The Thicket at State Legislatures

New Civic Mission of Schools Report

by Jan Goehring

Guardian of Democracy: The Civic Mission of Schools is a new report that documents the decline in civic education in schools, describes six effective practices for civic learning and offers recommendations for education policymakers. The report strongly argues that investing in civic learning strengthens American democracy.

Guardian describes how American schools either neglect civic education or teach it in a superficial way. Other topics take precedence. However, research shows that civic learning improves civic knowledge, skills and dispositions. "Students who received high-quality civic learning are more likely than their counterparts to understand public issues, view political engagement as a means of addressing communal challenges, and participate in civic activities. Civic learning has similarly been shown to promote civic equality."

The report offers six proven practices for schools to enhance civic learning. The effectiveness of these practices is supported by research. They include:

• Classroom instruction in government, history, economics, law, and democracy,
• Discussion of current events and controversial topics,
• Service learning opportunities that link the service to classroom instruction,
• Extracurricular activities that allow students to be involved in their communities,
• Student participation in school governance, and
• Simulations of democratic processes and procedures.  

A number of recommendations for education policymakers at all levels are also listed in the report. Suggestions for state policymakers include developing state standards and assessments for civic education, holding schools and districts accountable for civic learning achievement, using alternative forms of assessment such as group projects, and supporting professional development for civics and government teachers.

NCSL's Trust for Representative Democracy, a program to educate the public about American democracy, considers state lawmakers to be uniquely qualified to help young people understand and appreciate our government. Legislators can bring civics to life for students by visiting classrooms through the America's Legislators Back to School program. By sharing their experiences in the legislature and talking about the debate, negotiation and compromise involved in the lawmaking process, legislators provide an effective civic learning opportunity. The Trust also believes that Legislative Youth Advisory Councils are a good way to involve young people in the legislative process and educate the public about representative democracy.  Twelve states have these youth councils.

The Guardian report was produced by the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, the Leonore Annenberg Institute of Civics of the Annenberg Center for Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania; the National Conference on Citizenship; the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement at Tufts University and the Public Education Division of the American Bar Association. It updates and expands upon the findings in the 2003 Civic Mission of Schools Report.

Republic or Representative Democracy?

by Karl Kurtz

In our work on NCSL's Trust for Representative Democracy, from time to time we receive comments or questions about our use of the term "representative democracy." Two recent ones include: "Since we are a constitutional republic, is there a reason why the term representative democracy is being used instead of constitutional republic?" "We are not a 'Democracy' we are a Democratic Republic." These comments often point out that nowhere in the Constitution does the word "democracy" appear.

The answer is that we regard the terms “republic” and “representative democracy” as being interchangeable, as does the political science literature. They are a form of democracy distinct from another form known as direct democracy. A number of years ago I coauthored a college textbook with professors Alan Rosenthal, Burdett Loomis and John Hibbing, Republic on Trial: The Case for Representative Democracy. Here is what we said in the first paragraph of that book:

After the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of government the framers had produced. “A republic if you can keep it,” he replied. The American republic is synonymous with representative democracy, the political system through which citizens govern themselves. Representative democracy is democratic in that the people have the power to choose those who govern; it is representative in that the people themselves do not govern but leave governance to the agents they elect. The engines of representative democracy are Congress at the national level and legislatures at the state level, with the executive and judicial branches playing important supporting roles.

The fact is that neither republic nor representative democracy is ideal from the standpoint of marketing or promoting public understanding. Both of them draw blank stares when presented to focus groups of young people (or adults, for that matter). "Republic" is not at all well understood. About the only time it is used in popular communication is in the formulaic recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. And "representative democracy" is a nine-syllable mouthful so unfamiliar that many people have difficulty pronouncing it. I have cringed as trained actors stumble over these words in rehearsals.

To get around some of these problems, we often use the terms "American republic" or "American democracy" to suggest that we in the United States have evolved our own particular kind of governance--one in which the people have the ultimate authority but they exercise it through their elected represenatatives. But these terms require explanation, too.

If we were corporate marketers, maybe we would go the Xerox or Exxon route and simply invent a new one or two syllable word with memorable spelling for our system of government. "Amgovv" anyone? On second thought, forget it.

Let's live with what we've got--republic or representative democracy, whichever you prefer--and do our best to help people understand the virtues, values and flaws of our governmental system.

Baseball and Elections

by Wendy Underhill

A love for baseball seems to be positively correlated with an interest in elections policy. 

I make this unscientific statement based on a quick count of election geeks: Tim Storey and Peggy Kerns (from NCSL), Doug Chapin (director of the University of Minnesota’s Excellence in Election Administration program), Rokey Suleman (former executive director of D.C.’s Board of Elections and Ethics), Charles Stewart III (MIT political scientist), Paddy McGuire (Federal Voting Assistance Program), and Zach Markovits and Sean Greene (Pew Center on the States’ Elections Initiatives). 

I'm guessing that folks like both elections and baseball because the two are so similar. Both are:

• the most interesting in the fall, what with the World Series and the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

• community rituals governed by arcane rules that change depending on the league (or jurisdiction) and can only be fully grasped by the cognoscenti.

• statistics-rich fields ripe for quantitative analysis.

That last point was brought home by Doug Chapin in his blog on Friday.  He points to the new movie, Moneyball, that brings the book by the same name to the screen.  The book (and presumably the movie, although I haven’t seen it) is about general manager Billy Beane, who made staffing decisions for the Oakland A's based on the ideas of Bill James. James basically invented stats-based analysis for baseball, or “sabermetrics.”

Chapin loves that kind of analysis, whether about baseball or about elections. In his missives he frequently pushes policy makers to work from data, not opinion. His post today ends with this:

I get flak occasionally for using the term "election geek" to describe people who immerse themselves in the minutiae of election administration - but somewhere out there, I hope, are one or more "election geeks" whose passion for the field, mixed with skepticism for the inertia of tradition, will change election administration the same way Bill James transformed baseball.

Well, some legislators do “immerse themselves in the minutiae of election administration,” show a fair amount of "passion for the field," and have tweaked tradition to make elections more cost effective, accurate, and secure.  This year, these dedicated people have written laws to permit the use of vote centers, authorize online voter registration, share registration data across state lines, and even experiment with internet voting for overseas citizens. And yet many of these changes likely won’t even make it to the front page of the newspaper, much less the big screen.  Too bad, when analysis-based legislative work can lead to better elections.

For related ruminations, see "Is Politics Baseball, or is Baseball Politics?".

Economics and Ethics

by Peggy Kerns

In his weekly column, Rushworth M. Kidder, president of the Institute for Global Ethics, asks, “Are we in a double-dip ethics recession?”

When the last recession began to hit in 2008, we at the Institute started examining evidence of a connection between economics and ethics. As scandal after scandal erupted in the financial sector…we asked whether the economic collapse arose not from innocent financial forces but from a vast ethical meltdown. Summarizing our work in 2009, we published The Ethics Recession: Reflections on the Moral Underpinnings of the Current Economic Crisis.

So we were pleased to see the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission explicitly making the ethics link in its 545-page report last February. Pointing to “a systemic breakdown in accountability and ethics” as one of six fundamental causes of the crisis, its authors noted that “the integrity of our financial markets and the public’s trust in those markets are essential to the economic well-being of our nation.”…And that got us wondering whether we could put a metric to the idea of an ethics recession.

Broadly speaking, they (recessions) happen when GDP has been shrinking for two consecutive quarters. By analogy, might an ethics recession happen when a nation’s public integrity has been in decline for a similar period?  

How might this be measured?  Kidder says one way is through public opinion, which has not been favorable to Congress or the administration. If people agree that core values are honesty, fairness and responsibility, Kidder believes that Congress “indeed has lapsed into moral decline.”  He writes that:

Its institutional behavior over the summer raised serious questions about the truthfulness of what both sides portray as facts, about the sense of justice and fairness to citizens present and future, and about the duty of elected officials to find ways to compromise in order to prevent stalemate and paralysis. 

Though much of Kidder’s column is devoted to the national scene, he raises issues that can apply to all levels of government. In our ethics trainings, NCSL’s Center for Ethics in Government asks participants to name the ethical values they bring to their jobs. The group votes on their top values and then defines the values and how they apply to their work. Honesty is always on the list and defining it is easy for the groups−truthfulness and never lie.  Further discussions reveal that this definition is not so easy. When presenting a bill do you tell the whole truth about its impacts? In dealing with the opposition, do you withhold information? On the campaign trail do you make promises that are politically expedient but you might not be able to keep? Do you exaggerate facts about your opponent? Do you let others lambaste an opponent so you remain squeaky-clean?

Polls show the public distrusts government and public officials and confidence in them has eroded. If we follow Kidder’s model, then doesn't everyone in the public sector have a moral obligation to correct this perception and bring us out of an ethics recession?

Fixing Congress

Two items today about strengthening Congress, one noteworthy for what is not being proposed and the other for its succinct, useful list of ideas and sage conclusions.

From the Washington Post on term limits for Congress:

In 1994, the last time there was a conservative grass-roots revolution, term limits were front and center. The Republican-written Contract With America included a vow to hold a vote on a term-limits amendment, and candidates nationwide got mileage out of pledging to back the bill or to limit their own service.

Yet in 2010, neither the Contract From America, endorsed by a host of conservative groups, nor the Pledge to America, written by House Republican leaders, mentioned term limits.

Even as the tea party movement swept the nation with calls to buck the political establishment and elect “citizen-legislators,” term limits were not high on the agenda.

And from the venerable Lee Hamilton, the former member of Congress who directs the Center on Congress, reflecting on the loss of public confidence in the legislative branch:

Removing the roadblocks to institutional effectiveness will take hard work. Congress has gotten its house in order before, however, and it can do so again.

It could start by addressing the filibuster rule, which effectively requires 60 votes in the Senate in order to move most legislation, a formidable hurdle in a closely divided Senate. In the name of efficiency, Congress routinely embraces giant omnibus bills which allow the leadership basically to undermine the deliberation, transparency, and accountability we expect and need in our system; it needs to return to the regular order developed by Congress over many decades.

The country also needs more robust congressional oversight into every nook and cranny of government, and a vigorous ethics system which enforces the basic rule that every member act in such a manner as to reflect credit on the institution.

A Congress seriously interested in effectiveness would pursue procedural fixes to reduce the excessive partisanship that too often paralyzes Capitol Hill. None of them are mysterious: redressing the outsized role of special-interest money in elections; reducing partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts; eliminating closed state primaries, which enable ideological activists to dominate elections; and wringing the intense partisanship of committee staffers out of the legislative process.

Hamilton goes beyond these procedural reforms to bemoan a loss of commitment by members of Congress to "a search for a remedy" (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s phrase) and concludes:

It is not hard to find members on the Hill who speak for a defined narrow interest. It is much harder, though not impossible, to find members who search for a remedy, as opposed to a political position. We need more members who reflect the diversity of this great and varied country yet work to bring it together, not tear it asunder.

Turning Congress around will take some effort. But make no mistake. Congress can live up to the faith our Constitution and our democracy place in it. But we, as Americans, have to insist that the people we elect make this a priority. Congress has to want to change, and we as voters have a major role to play in helping to bring that about. 

Indiana Civic Health Index

by Jan Goehring

The Indiana Civic Health Index report, released last week, examines how actively citizens  engage in their communities. Compared to the rest of the nation, Hoosiers ranked well in terms of group membership and volunteering. But, there was room for improvement in political involvement. Indiana ranked 48th in the nation for voting, 43rd for citizens registered to vote and 48th for frequently discussing politics.

There are a number of efforts to promote volunteerism and civic participation in the state. For example, the Indiana Supreme Court sponsors Courts in the Classroom to educate students about the history and operation of the state courts. The Indiana Bar Foundation and the State Bar Association have long supported civic education programs. In addition, the Center on Congress at Indiana University, directed by former U.S. Representative Lee Hamilton, provides non-partisan educational material to improve public knowledge of Congress and to increase civic engagement.

This index gives us a “baseline, a place to start building up,” Hamilton said. “The path to improvement starts with an honest look at where we are.”

The study was sponsored by the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) in partnership with the Indiana Bar Foundation, the Center on Congress, the Hoosier State Press Association Foundation, Indiana University Northwest and the Indiana Supreme Court. The NCoC, an organization that tracks, measures and promotes civic participation, has also released reports on the civic health of Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Virginia. These reports can be found on the NCoC Civic Health Index site.

Guarding Against Hyperbole About Social Media

by Karl Kurtz

Over at Stateside Associates Blog, Graham Grossman says that social media have replaced business cards:

The contact information contained on a business card was once the only means through which we would know how to communicate with an individual. The business card facilitated communication and collaboration by offering a phone number and an address for people with whom we wanted to connect. In the world of government relations, the same applied; we would collect cards from elected officials and their staffers, lobbyists, businesspeople and prospective clients, trade association members and many others. We wanted to communicate and collaborate with these people and the contact information on their cards gave us the means of doing so.
 
But times have changed. When was the last time you heard an elected official tell a crowd to stop by his/her regularly scheduled office hours? Office hours? They don’t exist anymore! Officeholders prefer to hold conversations on Facebook and their office is always open on Twitter. The most successful candidates tell their supporters to Like them on Facebook, they regularly give out their website address, they ask supporters to forward their e-newsletters to friends and they count on voters stumbling across their website through a search engine result. Most politicians are savvy to how the game has changed.

Well, I'm not sure that elected officials have completely given up office hours, but I'm willing to grant Graham a bit of hyperbole to support his argument. The point that business cards are used less often these days is an interesting one. I certainly don't reorder them as often as I used to, and I can't remember when I last used a Rolodex. Social media and online databases have definitely added a new dimension to how we communicate.

Yet, however much social media have changed the world of elected officials, let's not lose track of the fact that Facebook, Twitter and e-mail will never replace the face-to-face human interactions that are the very stuff of politics: the door-to-door campaigning, the meetings and phone calls with constituents and lobbyists, the conferences with fellow members, the interviews with the media.... Most state legislators in my experience are like a long-ago speaker of the Minnesota House who once said, "I don't learn the most important things from reading; I learn them from talking to people."

The virtual legislature connected primarily by the Web, e-mail, remote conferencing and social media is not coming anytime soon.

Death Valley of "No" Votes

by Karl Kurtz

Earlier this week, the Sacramento Bee reported that two members of the California Assembly majority Democratic party voted "yes" on all 1,450 roll call votes during the just-completed 2011 legislative session. Fourteen other members, including the top leaders in both the Assembly and Senate, cast "no" votes five or fewer times.

It's no secret that Democrats rarely vote "no" on the floor. They control the Legislature and its committees, they control what comes up for a vote, and they usually let only the bills that they like come to a vote.

Plus, many votes pass judgment on measures that would draw little objection – resolutions honoring fallen officers, bills renaming bridges and the like.

Most Democrats do occasionally break with their party to vote "no" on the floor, but for some of them, you were more likely to see rain in Death Valley.

Wondering how common this might be in other states, I checked around with informants in selected states and found that there are a few chambers in which virtually every bill that comes to the floor passes, and majority party members generally vote yes. But most said that it was rare for members not to cast any no votes.

Although the article does not say it, these votes in the California Assembly are almost certainly on final passage only. The Ohio House has similar practices to California, but House clerk Laura Clemens notes, "A member might cast several 'no' votes on certain motions, i.e. motion to re-refer to committee, motion to lay on the table, etc., but vote with the majority 100% of the time....  We have quite a few of these."

And then there's the Illinois House. With strong leadership control, most bills that make it to the floor pass in that chamber. But not all of them. In fact, there is a special Century Club reserved for members whose bills obtain at least 100 (out of 118) "no" votes. When the vote tally board nears 100 nays, the chamber turns raucous with members urging their colleagues to change their vote from green to red in order to induct another member into the Century Club. A celebration, which includes passing a trophy from the previous inductee into the club, ensues, as shown in this video captured by Illinois Statehouse News earlier this year.

Politically Involved Students Know Compromise

by Jan Goehring

A recent Governing magazine article, The Nasty, Ineffective World of Politics, describes the political participation and outlook of several members of the Louisiana Legislative Youth Advisory Council (LYAC). Despite the title, the article gives a positive account of what these students experienced and accomplished, even when exposed to negativity on the part of the adults. The young people worked together to get things done. As one council member stated, "we know compromise." And that is an important message.

The Louisiana LYAC has its roots in the America's Legislators Back to School Program. Several years ago, then state Senator Gerald Theunissen visited a classroom as part of the Back to School event. He asked students for bill ideas and they came up with the advisory council. The class was involved in the bill from drafting to enactment. This is a wonderful example of the power of connecting lawmakers and young people. However, the Governing article mentions that the LYACs, now in 12 states, all arose from the Back to School Program. We'd like to take credit, but not all started with a classroom visit from a legislator.

Inside the Main Street Fairness Act

by Jon Kuhl

On Sept. 9, the California legislature approved a deal with Amazon.com in which the online retailer will begin collecting California sales taxes after September of 2012. The deal is expected to bring in millions of dollars of revenue for the state.

In light of the deal, and the continuing momentum for Congress to pass the Main Street Fairness Act, NCSL’s Neal Osten, in this short video, answers some of the most commonly asked questions about the legislation. 

 

If passed, the Main Street Fairness Act will remove the burdens to interstate commerce that were of concern to the Supreme Court in the 1967 Bellas Hess case and the 1992 Quill v. North Dakota case. Through these cases, the Supreme Court acknowledged consumers owe the sales tax when they purchase goods through catalogs or over the Internet, but ruled states cannot force retailers to collect the tax. This legislation will overturn these decisions and authorize states to collect sales taxes on out-of-state sales.

For more information on Main Street Fairness Act, head to NCSL's website.