No One Understands Me: Accessibility in Politics
No one understands me.
This phrase seems straight out of a 2010s young adult novel or a movie with a Rotten Tomatoes score in the single digits, but it also describes politics. For an outsider, the name Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) might barely ring a bell, and the term gerrymandering might prompt the questions: who is Gerry, and why is he mandering?
In 2022, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center found that less than half of U.S. adults could name all three branches of government. No one is born with political knowledge, so how does this information inequality emerge?
Privilege is a key factor. Political scientists Jack Knight and James Johnson write in their 1997 essay that differences in “material wealth and educational treatment” and in intellectual faculties, like the ability to reason, lead to inequality in political discussion.
Knight and Johnson argue that deliberative democracy relies on public participation in activities like political discussion. Their argument circles back to the central issue of access and privilege—though democracy relies on political conversation, only a select population has access to the necessary political knowledge to participate. That means that an essential element of democracy relies on a catch-22: individuals can’t participate in political conversations if they don’t have the appropriate knowledge or skills, but that knowledge and skill come from participating in political conversations.
Participants might mention specific politicians by name, or discuss policy issues, assuming everyone else has the same level of familiarity. Participating in political discussions requires a certain skill set and mentality that only some possess, including knowledge of the subject and comfort with conflict. In 2019, the Pew Research Center found that a majority of U.S. adults felt more comfortable talking about religion than politics. Of the respondents comfortable with talking about politics, most were also comfortable with conflict. Only a small portion of respondents less comfortable with conflict expressed willingness to share their political opinions, especially those with opposing views.
Beyond the content of the discussion, participants’ exclusionary behaviors can go even further, precluding other participants by ignoring their contributions or through non-verbal cues like yawning. Political scientist Iris Marion Young writes that this behavior is a manifestation of internal exclusion, where a person appears to have a seat at the table while, in actuality, they have no voice in the discussion. Consequently, political discussions become like an exclusive club where newcomers, especially those unaccustomed to conflict, are left out.
Making space for new voices can begin in K-12 schools. Researchers at the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University suggest a correlation between a person’s civic engagement and receiving encouragement to vote during or before high school. However, privilege shapes that relationship: 64% of voters overall recall encouragement to vote, though 54% of Black voters recall the same as compared to 67% of white voters.
Encouragement to vote is not the only solution—certain classroom environments also contribute to increased political engagement. Political scientists Claire Willeck and Tali Mendelberg find a significant correlation between a person’s increased intention to vote and classrooms where teachers encourage students to respectfully debate political issues. Willeck and Mendelberg suggest that these active learning methods intensify students’ civic attitudes, resulting in a higher likelihood of political involvement. Civic education is not infallible, however. In 2018, the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution found that multiple state standards for schools lacked elements of a high-quality civics education, such as civic engagement within the students’ communities. The findings of the report suggest that while education is a solution, it has limitations.
Therefore, a policy-forward solution is not the only option: an equally effective alternative is to change the culture around political discourse. The norm of dispassionate impartiality in political conversation inherently discourages participation from anyone who employs more emotional forms of expression. To remedy that exclusion, political scientist Iris Marion Young argues that three political modes of communication should be utilized: greeting, rhetoric, and narrative.
When a person greets another, the greeting implies a mutual responsibility to listen and respond to the other’s claims and to accommodate each perspective. A speaker’s use of rhetoric enables a connection with their audience through, for example, familiar idioms or figures of speech; this discards the norm of completely serious, rational argument. Participants who frame their arguments as narratives encourage others to understand the experiences and needs of differently situated groups.
Participants therefore do not need to change the content of their arguments, but the framing. Consciously greeting other participants, for example, can establish an atmosphere where participants who prefer to avoid conflict still feel comfortable enough to share their opinions. When participants consciously alter exclusionary behavior, they make way for voices that previously felt silenced, whose unique opinions could change the very direction of the conversation.
There are multiple approaches to the issue of asymmetric political communication: approaches that seek to tackle the issue through policy, like nationwide political education, or solutions that seek to alter culture, like those proposed by Young. Until lawmakers widely implement policy solutions across all levels of government, changing the culture of political discourse is the most effective solution. Unlike policy-forward solutions, cultural change does not require months of debate–it starts with individual efforts. Individuals can subvert the standard of purely rational argument by using relatable jokes or anecdotes to simultaneously emphasize their argument and encourage understanding of other perspectives.
Though policy and culture-focused approaches have different means of addressing exclusion in political discourse, they are not mutually exclusive. Both can be practically implemented by federal legislation to encourage civic education and encouragement for participants in political conversations to be consciously inclusive. Congress can introduce federal incentives to encourage states to create civically-minded curricula while individuals also take steps to foster an environment that welcomes new perspectives. When these two approaches are combined, they can create change that can truly make political discussion more open and inviting to newcomers, demystifying political conversation so that politics is truly inclusive for all.