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WEDNESDAY, MARCH 30, 2016
THE DAILY PENNSYLVANIAN | THEDP.COM
Prof. tracks declining interest in local politics
New book tackles issues of voter participation NICOLE RUBIN Staff Reporter
An old adage may say that “all politics are local,” but interest in politics is clearly not. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only 61.8 percent of eligible voters participated in the 2012 presidential election and only 41.9 percent in the 2014 Congressional election. Those numbers have both declined from highs of 64 and 48.9 percent respectively in 1978. One Penn professor thinks that decline is emblematic of a growing disinterest in local politics. In his soon-to-be-published book,
“The Increasingly United States,” political science associate professor Daniel J. Hopkins says that people are more engaged in national politics and are losing interest on the local level. “Our identity as American is frequently much, much stronger than our identities as residents of Philadelphia or Baltimore or the state of Pennsylvania,” Hopkins said. But it hasn’t always been this way. Hopkins explained that in the 1983 Chicago mayoral election, turnout was higher than in the presidential election of the next year, “which is a really striking demonstration that people really were very, very engaged in that election.” Declining local participation is ironic, he said, because when
the founders originally set up this system of federalism, they created more localized branches to be more democratic. The House of Representatives, for example, was the smallest democratic branch, in contrast with the executive branch, which has one leader and is inherently less democratic. Hopkins said our nationally focused political participation follows a trend set by modern media. Newspapers and television stations are becoming more nationalized in scope. It is possible to watch Fox News or read The New York Times “in any corner of this country,” he said. The main problem, Hopkins said, is not just that voters are more nationally focused, but that there is
a “mismatch” between the national focus and the powers held by states and localities in the federal system. “States and localities make consequential decisions about broad aspects of our lives,” Hopkins noted. “We are engaged in the national spectacle, and missing out on the decisions about who is going to educate our children or how we are going to clean up our streets.” The United States is currently in a period characterized by high rates of distrust in the federal government and Hopkins believes that as politics becomes more nationalized, distrust will rise. He said that this is because “we are thinking about the level where things [issues] are remote, they are a spectacle of party competition and not the level where the
trash actually gets picked up or the police actually serve the neighborhood.” The irony here is that people also tend to have more trust in their local governments, but participate less, which can continue to hurt them in a self-reinforcing cycle. It is not uncommon to hear criticisms of politicians and government officials, but according to Philadelphia Magazine, only about 27 percent of voters turned out to vote in the most recent mayoral election. One of the foundations for the Donald Trump presidential campaign is distrust or dislike of politicians. Hopkins believes, however, that this can be a “selfreinforcing cycle where voters think poorly of politicians so they’re not
interested in getting engaged in the process.” “They’re going to start to worry more and more about the narrow constituencies that do vote, and that can just perpetuate the cycle,” he said. There has been an increased focus and worry concerning the recent decline of political participation on the national spectrum, but Hopkins believes that the problem is more severe locally. In a national election, an individual can make up one of potentially hundreds of millions of voters, whereas in a local election in a smaller city, that same individual can be one of only hundreds or thousands of voters. Their vote, which matters much more proportionally, is going to waste.
Authors of ‘Notorious R.B.G’ Tumblr and book speak at Penn Law
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a feminist, progressive JAMIE BRENSILBER Staff Reporter
She is a revolutionary figure: a feminist, a progressive and a leader. She is the “Notorious R.B.G.” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined the Supreme Court in 1993, becoming the second woman on the high court after Sandra Day O’Connor. I r in Ca r mon and Shana Knizhnik gave a talk about their book “Notorious R.B.G.: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg” on Tuesday night in Golkin Hall. Penn English professor Salamishah Tillet moderated the discussion. Knizhnik started a Tumblr about Ginsberg in 2013 as a rising second-year law student around the time when the Supreme Court released a series of disappointing decisions for progressives. She was inspired by Ginsburg’s stirring dissents. The
justice “broke the record for the number of oral dissents given from the bench,” Knizhnik said. “My peers a nd I were frustrated with what was happening,” she said, and they “needed space on the Internet to celebrate her.” She started posting quotes from Ginsburg online on her Tumblr page, Notorious R.B.G. One of the pivotal moments for Notorious R.B.G. was Ginsburg’s dissent to the Voting Rights Case in 2013, Shelby County v. Holder, by which the Court struck down a part of the VRA that required states to pre-clear their voting laws. K nizhnik attr ibuted this change to the majority’s belief that the country no longer had a discr im ination problem. Ginsburg wrote in her dissent, “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away an umbrella in a rainstorm because you’re not getting wet.”
The idea for the book came when an editor from Harper Collins approached Knizhnik about her Tumblr page and suggested she turn it into a book. This editor connected Knizhnik with Carmon, a journalist, to write the book. “It didn’t fit into the preconceived categories,” Knizhnik said, describing the unusual task of turning a Tumblr into a book. Knizhnik described the inter-generational aspect of the R.B.G. phenomenon. “It’s unusual for us to have these icons of older women. Now people are really curious about who Justice Ginsburg [is],” Carmon said. “We wanted our book to be for both [lawyers and non-lawyers].” Throughout her professional life, Ginsburg’s views were formed in part by the circumstances of her ascent to the Court. K nizhnik said, “I don’t think she did consider herself a feminist at first. She had a conventional trajectory,” despite
being a Jewish girl in Brooklyn who was the child of immigrants. “She was forced into radicalism again and again by her circumstances,” Knizhnik said. During a stint volunteering at the American Civil Liberties Union, Ginsburg received a stack of letters from women, Knizhnik explained. These letters helped her realize that she was not the only woman facing discrimination and sexism. “She needed to use her talents to change the status quo,” Knizhnik said. Even today, Ginsburg is ahead of her time and still questions sexist laws. “Her life made her a feminist,” Carmon said. The two authors also spoke about Ginsburg’s marriage. Her marriage to tax attorney Marty Ginsburg was anything but conventional for the time. Instead of playing the role of supportive housewife, she rose to success, and he supported her. Ginsburg noted that traditional marriage does not exist
JULIO SOSA | NEWS PHOTO EDITOR
Before the authors of “Notorious RBG” gave a talk at the Penn Law School, students were able to pose with and purchase the book.
anymore, as traditional marriage was the case where a woman was inferior to her husband, Knizhnik explained. This helped her support same-sex marriage before some of her colleagues. When Sandra Day O’Connor
left the Court, Ginsburg felt her absence. Ginsburg was pleased when Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor were appointed. Famously, asked when there would be enough women on the bench, Ginsburg said, “When there are nine.”