Democracy Lesson Plan for High School Teachers: Contents--What Makes Lawmakers Tick?

What Makes Lawmakers Tick?

A Lesson Plan for High School Teachers of Civics, Government, and U.S. History

Prepared by Alan Rosenthal, Rutgers University
April 2007

A project of:
The National Conference of State Legislatures; The Center for Civic Education; The Center on Congress at Indiana University
The author can be reached at alanr@rci.rutgers.edu

Lesson Plan (8 pages); Handout (9 pages). Complete document (17 pages): Download to MSWord or print in PDF format.
To view PDF files, you must install Adobe Acrobat Reader.

An Overview of the Lesson: Background, Objectives, and Methods for Teachers (HTML)

Objectives
Rationale
Problem
Procedure

Handout: What Makes Lawmakers Tick? (9-page handout also included in Word & PDF documents above)
     Who they are
     Table: Number of Members of Congress and Legislatures, by State
     Why do they run?
     How do they get there?
     What is the job like?
     Is it worth it?

An Overview of the Lesson: Background, Objectives, and Methods for Teachers
This lesson on “What Makes Lawmakers Tick?” is designed for civics, American government, and history courses taught at the high school level. It follows upon two earlier lessons. The first is “Teaching Democracy Appreciation,” which deals with the fact that people have different values, interests, and priorities and that legislative bodies try to settle these differences by means of deliberation and negotiation, with compromises and majority votes as key elements. The second is “Appreciating Representation,” which shows how people elected to public office represent constituencies, while reflecting their own convictions, the positions of their political parties, interest group concerns, and the merits of the issues before them.

Objectives
The purpose of this lesson is simple--to give students a sense of what lawmakers are really like. What makes them tick as elected public officials? What motivates them? How did they get where they are? What do they like and dislike about their jobs? What do students think of them? How would it be to follow in their footsteps?

Rationale
The U.S. Congress and the legislatures of the 50 states are central institutions of representative democracy. They have functioned for more than 200 years, which is testimony to their durability. Nonetheless, Congress and state legislatures are not popular institutions. There are a number of reasons why Americans have become cynical.1

One important reason is that Americans distrust the people who are elected to political office. They do not believe that members of Congress and state legislatures are motivated mainly to serve the public’s interest, but rather to serve their own personal interest. They think that many politicians are crooked, perhaps even most of them. Even if those elected are essentially honest when they start out, a majority of Americans believe that it is almost impossible for individuals to stay honest after going into politics. In fact, fewer than one out of five people rate congressmen or state office-holders as “very high” or “high” on honesty and ethical standards.

At the state level, for example, New Jerseyans were asked how many politicians they thought were corrupt. Half the respondents replied that from 50 percent to 100 percent were corrupt. In most states, public assessments of their elected political officials would not differ much from the assessment in New Jersey. In low population states--like North Dakota, Wyoming and Vermont--people tend to be more positive. But just about everywhere else the distrust of elected public officials is widespread. Interestingly, when people are asked in public opinion surveys about their own congressman or state legislator (that is, the person who represents the district in which they live), on average seven out of 10 people respond positively. They trust their own representative; they just have little trust in the rest. The obvious question is, why don’t they generalize from their own representative to others?

One reason they don’t is that the dice are loaded against a positive generalization. It is almost impossible to regard legislators as a species in any affirmative way. The image that members of Congress and state legislators have today derives in part from the unethical or illegal behavior of some members. It is undeniable that there are lawmakers who behave unethically or corruptly. Some members of Congress have been convicted of bribery, extortion, and other felonies. Some members have resigned under fire. During the past 30 years, state legislators have been tried and convicted as a result of sting operations in Arizona, California, Kentucky, South Carolina and Tennessee. In other states legislators have stepped over the ethical line. It should be pointed out, however, that these public officials have been elected by a plurality or majority of voters in their state or district.

In any barrel of apples you can expect that a few will be bad. Bad lawmaker apples exist, but they are a very small proportion of the 7,382 legislative and 535 congressional apples in the barrel. Unfortunately, it is mainly these few that the public hears about. They provide the basis for the public’s generalizing from the few to the many.

Curiously, people have a much better idea of the few bad apples than they have of their own legislator. This is because, while most people have only a vague and fuzzy impression of their own representatives in Congress and the state legislature, their impression of lawmakers in general is more concrete, as illogical as this may seem. The picture that people have of lawmaking is largely a product of what they see and hear about in the media and in political campaigns. There’s not much fuzzy about this.

The media’s imperative is to accentuate the negative and underplay the positive. The media are the principal storytellers about political institutions, political processes, and political people. Although no single story in print or on television shapes people’s orientation, the accumulation of negatives has effect over time. Political scientist Joseph Cooper describes media coverage of Congress as follows:

Politics and politicians are covered in ways that highlight conflict and controversy, on the one hand, and personal ambition and ethical lapses, on the other....The defining impression created is of Congress as a bunch of politicians squabbling over the distribution of benefits to special interests and jockeying for personal power while the needs of the country are ignored.

The same can be said of the coverage of state legislatures. The cliché, “no news is good news,” has a corollary: “good news, by and large, is no news.” In the idiom of journalism, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Thus, for the media, the more negative the better, while the scandalous is best. The media are not solely to blame. The media respond to public tastes, and in doing so create the picture of politicians that people carry in their heads.

Political campaigns work along the same lines. Today, the competition between the Democratic and Republican parties in the nation and most of the states is ferocious. The two parties represent different constituencies and promote different agendas. The stakes for each are high. Both parties and their candidates want to win and they do what they can to accomplish their objectives. One of the things they do is to attack the other side. This is because voters pay more attention to the negative in campaigning than to the positive. Part of the attack often includes a challenge to the integrity of the opposing candidate or the opposing party. Democrats accuse Republicans of fostering a “culture of corruption” in Washington, D.C. Republicans accuse Democrats of fostering a “culture of corruption” in New Jersey. And so it goes.

Charge and counter-charge have become a normal part of politics today. These charges not only appear on radio or television in paid political advertisements, they are also are reported in the media. “He says, she says”--and the public response is that since they are both saying it, it’s probably true for both sides. Over time, the public’s impression is that no politician can be trusted.

Problem
With the help of the media and political campaigns, people generalize about lawmakers from what they see and hear, most of which is negative. Is it any wonder that their impression of lawmakers is the way it is? The fundamental question, however, is whether such a generalization makes sense. Self-serving, unethical and corrupt lawmakers--are they the rule, or the exception to the rule?

The civic education of high school students ought to address such questions. The lesson presented here has that objective in mind, which it tries to accomplish by giving the “good guys” equal time, so that students have a more balanced picture. The idea is for students to get a bit nearer political people--who they are, what motivates them, and what they do--by inviting them for a question-and-answer session in class. Familiarity, we believe, will breed understanding, not contempt.

The National Conference of State Legislatures currently sponsors a program that encourages state legislators to visit classrooms in elementary, middle and high schools. Each year more than 1,500 legislators from around the country participate and reach about 300,000 students. This lesson fits into that endeavor. It focuses on a member of Congress or the state legislature as a person who has chosen to run for public office, who has adapted to the jobs of representing and lawmaking, and who has to balance public and private responsibilities.

Procedure
Invite a member of Congress or a state legislator to class to discuss his or her life as a lawmaker with students.

If you want to invite a lawmaker who represents the district in which your school is located, it is easy to obtain his or her name and contact information. Go to the Project Vote Smart website, which is www.vote-smart.org. On the left side of the page, enter the nine-digit zip code for your school. The server will show the name of the state’s two U.S. senators, the U.S. representatives, and the senate and house members of the state legislature. If you click on any of their names, you will be given personal and contact information.

In preparation for the lawmaker’s visit, the teacher should give the class the lesson handout (which is attached) to read in advance at home. This handout provides information on:

(1) The number of lawmakers by state;

(2) Their general backgrounds;

(3) The reasons they run for public office;

(4) How they get elected;

(5) What their jobs are like; and

(6) What they get out of legislative service.

This handout should serve as a basis for the questions students ask the lawmaker in class. In class, after reading the handout and before to the visit, students can frame the questions that they will ask the lawmakers. During the session itself, follow-up questions may be asked, depending upon what the lawmaker guest says. It is important that the class session focus on the topics suggested in the handout. That way, students will get a good sense of what makes at least one lawmaker tick. They might consider generalizing to others.

The following are questions that are worth asking the lawmaker guest:

(1) Why did you run? What did you hope to achieve in public office?

(2) How hard was it to get elected? What did you have to do? What qualities did you need to be a good candidate?

(3) Now that you’re in office, how much time do you spend on the job? What part of the job do you like best? What part least? What personal qualities do you possess that help you do your job? Just what does it take?

(4) How does being a lawmaker fit in with your private life? Do you have an outside job as well? How does your job as lawmaker affect your family?

After the lawmaker’s visit, it would be useful for students to be assigned a brief essay, responding to the question, “What did I learn?” Whether they are assigned the essay or not, students should be debriefed in class on: what they learned; whether and how their view of lawmaking changed; and whether (and why or why not) they would consider undertaking careers in politics and public service.

__________________________________
1These reasons are discussed at greater length in Alan Rosenthal, Burdett A. Loomis, John Hibbing, and Karl T. Kurtz, Republic On Trial: The Case for Representative Democracy (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2003), for those who wish to explore further.

Posted June 1, 2007

Visitor counts for this page.