Daniel Carpenter: evaluation

Transcript context

…Let me ask you an analytical question, and please try to give me an answer for both the middle of the 19th century and then for today. There’s a bunch of different hypotheses you might have about petitions — that they strengthen the relative power of what is truly popular, or you might think it strengthens the relative power of groups who organize well, or maybe groups who are good on the media, groups that are good at fundraising. On net overall, on average for each of those two periods, what do you analytically see as the major effect of petitions, apart from any particular case? Excellent question, Tyler. The 19th century is easier to answer because that’s what I just wrote about. What I see is — particularly during this crucial period, say, the 1820s to the 1850s in the United States, Canada, parts of Mexico — people who didn’t already have organizations, didn’t already have parties — which of course, in the United States, especially, were really an important technological innovation — didn’t already have lobbies, didn’t already have interest groups, were able to successfully harness the petition to make their voices better heard, to set the agenda — I think agenda setting is really important when we think about democratization — and also to organize. What I argue in the book is that everything, from anti-slavery societies to new parties, such as Canadian reform parties, the American Whigs, and others, drew much of their energy and structure from early petitioning campaigns. Look, we’re in a different world now, especially in the United States, where I don’t think petitions have quite the societal and historical imprint that they used to. There’s a whole bunch of reasons for that, but I want to answer your question. I would say now, in part, what we don’t have . . . Let me just first bracket this by saying, we don’t have anything like the legislative petition process that we used to have in the 19th century. By the way, Canada still does, and Canada still gets, I think, 1500 paper petitions per year. Now, we could get into a whole argument about whether that changes anything. What you’re going to see with petitioning nowadays — especially of the electronic variety, occasionally of the plebiscitary variety, like the initiative and referendum — is that select groups and interests that know how to make something go viral. Virality, if I can use that term, was there in the 19th century now, but you have to make it get hot right away. I’m reminded that there was an electronic petition signed about 10 years ago, contesting new card fees at Bank of America. I think it was by somebody in Chevy Chase, and immediately, within days, hundreds of thousands of signatures. Bank of America backed down. I don’t know, by the way, whether that’s good or bad economic policy — probably an effective petition from the standpoint of having changed things. Can you imagine any other institution — the courts, parties — through which that would have happened? Nowadays we could say social media — somebody could jump on social media and say, “Hey, look at this awful card statement I just got. ” And then you get a bunch of likes. It’s some kind of aggregation mechanism like that, that can do that, but I don’t think we have the kinds of institutions that we used to, in part because we don’t have a petition institution that structures robust public debate as much as we used to, and I think that’s a problem. If I look at state-level referenda, I tend to think it’s a bad idea to make them too easy, California being exhibit A. Do you agree with that view or differ from it? And if you agree with it, doesn’t it mean you now think petitions actually have become, on net, somewhat harmful?…

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