Princeton Weekly Bulletin, February 23, 1998
Can "the system" be fixed?
Graduate students examine issues of campaign reform, make recommendations
By Mary Caffrey
For four decades, polls have tracked a steady decline in the public's confidence in both the election process and the leaders it produces. In many recent elections, voter turnout has failed to reach 50 percent. Parents have told pollsters they do not want their children to be president.
Should we be alarmed? Can "the system" be fixed, and if so, how? These are the questions a group of graduate students in the Woodrow Wilson School explored under the direction of Larry Bartels, Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs.
Bartels is chair of the Task Force for Campaign Reform, an 18-month effort supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts that began in April 1997. In this capacity, he is directing 15 scholars from the fields of politics and communication as they prepare a report to be released in Washington, D.C., in May; last fall Bartels' graduate workshop produced a paper that will serve as a partial draft of the task force report.
Students in the workshop made 17 specific recommendations to reduce the amount of money in campaigns and the time spent raising it, to improve the quality and fairness of campaign advertising and media coverage, and to encourage more people to vote. Scholars in the broader task force, who have already met twice, will come to Princeton in May to evaluate these recommendations and draft their report; an edited volume of the paper and supporting documents is to be completed in September.
Recommendations
Recommendations from the workshop covered six areas.
Campaign finance. The students called for full public financing of federal and state campaigns, which would be tied to limits on campaign spending. They argue that the cost, estimated by Jamin Raskin and John Bonifaz at $500 million a year, is small compared to the $1.5 trillion federal budget -- and that public financing might reduce wasteful tax breaks and programs that benefit wealthy contributors. Students also called for a ban on unregulated and unlimited contributions made to political parties.
Free advertising time. The students endorsed proposals for a broadcast bank that would give the Federal Election Commission and political parties the ability to grant vouchers to candidates for advertising time. Paul Taylor, a former Washington Post reporter who has twice been Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton and is now a full-time advocate for free advertising, discussed these issues with the workshop students last fall.
Ad watches. Boxes evaluating the accuracy of campaign ads, now seen in many newspapers during campaign season, are advocated by Kathleen Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, a member of Bartels' task force who visited with the workshop in October. Students endorsed her call for a consistent, comprehensive format for evaluating advertisements.
Civic journalism. This term refers to efforts by newspapers, and radio and television stations to engage the public in campaign coverage, including decisions of what issues matter in the race. Though journalists have often greeted civic journalism with a jaundiced eye, workshop students argued that "the jury is still out" on whether civic journalism works, and they encouraged continued experimentation.
Candidate debates. The students called for improving the formats of presidential debates and urged the media to cover the issues, not simply who "won" or made mistakes. They also supported strengthening the Commission on Presidential Debates in order to reduce the influence of the major political parties.
Voter engagement. The students advocated continuing efforts to make it easier for people to qualify to vote, and public and private efforts to distribute election materials and motivate various age, ethnic and economic groups to cast informed votes.
Standards for judging
The national task force will address the students' recommendations within the context of a broader effort to define and apply standards by which campaigns should be judged. Three members of the task force -- John Geer of Vanderbilt University, Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Stanley Kelley, professor of politics, emeritus -- evaluated the students' report, in part on the basis of its usefulness to the task force. "We felt that the students did very well in raising both substantive issues and issues of presentation," said Kelley.
In a study presented at the August 1997 meeting of the American Political Science Association, Bartels noted that public interest and faith in the 1996 presidential election hit a 40-year low, but "Prospective voters probably knew more about the candidates' issue positions in 1996 than in any other recent presidential election." He feels that campaigns should be judged not only by the nastiness of advertising but also by whether voters learn where the candidates stand on issues.
Bartels also believes that incentives are needed to change the "journalistic culture" that encourages reporters to present their own assessments of candidates' positions. Such assessments are often negative, Bartels notes, and some of this negativity can be attributed to press working conditions: When reporters travel day after day with a candidate, the only "news" may be an essentially insignificant faux pas or a repetitious assessment of strategy. "What could be done to convince the media to cover campaigns differently?" he asks.
Disturbing trends
The student report raised concerns about the potential negative effects of current campaign practices on levels of engagement and information among prospective voters, as well as on the willingness of good candidates to participate in the electoral process. When Bill Bradley '65 announced in August 1995 that he would not seek a third term in the U.S. Senate, his declaration that "the system is broken" resonated with many Americans.
"These symptoms," says Bartels, "are of a piece with disturbing trends in the broader civic culture of the contemporary United States: increasing dislocation and social isolation, declining trust and confidence in a wide variety of political and social institutions, and increasing pessimism regarding the prospects for economic and social progress. Thus, it is understandable and appropriate that the electoral process has become a primary focus of the broader public debate about what is wrong with American civic culture and how to fix it."