Reddit reviews Congress: The Electoral Connection

Alright, well the first thing to remember is to disregard most of what you hear from your acquaintances on social media- they are almost always wrong. The second thing to remember is that everything is always more complex than sound bites let on. This is meant as a starting point- if you are interested in politics there is a mountain to read and learn.

You have a lot of questions, and I will try to answer them in order.

> How exactly does the US election process work?

The US has a single-member plurality representative democracy in a presidential system of government.

The US Constitution denotes the separation of powers of the three branches of the federal government, and also lays out indirectly how federalism works.

Because of Duverger's Law, this results in the primacy of two major political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats. Most major candidates at all levels of government are traditionally from these two parties.

Each of these parties select their candidates through a primary election process, where candidates of the same party compete to represent that party in the actual election.

> What are super PACs?

Super PACs are a type of Political Action Committee that grew out of the Supreme Court's Citizen's United ruling which established that the First Amendment to the Constitution protects political giving as a form of free speech, even for corporations. A lot of people confuse Super PACS (PACs that have unlimited contributions but cannot give to or coordinate with a candidate) with Dark Money that sometimes gives to Super PACs.

> Also, what exactly are lobbyists? In my understanding, politicians are being bribed and it's legal? Politicians are basically openly buyable?

No, this is patently false. It is a very common misconception (especially on social media like Reddit) that is perpetuated by people with little knowledge or background in politics. Bribery (exchanging money for votes) has been illegal for hundreds of years, and yes politicians have gone to jail for it.

Lobbying is an industry that grew out of the First Amendment's right to petition the government. Basically, it is every citizen's right to go up to Congress or the Administration and talk to them. Over time, people realized that going in groups of like-minded people is better than going alone; so they formed advocacy organizations (lobbying groups) and they lobbied Congress on behalf of their members. Obviously, corporations do this too on behalf of their owners/shareholders. Lobbying performs some very important functions.

Now, an area where reformers are looking is how donating money to a candidate year after year (remember that money for votes is illegal) to develop relationships with lawmakers gives them influence. This is undeniably true. A politician is much more likely to take a long discussion meeting with someone who gave to their election bid than someone who didn't. This is a problem. However most laypeople assume that lawmakers make up their platforms to please lobbyists in order to get money- this is demonstrably false- it's actually the other way around. Advocacy groups largely give money to people who already agree with them, to support them and to get or keep them in office. (The one area where this doesn't hold true is on non-salient issues; small tweaks in the tax code, minor regulation changes, etc. In these cases, lobbyists do exercise undue influence because the issues are so remote, lawmakers don't already have an opinion.) -But these problems are not unique to American politics- lobbying in some form happens in every country in the world.

In terms of all candidates but Sanders being utter jokes, you are entitled to your opinion. But please don't assume that other rational voters are any less astute than yourself- there are always reasons to support a different candidate, and the only way to test if your reasons stack up against theirs is through vigorous public debate.

If I missed anything, or you have follow up questions, let me know. It is a big topic, worthy of many books, so obviously things are paraphrased or left out.

EDIT: Thanks for the gold!

>I agree. I figure there is no difference between Obama and Romney, and I'd be voting for Ron Paul as VP.

what gets me about this statement is its so fundamentally wrong. The concept of a political ideology completely smashes this statement into the ground, but just even looking past that for a second we come to this. They perceive the two parties to be the same because they base their comparisons on the end result coming from our government. Since our government is naturally a pull-push battle between two sides the final product, or legislation, is something both people support. So they overgeneralize this factor and state "well since republicans and democrats both supported it they're the same". its absolutely breath taking the lack of knowledge these people have in terms of understanding the way our government works. I'd love to put one book in all their hands and tell them to read up.

Congress: The Electoral Connection
http://www.amazon.com/Congress-Connection-Professor-David-Mayhew/dp/0300105878/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1342584855&sr=1-4&keywords=Congress

serenity now!

It's not as bad as you might think, research tells us the kind of people who vote are more educated, more wealthy, and in middle to upper socioeconomic classes. The two parties are on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, and a majority of Americans reasonably align with one of the two. If you don't, then you can simply deny party affiliation and vote for whomever you want.

I feel as though it's a popular sentiment to hate the U.S. government and believe it to be inefficient, but as far as representative government goes, that's exactly what Congress is right now -- each individual district represents the constituents of their district pretty well, and most Americans approve of their Congressperson because, contrary to what people might think, members of Congress are really efficient at doing things that benefit their district, which they can then gloat about, get re-elected, and continue.

Congress as a whole is divided because we as a country are divided -- so ideologically, it actually represents us pretty well. Having a system that removes parties will only cause ideological confusion, representation issues, and a majority of other issues.

If you're interested in this kind of stuff, I suggest reading Mayhew's Congress: The Electoral Connection which sums up a lot of these issues very nicely. My degree was in political science, so I'm biased, but a fascinating read nonetheless.

I cannot put in strong enough terms how much I disagree with your thoughtful decision to not vote. As such, I think it useful that I present my opinion below; I apologize in advance for potential pay-walls below. Note that a lot of the earlier research (aka not Avery or Gilen's papers) can be found in summary form on wikisum if you cannot bypass the pay-walls and yet are interested in following along.

As far as I understand, the main reason that you decide not to vote is because you believe that the voting public has virtually no influence on policy decisions. Since you are one of the voting public, your voting is effectively a waste of your valuable time. For evidence of this belief, you present Gilens' recent paper.

I personally have two major problems with this paper, but only one is relevant to this discussion on the utility of voting: the professed interchangeability of the beliefs of the elite and the beliefs of the median voter (R^2 = 0.78, pretty good for social science). This high level of interchangeability means that their model's imposition of independence between the two is highly suspect. I believe that this model could easily shunt all correlative power from the elite to the majority voting public and lose very little predictive power. Said another way, this model could just as easily demonstrate that the American system is a democracy as an oligarchy.

Regardless of my opinion, this paper will also take a while for other political scientists to adequately respond for/against/otherwise to this very exciting and divisive work. Note that this is not at all a point for or against the paper.

Avery's recent paper instead posits instead that no matter how you slice the data, systematic economic inequalities in voter turnout are represented in economic policy decisions in the near-long term (3 or so years after election). Obviously this result may just arise from confounding factors (ie elite people vote more and also have a disproportionate influence on policy). However, there is a large body of evidence that individual representatives view re-election as at least a proximate goal (see Mayhew and Fenno for the basics). To me, this provides at least soft evidence that this reflection of voter turnout on policy is a causal one. Miller and Stokes put this idea to the test and found that representatives vote pretty well along the constituency preferences on the salient issues of civil rights and social welfare and less well on the less salient issue of foreign policy.

Look, there is no doubt that the system has flaws. There is no doubt that a lot of victim blaming in the form of shunting shame on the American people for not informing themselves. But your beliefs on salient issues do matter (such as civil rights and social welfare; I am very confident that economic issues can also be added to this list) and one effective way to leverage these votes means making sure to help avoid systematic under-representation/inequality in voting. That means, if you are someone who has the thought not to vote, you are one of the most influential voters (a paradox, I know). However, if you don't vote, your influence drops to 0. So please, please vote. Vote for the implementation of deliberative democracy if you think that will help. Vote uninformed. Vote selfishly. Vote so that, overall, the votes are representative of the population. Once we start working towards that problem, then we can start working toward related issues (such as informed voters).

Thank you for providing me an opinion to which I could respond. I look forward to responding further!