A question any civics teacher should address with his/her
students is: what leads policy proposals
to become policy? For example, why does
one legislative bill become a law and another does not? In common parlance, this question is usually
talked about in terms of how much do public wishes play; how much of what the people
want leads to our laws; how much the public influences the acts of executive officials and
affects judicial decisions?
In terms of
the national democratic bias, Americans tend to savor the Lincoln quote: “government of the people, by the people, and
for the people.” This bias naturally assumes
and/or counts on citizens having quite a say in what policy is thought of,
developed, enacted, and implemented in our governance. But what civics teachers should have their
students investigate is whether this is true and if so, how often, and if not,
how often does it not happen?
In an opinion
piece published today, the writer offers the following:
Congressional Republicans, meanwhile,
have a long agenda of unpopular policy changes they want to make, and they
won't be impeded by the fact that the majority of the public doesn't actually
want tax cuts for the wealthy, corporate giveaways, or restrictions on
abortion. They're going to do them because it's what they believe in, even if
the public might not approve.[1]
This pundit does not seem to place much faith in the power of
public opinion.
Such a civics inquiry and subsequent
discussion would benefit from several issues or facts. To begin with: most items of concern that government
officials deal with are of little or no interest to Americans assuming the
entailed function is being met – the police are protecting, the roads are
paved, the fires are extinguished, etc.
For example, which highway builders should be contracted to build or
refurbish a nearby highway is of little interest to Joe Q. Public. Yes, some citizens might care, but by and
large, most won’t. The clear majority of
policy questions are just about such details.
Another
related item is: how much does policy
reflect how affected groups lobby policy-makers to issue favorable decisions? Those highway building businesses, for
example, want specific decisions as to who will get that next contract. And like that case, one can multiply such
concerns across all those private interests that are affected by policies that
usually mean monetary rewards or losses as in tax policies. What one can note in terms of these lobbying
efforts is that the sought-after policy is usually specific.
One last issue
or concern relating to factors concerning policy making and how democratic the
process is is the “collective action problem.”
To quote an expert in this realm of research:
… organizations attempting to affect
policy seek a collective good that will benefit every member. Because everyone will benefit, whether or not
they have done anything to win a collective good [such as a highway], it is
rational for everyone to let others do the necessary work. The result will be little or no collective
action. The same argument holds for
individuals: why try to influence policy
when letting others do the work will produce the same benefit? And if little effort is made to influence
Congress, such efforts cannot very well have much impact.[2]
The effect of the collective action problem is that most
citizen action tends to be coming only from
special interests and not from the general population. Hence, any input from the citizenry is
directed at specific concerns with specific aims and goals.
In a civics
class that adopts a goal of having students engaged in political participation
– for example, one that relies on federation theory, as described and explained
in this blog – the teacher of that class needs to ask about the above issues. Such a class would not simply accept that
students’ interests are elsewhere, but would call on those students to defend
their apathy.
By framing this overall concern
repeatedly, the aim is to at least have students reflect on the democratic
level of the nation’s governance and politics and on their own engagement and
their related values concerning governmental and political engagement.
[1] Paul Waldman, “Will Donald Trump's historic
unpopularity hamstring his presidency?,” The
Week, accessed December 16, 2016 from Windows 10 news service.
[2] Paul Burstein, American
Public Opinion, Advocacy, and Policy in Congress: What the Public Wants and What It Gets, (New
York, NY: Cambridge University Press,
2015), loc. 206-217 (in a Kindle reader).
The facts of this posting are derived from this source.
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