By James A Gardner
Election campaigns should be critical events within the lifetime of a democratic polity. For electorate of a democracy, an election is a time to take stock-to reexamine our ideals; to check our realizing of our personal pursuits; to contemplate where of these pursuits within the better social order; and to consider, and if essential to revise, our knowing of the way our commitments are most sensible translated into governmental policy-or so we profess to think.
americans, although, are haunted through the phobia that our election campaigns fall some distance in need of definitely the right to which we aspire. the common sleek American election crusade turns out crass, shallow, and unengaging. the world of our democratic politics turns out to lie in an uncomfortable chasm among our political beliefs and daily fact.
What Are Campaigns For? is a multidisciplinary paintings of criminal scholarship that examines the position of felony associations in constituting the disjunction among political excellent and truth. The booklet explores the modern American excellent of democratic citizenship in election campaigns through tracing it to its old assets, documenting its thorough infiltration of criminal norms, comparing its feasibility in gentle of the findings of empirical social technology, and checking out it opposed to the necessities of democratic conception.
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Extra info for What are Campaigns For? The Role of Persuasion in Electoral Law and Politics
Example text
155 If voters did not know these facts, it seemed, they must necessarily lack the capacity for rational decision making in the political arena. 156 That our campaigns fail to meet the standards and ideals that we have for more than a century professed seems obvious. 157 But there is something more—a sneaking suspicion that the poor quality of our campaign politics may ultimately be attributable to shortcomings of the electorate itself; that in the end, our electoral politics falls short of our ideals because we are not capable of meeting those ideals; that candidates give us poor campaigns because they are only responding to public demand; that we have, in short, the politics we deserve.
The political campaign: emergence of the deliberative ideal along with previously acquired loyalties to party organizations. Because their opinions were fixed, winning became a matter of raising the practical barriers for opponents and lowering them for friends. Men placed their bodies in the path of opponents attempting to approach the voting window. They shoved, poked, threatened, grabbed, and sometimes stabbed or shot those they saw as politically damned. But, whatever they did, men at the polls rarely engaged in an open and free debate of the issues that divided them.
Tellingly, the prevailing answer seems to be more and better debates. In 1968 and 1972, the presidential candidates debated once. In 1976, there were six debates: three during the primaries and three during the general election. 172 During the 2008 presidential campaign, the Democratic and Republican National Committees together sponsored a total of 47 official debates among the primary candidates, including a much-hyped format cosponsored with the popular video website YouTube, in which questions were posed by ordinary voters instead of journalists.