 Welcome to the 100th episode of Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burrus. And joining us today is Jennifer L. Lawless. She's professor of government at American University where she also is the director of the Women and Politics Institute. She's the co-author of a book called Running from Office, Why Young Americans Are Turned Off to Politics. So the idea behind this book is that young Americans have declining interest in specifically running for office and that this represents a problem for the future of American democracy. Right? Certainly that we think there's a problem. We have 89% of high school and college students across the country say that they've already written off the idea of a candidacy later in life. Given that we have 500,000 elective offices in this country, Richard Fox, the co-author of the book and I, are somewhat worried because people will fill those positions if the best and brightest young people are writing off that possibility already, we're concerned about who might actually pick up the reins of power. So I'm curious before we get into the findings how you gathered this data. So you surveyed 2,163 high school students and 2,117 college students. What did those surveys look like? What did this process look like? We received National Science Foundation funding to conduct the study and we contracted with GFK Knowledge Networks. They have a national panel of respondents who take various surveys and a national sample of those people gave consent for their children also to complete a variety of surveys. So what we wind up with is a 4,200 person sample of high school and college students who represent what high school and college students across the country look like. So this is a very rare snapshot of young people in the country and in addition to conducting the survey which we did in the fall of 2012, in the summer of 2013, we did 115 hour long phone interviews with a random sample of the survey respondents so that we could delve more deeply into the responses that we garnered from the closed ended questions the previous fall. And you said it was 11% who had, it was even the modicum of interest, right? Right. So maybe only half of those have a strong interest. Right. The other 4% said that running for office, some office at some point in the future was something they were pretty sure they would ultimately do. The other 4% had not written it off entirely and thought that it was probably more likely than not that they would continue to give it serious thought as time went on. The 89% who are much more typical, you know, almost 9 out of 10, said that absolutely no way and it didn't matter if we were talking about the presidency or Congress or even a local office. They just had no interest in electoral politics. One thing I was curious as I was reading that is how much people's opinions of what they want to do change as they age. So when, if you had asked me when I was a high school kid if I wanted to work for a think tank in Washington, D.C., I probably would have said absolutely not. So do we have data on how many of these people say they don't want to run and then would change their mind or think they will run but then decide later on that they won't? Well, there are two pieces of useful information here that speak to that, I think. The first is that studies in other disciplines find that the kinds of professions that you say you're interested in or not at all interested in by the time you're 15 or 16 years old map pretty well onto what you ultimately consider a plausible option later in life. So it's not a perfect correlation but if you write something off as absolutely definitively no way when you're a teenager it's very rare that it comes back later in life. The other piece of evidence that we have that suggests that teenagers' attitudes matter is survey data that Richard and I have conducted on adults who are well situated to run for office. So since 2001 we've conducted surveys of lawyers, business leaders, educators and political activists, many of whom are in the professions that tend to lead to political careers and about half of them had said that they were interested in running and when we asked them when that thought first occurred to them the overwhelming majority said in high school or in college. Do you see any big differences between college and high school in this because I feel like you'd have a little bit more political involvement in college and you wouldn't high school? We did. The interest in running once you were in college was statistically higher, about four or five percentage points higher but the interest in college mapped pretty well onto what we know about adults. So it's not a situation where as you go throughout the course of your life every four or eight years you're going to get increasingly politically ambitious. By the time you leave college that your ambition level is pretty much set. So we have today 89% of young people basically saying no way to elected office. How does that compare to prior generations? So that's the big question. We don't know. It's shocking to us but this is the first time that a national survey of young people has been conducted that's asked explicitly about whether they want to run for office. We do know however that the things that lead people to say they're interested in running for office have changed over time. So among this sample of young people for example we know that people who talk to their parents a lot about politics, people who engage in political extracurricular activities, people who follow political news are far more likely to say they're interested in running for office. And we know that when we compare levels of conversations in the family that are political, political activities at school and news interest this generation scores much lower than previous generations. So we think that's relatively convincing and certainly suggestive that levels of political ambition are lower now than they've been in the past. But speculation is really all that we can offer on that point. Are we not even seeing, you mentioned in the book some of the use of social media and Facebook and things like this. But it was unclear to me, I do a lot of political stuff on Facebook. So whether or not the social media was apolitical, it kind of seemed like you maybe were saying it was apolitical but it may be they're interacting politically on the social media. So we asked explicitly whether they shared stories about politics via social media through Facebook, through Twitter, through any other technological interface that I'm not even familiar with. We also asked how frequently they accessed political news from social media sources. And frankly, those numbers were very, very low. Even among this generation, the people who are politically interested are still getting the bulk of their news and their political conversation and discussion not through social media outlets. So how big is the scope of the problem from the other direction? I think you said there were half a million elected offices in the United States. This is everything from dog catcher to president. Yes. And so how do we get from only 11% interested? How does that match up with the number of available slots? Well, we're confident in saying that there will always be enough human beings to fill these slots, right? And there will always be people that are willing to acquire political power. The concern is that if today's young people in general are not interested in doing so, and there's no sense that acquiring any kind of electoral position is noble or worthwhile or an effective way to bring about change, then the people for whom that's appealing long term might not be the people that have the most interesting ideas, might not be the people with innovative solutions, might not be the people that we ultimately think are most qualified to run for office, because those who are the most ambitious to solve the community's problems, the society's problems, global issues believe that there are many mechanisms by which to do that that are far more effective than running for office. Do we have data on how many people and of what age are actually running for office? So you did this survey three, four years ago. Do we know if the number of people who are putting their hats into the ring for offices in general is declining as those young people move into the age when they might be running? So this is one of the solutions that we offer in the book actually involves an app where people can find out what offices are open to them and they could consider running for them. Another upside to that app is it would at least let us have a better handle on where these offices are competitive and not. There is literally no systematic clearinghouse where I could go to that site or call that office and answer your question. We know that electoral competition at the congressional level is down in terms of competitiveness, but not in terms of the number of candidates. State legislative races are similar, but it's those other several hundred thousand local positions where we just don't know. I can tell you that at the school board level, for example, in most school districts in California, you have uncontested school board elections. Do we know if the say average age of someone running for office is increasing because it would seem if young people are not interested in running, then we would see more and more older people running for particular slots. Again, the demographic information that we have is usually about state legislatures and Congress. And so in those positions, many of which are professionalized legislatures, many of at the congressional level, certainly that's a pretty lucrative career. There we're not seeing substantial changes, but we wouldn't expect to. It's really at the local level where we need to start gathering these data so that we can figure out how these patterns are playing out. Do you have your own sort of theory of because what I was thinking when I saw 11 percent is I was depending on how you define young people. That's still several millions of people. And I don't know how many people we need for the 500,000 elective offices. But you have any sense of what it was like before? I mean, I saw one of those things you talk about when you ask students to name people that they admire. The president used to be a far more common thing. And the president is just the only politician on the list. So I mean, is it your sense that maybe in the 60s, people would have young people were all about politics or way at a way higher rate? I think the latter, not the former. So I don't know that we've ever been a country where we've been all about politics, even when presidential candidates were ranked as the most inspiring figures at the highest levels. We're still not talking about 80 percent of the population saying, yeah, that's great. That's my role model. That said, we do know that over time, people's government, people's trust in government has gone down dramatically. Congressional approval ratings have gone down dramatically. Presidential approval ratings have gone down dramatically. And it's through this national lens that people assess the political system. So our concern is that when people look at Washington, they see dysfunction and they don't know that much about politics. But what they see, they don't like and they extrapolate and assume that that's what it's like at all other levels of government as well. When people had a more favorable view of politics in general and of Washington, D.C., they still use that national lens. But it meant that they weren't necessarily writing off political positions in their towns or their localities. So again, it's difficult to track, but we do know that the national lens is the way people view the political system and that attitudes toward Washington have gone down over time. Do you think that this becomes, I think another way of restating your concern, which is I didn't really pick up on it the way you said it in the book, but when you said it here, that there can be a very negative self-reinforcing thing here where you think that only bad people have office. And so then maybe only bad people then run for office. There's a thing libertarians like to say, I'm not, there's a the worst rise to the top. And so one of the things that we talk about that we're not very big fan of elected officials, but we think that the worst rise to the top. But maybe we're creating a system where more and more of the worst will rise to the top because people are so down on politics. I think we have to figure out what we mean by the worst. But I do think that a very small sliver rise to the level of interest in running and one of the chapters in the book talks about people's attitudes toward politicians in general. And what we find is exactly what we would expect. They think that the people that run for the highest offices in the country are egotistical, self-involved narcissists. They think that people like John Edwards and the extent to which he lied and then actually brought the media in and perpetuated that lie are far more than norm than not. They think that sex scandals are completely prevalent and that they're not in the news just because they're unusual. They're in the news because they happen on a daily basis and that we can't trust our leaders. So they look around and they say, wait a minute, I'm not like that. If I want to solve the world's problems, if I want to figure out how to generate public policy and I'm not like that, why would I want to spend my time with people who are like that? And that reinforces this idea that this is just not a venue where they want to see themselves. Now, the very interesting finding is that people who are inspired even by one elected official are far more likely to have a broader positive view of elected officials in general. So one of the things that we argue in the book is that if we could up exposure to politics, chances are people would encounter at least one person that they thought was okay. And that might actually make them realize that all of the terrible people that get a lot of coverage aren't necessarily the norm. Donald Trump, sorry, that was a little bit of a... This is the third podcast in a row you mentioned Donald Trump, I actually know who you want to do it. Unfortunately. But that point about exposing people to politics, so that jumps ahead a bit to the solutions the last chapter of the book. But I want to ask about it real quick because it was something that I wondered about as I was reading the book. A lot of the argument in here takes the form of if we look at the 11% of the people who seem to be interested, they talk more about politics. They have more exposure to it. Their parents talk more about it. They have higher opinions. And so therefore the way that we ramp up interest is by exposing people to more politics and all that. But I wondered is there evidence that that's the direction the line of causation runs and that it might not run in the other direction that if you are the kind of person who's already interested in politics, then you're going to talk more about it. You're going to look up to elected officials. And the reason I wondered that is because this idea of getting people more interested by exposing them more to politics, I wonder if that could have the opposite effect. I mean, I was fairly down on politics before coming to Washington. And then after six years of living here and being much more exposed with than I was, I am radically more down on politics than I ever was. That's a very good question. And it's fair because whenever you're doing survey research like this, you have this reverse causation problem. And all you can really do is make an argument about why you think the directional arrow flows the way that it does. And what we would say is that the family results are the most compelling because the average 13-year-old does not come home, sit down at dinner with their parents and say, I really want to assess what Donald Trump said to Carly Fiorina today. It's that they pick up snippets of these conversations that are going on in a political household. And so it's unlikely that children are not picking up cues from their parents. Now, at that point, it could be that the ones who are growing up in these political homes are finding it interesting. And then when they go to school, they're seeking out those conversations with their peers or they're looking for political media. I think that it's more likely though that at least as far as the family concern is concerned, and that's the most important socializing agent, it probably is more politicized households feeding children that information. Well, let's use that then to jump into this, the heart book is these three chapters on why. And so you give these three broad reasons for why young people might have declining interest. And the first of these is just that, that families don't talk about politics. And you begin, I believe, by discussing the fact that is it family ties you talk about, and the way that sitcoms don't discuss. Can you go into that a bit? Sure. My goal in this book was to make sure that Michael J. Fox was heavily featured. Growing up watching family ties and being in love with Alex P. Keaton, I felt like it was the only right thing to do. It only recently actually dawned on me as an aside how political that show was. I watched it as a kid and I wasn't very aware, but the entire point of the show was hippies in the Reagan era. It was so political and you wrote about it and I was like, exactly. Right. And in the 1980s and certainly before then, there was a general sense that politics took place at the kitchen table. And I don't mean that in the way that we talk about kitchen table issues now. I mean that families would talk about what was going on politically and families would watch TV sitcoms together and that could generate discussion. Family ties was the example that we cited in the book just because you have this major dichotomy between parents who are very liberal hippies and a son who's very politically active, but he loves Ronald Reagan. He has Richard Nixon on his bedside table and he wants to run for office. And they disagreed on everything, but they talked about these issues in a pretty civil way and it was okay to disagree. We've reached a point now where that's not what political conversation looks like and the point that we make at the beginning of this chapter is that it follows that most family TV shows and most TV sitcoms now don't even address those issues because there's no fun civil way to talk about them. We only have political shows that are explicitly about the infighting in Washington right now, whether it's House of Cards or Veep. And I think those shows are great and I think a lot of political junkies do too, but it's hard to imagine a scenario whereby a semi-political family or a family that votes but isn't incredibly politically active would find that kind of detail at all appealing. I kept thinking as I was reading that of Parks and Recreation, which is probably not the best example of like portraying politics in a good light, but... But it's local. It's a local representative. I don't know if you've seen the show right I have. It's funny. I was talking about this with some students yesterday and one of the... I think it also highlights some of the amusing but worst aspects of politics. Amy Poehler's character at one point actually says, people ask me who inspires me and I'm a big enough person to say that I often inspire myself, which is a great line, but it also in a lot of ways typifies this idea of what people think about politicians. So it reinforces this egotistical narcissism, even if people are using it in a good way to solve problems. I was curious... I mean, so you mentioned that the decline of dining room table discussions of politics and I wondered if what we often hear stories of how basically there's a decline of dining room tables in general, right? That families don't eat dinner together and I wondered if the decline in political discussions among families is a possible symptom of just what feels like a decline of weighty discussions in families regardless of topic? It could be, but we found some data that were quite recent that surprised us quite a bit, but about 85% of families still say that they eat dinner together about five nights a week. And so if the overall weightiness of those conversations have gone down, that's a fair point, but that's still the venue where they would occur if they were going to occur. So we talk about how mobile everybody is and how people don't get together and eat together anymore, and it's just not true, especially when you're talking about parents with their kids in general. So the opportunity exists for these discussions to happen. They're just not happening. And one of the reasons why, and this came through very thoroughly in the interviews we conducted, was that parents don't feel like recounting according to their children the horrible things going on in Washington. If you're sitting down at the end of the day and you want to have a conversation with your children and your spouse, you don't want to chronicle everything that didn't go well that day in the country. And you don't want to argue or debate issues and policies, and that's what political conversation has become. Do you think the me-feed, what I will call the me-feed, the niche, the nicheification of pretty much everything, if you think about the family ties era, you are talking about a three-network kind of era. And my first political thought I think I ever had was that I was very upset that the State of the Union was taking over all the channels and there was nothing to watch. Now the State of the Union is you can go to your own niche and watch the State of the Union if you want to watch it. And so the political drunkenies have their own niche and they went to their own niche and they don't have to infect the other niches with their stuff. And then you have a Republican niche and you have a conservative and you have a liberal niche. And so now everyone's just in their own niche, which creates more argumentation and more vituperative, main calling and everything else. For our colleague, Julian Sanchez, called epistemic closure. Yeah, within this. And maybe that's the biggest cause of this. That's right. And the fragmentation of the news has made it such that nobody has to happen upon anything that they don't want to see anymore. Right? It used to be that you would flip through the newspaper or maybe have to watch a nightly news segment and encounter something that you don't agree with or actually have to think critically about a discussion or a debate happening. That is no longer the case. You don't have to, with the death of local newspapers pretty much, it's now gotten to the point where most people don't even have anything to flip through at breakfast in the morning. And when they're watching cable news, if they're very liberal, they're not watching Fox News in the morning. And if they're very conservative, they're not watching MSNBC. And so I do think that that's part of it. But I think that part of it also is that even when you think about balance and even when you think about people that are seeking out a middle ground, the debates are incredibly hostile and the lack of civility is ubiquitous. So it's gotten to the point not only where you can only look for and find your own opinion, but in having that opinion reinforced, you also rarely see any deference to just a general respect for the other side. So that's two issues there, right? There's the how it's being portrayed and then what is being portrayed. And those are your two other chapters. So maybe we'll move into the second of them, which is largely politics gets portrayed poorly and mostly by the media. You refer to this as hashtag government sucks. And my immediate question in reading that was is the media portrayal of – because as I read you, it feels like you're saying that to a large extent it's unfair. The media portrayal is not necessarily accurate. I think at one point you call it laughable. Is it that media is unfairly portraying politics or is it simply or is it that because we have so much more media now, we have so many more outlets and they're spending so much more time on this stuff that we're starting to see politics as the way it always has been. And as part of that, I think you point to like the 60s and 70s as a time when things were very different. But that was also a time when the media seemed very willing to say cover up the transgressions of politicians. We're not going to report on all of JFKs or LBJ. We had horrible, horrible things that they did. So how is it that they're just reporting more accurately now? I think there are two different factors here. The first is whether they're reporting more accurately. The second is whether what they're reporting is newsworthy. And it's the latter that is the most concerning, I think. As far as whether they're reporting accurately or not, I generally work under the assumption this might be naive that politicians tend to run for office because they care about improving society. And that journalists generally cover politics because they care about whether politicians are improving society. And that a lot of things happen along the way and that there are bottom line incentives that mean you're looking for a sensationalist headline or that which is unusual or partisan or conflictual. But generally speaking, everyone's out there to do their jobs. When there was a one hour or 30 minute time slot, the choices that were made about what was newsworthy, assuming that the level of accuracy were the same across the board, looked different. Because whether JFK or LBJ had moral and discretions on the side, if you only have 30 minutes, you can't report on those things. You have to actually report on what's going on in Vietnam, for example. That's a clear different, that's a clear choice to make. Now, I think we've reached the point where there is this race to the most sensational. And I'm not sure that a lot of what we see is newsworthy. And I also think it's not necessarily fair in that if you're going to highlight every terrible thing that every politician does, you could make the case that you should spend at least some time highlighting successes and good things that politicians are doing. But that's boring. If every single morning on the Today show, when they cut away to the news segments, they said, and today, the state legislature in Wisconsin managed to succeed in passing X. And the state legislature in Missouri passed Y. And in New York, Z was accomplished. People would turn off the channel right away. It's just not that interesting. It's not that important. And so I think that what is sensational and what is bad helps a bottom line. And so even if the level of accuracy was the same across the board with more television time now and more resources available to devote to specific candidates, we wind up seeing things that probably ultimately are not that relevant for politics, but do turn people off to the idea of throwing their own hats in. Do you think it's really, is it politics or politicians? Maybe they're inseparable, but it could also be the case that the caliber of person who's been running for office has been going down for a while. George Washington seems to be a pretty upstanding noble guy. And if you look back at the founding area, you have a lot of discussions about the caliber of men to be office holders and how they should have leisure time to read philosophy and things like this. And that was, of course, before TV and before you could make the maniacal tendencies to see yourself on TV and have a persona and then we get a TV presidency. I don't think James Knox Polk could ever be elected in a TV presidency. And so maybe the caliber of person who wants to be a politician is just getting worse for a lot of these sort of feedback loop effects. And so people really have a problem with politicians, maybe not so much politics, or maybe they're separable in some way. That could be. But the unfortunate aspect here is that it's this very, very small sliver of politicians that even ever make it onto the national news that are then kind of ruining the reputation for the other half million of them. So most people, if they run for office, if they're going to be dogcatcher or school board member or even state legislator in 40 of the 50 states, they're never going to be on television. So they can be the kind of person, I don't know if George Washington and James Madison were as knowable behind the scenes as we claim to, as we often purport, but they could be that kind of person. They wouldn't have to worry about the media rifling through their trash. They wouldn't have to worry about being confronted and in all these gotcha moments. But it's this small group of politicians, many of whom go out and seek this limelight, who then become the face of what politics must be like. And that sends the signal. It's through that lens that people assess what the system must be like and the kinds of players that migrate toward it. One of the things I was curious about in this chapter is you're talking about how little people, how little students discuss politics, say, in the classroom. So I had a point of clarification. I just wasn't sure what. So you say weekly political discussion in the classroom, the political discussions were not the norm that 32% of students report having had one in the last week. And what I was wondering is that the same 32% over time, so is it that 60% of people aren't having any or is it that 100% of people are having one every three weeks? We asked, in general, how often would you say you discuss politics in your classes? And it could be multiple times a week, once a week, monthly, never. And then what counts as a political discussion? Because again, so much of this is like about politicians. And so is it only discussions of the kind of stuff we would read about in Politico? Or is it, you know, if we have an extended discussion about John Rawls, does that count or a discussion about like the existence of systemic racism? Is that a political discussion? So some of that is in the eye of the respondent. When we followed up on that question in the interviews, we were thinking about political discussions as anything that would be about government politics or any sort of public policy. So not a broad theoretical question about, you know, the state of nature necessarily, but certainly any kind of current event that has any degree of political implication. Of the 11% who are interested in political office at the end, in part of the book, you discuss how young people with like the quotes from young people talk about not liking talking politics because of the kind of divisive elements that we were talking about previously. Are these 11%? Do you see them as people who actively enjoy talking about politics who engage in a very, very forthright and passionate manner or they just sort of begrudgingly do it? The interesting thing about the 11% is that they were what we would call the teenage political junkies, right? So they're not political junkies like I am or like Washington people are in general. They're not reading Politico, but they are interested enough in what's going on that they're willing to have conversations with their friends and in their classes and with their families that might not always be warm and fuzzy. So some of it is this sort of negative view of the political system and that, you know, it's unfortunate a lot of their conversations they would say were, you know, sad because they look around and they talk about policies that they think matter or issues that they care about and they kind of bemoan the fact that there's no progress on those issues. But a lot of these conversations are also about the kinds of elected leaders that they like and that they're inspired by. Barack Obama came up over and over again hardly ever because of any specific thing he wanted to do, but because of the promise in 2008 and 2012 that he was going to change the way politics looked. And I think a lot of the people were inspired by him because he at least had the audacity to say maybe we should change the way politics looks. They were perhaps a little bit naive in that they didn't realize he hasn't or that one person can't. So there still is that optimism, but it's also somewhat realistic in that they're well aware of the failures that surround them at the national level. One of the common things, in the book you quote a lot from these survey respondents, let them speak in their own words. And one of the common things is something along the lines of, of course my friends and I don't talk about this stuff because I don't want to say anything that's going to get each other upset. We would just fight why do we want to do that? We're friends. And as, I mean, I just, this occurred to me now that this seems awfully similar to the broader cultural trend of say like, so the Twitter shaming, the notion that it is a profound moral wrong to say anything that would even on the margins upset someone. And so is this, in light of that, is this specific to politics? Like they don't want to just, you know, politics is turning them off so they don't want to discuss it or just that we, our culture is shifting in a direction where it's less and less okay to say things of any sort that will make someone else uncomfortable. That's funny that you characterize it that way because I feel like we've shifted in a direction where people say things all the time and the bar has just changed for what's acceptable for you to say it makes you uncomfortable. So, so I don't know about that. But what I will say is that I don't think it was as deliberate as that in that a lot of the students had no idea where their friends would fall on these issues. And so they were avoiding politics in anticipation of what could be a debate or a disagreement. And that's kind of worrisome. If it turns out that you know very clearly how you fall on a wide range of issues and you know how the people around you fall, and then you decide that there are certain conversations to have with one group of people and not to have with others, or people that you can be friends with on Facebook and others that you probably should not, that suggests that you're actually processing this and coming to a logical decision. What we found more was that they were just avoiding it altogether and avoiding exposure to it because they didn't want to chance the fact that they might surround themselves with people who disagree. Is it possible that politics itself and I would even, this is the libertarian position or my specific position, that politics itself or the over politicization of the world just compared to how many departments there are, how many different levels of government there are, how many elected offices there are, is it possible that politics itself creates enemies out of friends? And so maybe it's actually producing the kind of animosity. As soon as you're trying to look for a political solution to say schools as opposed to like a libertarian idea of parental choice, which allows parents of different persuasions to be friends, well as soon as it's a political solution, they're both parents not trying to control the makeup of school for the other parents' kids and so now they can't be friends. Is it possible that politics itself and its growth and it's increasing in normativity because we, it's covering more and more important things like healthcare is that it's creating this distaste to politics and this animosity on both elected representatives and how we view our politics? It seems to me that it's not politics itself but it's increased party polarization at all levels of government that is fostering and then reinforcing that outcome. And by that I mean that in the 1980s even and in the early 1990s to some extent there was something noble about getting a deal done and compromising and there was this idea that you aren't going to win all the time and you were going to obviously try to get the best outcome for your side as you could but getting an outcome was better than getting no outcome and that has fallen away in a lot of cases. The 2013 government shutdown is one example of that. Now the government reopened because at some point having a government was more important than not and both sides of the aisle agreed on that but almost everything has become a contest and almost everything has become a partisan contest where not moving at all is a viable option and so and it makes sense too when you look at the way our districts are created at the federal level there's absolutely no reason why anybody would have to behave differently because except you know in 2014 there were 17 toss-up districts out of 435 in those other 418 districts it was a foregone conclusion what party was going to hold that seat so there's no incentive to compromise and there's nothing noble about striking that deal and so I think that that reinforces the idea that if you're a democrat you think one thing if you're a Republican you think another and it's not that the moderates are gone it's that there's no reason for there to ever be a middle ground reached between two strong partisans so that would seem to say that and let you either change you can change the districts I guess you could do that you could change people's underlying attitudes or work on that or you could say that this might mean that fewer decisions that the very more federalism fewer decisions should be reposed in Washington DC because Massachusetts in Texas Massachusetts in Texas are just not gonna agree and a representative from Massachusetts in Texas are not gonna agree when they get together to vote on a massive overhaul of the healthcare system they're not going to agree on that and that we don't have blue dog Democrats anymore so maybe this is a reason to not do that so I'm a very liberal Democrat so obviously my view of that is a little bit different but I but but there is a movement for federalism among some liberals I mean some certain some are you know marijuana obviously you know fair weather federalism but if you're not going to have Massachusetts in Texas disagree or maybe you can get gun laws and Massachusetts you can't get in Texas we don't need a federal gun law we need one for Massachusetts one for Texas right so I'd say two things the first is that what's important is that we somehow educate the citizenry to realize that the kinds of party polarization and polarized districts that we see at the federal level do not trickle down states are at least a little bit less polarized internally than the federal government is and at the local level many of these offices like hundreds of thousands of them are completely nonpartisan and they often don't deal with issues that lend themselves to a clear partisan divide when you're like dog catcher yes I mean I'm sure that we can figure out what Democrats and Republicans think about animal control but generally people don't like rabid dogs biting their kids right and so you can come up with these kinds of solutions so if we I think can expose people to that reality first of all they might think about politics a little bit differently and realize that what they see in Washington doesn't necessarily trickle down and generalize I think that they could also then and maybe this is a little bit too optimistic but consider holding their elected officials a little bit more accountable for getting the job done and that could involve sometimes making a compromise you know you think back to the 1990s and Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich they didn't like each other they didn't agree on everything but they understood at the end of the day that the federal government had a responsibility to pass a budget and they both gave a little and sometimes one won more than the other one did but there was also this sense that they would be held accountable by their constituents and they would be held accountable by their colleagues if they didn't manage to figure out how to move on and I think that's been lost we've seen John Boehner have an incredibly difficult time and when he has tried to strike deals and when he's tried to you know reach compromises he's had you know people in his own party say we're not playing that way and they have no incentive to so part of this comes back to the voters and what they're expecting in their elected officials and if we can get them to start thinking not necessarily about expecting the same thing all the time we might change the incentive structure of some of these politicians. So throughout the whole book there was this theme that I noticed that when are you potentially runs counter to the thesis of the book at least and so when I first heard about this book because I heard an interview with you on the new books and political science podcast which is a terrific podcast that you all should listen to and what struck me and I think is what I said in the email to you was you and now I'm forgetting the name of the host we're discussing this book and it was this is a problem you know this is a serious problem for American democracy we need to fix this we need to get people more interested in politics and so it was a very pessimistic interview and the book is very pessimistic except for you give solutions whereas I again as someone who comes from a different political ideology found it extraordinarily optimistic yeah I was like right now I'm optimistic I think this is great and so I want to I mean I whatever happened if you had an election and no one came in no one had to rule over it would be amazing so there were I mean there were minor versions of that like wow really there's 500 000 elected offices that's too many but I there was a theme that a lot of the when you when the the kids would speak for themselves would say something that struck me and so there's you you summarize it and this is a line a version of this line repeats a fair amount in the book but at one point in the book you write young people want to improve the world in their communities but they tend not to think of politics as an effective means to do so that's almost like libertarianism in like a little boom and so that's what what I was wondering is it is is the alternative narrative not that you know they're just like they would be into politics if it weren't so ugly but maybe that they're increasingly seeing that politics is an ineffective tool to improve the world that if you want to make your community better there are other more effective ways to do it outside of using the state and that in fact the state is often you know we like say the uber the fights over uber that expose the state as basically a tool for protecting cartels and they see look look there's this much more effective alternative but politicians and their friends are just getting in the way of it that so is is it possible the alternative narrative to this is simply that young people are more libertarian no she hopes not i've already laid my cards on the table um so so that argument that you just made i think would require two things the first is that their view of government is accurate and i don't know that the way that they view politics in general is an accurate representation of what it's like across the board i don't even know that it's accurate about washington dc but it certainly doesn't apply to a lot of these local offices and they're generalizing in a way where they in a way where they have no information to justify that but the second thing is that they don't think that electoral politics is an effective way to bring about change in part because the idea of electoral politics being an effective way to bring about change has not really been introduced to them so if they considered a public policy problem let's say that they don't like guns or they do like guns and they either support or don't support gun control or they support or don't support some kind of economic policy it doesn't occur to them to think about how running for office might be a way to weigh in on that policy what we find is this knee-jerk reaction that politicians are not effective washington is not effective so let's consider all of these other ways that we could possibly bring about change and there's no question that these other ways are effective ways to bring about change but i don't feel like they've been weighed against running for office and for some people the actual decision will be yeah running for office does not seem like it is the best alternative if i want to reach goal a but for some it will and i just don't think they've gotten the kind of exposure that they need to make that decision i've you know most of my work focuses on the gender gap and political ambition and why women don't want to run for office and what i've said all along is we've conceived of this is a two-stage process you either you consider running for office and then if you've considered it you either do it or you don't and most people care about that second stage the well who runs and who doesn't if you decide not to run i don't care i wanted to have occurred to you in the first place right something seems fundamentally wrong with the system if there are systematic discrepancies in terms of whose radar screen running for office shows up on and so i kind of feel like it that kind of logic applies here as well let everybody at least consider it and then let them decide whether that's effective or not but all of the messages that they're getting from their family from their friends from their teachers from the media are systematic examples of all of the failures i think it's interesting the way you contrast like the dc you know that everything about dc that day is not true about all of dc and and it's certainly not true about local races but the local races themselves are i mean it's an interesting area where a lot not a lot of people think about running it requires certain political organization i mean mentioned school boards in california but pretty much a union driven type of thing so like what kind of person before ran for water board or i mean it does it should we really care about who's on the water board first of all or maybe there should there are there too many elected offices maybe down there that it doesn't really matter who they are they should they're like ministerial offices so they don't create the kind of division that you can create when you have discretion to decide national policy the reason i think local politics are so important is because we have career ladder politics in this country so for better or worse the overwhelming majority of people who ultimately run for a competitive state office or federal office held previous office and it's there that they get their foot in the door and they gather their experience like harry reed basically you work your way through the political machine and make friends and influence people along the way or alternatively you become friends with members of the chamber of commerce and then they support your oh yeah to do whatever else no that wasn't even a partisan i mean but whether it's you know i think her first job was gaming commissioner right so whether it's through unions or whether it's through the chamber or whether it's just through local political connections that you have that's sort of the way that most people then decide whether they want to climb the ladder or not so if we are not making sure that we're making those local offices accessible to a wide range of people then we're already narrowing the pool of potential candidates who could run for offices that do play a much more i don't want to say important because local offices have jurisdiction over a lot of very important issues but play a more high profile role we mentioned a lot of solutions so far in the last 50 minutes but your last chapter proposes several of them and very specific ones so maybe we can close by just running through what some of those look like well the one that you guys will definitely not like is basically making it mandatory in the college admissions process that people have some kind of political aptitude yeah pretty much the mandates is that word but one of the so one of the issues that we take up and the suggestion that we make first let me just preface this by saying that all of our suggestions are contingent on changes that do not depend on politicians changing their behavior or the media changing their behavior because we did not want to write these sort of shape up or ship out yeah i mean they have no incentive to right they're not they're not going to and we could say oh but look it affects the children and they'll say oh that's a shame and they'll continue doing the same thing you know tomorrow so one of the suggestions was geared to at least generate incentives for young people to know something about politics currently you can apply to any college and university even the most competitive ones and know virtually zero about current events or the way government or the world works it depends a lot on what your high school education is but you certainly don't need to know that kind of information we do know though that people who have greater levels of political knowledge and political aptitude are more likely to find something in politics that they like more likely to find a political figure they find inspirational and more likely to at least consider running for office so similar to the way that college admissions has pretty much mandated that community service or volunteerism rewarded in the college application process we thought that rewarding political aptitude would be an indirect way to generate ambition as well it's interesting I mean for me the policy thing would be you know it it is I was thinking that when Aaron was asking about the causal chain question would people talk more about politics um which way does it run do you like politics or you talk more about it in the quite in the one way you can answer is that you can like force everyone to talk about politics for an hour it's like part of like a fourth grade activity well it's my class okay we're going to talk about politics for you know we can make a state law a federal law hey the un can make a law whatever everyone in the world has talked about politics for an hour and you probably would increase political engagement but you'd be doing something unjust so at least in my opinion forcing a bunch of kids to do something and you're in although we do force kids to do things all the time oh yes yes parents can do that absolutely um another solution and this also just speaks to access to information is what we call the go run app and this would just be a way for people to see how many opportunities they have to engage the political system if they want to so right now if somebody says oh how do you run for school board in Santa Monica California it's not completely obvious how you would do that we envision being able to type and address into an app and every elected official that represents that residence would pop up and in addition to that there would also be a description of the offices and what those key responsibilities are and you can imagine teachers you can imagine professors using this as a learning tool but you could also imagine people out there who are just kind of interested in politics in general getting a better sense of the opportunities that they have and the fact that no clearinghouse like that exists is in part driven by the vast number of these positions but it's also driven by the fact that no one even realizes that this vast clearinghouse doesn't exist and so making that information more accessible we think could go a long way as well so are you ultimately optimistic hopeful about solving this problem or at least moving things in the right direction i am because the most i think important finding in the book is that this next generation is in no way disengaged from their communities from the country or from the world they care about solving problems they care about making the world's better place they care about public policy issues that affect not only them but future generations and so if we can highlight some effective ways for government to address those issues and those problems and expand the arsenal that young people have at their disposal by which to attack these different public policy issues it's hard to imagine that things won't get better free thoughts is produced by evan banks and mark mcdaniel to learn 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