expanding infrastructure of professionals who know the business" (Rauch, 1994, 58). As activation becomes more efficient for more entrepreneurs, the national political system gets clogged and public alienation mounts. Groups "begin to choke the system that bred them, to undermine confidence in politics . . . The system might begin to defeat the purpose for which it exists, namely, to make reasonable social decisions quickly" (Rauch, 1994, 61).
As groups swamp the system, and participatory forms grow in popularity -- in great part because of the rhetoric of successful activation -- the representative and deliberative functions of legislatures weaken. America's founders envisioned a deliberative national government, dominated by the Congress. By this theory, "there are two kinds of public voice in a democracy -- one immediate and spontaneous, less well informed, and less reflective; the other more deliberative, taking longer to develop, and resting on a fuller consideration of information and arguments - and that only the latter is fit to rule" (Bessette, 1994, 212). Activation engenders a seemingly "spontaneous" voice in fact produced by elite, entrepreneurial calculation. The goal of activation is results, not discussion as an end in itself. Inevitably, the vogue of activation weakens the deliberative norms of government. Myriad groups put on grassroots pressure for action, making it more difficult for lawmakers to act intelligently. Robert Dahl summarizes the syndrome: "the number and diversity of interests have increased without any corresponding increase in the strength of the process for integrating interests; and plebiscitary techniques have gained ground without a corresponding increase in representativeness and deliberation" (Dahl, 1994, 100).
The paradoxes displayed in Tables I and II reveal another disturbing consequence of activation strategies. A theory of individual representation through participation underlies activation. But this participation occurs in a political structure that places heavy demands on the citizen:
In the world of American politics, citizens are asked to undertake a wide array ofcivic activities: select qualified representatives (both within parties and in generalelections) for local, state and national offices . . . vote directly on policy issues through initiatives and referenda; fill the thousands of voluntary, appointed and bureaucratic civic roles required for the machinery of campaigns, elections and government to work effectively; help shape local, state and national political agendas through numerous outlets from public opinion polls to public demonstrations to direct contact with public officials . . . navigate government bureaucracies for information, goods and services, attend local government and civic meetings, and more (Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996, 3).
These myriad participatory venues give entrepreneurs many opportunities to activate effectively. Most activation efforts distinguish the activist few from the passive many. Hence diverse groups of active citizens besiege government while most Americans feel no connection to the political system. The system's complexity discourages those inactivated citizens, creating more benefits for successful activation. The large scale of citizen responsibilities, created through the participatory theories inherent in the progressive reforms, makes activation a particularly valuable strategy for candidates and groups. Since the task of the citizen can be quite demanding, the prize goes to those best able to convince a targeted group of fellow citizens to do just a bit more.
James Bryce almost one hundred years ago identified three intractable impediments to the realization of successful participatory democracy: severe time constraints for citizens, competing demands for leisure time and the complexity of many policy issues (Bryce, 1909, 237, 240, 331, 356). The complications of the political system create yet another great barrier. One solution, in practice when Bryce wrote, was party mobilization of the mass public to overcome these impediments. After mobilization came activation, a system of manipulating the complex electoral and governmental system by minority interests in the misleading garb of participatory democracy.
We have every evidence that the era of activation is here to stay. Rising education and economic security creates steadily more citizens with postmaterial values, which include belief in participatory democracy and "elite challenging" political tactics (Inglehart, 1997a, 220-221). This stimulates yet more activation strategies, creating a dense crowding of vocal, segmented and relatively elite Americans around the governmental stage (Nie, Junn and Stehlik-Barry, 1996, 131-2). Governmental participation grows, while, due to declining party contact, electoral participation withers (Rosenstone and Hansen, 1993, 56-70). Changes in voting turnout from year to year become the byproducts of the activation strategies of elites, decline in party attachment and contact, and the disappearance of person-to-person political conversation (Nie, Junn and Stehlik-Barry, 1996, 132).
The paradox is complete. America's complex political system provides manifold avenues for participation, and millions of Americans use those avenues every year. But most Americans do not, and probably will not. The vogue of participation holds that all should "get involved." The process in fact encourages only a strategically selected few to vote in elections and petition government for their interests. This is a particularly grand example of unintended consequences. Progressive reforms, extolling popular participation, weakened parties and shrank the electorate. The proliferation of interests in recent decades made interests less well loved in the public mind. Attempts to engage fellow citizens in political activity decayed into narrow strategies to fragment the public into activist factions. America's era of activation is ultimately an era of self-delusion. We trumpet popular participation, yet we have raised the costs of participation, and reward those who overcome these costs by activating fragments of the public.
The following chapters examine the activation phenomenon in more detail. Chapter two explains the decline of partisan mass mobilization and the rise of activation strategies. The impressive ability of candidates, interests and parties to activate selected parts of the electorate receives analysis in chapter three. Chapter four explains how various interests and movements employ the arts of activation, illustrated through case studies of state-of-the-art activation by five major national interest groups. The concluding chapter discusses further the problems of activation and proposes several reforms to revive majority rule in American politics.