If you look
for a path to fixing California’s governance crisis in traditional public
opinion polls, you’ll look in vain. California voters are frustrated but don’t
understand the basics of state finance and governance enough to identify a way
to reform. In this way, the California electorate is like the worst girlfriend
(or boyfriend) you’ve ever had: she is angry about just about everything, but
can’t give you any clear instruction about what you can do to make her happy.
What if
California voters learned how the governance system really worked, through some
sort of educational process? Would they be able to point to a coherent way
forward?
That, in
over-simplified fashion, is the goal of a deliberative poll being conducted
this weekend in the LA County city of Torrance. Some 300 Californians, chosen at random from around
the state, will come together to learn about four big policy areas, ask
questions, and, once informed, offer their views.
You may
have heard about this poll (full details are here).
Virtually every good government group in California has put its name on the
event (full disclosure: including the New America Foundation, the think tank
that employs me, though I’m not one of the organizers). And critics have
already begun
raising questions about the value of the poll, and the political
affiliations and previous stances of the various sponsoring organizations.
In both the
praise and criticism, the deliberative poll is depicted as exotic. This tells
us more about California than it does about this poll.
The concept
of deliberation is foreign to our political culture. Too foreign. We often put
together major legislation and budgets behind closed doors, in last-minute
sessions. Our ballot initiative system runs at reckless speed, giving
initiative sponsors just 150 days to collect hundreds of thousands of
signatures. (The Swiss, who value deliberation, give sponsors 18 months so they
can build support, spark debate and still have plenty of time to gather
signatures). Our voters have chosen to establish complicated formulas to govern
spending and taxation – effectively blocking political debate over questions
like school funding and property values.
The best
thing about the deliberative poll is that its very existence challenges this culture.
Just getting Californians to sit down and seriously think about different
pieces of the state – taxation, the initiative, representation, the state-local
government relations – is useful as a counterweight. And attention to the poll
might even get Californians thinking about the value of deliberation – a
radical thought in the Golden State.
Of course,
the poll is designed to tease out support for a variety of specific policy
ideas for fixing California. That’s fine as far as it goes, but the specific
poll results are not nearly as important as what is learned from watching
Californians try to figure out the issues. For me at least, the key question of
this exercise is how people think and talk about the state’s problems – and
what information, phrases, and questions move them away from angry girlfriend
territory and towards a view of California’s problems that resembles reality.
I have my
doubts about whether people can get there. California’s political discourse is
so full of false narratives that correcting misimpressions (only 9 percent of
Californians know that education is the number-one spending item and the income
tax the number one revenue source in the state budget) seems like a task that
might take more than a weekend. But we won’t know until someone tries.
Maybe, if
this poll produces interesting data and new knowledge, the California
electorate and governmental reform can start dating again.