Chapter 11. The Participation Gap
“The great lie politicians like me tell people like you is ‘vote for me and I’ll solve all your problems.’ The truth is, you have the power.”
Let’s go back to those signs: “Enlist Here to Die for Halliburton” and “Keep your Government Hands Off My Medicare.” For me, they were the signals that something was wrong with our democracy—that our nation suffers from an information obesity dilemma, especially in the world of politics.
To figure out what was going on in the information diets of partisan activists in the United States, I built a simple service that subscribed to the various political email lists that are sent out by politicians, advocacy groups, and other political organizations. The result is one of the larger compendiums of political emails that exists organized by political spectrum. I waded through the various emails we received, and began to get a taste of what both sides of the political aisle were talking about.
Figure 11-1 shows what might end up in the inbox of a conservative activist. Figure 11-2 shows what could end up in the inbox of a liberal one.
Figure 11-1. The potential inbox of a conservative activist.
Figure 11-2. The potential inbox of a liberal activist.
In a world where both sides have information diets like these, our democracy will remain completely paralyzed and divided. Moreover, charged up activists and the organizations they support will drive the public further away from the actual mechanics of power in government.
The “sportsification” of federal politics has made it so we treat elections like athletic rivalries, vilifying the other team at the expense of doing what’s right for the country. If this was what motivated your constituents, would you listen to them? As Congress stops listening, people get more furious, building larger megaphones with which to shout at their representatives; and Congress, being unable to decipher what people are saying from the sheer volume of input, simply listens less. It’s a destructive loop that causes a great chasm between people and the functions of government designed to listen to them: a participation gap.
The participation gap is the gap between people and the mechanics of power in their governmental bodies. Its cause is our desire to focus on large, emotionally resonant issues over practical problems that can be solved, and the disconnect between what people want out of their government and what it can actually do.
Because of the participation gap, citizens are frustrated and take out that frustration at the polling booth, voting to “throw the bums out” and “elect fresh blood in Washington.” As new members of Congress are elected, they must rely on the professional class of Washington—professional staff, lobbyists, and consultants—in order to understand the mechanics of our government. The cycle then repeats itself, our satisfaction with Congress sinks to a new all time low, and we do the same thing, over and over again, expecting a different result: Benjamin Franklin’s definition of insanity.
What we never do is look at how to close the participation gap, to more closely connect people with the levers of power in Washington. Instead, we’re distracted by issues du jour: the anger at Washington being unaccountable turns into debates over the debt ceiling, healthcare, abortion, guns, or gays. But it never turns into a discussion about how to make the United States government better at representing the interests of those who elect it or solving the great disconnect problem. No matter which side of the aisle you sit on, it’s better television to watch pundits talk about polarizing issues than it is to figure out how to make governments work better.
The answer isn’t as simple as firing the professional class of Washington, either; banning lobbying in Washington will just create a newly named profession of “citizen activists” that will do the same thing. In order to treat the problem, we’ve got to figure out what causes it.
The Scalability Problem
The first cause of the participation gap is a problem that technologists would call scale. The underlying structures of government aren’t designed to handle our present population as it is currently interacting with government.
If you take a look at the Constitution, you’ll quickly figure out that the framers couldn’t have imagined a union with this many people in it. At our first census, the population of the United States was at less than 10 million people scattered across the 13 colonies that now make up the eastern seaboard. The population of Planet Earth was a measly one billion people. There is no way that the framers could have conceived of a country of 300 million people—roughly a third of the world’s population at that time.
But the framers did something smart: they pegged the number of representatives in the lower chamber of Congress, the House of Representatives, to be proportional to population. Our first Congress, in 1789, had 65 members of the House of Representatives for roughly four million people; each member represented approximately 60,000 people.
In 1890, our population had grown, and so did our House of Representatives. Each of the 325 members of the House represented roughly 200,000 people. Then at the turn of the last century, just before our population exploded, Congress came to the realization that the House of Representatives was getting unruly and incapable of getting anything done, so they put a cap on the number of total representatives that we have: 435.
The result today is a staggering 1:717,000 ratio. The only democratic country in the world with a ratio more unwieldy than ours is India. If you combined the populations of Japan, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, and the UK, and had them all represented by just the number of members of UK’s House of Commons, they’d still have a lower ratio than we have in the United States.
It’s impossible for one person to accurately represent 717,000 people—it’s why candidates have to raise and spend millions of dollars on television advertisements rather than getting to know their constituents. It’s why members of Congress have to rely on lobbyists to get ideas on what to do, and it’s why the media sensationalizes politics. Today, politicians must come out strong on polarizing issues in order to get the attention of the major media markets they’re representing. Thus, it’s easier for people to treat Republicans and Democrats like the Red Sox and the Yankees.
Granted, a lot has changed since that 1:60,000 ratio was created: we have gone through the media revolutions of the telegraph, the radio, the television, and the Internet, all of which should positively affect a member’s ability to hear from her constituents.
We also have enhanced travel technology and infrastructure: planes, trains, and automobiles, combined with a strong civic infrastructure of roads, highways, train tracks, and airports, make it easier for a member to travel back and forth to hear from her district. But even with this new technology, it’s clear that we’re dealing with a scalability problem with our democracy.
So how do we solve this problem? The law placing a cap on members of Congress was invented 100 years ago for a good reason: Congress was getting unwieldy. If we reverted to our framers’ 1:60,000 ratio, we’d now have over 5,000 members of Congress. It’s unlikely they would be able to work as a cohesive legislative body at that level.
Sticking to that ratio would mean rebuilding the Capitol building into something that looked a bit more like RFK Stadium—congresses would look more like trade shows than what we see today—and it would mean a Congress that couldn’t effectively get anything done.
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