What Are Campaigns For?
Prof. James Gardner
Joseph W. Belluck & Laura L. Aswad Professor of Civil Justice, Law School
June 11, 2008
UB Reporter Article on Lecture
It is an article of contemporary common faith that American election campaigns are of poor quality. Each election season, Americans eagerly anticipate a campaign of dignified, reasoned deliberation on the great issues of the day, only to experience profound disappointment at the thoughtlessness and superficiality of the actual event. But if our campaigns constantly disappoint us, why do we continue to hold them to an elevated standard of sober, deliberative rationality? What justifies such a standard? If we constantly fall short of it, is it the right standard? And if it is, then what causes our campaigns to fail so consistently to deliver the kind of politics to which we collectively aspire?
In fact, we expect much more of our campaigns than they are capable of delivering, and we would do better to think of a campaign not as a forum for public deliberation on the issues, but merely as a mechanism for tabulating the political opinions that voters hold before the campaign begins. The persistent contemporary longing for deeply deliberative campaigns is rooted in a long-standing elite frustration and impatience with the slow pace of social and political reform in the United States. Critics of American elections thus typically argue for thoughtful, deliberative campaigns because such campaigns hold out the only reasonable hope that social and political change may occur in a mass democracy at any rate faster than glacially.
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