Day: November 6, 2018

A trivia question for this US election day. What do the following 21 countries have in common?

My current office sits near the anthropologists, who have posted this comment from Clifford Geertz on the departmental bulletin board. It appears near the end of the \”Introduction\” to his 1983 collection of essays, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology. Geertz wrote:

To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.

Geertz is writing about people viewing themselves within the context of a variety of cultures: in passing, he mentions \”American ethnographers, Moroccan judges, Javanese metaphysicians, or Balinese dancers.\” But near what feels like an especially divisive election day, it seems worth posing his insights as a challenge for all of our partisan beliefs.

While I am not a member of the Religious Society of Friends, I attended a college with Quaker roots and married a 22nd-generation Quaker. The Quakers have a term called a \”query,\” which refers to a question–sometimes a challenging or pointed question– that is meant to be used as a basis for additional reflection. So here is Geertz, reformulated as queries to myself.

• What effort do you make to see yourself as those from the other sides of the partisan divides see you? 
• Do you have the \”merest decency\” to see those with other political beliefs as sharing a nature with you? 
• Do you see yourself and your political beliefs \”as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases\”?
• To what extent is your objectivity a matter of self-congratulation?
• To what extent is your tolerance a sham? 

One of my pet peeves about arguments over the role of money in elections is that the discussion usually focuses so heavily on campaign contributions, while leaving out other intersections of money in politics–like the role of lobbying.

To illustrate, here\’s data on the total cost of elections to the candidates from the ever-useful Center for Responsive Politics its Open Secrets website. The yellow bars show costs of Congressional elections, while the green bars show costs of presidential races.  Thus, this year\’s election will cost Congressional candidates about $5 billion, while the total cost of the 2016 Congressional and Presidential campaign was more like $6 billion.

I\’ll say in passing that the idea of Congressional and Presidential political candidates spending $5-$6 billion on their campaigns doesn\’t strike me as all that high, not in the context of a country with 250 million or so adults who are potential voters and an economy approaching $20 trillion. For example, Comcast and Proctor & Gamble, the two US companies that do the most advertising, spent $5.7 billion and $4.4 billion on advertising in 2017, respectively.  The Journal of Economic Perspectives (where I work as Managing Editor) ran an article back in the Winter 2003 issue  called \”Why is There so Little Money in U.S. Politics?\” by Stephen Ansolabehere, John M. de Figueiredo, and James M. Snyder Jr., and that still strikes me as the relevant question.

But the bigger issue is that we can see pretty clearly what campaign spending goes for: advertising, mailing, travel appearances, and so on. That spending needs to be disclosed and accounted for. Contrary to what a lot of commentary seems to imply, campaign contributions are not personal income to politicians. In contrast, spending on lobbyists is cloaked in mystery. The amounts spent on lobbying are supposed to be disclosed, but what precisely is included in lobbying is often not very clear. The activities of lobbyists, and in particular how they influence or even just write the fine print that affects their employers, does not happen in public. The effects of lobbying are typically not known or disclosed.

From the Open Secrets website, here is spending with officially registered lobbyists, which is almost certainly a substantial understatement of total spending on activities that bear a strong resemblance to lobbying. (For example, corporate charitable contributions are often given in a way that seems designed to exert political influence.)

Notice that the spending on lobbying is annual, while the above spending on campaigns is every other year. To put it another way, spending on lobbying doesn\’t go away in-between elections. Over time, it exceeds campaign spending. And remember that when many politicians leave office, their future stream of income comes in large part from using their political connections and lobbyists–whether they officially register to do so or not.

I do worry about whether the low and emotive campaign ads I see, from all sides of the political spectrum, have much effects. Are the people who write and place such ads really understanding what moves voter turnout or voting decisions? But that said, the lobbying that I don\’t see seems to me a  more serious issue for what ends up being written into laws and rules.