Making Constituencies: Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy

By Lisa Jane Disch

Public division is not new; in fact, it is the lifeblood of politics, and political representatives have constructed divisions throughout history to mobilize constituencies.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the idea of a divided United States has become commonplace. In the wake of the 2020 election, some commentators warned that the American public was the most divided it has been since the Civil War. Political scientists, political theorists, and public intellectuals have suggested that uninformed, misinformed, and disinformed voters are at the root of this division. Some are simply unwilling to accept facts or science, which makes them easy targets for elite manipulation. It also creates a grass-roots political culture that discourages cross-partisan collaboration in Washington.
 
Yet, manipulation of voters is not as grave a threat to democracy in America as many scholars and pundits make it out to be. The greater threat comes from a picture that partisans use to rally their supporters: that of an America sorted into opposing camps so deeply rooted that they cannot be shaken loose and remade. Making Constituencies proposes a new theory of representation as mobilization to argue that divisions like these are not inherent in society, but created, and political representatives of all kinds forge and deploy them to cultivate constituencies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226804477

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Cover Page for Making Constituencies

Making Constituencies

Making Constituencies

Representation as Mobilization in Mass Democracy

LISA JANE DISCH

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-80433-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-80450-7 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-80447-7 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226804477.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Disch, Lisa Jane, author.

Title: Making constituencies : rethinking political representation as mobilization in mass democracy / Lisa Jane Disch.

Other titles: Rethinking political representation as mobilization in mass democracy

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021004017 | ISBN 9780226804330 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226804507 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226804477 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Representative government and representation. | Democracy. | Political participation.

Classification: LCC JF1051 .D568 2021 | DDC 321.8—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004017

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

INTRODUCTION: Responsiveness in Reverse

CHAPTER 1.   In Defense of Mobilization

CHAPTER 2.   From the Bedrock Norm to the Constituency Paradox

CHAPTER 3.   Can the Realist Remain a Democrat?

CHAPTER 4.   Realism for Democrats

CHAPTER 5.   Manipulation: How Will I Know It When I See It? And Should I Worry When I Do?

CHAPTER 6.   Debating Constructivism and Democracy in 1970s France

CHAPTER 7.   Radical Democracy and the Value of Plurality

CONCLUSION

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

Responsiveness in Reverse

This book asks you to change the way you think about political representation. Classic accounts of representative democracy describe an interest-first model according to which constituencies form around things they want and elected representatives respond to their demands. Research into political knowledge and preference formation shows that in practice, responsiveness goes the other way. Most people form opinions and political preferences based on the messages they receive from sources they trust—candidates, political parties, nongovernmental organizations, advocacy groups, opinion shapers in the mass media or on social media, celebrities, and more.¹ In mass democracies, acts of political representation often do not take constituencies and their interests as a starting point; they begin by making constituencies and specifying their demands. Representatives of all kinds participate in forming group identities, crafting political demands, and defining the cleavages that set one group against another. Think of this as a mobilization conception of political representation. Not a concept, aspiring to universal validity, but a conception, one inviting a broad reconsideration of how and whether political representation serves mass democracies.²

Few of us believe that today’s democracies conform to the classic model of interest representation or live up to the standard of responsiveness it sets. Representatives do not strike us as responsive to working people of the middle and upper-middle classes, let alone to those in the lowest income brackets.³ Most of us believe—and policy outcomes on most redistributive issues confirm—that politicians in fact serve the elite interests that fund their astronomically expensive campaigns.⁴ Even if politicians were responsive to mass publics, many of us question whether they ought to be. Few of us imagine that ordinary people are sufficiently well informed about their own interests, let alone public goods, to make competent choices about public policy. One influential recent book goes so far as to claim that anyone who values such democratic ideals as economic and social equality should want less responsiveness to public preferences, not more.⁵

Yet responsiveness survives as an ideal and an expectation despite these discrepancies.⁶ Even if it does not describe how our system of representation works in practice, many of us use the term responsiveness to describe how we believe it should work. At the very least, we trust it to capture how the system is failing us.

This catchword, responsiveness, describes neither how democratic representation should work, how it does work, nor how it lets us down. On the contrary, the model of interest-first representation and the belief in responsiveness as its measure of success create expectations about citizen competence and stoke fears of manipulation that set mass democracy up to fail. Since the advent of the first popular political parties, political representation has worked dynamically. It operates creatively and generatively—as theories of representation in culture, literature, and the arts would predict—rather than statically and unidirectionally, as our democratic intuitions prime us to expect.

Rather than debate whether voters can be trusted with democracy, this book aims to dislodge the hold of the competence model over democratic debate. I argue that voter incompetence and susceptibility to manipulation are not as grave a threat to democracy in America as many scholars and pundits make them out to be. The greater threat comes from a picture that partisans use to rally their supporters: that of an America sorted into opposing camps so deeply rooted that they cannot be shaken loose and remade. Making Constituencies proposes a new theory of representation as mobilization to argue that divisions like these are not inherent in society but created. Political representatives of all kinds forge and deploy them to cultivate support.

Representation as Mobilization

To those who regard responsiveness as a foundational measure of democratic representation, the suggestion that a constituency is not found but made (although not from scratch) smacks of manipulation.⁷ According to this established line of thought, small-d democrats should prefer that these two modes of representation—cultural and generative, political and responsive—remain distinct. After all, that a fictional work has no direct material referent is both obvious and anodyne. But the mobilization conception’s suggestion that a democratic constituency is part political fiction—this seems dangerous and wrong.

Maybe the mobilization conception affirms its critics’ worst concerns about voter manipulation in mass democracies. Or maybe it presents an opportunity to reconsider the basic assumption that fuels those fears. That assumption, which is that citizen competence supplies the foundation on which modern democracies stand, has managed from the start to both define modern democracy and work against it.

The Constructivist Turn

The mobilization conception of representation is constructivist in one of the senses that the term took on during the earliest years of Bolshevik rule in Russia, when the regime commissioned artists to galvanize support for the Revolution among rural people—mostly illiterate—who lived too far from the capital to have even heard that the Revolution was taking place, much less take it up as their cause.⁸ Those artists produced propaganda to represent Russian society to its people as divided by a new conflict: an emancipatory struggle between workers and the elite. But directly representing that conflict—in the mirroring sense of the term—was not immediately possible, as the target audience did not yet share the Bolshevik understanding of either workers or the elite as meaningful categories of identity. Working people in these rural areas neither identified as workers nor understood themselves to be in conflict with capitalists. Constructivist art constituted those groups at the same time as it animated a bid on the part of the Bolsheviks to be accepted as the vanguard, representing workers as a class in struggle against capital.

Bolshevism is certainly no model for democratic representation. But the role that art played in the Bolshevik bid for support dramatizes a fact about political representation that holds even in ordinary times, in democratic regimes. As Linda Zerilli has emphasized, a constituency is not a demographic fact but a political achievement.⁹ Constituencies are not simply out there, except in the most formal sense as an aggregate defined by district lines. Acts of representation call them into being. They take shape out of an amorphous plurality of social relations when a movement, a leader, a message, or an event solicits their participation in conflict.

Throughout this book, I will use the term constructivist to characterize two premises about politics. The first of these is that political representation does not merely reflect social constituencies but participates in constituting them. The second, to which I will sometimes refer with the phrase autonomy of politics, is that political conflict does not merely express divisions in society but participates in forging those divisions.

In the late 1990s, contemporary political theorists proclaimed a "democratic rediscovery of representation."¹⁰ Rather than simply resuscitate a concept that had fallen out of favor in the participatory fervor that gripped Anglo-American political theory in the wake of the 1960s, these theorists made a constructivist turn. They rejected the commonsense model of democratic representation as a mirror of or transmission belt for constituency interests, instead affirming the basic premise of my argument: that a popular constituency comes to be a political agent only through acts of representation.¹¹ Iris Marion Young framed this development in especially striking terms, calling it an awakening to democratic theory’s metaphysics of presence.¹² Presence, a concept that Young borrows from Derrida, names the fantasy of a reality that is self-evident, unmediated by social processes, and sovereign—an origin and point of reference for assessing the accuracy and faithfulness of any act, body, or person that claims to represent it.¹³ To reject such a fantasy is precisely to refute the assumption that representation is a descriptive and mimetic process, one that merely transmits something preexisting it . . . that seeks pictorial representation.¹⁴

Empirical political science research on political knowledge and public-opinion formation vindicates this constructivist turn in political theory, and, in fact, beat political theorists to the punch. Suzanne Mettler and Joe Soss cite the mid-1980s as the moment when behavioral researchers began placing greater emphasis on the ways mass responses get shaped by political actors, organizations, and information flows.¹⁵ This body of work found that US voters possessed more well-formed preferences than midcentury public-opinion research once held.¹⁶ People determine the stakes of a political conflict and choose their side by taking cues from a variety of (typically) elite sources.¹⁷ They listen to their favorite talk jockey, or follow the lead of a party spokesperson, or take direction from their church or union. If it is reassuring to learn that US voters hold preferences, it is worrisome that they develop those preferences based on information from the (typically) self-seeking rhetoric of elites who aim primarily not to educate but to win an election or policy contest.

Constructivist research opens an uncomfortable gap between the concepts we use to describe how representative democracy should work and observational data regarding how it works in practice. As James N. Druckman has observed, studies that aimed to vindicate voter competence ended up provoking the discomfiting sense that one form of incompetence simply replaces another. Specifically, while people who rely on party cues avoid basing their preferences on arbitrary information, they also expose themselves to the possibility of elite manipulation.¹⁸ Maybe the people—surely never sovereign—cannot even manage E. E. Schattschneider’s semisovereignty: choosing sides in a well-formed public conflict.¹⁹ Can elections be trusted to produce democratic outcomes if voters routinely succumb to disingenuous messaging? If elites broadcast policy goals at full volume as cover for a struggle that is all about power? These questions raise a larger, overarching one: Is US representative democracy facing a crisis in citizen competence?²⁰

A Crisis of Competence?

An influential popular and scholarly narrative holds that our era combines civic ignorance and the most extensive democratic mechanisms in our nation’s history—universal franchise, primary elections, ballot initiatives, and more—with disastrous results. This narrative intensified in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, but it has been around much longer. Books like Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004), Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels’s Democracy for Realists (2016), and Jason Brennan’s Against Democracy (2016), sound a common theme. They denounce elections as irrational, asserting that people vote out of tribal loyalties rather than economic interest and fall for fantasy solutions to real problems.²¹ They doubt that voting can yield outcomes that are not retrograde with respect to basic ideals of empowerment, equality, freedom, and cooperation. Brennan proposes in all seriousness that citizens pass licensing exams to earn the right to vote, as if he had never heard of Jim Crow or were not following the proliferation of voter suppression efforts above and below the Mason-Dixon line today.²²

Concerns about citizen competence have a long history in the US. From its founding as a republic to the beginnings of its transition to a democracy, conservatives who opposed universal white male suffrage denigrate[d] the mass public’s capabilities.²³ These concerns took on a new form in the early twentieth century as scholars recognized public opinion as a new democratic agent. The famous battle in the 1920s between democratic reformer John Dewey and noted reporter and political commentator Walter Lippmann could have changed the terms of the debate but, as I will argue, did not.

Lippmann extrapolated criticisms of individuals to the public as a whole, arguing that the idea of its acting in anything like a general interest was a mere phantom.²⁴ Publics, being composed of those persons who are interested in an affair because it affects them personally or because it has been melodramatized as a conflict, can be trusted neither to discern the public interest nor act to bring it about.²⁵ Dewey countered that the public is no phantom. But being inchoate—scattered, mobile and manifold—it needs political organizing so as to recognize itself and define and express its interests.²⁶ Rather than lament what citizens are, Dewey proposed considering what democratic politics makes them. He took hold of a debate that had essentialized competence by its focus on the psychology and political knowledge of the so-called ordinary citizen (there’s a phantom for you!) and nudged it toward political and institutional analysis.

Dewey’s arguments epitomize realism as James N. Druckman would later define it, as assessing what the democratic system . . . motivates citizens to do, or not do, when it comes to politics.²⁷ Ideally, people would not merely take sides on issues but form opinions. They would do so anticipating the need to give reasons for their preferences, rather than merely root for their favorite team.²⁸ Yet Druckman acknowledges, like Dewey, that people cannot be motivated to form opinions if they do not recognize that they are affected by a policy, understand how they are affected, and believe they will have the opportunity to respond.²⁹ Dewey held, and Druckman agrees, that for representative government to function democratically, it would need to do more than meet pluralist theorists’ demands for political and civil rights, competitive elections, and competition among plural overlapping interest groups. It would have to foster principles and practice forms of organizing that make conflict broadly public.³⁰

Journalists and scholars have framed events of the new millennium in ways that would seem to vindicate Lippmann’s pessimism. Over and over again we hear how US publics have been melodramatized into action by such triggers as (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction; the (false) threat of death panels; and the improbable (but deadly) social media–fueled Pizzagate conspiracy theory, featuring prominent Democrats, a child sex ring, and a string of pizza parlors in Washington, DC.³¹ From these and other episodes emerges the specter of the low-education, low-information voter—the prey of manipulative elites—who fails democracy and endangers it by falling for alternative facts and emotional appeals.

Dewey and Druckman would exorcise that phantom and so would I. I propose the mobilization conception of representation in order to redirect attention away from the voters who credited various lies and toward the respected public figures like Colin Powell who testified to them; toward the partisan information context that enabled those lies to propagate without competition; and toward the social media platforms that gave cash for political clickbait. Representation as mobilization interrupts the competence debate. I ask not what citizens bring to politics but what the institutions and processes of mass democracy bring out in them. This framing shifts the terrain from asking what people know to analyzing how democratic institutions call upon them to act.

Politics, Not Pedagogy

The competence conversation focuses normative and empirical scholarship on the content of constituent opinion—informed? uninformed? misinformed?³² It presupposes the typical model of democratic competence, which ignores the way that individuals actually form policy preferences—in response to political communication, not in isolation from it.³³ It assumes that limited information precludes reasoned choice, when most of us make most of our choices every day lacking detailed information about our options but taking cues that we have tested and found reliable.³⁴ Think Consumer Reports for products, Expedia for deals on travel, and endorsements or party ID for politics. Why shouldn’t people use information shortcuts in political decision-making as they do for so many other choices?

When scholars assess the quality of political preferences based on their content/substance, they impose a pedagogic model on voting.³⁵ They take it for granted that people do and should treat voting as a decision to be researched, like students aiming to pass a test. The pedagogic model underestimates the role that cues play in all kinds of reasoning. Like too many (unskilled) pedagogues, it also equates learning with information delivery, as if voters and students alike were receptacles to be filled. Neither students nor voters are receptacles for information. They are repositories of a valued resource—engagement. The best teachers and most successful politicians learn that there’s no informing anyone without first winning their attention.³⁶

Any representative—from candidate to social movement—knows that the pedagogical model gets it backward: no constituency sits out there waiting to be served information like a famished customer at a diner. A constituency resembles a hive without a queen—a mass of people busy studying, earning, shopping, and swimming; tending to children, partners, parents, or gardens; falling in love or falling sick; and celebrating and mourning. The representative or would-be representative must earn the attention of these otherwise-engaged individuals. Competence focuses concern on citizens’ information levels at the expense of analyzing how representatives bid for their attention or how political institutions shape and constrain those bids. Rather than ask what people know, we should be asking what politics brings to their attention and how.

Isn’t It Time We Stopped Talking about Competence?

If the responsiveness ideal and the empirical research it inspires holds constituents to an impossibly high standard of full information, it asks too little of what E. E. Schattschneider, writing in 1960, termed the conflict system.³⁷ Like critics of democracy today, Schattschneider worried that elections could not produce democratically representative outcomes. Rather than worry about ill-informed or manipulated voters, he worried about the bias of interest-group conflict.³⁸ Schattschneider coined an entire vocabulary of concepts to direct attention to the specific legal and institutional forms of organization that motivate—and suppress—popular participation in mass democracies.

Schattschneider famously argued that interest-group pluralism’s bias toward privatization of conflict assured that the chorus in the pluralist heaven would sing with a strong upper-class accent.³⁹ More importantly, but less well known, Schattschneider faulted this bias for demobilizing less well-resourced and less vigilant populations, who need the contagion of conflict to command their attention and morph them into groups.⁴⁰ This intervention strikes me as exceptionally relevant today for its potential to redirect the competence conversation from its focus on the stock of information that any individual possesses to the features of institutions that constrain their engagement. Schattschneider also warned that the vote can be vitiated as effectively by placing obstacles in the way of organizing the electorate as by denying the right to vote.⁴¹

In the context of today’s battle not over the right to vote but over the ease of its exercise, that caution in particular hits home. Advocates for democracy are wrong to assum[e] that only legal barriers inhibi[t] the disenfranchised, when the exclusion of people by extralegal processes, by social processes, by the way the political system is organized and structured may be far more effective than the law.⁴² Schattschneider understood that the struggle for democracy could not rest with the movement to universalize suffrage; it would be equally urgent to fight back against the attempt to make the vote meaningless.⁴³

Twenty-first century US democracy makes a great show of popular empowerment. The US fills more government positions by election than any other Western democracy. Due to primaries and caucuses, voters have a stronger hand than parties do in selecting candidates. In many states, ballot initiatives, referenda, and recalls let voters nullify electoral results and circumvent legislatures. And yet, significant features of the electoral system—gerrymandering, winner-take-all voting, restrictive voter registration laws, a virtually unrestricted flow of private financing into political campaigns, organized lobbying—make it clear that voting does not mean very much.

The competence debate blames voters for the failures of representative democracy. It accuses them of being too ill-informed and inattentive to politics to play their appointed role in securing a political representation responsive to popular interests. The mobilization framing offers an alternate perspective. It sets the so-called failings of individual voters in the context of the institutions that motivate them to act, or to abstain from acting, by the manner in which those institutions stage, or fail to stage, conflict.

What If We Start Talking about Plurality?

I argue that mass democracies need plurality more than they need competence. I borrow this term from the lexicon of radical democracy, where it means more than a simple diversity of values and opinions. In the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, plurality names the unfixity of social identity that opens up group identifications and relations of enmity and alliance to political invention.⁴⁴ Wherever plurality exists, political struggle will not follow deterministically or inevitably from any particular social or economic facts. Maybe today’s pollsters and political scientists are able to predict people’s candidate or party preferences from their zip code, the cars they drive, or the publications to which they subscribe; that predictability is an effect of politics, not its basis. Lines of conflict do not inhere in social life but result from acts of representation that become sedimented over time as social fact.⁴⁵

It is easy to forget that in the US prior to 1945 or so, a civil rights Democrat was as unthinkable as a Dixie Republican. Today, the South is red and voters identify the Democratic Party with the interests of Black Americans (no matter how well or poorly it serves them).⁴⁶ Wherever plurality exists, these predictions are not stable. Think of the perpetual disappointment over what too many political commentators and strategists refer to in the singular as the Hispanic or Latino vote, which they persistently imagine as a socially determined voting bloc because they fail to recognize Latino "as a political rather than merely descriptive category."⁴⁷

Plurality changes the subject of the competence conversation by bringing to light an aspect of power that conventional pluralism conceals. Plurality proposes that society begins in heterogeneity and that politics creates group differences.⁴⁸ Once difference appears, division has already occurred. But wherever difference presents as a social fact, it hides this political operation of division and differentiation.

I argue that democracy flourishes when struggles and their outcomes cannot be deduced, predicted, or contained by given calculations of interest, when democratic politics itself produces interests, makes subjects, and creates alliances. It is to encourage just such a flourishing that modern democracy needs plurality in the precise sense I have developed here. Plurality supplies the necessary conditions for the transformational political work of creating unsuspected linkages among struggles to alter the social and political identities that are permissible and even thinkable, mobilizing new forms of political struggle by breaking and recombining old patterns of enmity and alliance.⁴⁹

Sorting: Today’s Most Counterproductive Mobilization

Today, party leaders in government and on the campaign trail stage partisan conflict as polarization, a culture war between opposing partisans who have no overlapping political opinions.⁵⁰ This portrayal serves up high drama on the campaign trail and on cable news but it runs contrary to empirical studies of public opinion, which find that although political elites and political parties have charged to the ideological extremes, their constituencies have not.⁵¹ Opinion shapers and political representatives picture the US body politic to itself as deeply divided into social groups whose habitat, values, and tastes determine their irreconcilable political positions. Urban versus rural maps onto liberal versus conservative maps onto Democrat versus Republican.⁵² Rather than reflect the truth about US society and politics, this representation mobilizes: it produces what it appears to describe. Political scientist Morris P. Fiorina calls this story of social polarization a distorted picture that threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy as a polarized political class abandons any effort to reach out toward the great middle of the country.⁵³

Much scholarly and journalistic writing on polarization assumes that this picture is real, taking it for granted that Democrats and Republicans automatically dislike one another simply because they belong to different political parties.⁵⁴ A work of popular social science supplied a catchphrase for this phenomenon: the Big Sort.⁵⁵ Thanks to its author, journalist Bill Bishop, the term sorting has come into use as shorthand for the process that has supposedly brought us to red America versus blue America, a nation riven in two by a social chasm that finds political expression in extreme forms of partisan incivility.

Bishop used vividly colored maps to set up a dramatic contrast between the purple electorate of the 1976 presidential race (Ford versus Carter) and the red and blue patchwork of its 2004 counterpart (Bush versus Kerry). The contrast supposedly illustrated his title thesis. Since the mid-1970s Americans have become divided by