interviews
The Nationalization of U.S. Elections
by Dan Hopkins
December 31, 2020
This interview with Dan Hopkins, Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
What were the original assumptions in the Constitution about state-level loyalty versus national government loyalty?
It's a good question. The Constitution is now far enough back in our collective memories that I think it's really valuable to start by having some sense of what the U.S. was like at the time. There were some scholars who argued that the Constitution is well understood as a peace treaty between sovereign states about how they were going to govern their affairs.
In 1776 and even in 1787, when the Constitution was drafted, the U.S. was a collection of 13 quite different colonies. It took the Georgia delegation six weeks to travel to Philadelphia in order to participate in the Constitutional Convention. Different colonies had very different economies and different religious heritages. This was a quite diverse country and, thus, the Constitution was designed to protect substantial levels of state-level autonomy. I think it is really important to recognize that at the time, many of the people thought of themselves as Americans, but also to a certain extent, as New Yorkers or Virginians or Pennsylvanians.
When do you start to see a shift towards politics in the U.S. becoming more nationalized?
To some degree, it's an ongoing process that has unfolded in fits and starts over our 200-plus year history. I do think that the Civil War is a critical turning point. In the run-up to the Civil War, you see many more implications of state-level identities. I'm a Georgian, I'm a Virginian. And obviously, the Civil War pitted state against state.
It's generally been the case that the Republican party has been more likely to invoke federalism. Of course, the exemplary issue is the issue of civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Even in more recent times, the Republican party has advocated for there being less of a role in the federal government asserting itself to protect the rights of African-Americans, especially, but not only in the South. I think it's fair to say that if you've heard a state rights argument in the last 50 years, it's more likely to be coming from the Republican party.
There's also an element in which as power shifts, we see changes. When the Republicans control the federal office, sometimes it's Democrats who say, "Hey, it's important to let California write its own laws with respect to clean energy or car emissions standards." At the same time, the extent to which we see Republican states moving to block sanctuary cities, for instance, is surprising.
If you're a principled federalist, then presumably cities shouldn't be punished for diverging.
In general, I see very few principled federalists in American politics. I think that all too often in contemporary American politics, federalism is just the clothing we use to dress up certain arguments instead of being a principled approach to a range of policy problems.
What factors contribute to a nationalized political landscape?
I actually think there's a relationship between the transformation of campaign finance, the transformation of voting, and the transformation of what's getting covered in our newspapers. There's a unifying element to all of this.
Let's look at campaign finance first. In many of the most competitive 2020 Senate races, large majorities of money came from out-of-state donations. What does that do to the candidates, and how does that affect the way constituents perceive elections?
I think that the nationalization of the campaign finance structure is an example of our nationalized set of divisions. What we're trying to do is refract these highly nationalized divisions through our federalist system. And the result often distorts representation in critical ways. One of the key facts about campaign finance has been that as late as 1992, two-thirds of all donations to federal candidates, to members of Congress, were coming from within the state that they represent. 20 years later in 2012, only one-third of all dollars were coming from the states that people represented.
The danger is that the representatives and senators increasingly have one constituency where they get their votes, but a separate constituency from where they get their money.
That is not how our system was designed to work. It was not designed for members of Congress to spend four hours a day raising money from people who are not their constituents.
And simultaneously, there has been a collapse of local media. I wonder how the decline of local news plays into this landscape?
When the internet first became a sizable presence, there was a hope that it might actually lead to a proliferation of local news. With the internet there are very, very low production costs, so, theoretically, I could put up a newsletter about my neighborhood. But in fact, as you said, the rise of the internet and the rise of cable television led to this dramatic concentration of our attention on a very, very small number of nationalized news sources. Partly that's because the news media would target us based on where we lived. The Philadelphia Inquirer targeted a set of people who wanted to know about life in and around Philadelphia.
But more recently we instead see that the business model for many media companies is to compete based on who voters are and who readers are and who consumers are, rather than where they live.
Rather than providing me with information specific to Philadelphia, they will identify me as someone who likes the National Football League or cares about politics.
That has led to the fragmentation of our media environment. One of the real losers in this has been people's attention to state and local politics. State and local politics have never been on the top of people's priority lists. It used to be that if I were reading the Philadelphia Inquirer, as a by-product of learning what the Eagle's score was, I also learn a little bit about who my mayor was or who my governor was. And nowadays, since I can go right to ESPN or I can go right to Fox News, I can skip over all that state and local information.
In a world where state and local politicians want to be well-known, they're much more likely to attach themselves to a lightning rod federal issue than they are to actually dive into the challenging, complex issues that face their local community.
Which really allows issues to be manipulated. When we focused on immigration, something I found interesting was how much immigration was used as a campaign tool in Ohio or Maine. It’s easy to make a border terrifying when you don’t live near one. Do you feel like campaigning has changed based on the ability to take issues that don't have anything to do with your constituents, but are made to look like they have everything to do with constituents?
Yeah, absolutely. One of the real challenges with a nationalized political environment is that it encourages attention to issues that are evocative and emotionally charged and often have to do with specific groups of people, but ultimately do not have clear policy effects. I think one prominent example of this is not long after President Trump was elected he attacked football players who refused to stand for the National Anthem. I think it's a very instructive case because he wasn't proposing any policy. This was purely about symbols.
I worry that in the nationalized political environment, it's very hard to put together a political coalition that speaks to auto workers and nurses in the suburbs of Detroit, and retirees in Maricopa County. This is a very diverse country. One of the easier ways to knit together a political coalition is to reach for these divisive, identity-oriented issues, even if that's not actually what's going to motivate the policies that you're proposing.
I do think that there's been a real connection between the way in which our politics has nationalized and the way in which our politics has become more identity oriented.
It's these kinds of identity charged issues that can have an intuitive meaning to people in places from Montana to North Carolina.
Has your work clarified your opinion about how national politics should work? What do you advocate for moving forward in terms of policy and campaigning?
I certainly think that voters do better when they have the information that they need, and I think that we are missing an opportunity to really use our federalist system, because there are so many different kinds of issues that face the different communities in our country.
If we are trying to force all of those issues onto a single divide between Democrats and Republicans, we're going to miss a lot of critical issues.
I think some of the disaffection with contemporary politics stems from the fact that many of us deal with problems in our day-to-day lives that are not represented by the Republican-Democrat divide.
I do want to be wary of nostalgia — or suggesting that some earlier period of history was markedly better. Yes. I worry a lot that today's voters just don't know much about state and local politics, but state and local politics wasn't always vibrant and democratic in previous generations, right? As a social scientist, I think part of my job is to lay out trends. I do think that nationalization is something that we should forecast as being a major part of our politics moving forward.
I also think that there are some policy changes on the edges that I would advocate for that I think would help reinforce the connections between places and voters, and to make better use of our current federalist system. For instance, I think campaign finance matching, so that every dollar you get locally is amplified, is a great idea. I think that could encourage politicians to lay down roots in the specific communities they represent and to spend less time trying to raise money from Manhattan or Dallas.
I think we should also do everything in our regulatory capacity to help promote, protect, and foster high-quality, non-partisan coverage of states and localities.
As a country that is hemorrhaging reporters who cover states and localities I do think that given how many important decisions are made at the state and local level, as a society, we have a real stake in the quality of local news media. There are fewer statehouse reporters, there are fewer city hall reporters, and there are fewer people who are tracking state and local politics to hold our politicians accountable. I think that has been underappreciated, and one of the real dangers in contemporary American democracy.
interviews
The Police and Public Health
by Melissa Morabito
August 16, 2020
This interview with Melissa Morabito, a professor in the Criminal Justice department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and an expert on police response to public health problems, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Melissa | There are spaces that we don't necessarily want the police to be in, and the police don't necessarily want to be in, but they're there. I look at police responses to people with mental illnesses. I look at police response to sexual assault. I have a new project looking at public schools and police.
frank | How did it come to be that the police are the ones to call for all these situations?
The police create this boundary for unpleasant things we don't want to deal with, we rely on them because it's easier. I always give my students the example of an officer friend responding to a noise complaint during the first week on the job, and it was a woman who had turned her music up while she was vacuuming, but had refused to turn it down for her neighbor, so he called the police.
On top of the socialization piece, we have not fully funded alternative systems in these areas. Think about mental illness. We know that we built community mental health centers, but we established no funding for them. So you had people who were let go right out of psychiatric hospitals, and there was no community healthcare provider for them.
People ask, “what do we do about police response to homelessness?” Well, we can provide housing for people, but the police can't do that. They're still going to end up getting called when a person has been living in front of a business or in front of someone's house. And as long as those calls persist, the police have to figure out something to do there to keep the community happy and engaged.
Even if we fully fund other sorts of services, I think that there will always be times where the police are the ones who show up. That's a concern for me with the conversation around defunding the police because if the police are going to show up, we want them to be the best possible when they get there.
Does it feel plausible to socialize other outlets, different versions of 911?
Some cities have worked with 311, which is a non-police information line. In Houston, they have a behavioral health version of 911.
I mean, the Tampa Police Department put up some of the craziest 911 calls on Youtube - I am talking about calls completely unrelated to criminal activity, but people don't know where else to call. In many communities, it is the only 24 hours a day number that you can call and you can get somebody.
And if the police are to respond, what is the framework that underlines how they approach these crises?
If you're looking at police response, there are a few models. There's the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT), which came out of Memphis, Tennessee from Lieutenant Sam Proctor - you train 10% of your police department as CIT officers. They go through 40-hour training, they wear special pins so that the community members know who they are, and there is a partnership with a local hospital.
Co-Responders is another model. This is also the model in Boston, MA where I am the evaluator. In this model, a clinician rides along with a police officer. The clinician has access to medical records that the police officer doesn't and should have access to. For example, they know where and by whom someone is being treated so they can connect those pieces. The idea is the police officer makes sure everything is safe, and the clinician would then take over.
Can you see a change in the decision-making process when these models are used?
There has been research that shows that the training does reduce stigma. In that sense, it's an evidence-based practice. But terms of long term outcomes for people with mental illnesses, it is still unclear.
You wrote in one of your papers, “Not surprisingly because they are policed based interventions, they have historically been evaluated on quantifiable police outcomes."
What do you mean by that?
A police department is interested in what's happening at that moment.
Was force used? Are they able to deescalate the situation? If a person has committed a crime, how was it handled? Was that person arrested? They don't want to have a lot of arrests of people with mental illnesses because they know that that's not going to help, especially for a low-level offense where they will be right back out.
For a long time, taking that person to the emergency department was considered to be a successful outcome. But when we look at what happens for people who go to EDs they're unlikely to get hooked up with long term care. They're going to be patched up, and then they're going to be sent back on their way for this whole cycle to happen again. But for police departments, they're just concerned with what happens at that moment because that's what they're tasked with doing.
As a researcher, I want to know what happens next. And what are the outcomes with a crisis intervention team versus co-responders versus another approach? And are there long term benefits to the person? Are they more likely to get his housing? Are they more likely to get access to drug treatment if that's what they want?
What do you think the best approach is moving forward?
I think we need more relationships between police and mental health providers. On the emergency services side, we need to keep up in the partnerships.
If we are thinking long term, we need to fund other services, and we need housing for our most vulnerable people.
I think we want to continue training police and creating these partnerships for those times of crisis, but I think, overall, we just want to reduce the number of crises. I think we do that by beefing up some of the other services.
For me, when I hear “defund the police,” I hear let's move funding to take away some of those responsibilities from the police and put them where they should be. We know that these things are possible with money, but there has to be a political will to do that.
What do you make of the push for reform and abolition?
I'm really happy to have these conversations and I'm so glad that they're occurring. I think discussions about reform and abolition and defunding are important.
I think we need to start off with an honest accounting of what that job looks like, what we want them to do, and what we don't want them to do. If we want that job description to change, how do we take those responsibilities away and who do we give them to? I'm not a big fan of just saying, we're going to take all money away. Because in a time of crisis, if you call 911 and if they're not ready to respond right that is a problem.
Also, 911 call takers and dispatchers make the decision of who to send. And 911 call takers are frequently left out of reform efforts. That was one of the big problems with community policing. A lot of communities didn’t train the dispatchers. So they didn't care that you were problem-solving and talking to community members, they were going to respond to the next call.
How do you feel like the reputation of police officers affects their ability to police and the interactions that they have?
We can look back at history. This is not the first time we've been here. If we think about the 1960s, you had Kent state, you had the Vietnam War protests, you had civil rights protests, you had rioting throughout cities.
Police morale was at an all-time low, crime was at an all-time high, and budgets were low. And they came back from that. I think it will come back around, and officers will retain the legitimacy that they had before. Even now, if you look at polls of police officers, people generally will say that they don't like police officers, but when you ask them about the police officers in their community they have a much higher rating for them.
In the 1990s where there was a big push for transparency. There are things now that came out of that. You go on websites for most major police departments and you can pull up crime data. You could never do that before. You can find out a lot about what's happening in your community because it was demanded.
Now, there is a lot of discussion about officers who have a lot of complaints who are not fired, and instead given the opportunity to be very resigned and can move from one department to another. The police community owes it to us to make sure that they do not become police officers. If they're doing such a bad job, that your department is telling them they need to leave, there needs to be a way to make sure that they can't work someplace else.
Why hasn't that happened?
Well, I mean, it's the same reason that businesses allow people to resign rather than fire them: because we don't want a lawsuit. We hope they will get another job and it won't be a problem.
I don't think that what happens in policing is so different in that regard from the corporate world, but the implications are much greater.
What needs to be done about addressing racism directly?
There needs to be greater transparency in the discussion about where resources are put in communities and which communities are going to receive the bulk of patrolling.
Are police departments organized locally? Who is in charge of coming out and saying that they are going to make these changes?
There are between 12,000 and 18,000 police departments. And I can't tell you how many, because police departments can open up and shut down at any time and they don't need to tell anybody.
We have designed it on purpose because they are hyperlocal. When we look at the national incident-based reporting system and when we look at those national crime numbers, that is all voluntary response. They are not required to submit to the federal government.
Who knew.
There has been a big push in Congress to collect more data, but again, they can not mandate it.
What do you think about that?
States that will create their own posts, officer standards, and training, and they will set minimum standards for the state. And then you have departments that may go above and beyond. But states can require that the police department do something, and the federal government can not.
Interesting. Have you seen a push by states to get more information and data from their local police departments?
Absolutely. Here in Massachusetts, there is a big push for reform. They're pushing for a Peace Officers Standards and Training (POST) to set minimum standards in Massachusetts, which we never had because we didn't think we needed it, apparently.
Academy training is decided either by the individual department or by the state, depending on what type of Academy. Most police departments don't have their own police Academy, they're not big enough. They will go to a regional one, or a larger city.
And are they public or private academies?
In the Northeast, they're all public. If you go down to Florida, you can go to a community college academy, which you can pay for yourself and then put yourself out to be hired. So it depends on which part of the country you're in. The standards are very different all over - some of the more rural areas the rules are quite flexible.
In parts of Louisiana, if you work 35 hours a week or less, you never have to have to go through the Academy because you are considered part-time.
Do you think there needs to be some sort of blanketed national police exam that you need to pass in order to carry a gun?
But what would that entail? Really?
I don't know...
When I think about it, like universally, every police officer has to qualify with their firearm. They have to know how to use it. When you think about it, most police officers will never even pull their weapon out of their holster, and they never fire it except in training. Research tells if they're not great shots.
What happens on top of that, that is different across communities and across states. So what would a blanket policy look like?