Abstract
Mobilization is itself a form of political participation, chosen with attention to the effects that an intervention in politics by significant numbers of others might be expected to produce, the costs that will need to be borne in order to produce it, and the effectiveness and cost of other kinds of investments in political influence. This essay focuses on the political participation of political mobilizers, the actors behind the actors in mass politics. Considering matters from the perspective of the elites who might solicit citizen involvement, I review some of the major ways that politics in the United States has changed over the last two decades, their implications for the cost-effectiveness of mobilization as a strategy in politics, and the evidence – such as exists – for their effects on mass participation in American elections and government. The regularization of two-party competitive politics, the polarization of political elites and the electorate, and the shifting regulation of campaigns and elections, I argue, have affected the opportunities, incentives, and resources for mobilization as the strategy of choice for campaigns, parties, and advocates in America.
Keywords
Published 20 years ago, Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America (Rosenstone and Hansen, 1993) intended to broaden the focus of political participation research, to shift the spotlight from the internal forces that enable people to participate in politics to the external forces that draw people into politics. Mass participation in politics, Rosenstone and Hansen argued, has a “supply side” – individual citizens and the motivations, inhibitions, and supports for their involvement – and, of at least equal importance, a “demand side” – the resources, incentives, and opportunities for political elites to mobilize citizen participation. Political participation is not only a source of influence and satisfaction for individuals but also an instrument for political elites in their competition for office and for influence. To win elections, candidates and parties need to activate voters to vote, volunteers to volunteer, and contributors to contribute. To influence government, politicians and activists need to mobilize members to support organizations, constituents to contribute to advocacy, and followers to fall in behind leaders. Viewed from the demand side, political participation is instrumental in purpose, directed to the achievement of political goals, if not for the individual participants then for the political elites who coordinate and support their activity.
The research on mobilization and political participation is now well advanced. Through the efforts of the scholars whose work appears in this issue and through the efforts of many others, the ideas have been elaborated, advanced, challenged, amended, and improved. The research has had a significant effect on the scholarly literature – and through the application of field experimentation (as reviewed elsewhere in this issue by one of its pioneers) on political practices as well.
The book was intended to broaden the focus of political participation research in a second way too. Rosenstone and Hansen (1993) argued that campaigns, parties, and advocacy groups are intentional in their use of political participation. They call people into action only when the returns from additional votes, additional effort, additional contributions, and additional communications exceed their costs. They call citizens into action only when they believe mobilization has a higher payoff in influence than alternative courses of political action. Mobilization, then, is itself a form of political participation, chosen with attention to the effects that an intervention in politics by significant numbers of others might be expected to produce, the costs that will need to be borne in order to produce it, and the effectiveness and cost of other kinds of investments in political influence.
This essay expands on this second form of political participation, the political participation of political mobilizers, the actors behind the actors in mass politics. Considering matters from the perspective of the elites who might solicit citizen involvement, I review some of the major ways that politics in the United States has changed over the last two decades, their implications for the cost-effectiveness of mobilization as a strategy in politics, and the evidence – such as exists – for their effects on mass participation in American elections and government. 1 The regularization of two-party competitive politics, the polarization of political elites and the electorate, and the shifting regulation of campaigns and elections, I will argue, have affected the opportunities, incentives, and resources for mobilization as the strategy of choice for campaigns, parties, and advocates in America.
American politics and political mobilization, 20 years later
By the 1980s, the time of the gestation of our book, American politics was in a settled pattern, or so it seemed at the instant. The dramatic legal changes of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were past. The restrictions on registration and voting were significantly eased, the regulation of campaign finance significantly strengthened. The terms of competition in national elections were lopsided. Many of the presidential contests of the previous quarter century were not close; several were historic blowouts. Democrats had an iron grip on the US House, and congressional elections were dominated by incumbents, each cycle a new low in a long and continuous atrophy of competition. Finally, it was a time of partisan “dealignment,” of weak party leadership, logrolling majoritarianism in Congress, individualistic presidents remote from party influences, and an independent electorate estranged from ancestral party attachments.
How long ago that day now seems. Nowadays, the competition between the two parties is nearly equal: every presidential election is closely fought and in every congressional cycle the control of Congress hangs in the balance. Nowadays, Democratic and Republican politicians are absolutely divided on nearly every important issue; Democrats and Republicans in the electorate are also much more polarized than before. Nowadays, the legal environment in campaigns and elections, particularly in the regulation of campaign finance, is greatly in flux.
It seems reasonable to suppose that these changes in the political environment have influenced the calculations of the elites who might muster their fellow citizens into politics. They affect the readiness of citizens to respond to calls for action; they affect the likelihood that mass participation will help elites to achieve their objectives; they affect the price and the productivity of alternative means of influencing politics – they affect all of the considerations, in short, that ought to factor into decisions to mobilize citizens into politics, or not. The effects of environmental change on the incentives for mobilization have not necessarily been uniform. Overall, however, the changes of the last two decades have increased the net returns for mobilization, just as, on the whole, the changes of the two decades previous to 1993 diminished the incentives for mobilization.
Electoral competition
Since 1993, the competitive situation in US national elections has changed markedly.
In the nation’s legislature, the Democrats controlled the US Senate continuously between 1955 and 1981 and the US House of Representatives continuously between 1955 and 1995, the longest spells of single-party control in American history.
Since 1993, though, the control of the Senate has alternated four times and the control of the House three. For more than half the time, the control of the two chambers has been divided, the Senate in one party’s hands, the House in the other’s. The governing majorities have been very narrow, especially in the House of Representatives. In the lower house, the majority party has enjoyed a margin of 20 or more seats beyond the majority of 218 in only two of the last 11 congresses; House Democrats routinely held 30- to 50-seat majorities from the late 1950s into the early 1990s. 2 After many decades of party monopoly in the US Congress, the control of the national legislature has now been up for grabs for two entire decades.
Presidential elections have likewise stabilized into a pattern of regular and intense competition. President Obama was the third president in a row to be elected to a second term, an event that has only occurred once before, in the 1820s. 3 By any standard, however, all of the presidential elections over the last two decades have been painfully close. After the event, the margins of victory have proved to be small. The senior George Bush was the last presidential candidate to win more than 53 percent of the popular vote, in 1988; his son was reelected in 2004 by the smallest margin of any two-term president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916. In the lead-up to the event, moreover, the races have been deemed competitive by their ultimate participants. More than three quarters of respondents to the American National Election Studies (ANES) surveys anticipated a “close” race in five of the last six presidential contests; the proportion had never before exceeded 70 percent in any election back to 1952 (ANES, 2015). The competition for the nation’s highest office is as robust as it has been in over a century.
Competition is a strong incentive for candidates, parties, and advocates to commit resources in mobilization. Since the 2000 election, decided (officially) by 537 votes in Florida, the two contenders for the presidency have invested mightily in the “ground game,” grinding out tough reelection victories in 2004 and 2012 by focusing on voter turnout in key states. As expected, ANES data show a marked increase in “direct mobilization,” in the form of reports of contact by parties and candidates, up by 15 percentage points since the 1960s and 1970s and up by more than 20 percentage points since the trough in the 1990s. They also show a sharp rise in attempts to influence the votes of others, in “indirect mobilization,” up by about 15 percentage points just since 2000 (ANES, 2015). Rosenstone and Hansen (1993) among many others found a powerful relationship between several measures of electoral competition – objective and subjective; presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial – and voter turnout. And indeed, the knock-on effect of increased competition for office is surely a major factor – even perhaps the primary factor – in the general rise in voter turnout in presidential elections that began in the middle 1990s. 4
Voter participation in congressional elections in presidential election years has risen in parallel with participation in presidential elections. Despite the greater intensity of the competition for control in the US Congress, though, the rate of voter participation in midterm elections has hardly budged in 40 years (since 18- to 20-year-olds gained the right to vote in federal elections). One factor is surely that the competition for control of the Congress has come to focus on a shrinking number of marginal congressional districts. Less than 10 percent of the 435 constituencies are “neutral” between the two parties, compared to 15 to 18 percent in the 1970s, and only 23 representatives (on average) manage to “win against the grain” and serve districts that distinctly favor the opposing party, compared to 56 (on average) in the 1970s (Jacobson, 2013: 18–19). As a result, the heightened incentive to mobilize voters has been offset by the diminished number of campaigns in which turnout can have a practical effect on outcomes.
Of course, the number of states whose electoral votes are in play in presidential elections has fallen over the same decades, indeed dramatically. As in congressional elections, campaigns for the presidency are focused with greater intensity on fewer voters. In 2012, just eight states received as many as five candidate visits during the fall campaign (New York Times, 2012); the two campaigns spent more than one advertising dollar per voter in just 12 states and only a few cents per voter in every other (NPR, 2012). Whether competition for the nation’s highest office will be able to sustain voter turnout by itself is an open question.
Partisan polarization
Tied up with increased electoral competition, likely as cause and consequence, is a deepening of the division between the two parties in the American electorate. Over the last two decades, the voters have become more partisan. According to ANES data, “pure” independents, those professed independents who disavow leanings toward either party, have declined in proportion. “Strong” partisans, whether Democratic or Republican, have increased. The balance between “not so strong” partisans and independents who “lean” toward one party or another has tilted toward the latter, but to no effect, given the nearly identical political behavior of weak partisans and independent leaners (ANES, 2015). Now, a much larger share of “independents” are admitted partisans and a larger share of partisans are strong partisans.
More importantly, the voters’ partisanship is now more closely aligned with the voters’ policy views. In the 1960s, the Democrats were a mixture of northern liberals and southern conservatives, the Republicans a blend of moderates and conservatives. The ideological overlap of Republicans and Democrats in the electorate was substantial. Now, almost no Republicans claim to be liberal and only modest numbers of Democrats say they are conservative. The median Republican is a strong conservative and the median Democrat is a liberal. The two parties in the electorate are more homogenous in ideology today than they were only two decades ago (Levendusky, 2009).
The polarization of the mass electorate has also in itself had a significant effect on the choices of political elites. Polarized voters are motivated voters, easier and cheaper to activate and therefore more attractive targets for mobilization. The fraction of the electorate that claims to care a great deal about the outcome of the presidential election has risen by about 15 percentage points since the 1980s, surpassing 70 percent for the first time in 1992 and exceeding 80 percent since 2004 (ANES, 2015). (The fraction feeling invested in the outcome of the congressional election has also risen, by about 10 percentage points, to around two-thirds.) Electoral campaigns always face a tradeoff between persuasion and mobilization, between investing in attracting voters and investing in turning out voters who seem to be supporters. In the 1970s and 1980s, the relative payoffs seemed very much in favor of persuasion, and the mobilization infrastructure was neglected to pay for television advertising. In the last 20 years, or certainly in the last 10, the balance seems to have shifted. As Bartels, Jacobson, and others have shown, partisan identification is now more predictive of the vote than it was three or four decades ago (Bartels, 2000; Jacobson, 2013). Split-ticket voting, once widespread, is now rare. Persuasion is difficult if people’s minds are already made up. Correspondingly, mobilization is more attractive the more confidently campaigns can predict support (Levendusky, 2009).
The polarization of the parties in the American electorate has occurred in parallel, indeed in response to, the polarization of the parties in American government. According to a number of measures, the ideological divide between Democrats and Republicans in the US Congress has widened steadily ever since their movement apart began in the 1980s. Roll call votes, aggregated into the Nominate scores of Poole and Rosenthal, reveal that the most conservative House Democrat is more liberal than the most liberal House Republican, and has been since 2004. The most conservative Democratic senator is likewise more liberal than the most liberal Republican senator, and has been since 2005 (Poole, 2014). The widening split between the two parties also shows itself in presidential support. A half century ago, congressional Republicans supported President Eisenhower only 15 percentage points more often than congressional Democrats, and Democrats on Capitol Hill supported President Johnson just 35 percentage points more often than Republicans. A large contingent of southern conservative Democrats was open to cooperation with Republicans, and a smaller group of eastern moderate Republicans could be brought along with Democrats. The parties in Congress no longer overlap ideologically. The support that President Bush and President Obama received from their own partisans exceeded the support they received from the opposing party by 55 percentage points (Ornstein et al., 2013: Table 8–2). The aisle between the two parties in Congress, once a broad and indistinct footpath, is now a deep and well-guarded moat.
The intensification of partisanship at the elite level has had a pronounced effect on the institutional operations of the government. Writing in the early 1970s, David Mayhew (1974: 99–100) commented, “the best service a party can supply to its congressmen is a negative one: it can leave them alone. And this in general is what the congressional parties do.” Party discipline was not much in evidence in the United States Congress.
Today, however, the Democratic caucus and the Republican conference are more homogeneous than before. Both chambers of the Congress have witnessed an increase in the number of “party unity” votes – a majority of Democrats against a majority of Republicans – and increased party cohesion on party unity votes (Ornstein et al., 2013, Tables 8-3 and 8-4). The greater incidence of party unity voting reflects greater homogeneity in viewpoint within the two parties but also more effective party leadership, the first authorizing the second, according to the theory of conditional party government (Aldrich and Rohde, 2010). The Republican majority in the House, for example, has maintained fealty to the Hastert Rule, the principle that the leadership should advance no legislation that lacks the support of a majority of the GOP conference, articulated by the longest-serving Republican House Speaker.
The leadership and the caucus and conference majorities have also curtailed the autonomy of congressional committees. Fifty years ago, the party leadership exerted an appreciable level of control only over the committees whose jurisdictions most closely affected the party’s “brand.” In the 1970s, when Richard Fenno wrote about congressmen in committees, the House party leadership superintended the Rules Committee, the chamber’s gatekeeper, and the two money committees, Appropriations and Ways and Means. The other committees were never or only occasionally the object of the leadership’s concern and highly permeable, therefore, to a range of other influences, including lobbying groups (Deering and Smith, 1997; Fenno, 1973). Now, though, the party leadership has a wider range of interests, increasingly demanding that committee leaders synchronize their agendas and policy initiatives with party priorities. The leadership’s concern extends even to committees that used to be well outside its notice, like Agriculture and Public Works (Aldrich et al., 2013; Evans, 2001). As the institutions of US government have become more partisan, in short, they have also become more centralized.
The partisan polarization of American officialdom, it seems, might also have affected the efficacy of mobilization of communications with government and other forms of “governmental participation.” Congress is doing less, so there are fewer occasions for attempting to exert influence. Members of Congress are better ideological matches to their districts, so there are fewer opportunities for persuasion. As Gary Jacobson (2013) shows, congressional districts are also more homogeneous than before, creating a closer correspondence between the policy views of members of Congress and their constituents. Members have less inclination to follow other cues and less room for action. Finally, Congress is more closely controlled by the party leadership, acting for the majority of the caucus or conference, and the prospects for success in advocacy are more dependent than before on consistency with the position of the leadership. If an advocate’s position is opposed to the leadership’s, the effort in mobilization is wasted, as it is unlikely to succeed. If an advocate’s position is aligned with the leadership’s, the effort in mobilization is also wasted, as it was likely to succeed anyway. The changes wrought by polarization would seem to discourage elites from soliciting political participation aimed at influencing elected officials.
Relative to the information about electoral mobilization and participation, the information at hand about “going public” and “grassroots lobbying” is limited and occasional. Impressionistically, presidential appeals that voters communicate their views to representatives in Congress have declined in frequency. On the other hand, the revisions in the campaign finance laws have unleashed a torrent of “issue ads” sponsored by “independent” advocacy groups, all demanding, in lieu of an illegal electoral endorsement, that concerned voters “call Senator Smith and tell her” to refrain from any further atrocities.
It is equally difficult to track participation in governmental politics over time. The Roper series that Rosenstone and Hansen (1993) (and later others) used ceased in 1994, shortly after the publication of the book. The infrequent studies made since raise comparability issues, given differences in question wording and survey administration. That said, the available evidence seems to indicate that the expectation that polarization has discouraged governmental participation is incorrect, at least as it pertains to contacting Congress. In the 1970s and 1980s, on average, about 15 percent of the adult populace “wrote” a congressman or senator “within the last year,” according to the Roper data. In 2004, using a more expansive question, the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems module on the ANES found an 18 percent rate of contact with any “politician or government official” over the last five years. Other recent estimates range higher (even, perhaps, implausibly higher). A study using data from the 2006 to 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies (CCES) found that 29 percent claimed to have contacted a representative or senator in the last year (Hickey, 2013); a 2008 Zogby survey for the Congressional Management Foundation found that 44 percent claimed to have contacted a legislator in the last five years (Goldschmidt and Ochreiter, 2008). 5 In any case, as large a percentage of Americans as before, or even a larger percentage than before, appears to have contacted an elected representative in the recent past.
Of course, the last 20 years have seen many changes besides the increasing polarization of the electorate, most importantly, in this case, the advent of easy and inexpensive electronic communications. Twenty years ago, the availability of email for communication was quite limited. Now it is widely available both as a means of communication and as a means of mobilization. The recipient of an exciting or alarming email from an advocacy group needs simply to click on a link and enter a zip code to send a message to a representative or senator – or all three of the representatives in Congress at once. Moreover, advocacy groups and members of Congress themselves solicit comments on their websites. The 2008 CCES study found that 85 percent of the respondents who communicated with Congress did so by email, compared to 29 percent who communicated by phone and 11 percent by mail. The earlier Zogby survey found that 43 percent of those who communicated a message to a representative sent email, 7 percent used a member’s website, 24 percent placed a phone call, and 18 percent wrote a letter. One might question the effectiveness of messages so lacking in effort, but as Speaker Bankhead once said of the stimulated letters in his mailbag, “they’re there” (Bauer et al., 1963: 440). Easy as it is to send, a message to Congress indicates at least a modicum of interest and awareness.
Still, the instrumentality of mobilization of communications to a polarized Congress is a puzzle. One possibility is that the purpose has shifted from assembling majorities out of a diverse membership to influencing the majority caucus or conference: affecting the balance of power in the majority party, steeling the leadership against the temptation to compromise, urging the party leadership to action. Another possibility is that the purpose is “farming the membership”: advertising the activity of the advocacy group to its members and giving members an outlet for expression. One conclusion is clear: we have a lot to learn about the objectives of advocacy groups and their incentives to mobilize participation as a resource.
Legal environment
The dramatic changes in the competitive environment and the partisan environment are matched by important changes in the legal environment. Although there have been reversals in the last few years, the main direction of the last two decades has been to make it easier to register and to vote. In 1993, the year of the passage of the National Voter Registration Act (“Motor Voter”), three states allowed voter registration on the day of the election (and a fourth had no voter registration). Now, 11 states and the District enable voters to register on Election Day and two others (down recently from three) allow voters to register during the early voting period but not on Election Day itself. The states have also made it easier to vote other than in person on Election Day. In 1993, states were just starting to experiment with no-excuse absentee balloting and early voting. Now, all but 14 states, the holdouts mostly in the Northeast and South, have laws that facilitate voting before Election Day. In 2012, 32 percent of the presidential vote nationwide was cast early; early votes were a majority of the total presidential vote in 11 states, including the two that voted by mail, Oregon and Washington (Abramson et al., 2015: 92–93). The widespread availability of voting before Election Day has itself encouraged candidates and parties to develop the means to encourage it, as a way of locking in the votes of core supporters before the chaotic rush of the end of the campaign.
The effects of the new voter registration and balloting laws on voter turnout have been well explored. The research on voter turnout typically finds modest positive effects from the changes in registration laws but little or no effect from the reforms in balloting laws. Using two methodologies, for instance, Jan E Leighley and Jonathan Nagler (2014) estimated an appreciable effect from the adoption of election day registration and a smaller but still perceptible effect from shorter registration closing periods. By one method, they found, the implementation of no-excuse absentee voting made a significant difference for turnout; by the other, it made none. Early voting had no appreciable effect on turnout in either case.
The registration and voting reforms have had a greater effect on the activities of campaigns, from advertising and issue strategies to mobilization. On one hand, the innovations created new possibilities for mobilizing voters. African American churches, for example, used the early voting period to get “souls to the polls” on Sundays and Wednesdays, before or after services. In response to their and like successes, many Republican legislatures and governors elected in 2010 scaled back their accommodations for registrants and voters (and added new restrictions, like photo identification requirements for voters), inviting charges of voter suppression. Two states with the most liberal voting and registration provisions, Ohio and North Carolina, both won by President Obama in 2008 and by Republican governors in 2010, reduced their early voting periods; Ohio additionally restricted evening and weekend voting hours and North Carolina ended same-day voter registration during early voting. The usefulness for mobilization of the expanded opportunities for registration and voting was the heart of the issue: early voting and same-day registration empowered disenfranchised citizens in the Democratic view, perpetrators of fraud in the Republican view. 6
On the other hand, the accommodations to convenience in voting have also raised the costs of campaigns, including perhaps the costs of mobilization. By spreading the opportunity to vote over more days and more modalities, early voting and unrestricted absentee voting make it easier for voters to schedule the time to vote. (Indeed, the research on turnout mostly suggests that unrestricted absentee voting and early voting affect when rather than whether people vote.) By spreading the balloting out, however, early voting and unrestricted absentee voters make it more difficult for mobilizers to muster voters. The logistical and personnel requirements of get-out-the-vote campaigns are surely greater when they are distributed over days or even weeks, and when many people have already requested absentee ballots and are therefore barred from voting in person, than they are when GOTV campaigns are concentrated on a single day, when everybody must vote or miss the chance. The liberalization of registration and voting has created new opportunities for targeted efforts but new challenges for mass efforts.
The last 20 years have also seen significant changes in the regulations governing the financing of election campaigns. The basic law remains the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1971, as amended in 1974, but legislation, regulatory rule-making, and Supreme Court rulings have now changed the system so thoroughly that it is almost unrecognizable. Soon after the passage of the FECA Amendments, the Supreme Court in Buckley v Valeo invalidated limits on campaign expenditures and limits on “independent” expenditures on communications that do not “expressly advocate the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate,” thus establishing a privileged position for independent expenditures. Over the course of the 1980s and into the 1990s, the Federal Election Commission steadily eased restrictions on the political parties’ expenditures on “mixed-purpose” activities, including get-out-the-vote efforts and general party advertising, and on “legislative advocacy media advertisements” that mention specific candidates but do not expressly urge their election or defeat.
The parties’ “soft money” expenditures for advertising and legislative advocacy became the target of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (“McCain-Feingold,” after its sponsors) in 2002. BCRA diverted activity in campaign financing away from political parties and toward nominally independent organizations, the “527s” of the 2004 and 2008 presidential election cycles and the “Super-PACs” of the 2012 cycle. In 2010, the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United gave “independent-expenditure only” political action committees the ability not only to spend unlimited amounts – a right already established in Buckley – but also to raise unlimited amounts for their campaign activities. Most recently, in 2014, the Supreme Court invalidated limits on individual contributions to electoral campaigns in McCutcheon v FEC.
Between actions of the Congress, the FEC, and the Court, the federal campaign finance system has evolved in two clear directions. First, relative to the starting point of the 1974 amendments to FECA, the judiciary has gradually (and recently, rapidly) loosened restrictions on fundraising for electoral campaigns. Second, since the Buckley decision in 1976 first elevated the importance of independent expenditures, the interactions of the FEC, Congress, and the courts have shifted prerogatives in campaign finance first away from independent organizations toward political parties and then back in the other direction.
The changing legal structure in campaign finance might well be expected to have affected the balance between mobilization and persuasion in election campaigns. Although political parties and “independent” advocacy groups are both organized for campaigns, the differences between them are significant. Political parties have interests in common with candidates. They and their candidates both want the candidates to win. Political parties’ interest in winning, moreover, goes beyond the fates of individual candidates. They want to maximize the success of their tickets as a whole, across constituencies, across offices, and across time. Accordingly, parties internalize the benefits of campaign activities that promote their candidates as partisan slates, activities whose benefits are externalities for each of the individual candidates. One type of activity in which parties will invest more than individual candidates is the making and maintenance of party images. A second type of activity in which the parties are more motivated to invest is mobilization, activities that have spillover benefits for candidates up and down and across the ticket (Aldrich, 1995). In fact, the FEC loosened restrictions on party fundraising in the 1980s and 1990s to encourage just such “party building” activities.
Independent organizations, on the other hand, have their own interests, which will not always be aligned with a candidate’s or a party’s. They might wish to shape a candidate’s or a party’s message more to their own liking, to advance their own policy or ideological agendas, or to motivate their own contributors – in short, they may be less interested in helping a candidate or a party to win than they are in making points. They also derive no clear benefit from the mobilization of campaign activists and voters.
In the presidential election in 2012, 20 percent of the total spending behind Mitt Romney was SuperPACs other than Romney’s own, versus 9 percent of the spending on behalf of Barack Obama (Washington Post, 2012). The Romney campaign did not control its message quite to the same extent as the Obama campaign. Likewise, the Romney campaign did not control the allocation of campaign resources quite to the same extent as the Obama campaign. At the end of the fall campaign, the Obama team had the resources in reserve for a voter mobilization effort that Romney was not able to match. The new balance of power in campaign finance, which favors independent organizations relative to political parties, seems less favorable to voter mobilization at the margin.
As one might anticipate, though, the effects of the new regulatory regime on campaign fundraising – on the mobilization of financial participation – are nothing short of dramatic. Until 2014’s ruling in McCutcheon, contributions to candidates, parties, and PACs (other than independent PACs) were still capped but campaign spending was not. Candidates and parties had every incentive to seek out new financial donors and every incentive to encourage current donors to “max out” their contributions under the law. Moreover, spending in presidential elections, long limited as a condition of public funding, is now also practically unlimited. Under the 1974 FECA Amendments, the federal government provided matching funds for candidates in presidential nominating primaries and a large lump sum for the two major party nominees for the general election, in exchange for strict limits on spending. In the space of 12 years, the presidential campaign funding system broke down completely. In 1996, Republican Steve Forbes became the first aspirant to the presidency to decline federal matching funds for the primaries, and in 2000 the Republican frontrunner, George W Bush, followed suit. In 2004, President Bush and two leading candidates for the Democratic nomination, John Kerry and Howard Dean, also turned down public matching funds. Still, in 1996, 2000, and 2004, both of the major party nominees accepted federal funding in the general election. In 2008, though, Democrat Barack Obama opted out of federal funding in both the primary and the general election, and in 2012 both candidates, President Obama and Governor Romney, funded their campaigns without federal contributions. At all levels of government, even in the race for the highest office in the land, campaigns can now spend as much as they can raise.
With increasing demand for campaign resources, the mobilization of campaign contributions has been an area of considerable effort and innovation. In the 1970s, the conservative activist Richard Viguerie, the former executive secretary of the Young Americans for Freedom, perfected direct mail solicitation, computerizing mailing lists and automating the production of appeals. Direct mail was highly effective for fundraising, its low yields offset by large numbers of new contacts, repeat solicitations of previous givers, and appeals to contributors to affinitive causes. In the 2000s, the breakdown of the federal funding system elevated the longstanding practice of “bundling,” the recruitment of well-off and well-positioned volunteers to aggregate contributions solicited through their professional and social networks. Karl Rove’s force of “Bush Pioneers” (bundlers of $100,000 or more), “Bush Rangers” ($200,000), and “Bush Super Rangers” ($300,000) enabled George W Bush to swamp his opponents in 2000 and 2004. 7 More recently, email, social media, and websites have extended the capacity of campaigns to reach large numbers of potential donors inexpensively and effectively. Pioneered by the Howard Dean campaign in 2004, e-solicitations were raised to a high art by the Obama campaign in 2008. According to a study by the Campaign Finance Institute (2014), 57 percent of Obama’s individual donors who met the disclosure threshold of $200 in 2008 gave their first contributions in amounts that did not need to be reported separately. 8 Where direct mail once gave the Republicans an advantage in money raised from small donors, e-solicitation has recently given the advantage in mass donor participation to the Democrats. President Obama’s 2012 campaign raised 61 percent of its funds in donations of less than $200, Governor Romney only 25 percent (Federal Election Commission, 2012).
The intensification of effort in fundraising has produced a striking response. According to ANES data, the fraction of the electorate that has given money to a party or candidate has increased by as much as half, from around 8 percent in the 1980s and 1990s to 13 percent in the 2004 and 2008 election cycles (ANES, 2015). Financial participation in campaigns has always increased with income – historically, citizens in the top 20th of the income distribution were more than 10 times more likely to give a campaign contribution than citizens in the bottom sixth – and it still does today. The increase in participation through donations to parties and candidates, however, has occurred at all income levels, with the greatest increases recorded at the lower income levels. At fractions of a cent per solicitation, internet, email, and social media forms of fundraising have broadened the participatory base for campaign contributions in the United States. The effort to extend the reach of campaign fundraising is one of the mobilization success stories of the last half century.
But will campaigns work with such energy to expand the donor pool when single individuals can give unlimited amounts? Soon we will see.
Conclusion
American politics never stands still. The verities of today are the anachronisms of tomorrow. In a span of 20 years, elections whose conclusions were foregone have become contests whose outcomes hang in the balance; political parties whose adherents fraternized easily across ideological lines have become institutions whose partisans are homogeneous inwardly and antagonistic outwardly; a stable regime of public funding and contribution limits has become a system of unlimited supply and demand increasingly outside the control of parties and candidates.
Change in the political environment creates new opportunities and new impediments for political mobilization. I have identified several connections in this essay. The increasing intensity of the competition for control of national government has made citizen participation more consequential and mobilization, correspondingly, more attractive. The widening polarization within the electorate has raised citizens’ motivations to participate and, correspondingly, their readiness to respond to mobilization attempts. The deregulation of finance in federal elections has been an impetus toward more extensive campaign fundraising efforts and, correspondingly, to broader opportunities for citizens to give. Finally, the explosion of access to electronic communications, whether websites, email, or social media, has vastly reduced the cost of contact – and recontact, and re-recontact – with potential voters, potential donors, and potential participants in campaigns to influence legislation.
As intriguing as some of these connections might be, there is no lack of work still to be done to explore them. Twenty years ago, Rosenstone and Hansen (1993) posited the importance of mobilization as a factor motivating the involvement of the American public in politics. We portrayed public officials, campaign organizers, interest group leaders, and issue advocates as strategic actors who view citizen activism as a resource they might exploit in their struggles for influence. Twenty years later, the key role of mobilization in political participation is widely recognized and its impact on the public is better understood. Twenty years later, however, our knowledge of political elites as strategic agents in mass political involvement – their calculations of opportunity and advantage and the influences upon them – is still underdeveloped. Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America suggested a view of political mobilizers as political participants in their own right. A worthy frontier of research in political participation, perhaps, is a study of the goals, perceptions, opportunities, and resources of the elites who call it forth.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.