Setting the Agenda

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 3.2

A democracy must have more than merely a good means for making policy decisions. It must also have a good means for setting an agenda. The people’s control of the agenda — deciding which “problems” government will tackle next — is fundamental to democracy. Candidates in competitive election situations naturally gravitate to certain issues and ignore others. Likewise, the media have a built-in bias that both mirrors the politicians’ biases (simply by covering the candidates’ press conferences), and adds their own agenda items, influenced if not wholly derived from ratings and advertising pressures. And of course, powerful interests with large amounts of money can place their priority interests on the agenda as well (either the public agenda, or the nearly invisible legislative agenda).

Exactly how the agenda is established in electoral governments is extremely complicated, but candidates, elected politicians, and the mass media clearly have dominant roles. Whether made consciously or unconsciously, decisions about what problems don’t get onto the public agenda are generally more grievous than the decisions about those few that do. As Murray Edelman explained in Constructing the Political Spectacle, 

“Perhaps the most powerful influence of news, talk, and writing about problems is the immunity from notice and criticism they grant to damaging conditions that are not on the list.”

The powerful incentive for elected representatives and their supporters in an adversarial electoral system is to seek out agenda items that give opportunities for vilification of the opposition. Since it is generally more difficult to rile up voters around genuinely vital but nuanced or complicated policy issues, these crucial issues tend not to become the focus of “politics.” Instead the public is diverted with largely manufactured battles that are more suitable for sound-bites. This is not to suggest that Democrats and Republicans may not have sincere differences on matters of policy (as well as vast areas of silent agreement). But the “issues” that become part of the public awareness and debate, and on which elections may hinge, are frequently manufactured and quite minor in the grand scheme of things. The child-like simplicity of building a wall on the border with Mexico is merely a flagrant example of this general dynamic. Selecting issues that are based on the implied or stated “evils” of the other party is particularly beneficial, and more useful for voter mobilization, than proposing policies of one’s own. Slogans are a step down from issues, and are almost always intentionally vague. I half expect to see some candidate run with the self-referential slogan “Vote for me, the candidate whose slogan means something!”

The electoral system also encourages a tactical focus on knee-jerk “wedge issues” while intentionally ignoring complex long-term critical policy challenges. This tendency springs from the logic of the electoral system, where candidates seek to differentiate themselves with simple, emotional issues that do not require much explanation. The news media exacerbate this emphasis on easily digestible “news.” Austrian Sociologist Manfred Prisching describes the symbiotic relationship as follows: 

“Politicians know the rules for creating audience attentiveness, as media personnel know how to create a permanent stream of impressive “news.” There is a common logic for both partners in this game. They cooperate in producing “symbolic politics,” pseudo-events, political entertainment ….[A] world of simulacra is produced. The fictitious world becomes the real world, and reality is dwarfed by the staged events.”

The media focus on the electoral “horse race” and candidates’ nosing ahead, or falling behind. Even outside world events are frequently squeezed into this frame, as helping or hurting particular candidates. This makes for an easier “story” than discussing the complexities that underlie issues. Will the rise in gas prices hurt the incumbent? Is the rise in unemployment good for the challenger? Media analysis of political speeches and campaign debates generally come down to an evaluation of their performance quality. Stagecraft trumps content. Did the candidate come off as both likable and in charge? 

While the media certainly focus on – and the public is most aware of – the partisan battles, in fact, much of what Congress does, or refrains from doing, is the result of bi-partisan consensus. But to reiterate, this consensus is rarely the result of any deliberation. In many cases, this consensus is even more insidious than partisan gridlock. There are vast areas of policy in which there is virtually no deliberation and no significant difference between the two major parties. Whether the issue is funding military operations in other countries, extending the government’s surveillance powers, or attending to the interests of Wall Street billionaires, this bi-partisan consensus is rarely subject to significant debate in Congress. There will often be a few individual members who object (e.g. Sen. Bernie Sanders on the left and Sen. Rand Paul on the right), and the public might not agree, but as long as the leaders of Congress don’t argue about a matter, it isn’t deemed “newsworthy,” and doesn’t garner media attention nor thoughtful deliberation. Deliberation requires hearing and being open to novel and opposing points of view. The partisan divide combined with a deep homogeneity of Congress generally precludes this.

But there are actually two agendas. In addition to the set of issues selected for voter consumption during campaigns, there is another set of issues on which Congress focuses its legislative effort. These are not necessarily “sexy” hot-button issues, but are still fundamentally driven by the electoral imperative. Lawrence Lessig, author of Republic Lost, which addresses the corruption of our campaign finance system, notes that Congress tends to seek out those issues that have the best prospect for generating a flow of campaign contributions. These are issues where lobbyists and big money interests have a financial stake.

Lessig gives numerous examples of this, such as the bank debit card “swipe” fee legislation, which he notes dominated the attention of Congress during the first several months of 2011. The issue of what percentage of each consumer transaction merchants should pay to banks when a consumer uses a debit card received more legislative time than the nation’s unemployment problem, global warming, or the two wars the nation was fighting at the time. With banks (on one side) and merchants (on the other) funneling huge amounts of campaign money to try and influence Congress, the issue was tailor-made to fatten the campaign war chests of members. Unemployed workers, future Americans suffering the effects of global warming and veterans simply couldn’t compete in terms of campaign contributions.

The manner in which electoral politics establishes an agenda is extremely short-sighted and repugnant. Political scientists have long recognized that it is a mistake to assume that those issues that captivate politicians or journalists are the problems that actually matter most to the populace, or will have the greatest impact on their lives. Issues that the media and politicians obsess about are forced to the front of the public’s attention by sheer repetition. Trump’s wall is again an extreme example. But many issues that the general public might rather deal with, if allowed to set their own agenda, are routinely ignored. It is generally assumed that it is inevitable that elites will establish the public agenda, but the use of sortition opens the door on a new avenue. Just how this might work will be discussed in later chapters.

While some issues are thrust upon legislatures by outside events (like a bridge collapse), much of what is dealt with (or ignored) is determined by an evaluation of whether raising the issue is electorally beneficial to one group of candidates or another. Construction lawyer Barry Lepatner explained to a reporter in a May 2014 interview why state politicians routinely underfund maintenance for bridges and other infrastructure.

“Politicians do not think of fixing the underside of a bridge or fixing a road that’s in trouble as a kind of political photo-op, or something they can get mileage on with campaign contributors.”

Ignoring serious issues is the norm. The Democrats and Republicans together paved the way for the financial crisis of 2008, as they did for the Savings and Loan crisis in the 1980s. Neither party could successfully blame the other (both being culpable), and thus these issues were not useful for campaigning. Raising the issues prior to the impending crises would risk drawing attention to their own responsibility for laying the groundwork. Thus the issues were expediently ignored. There were warnings, but the issues didn’t have electoral “sex appeal.” Then the financial disasters came to fruition, collectively costing Americans hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars (depending on exactly how that cost is measured).

As a third party legislator, I and my fellow Progressive Party legislators in Vermont regularly ran into this barrier preventing consideration of issues that both major parties wanted to ignore. Bills, once introduced, are sent to committee, where they never receive a hearing. We were occasionally able to raise new ideas by offering floor amendments to other bills, though they had to be ruled germane to the bill by the Speaker of the House. With rare exceptions, by the time a bill gets to the floor for action, legislators will simply defer to the recommendations of the members of their party who served on the committees that worked on the bill, and floor “debate” is merely a ritualized performance.

An instructive lesson about agenda setting through the use of sortition can be found in the Irish constitutional conventions convened in 2012 and 2016. Randomly selected citizens’ assemblies considered a series of constitutional amendments including same sex marriage at the first one and abortion legalization at the second. These citizen assembly-recommended amendments were subsequently enacted through referendum. The fact that these agenda items were advanced by random citizen panels (though the first of these was two thirds randomly selected citizens and one third politicians) rather than being products of the elected parliament is revealing. In an overwhelmingly Catholic nation, politicians who faced election, were reluctant to place these items on the agenda of parliament itself. 

As the Ancient Greeks understood, when elites control the agenda, democracy does not exist. An agenda-setting body of everyday people selected by lot, without ulterior partisan or electoral imperatives, who are given the time, resources, and a full range of expert testimony, is essential for true democracy. The critical failures from allowing politicians to set the public agenda is exemplified by the climate change issue. The urgency of dealing with anthropogenic climate change has been known for many decades. The fact that any delay would dramatically compound the problem was also known. Ordinary people in a learning environment, such as a citizens’ assembly, have been able to quickly understand why climate change needed urgent action. Sadly, politicians didn’t find climate change to be an electorally expedient issue to tackle, so it was ignored, until the crisis was upon us.