By Nicole Ki, Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism
Sheila Plotkin, an 80-year-old retired teacher and McFarland resident, is among the growing segment of Americans questioning the strength of democracy in this country.
Seven years ago, with a protest sign in her hand and her husband by her side, she stepped onto the glossy tile floor of the Wisconsin state capitol to protest Gov. Scott Walker’s legislative efforts that all but ended bargaining rights for state public sector employees.
Due to increased security, police officers escorted the couple and other members of the public to the Senate chamber. There Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) was signing a contempt order for 14 Democratic senators who fled the state to avoid voting on the controversial legislation — later called Act 10.
As Plotkin and her husband were leaving, the elevator unexpectedly stopped at the second floor. Plotkin said an officer stepped forward and took their photo. Plotkin told protesters gathered outside that the experience left her feeling as if she was in a “czar’s castle” being escorted by “the palace guard.”
This story is part of a series that examines the state of Wisconsin’s democracy in an era of gerrymandering, secret campaign money, restrictive voting laws and legislative maneuvers that weaken the power of regular citizens to influence government. More stories will be published by the WCI J in upcoming months.
“I was so angry. I was so distraught,” Plotkin recalled. “I said, ‘This is not my Wisconsin,’ and then I broke down and started to cry.”
But her tears eventually gave way to action. Plotkin, who taught for 28 years, formed a citizens’ group, We, the Irrelevant, in 2015 after the Legislature voted in a surprise move to severely weaken the state’s public records law by exempting key government records. This deeply unpopular move later was removed from the budget by Walker and the GOP legislative leaders.
Polls show public is worried about American democracy
Plotkin said she found it distressing to see democracy here being “nibbled away” and she isn’t alone in her concerns. A recent poll commissioned by the bipartisan Democracy Project found that over two-thirds of Democrats, Republicans and independents feel very or somewhat concerned about the current state of American democracy.
“Most people believe government no longer represents the people,” Plotkin said. “It represents campaign donors, special interests, the wealthy.”
The Edelman Trust Barometer, which has been gauging public faith in institutions in the United States and elsewhere for 18 years, said 2018 saw the “steepest, most dramatic general population decline the Trust Barometer has ever measured,” with just 33 percent of the both the general public and the informed public expressing trust in the government — down 14 points and 30 points, respectively from 2017.
“The public’s confidence in the traditional structures of American leadership is now fully undermined and has been replaced with a strong sense of fear, uncertainty and disillusionment,” according to Edelman, a global communications marketing firm.
Citizen power on the rise?
Unlike Plotkin, some political observers in Wisconsin say the power of the individual is actually getting stronger. Brett Healy, president of the MacIver Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank, said there are numerous organized and well-funded groups for Democrats, Republicans and special interests that people can join to exert influence.
“If you care about democracy, your country, your state, you’re going to join with others and make your opinions heard,” Healy said.
In Wisconsin, the percentage of residents saying they strongly or somewhat agree that the government is run by “a few big interests looking out for themselves” has gone from 79 percent in 2013 to 84 percent in 2015, according to surveys by the Marquette University Law School Poll. Results showed that Democrats and independents were consistently more pessimistic than Republicans on this point.
A 2017 Marquette survey also found that just 47 percent of Wisconsin residents polled said they trusted state government “to do what is right” either “just about always” or “most of the time.”
Few remedies available to Wisconsin citizens
Aside from voting, Wisconsin residents have a limited number of remedies when they disagree with their elected leaders. In some other states, voters can initiate laws and even overturn decisions made by elected officials. Wisconsin voters do not have those options, but they have one potentially potent weapon: Recall.
Eighteen other states allow for citizens to recall their elected officials. Just 10 of them, including Wisconsin, include provisions for recalling any elected member of government. The others have specific limitations, such as Illinois, where only the governor can be recalled.
Recall elections are where Orville Seymer got his start in political activism in 2002. Seymer was part of Citizens for Responsible Government, which formed after news reports revealed that hundreds of Milwaukee County employees, including then-County Executive Tom Ament, stood to earn up to a total of $900 million in additional pension payments.
The citizens group launched a series of recall elections against Ament and county board members who had voted for the so-called backdrop payments. When Seymer and his compatriots hit the streets to gather 73,000 signatures in 60 days to recall Ament, the response was overwhelming: 182,957 signatures in just 28 days.
“Something like this had never hit Wisconsin before. It was wild pandemonium,” Seymer said.
The scandal eventually forced Ament and seven board members out of office and launched Walker into the county executive’s seat. In 2012, Walker himself was recalled, but a majority voted to retained him as governor.
Partisanship crowds out citizens
Former state Sen. Tim Cullen (D-Janesville) believes several factors have led to the weakening of citizen power. He cited hyper-partisanship, the need to raise significant campaign donations and officials’ desires to be re-elected.
Cullen served in the Senate in the 1970s and ‘80s and again from 2011 to 2015. After he returned to public life, Cullen said he noticed that legislators seem to act primarily in allegiance to their parties in order to keep their jobs.
“The political system is rigged in a way that in their own self interest of getting re-elected — which is an overwhelmingly important thing to most of them — it doesn’t help them get re-elected to be working with the other party,” said Cullen, who served as majority leader during his first stint in the Legislature.
Cullen, who is working with the Fair Elections Project to advocate for nonpartisan redistricting, said Wisconsin’s democracy has been crippled by gerrymandering and “dark money.”
Studies show growing partisanship
Jacob Stampen, a UW-Madison emeritus professor of educational leadership and policy analysis, said his research reveals a growing partisanship that has made state lawmakers more indebted to party bosses than to the public. Stampen has been tracking voting in the Wisconsin Legislature since 2003. His first analysis of voting was as a graduate student at UW-Madison in the mid-60s.
He said back then, Wisconsin politicians coalesced around ideas and not just party affiliation. He described it as a “healthy political system” in which lawmakers were “much more constituency-oriented.”
When he again started tracking every legislative vote in 2003, Stampen said he noticed a sharp increase in partisanship. He believes corporate influence has drowned out the interests of citizens.
“Overall, I conclude that in the 1980s and 1990s, Wisconsin’s political system became increasingly polarized, dependent on financial support from lobbyists, and corrupt,” Stampen said in a paper about Wisconsin legislative politics from 1966 to 2006.
Dale Schultz, a former Republican state senator, also observed that politicians are more attentive to big campaign donors than citizens. The public is frustrated, the former majority leader said, because elected officials “never take the time to listen to them or get to know them” — an exercise that would give citizens more influence by subjecting officials to questioning and examination.
Schultz served in the state Legislature for 32 years and earned a reputation for independent decision-making.
Citizens have less influence on natural resources decisions
Robert Rolley, a retired Department of Natural Resources (DNR) wildlife research biologist, said he has seen regular citizens lose influence over natural resource decisions since Walker took office.
“There is a long history in the DNR of listening to public input prior to making management decisions,” said Rolley, who worked at the agency for 25 years. “What has changed is which citizens the DNR Board and administration is interested in listening to.”
He added, “The leadership in the DNR is much more interested in facilitating businesses’ opportunity to expand. In the last eight years, it made it a lot easier for businesses to get the permits they want in a quick manner so they can make more jobs.”
The attitude of the current DNR administration is, “If we get a little more pollution it’s a small price to pay,” Rolley said.
Even the Wisconsin Conservation Congress (WCC) a nonpartisan group set up by the Legislature in 1934 specifically to gather public opinion and advise the DNR on natural resource issues – appears to be losing its influence. For example, the group came out strongly last year against a proposal to allow the resumption of baiting and feeding of white-tailed deer in areas where chronic wasting disease (CWD) had been detected.
“Passing this bill would disregard the thousands of volunteer hours citizens across this state have spent engaged in this CWD process,” Larry Bonde, chairman of the WCC, told lawmakers, adding that “dismissing their hard work and input could be damaging for future efforts to engage the public.”
The Legislature ignored that advice and passed the bill in June 2017.
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Kathy Cramer, a UW-Madison professor of political science and author of a book about Walker’s rise in Wisconsin, said recent scholarship confirms that “policy decisions most closely correspond to the political leanings of the wealthiest people in the population, and not so much to other people.”
“We, the Irrelevant”
Plotkin’s group uses public records requests to gauge the power of citizens to influence the state government.
It began by examining three bills. One dissolved the nonpartisan Government Accountability Board, the state’s ethics and campaign watchdog, replacing it with separate elections and ethics commissions with appointees of both parties.
A second bill exempted politicians from John Doe investigations, such as the one – thrown out by the conservative-leaning Wisconsin Supreme Court – that had probed coordination between Walker’s campaign and conservative groups. The third bill raised campaign contribution limits, eliminated the requirement that donors list their employers and allowed candidates to coordinate with so-called issue-ad groups. .
“I began to ask myself, ‘Who’s asking for these changes? Are citizens asking for this? Are they hearing from constituents saying ‘Get rid of the GAB’?” Plotkin said.
The short answer? No. The group found that Republicans who ran the Legislature had received 6,215 letters, emails and phone calls against those three bills and 312 in favor. Despite the overwhelming public opposition, all three measures passed.
Whose power? The public or politicians?
Kenneth Mayer, a UW-Madison professor of political science, said other states allow for more direct public input and responsiveness through initiatives and referenda in which citizens make laws directly. In all, 26 states have mechanisms that allow voters to propose laws through initiatives or overturn laws by popular referendum, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Wisconsin lacks an initiative process and any referenda are initiated by governmental bodies — not citizens. A bipartisan bill to give Wisconsin voters the power of initiative and referendum was introduced in 2017 but failed to get a hearing.
Many citizens in other states are utilizing the initiative process to create legislation directly, most notably in the legalization of marijuana. Of the nine states that have now fully legalized marijuana, eight of them did so through an initiative process, and only one — Vermont — through the legislative process.
Plotkin said she fears many people feel they no longer have influence on government.
“Indifference is a killer of democracy,” she said. “I’m hoping if Donald Trump has done nothing else, he has awakened those people who never thought voting mattered. If he’s made enough of them angry, I hope they vote.”
Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism reporter Madeline Heim contributed to this story. It was produced as part of an investigative reporting class in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication under the direction of Dee J. Hall, the Center’s managing editor. Nicole Ki was a member of that class. The Center’s collaborations with journalism students are funded in part by the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment at UW-Madison.
The nonprofit Center (www.WisconsinWatch.org) collaborates with Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Television, other news media and the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by the Center do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates. The Center’s coverage of democracy issues is supported by The Joyce Foundation.