Are You a Threat to Democracy?

by Kathy Goldschmidt on March 08, 2022

This is part of a series from our latest report, The Future of Citizen Engagement: Rebuilding the Democratic Dialogue. Over the next few weeks, check back for new posts outlining the principles and featuring accompanying resources, articles, and plans to support them.

We get it. There’s a lot of pressure on the organizers of grassroots advocacy campaigns. You need to keep the message consistent with organizational goals. You need to engage your members and get them to click through, send messages, keep active. You need to expand your reach, get new people engaged and involved. You need to demonstrate results. But there’s one important pressure you may not even realize you’re under—maybe the most important one of all. And that’s ensuring your tactics promote and enhance democracy.

In our 2021 report The Future of Citizen Engagement: Rebuilding the Democratic Dialogue, we propose ten principles for modernizing and improving the relationship between Congress and the People. All ten will require changes in the constituent engagement culture and practices in both Congress and the organizations that help facilitate grassroots advocacy. The top principle? Congressional engagement should foster trust in Members, Congress, and democracy.

If your grassroots advocacy tactics rely on generating fear or anger at Congress or specific legislators, are you sowing the seeds of mistrust in our democracy? If your practices for collecting new leads for advocacy or fundraising rely on sending mass emails to Congress, are you diverting congressional resources away from more meaningful constituent engagement? If your success depends on leaving out key information or skewing the truth in pursuit of your cause, are you advancing your cause in an honorable way that will result in constructive engagement between the governing class and the people they represent?

Trust between Members of Congress and those they represent is the foundation of our democracy. As a conduit between them, associations, nonprofits, and companies who advocate on their members’ behalf hold a position of significant responsibility and must act accordingly. Sowing fear, anger, half-truths, or disinformation—even in pursuit of the best of causes—can do significant damage to trust in our leaders and institutions. Using campaigns to Congress to generate contacts, keep them active, and raise funds makes the keystone institution of our republic a dumping ground. Each office must dig out before it can get on with the business of governance. It also reduces the impact and trust of advocacy campaigns that are genuinely trying to influence Congress. Unfortunately, with so many form email campaigns, House and Senate offices are either perpetually buried or have decided to ignore them so their resources can be directed toward more impactful work.

Here are a few comments from House and Senate staffers on a recent survey about constituent communications that illustrate our point:

  • “We respond to form letters, but *don't care about them*. Give me economic figures. Give me personal impact. Give me moral conflicts. Give me opportunities and solutions. We are very stretched thin, and reading thousands of form letter emails filled with empty platitudes and requests that are tone-deaf to the Representative's position and beliefs do nothing.”
  • “We now get 3-4K emails a week, the vast majority of which are one-touch, identical form emails. Responding to these takes considerable time away from more productive activities like responding to real constituent appeals, researching policy, etc. “
  • “It sometimes feel like folks don't understand representative democracy. The boss has to listen and be responsive to constituents and does, but it's not a simple counting exercise if we get 100 letters in support and 5 opposed that decides the issue.”
  • “Constituent communications and interactions are not a representative sample of the district's overall views, they are a reflection of who is most fired up about an issue and wanting to engage. We treat communication accordingly.”

Your activities and those of your organization and industry matter. Grassroots advocacy has always been critical to our self-governance, and we know most campaigns are conducted with integrity. However, right now we seem to be saturated with so many manipulative messages and so much misinformation that it is perhaps time for the industry to do more to combat it. Here are some ways you can help rebuild the democratic dialogue and strengthen the trust and relationship between Congress and the People while also helping to accomplish your advocacy goals:

  • Build relationships between legislators and their constituents. The days of one-click advocacy campaigns are over. It’s time for grassroots advocacy to shift tactics and incentives toward building trusting relationships between their advocates and the staff and Members of Congress who represent them
  • Be transparent and accountable. Democracy is a two-way street. While our elected officials bear the lion’s share of the burden to be transparent and accountable to those they represent, the People who engage Congress also have a civic duty. Petitioning the government should come with some level of accountability by the petitioner. The People trying to influence Senators and Representatives should identify who they are, affirm they are constituents, and explain the reasoning behind their involvement in the issue or campaign. This is all the more important as evidence has emerged of dangerous foreign attempts to influence U.S. elections and public policy and financially-motivated computer-generated public comment on federal regulations masquerading as real people.
  • Separate recruitment from legislator contact. Some groups build up their lists by testing who will click on an “action alert” email in order to move them up the advocacy ladder. Years ago, one grassroots software vendor said to a CMF staffer, “I don’t care if they actually send an email to Congress—I just want to know who will click on the link.” Find a better way to build your lists and keep your activists engaged. When thousands of organizations use Congress as the target of campaigns whose advocacy goals are secondary to their desire to identify new activists and keep the current ones engaged, Congress becomes frustrated, overwhelmed, and mistrustful of advocacy campaigns, in general. It may be easy to develop a phone or email campaign to Congress—even one that goes viral—but if the primary goal is anything other than persuading individual Members of Congress to do something specific in the very near future, you should consider other strategies.
  •  Adopt a code of ethics (even better, help create one for your industry). The Project on Ethics in Political Communication at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs provides research and guidance to help “students, academics, and practitioners to consider what, if any, ethical obligation political communication professionals have and to whom or what they have it.” Among the resources are a campaign ethics workbook entitled “Don’t Lose Your Soul Just to Win an Election” and links to the codes of ethics adopted by organizations like the American Association of Political Consultants, the Association for Business Communication, the National Association of Government Communicators, and others. As far as we know, however, there is not an industry association or code of ethics specific to grassroots organizers, so perhaps you’d consider creating one?
  • Help revive the chamber-level petition. In the first congress, when the House was debating the Bill of Rights, James Madison declared of the first amendment that “The right of freedom of speech is secured; the liberty of the press is expressly declared to be beyond the reach of this government; the people may therefore publicly address their representatives; may privately advise them, or declare their sentiments by petition to the whole body; in all these ways they may communicate their will.” However, Congress has mostly abandoned the process where people can “declare their sentiments to the whole body.” A vestigial version remains but reviving it could possibly help resolve some of the challenges of advocacy in the information age, including enabling organizations to publicly express their views to the House and/or Senate, rather than through individual Members and alleviating the need for individual Members to manage emails. Some form of the petition exists in many international legislatures. Shouldn’t the country that gave the petition a place of honor in the First Amendment be more robustly facilitating it?
  •  Become part of the civic infrastructure. The associations, nonprofits, corporations, and others who organize grassroots advocacy campaigns are integral to what Ronald Reagan described as the “infrastructure of democracy—the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities—which allows a people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.” He was speaking to the British Parliament in 1982 about strengthening the infrastructure in burgeoning democracies as a means to combat totalitarianism in the Cold War, but it’s something we need to turn focus on here and now. Those who have the skills and means to influence public opinion and motivate advocacy at the local, state, and national levels can use them more broadly and with democracy infrastructure-building as one of their goals.

Additional Resources

 
citizen engagement, congressional operations