America needs young, energetic, well-intentioned, and well-prepared elected officials. But a new book suggests that the kind of candidates we want are wary of running.
Shauna L. Shames, a 37-year-old assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University at Camden, earned her doctorate in 2014 at Harvard University. As part of her dissertation research, she surveyed 750 law and policy students at Suffolk University Law School, Harvard Law School, and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government to gauge their interest in eventually running for office.
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America needs young, energetic, well-intentioned, and well-prepared elected officials. But a new book suggests that the kind of candidates we want are wary of running.
Shauna L. Shames, a 37-year-old assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University at Camden, earned her doctorate in 2014 at Harvard University. As part of her dissertation research, she surveyed 750 law and policy students at Suffolk University Law School, Harvard Law School, and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government to gauge their interest in eventually running for office.
Suffolk is a major feeder school into Massachusetts state-level politics, and Harvard Law and Kennedy are major feeders into national politics. Although almost 88 percent of respondents listed as a goal “making my community a better place to live,” fewer than 15 percent “had seriously considered running for office,” Shames writes in her new book, Out of the Running: Why Millennials Reject Political Careers and Why It Matters (New York University Press).Instead, many of them planned on starting or working for nonprofits, working in the private sector, or pursuing careers in civil service.
Although some respondents had disadvantaged beginnings, by the time they were vetted by the admissions committees of their schools, they were already an elite group and an excellent pool of potential political candidates. But from the survey, and 53 hourlong interviews, Shames learned that beyond the group’s general wariness toward political careers, women, and particularly women of color, were even more apprehensive. Although half of Shames’s respondents were women, women made up only one-third of those who said they had seriously considered running for office. And although a quarter of respondents were women of color, they made up only 13 percent of those who said they had seriously considered running.
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The Chronicle spoke to Shames about her research and its implications. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
As they say in D.C., if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.
What are the origins of this book?
It came from my undergraduate thesis project when I was looking at women who had decided to run and were shaping their campaign strategies. I became more and more interested through my feminist work after college in earlier in that decision-making process — why more women don’t decide to run. I started thinking more seriously about democracy, about representation.
Why do you worry that the young elite don’t want to run for public office?
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They need to engage with the existing political structure, which, like it or not, is going to govern all of our lives. By trying to ignore it and do their work through other means, they allow the public sector to wither and become mired in corruption.
Tell me about the students you surveyed.
In a lot of ways, they are like their fellow millennials because they grew up in a highly technologized world where, when a problem comes up, the first solution they usually think of is technological: “Oh, well we need a new app.”
They also conform to the general millennial trends in their outlook on their own careers. They want to be more entrepreneurial. A lot of them would like to be in business for themselves. There’s a feeling of not wanting to join the existing institutions.
A lot of that I think stems from the distrust that all of us in this country right now have in major institutions. We’ve watched the church, the media, the government racked by scandals. But a lot of the older folks remember a time when you could trust the major institutions, and the millennials don’t, they’ve got no reason to.
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There seem to be plenty of people willing to seek public office. Why does it matter that the majority of the group that you surveyed doesn’t want to?
I’ve been looking at research about the number of state legislative seats that go uncontested. State legislatures actually make most of the policies that affect our lives on a daily basis — health, safety, police, fire department, zoning. They are increasingly narrow and unrepresentative in their candidates, and about 42 percent of the seats are incumbents whom nobody challenges. That makes me concerned about people’s willingness to run.
It is in a lot of ways a weird thing to do, to seek public office. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of effort. The way we’ve set it up now, it takes a lot of money. So it is not a surprise that most people don’t want to do it. And if it were just a small but random sample of people who did want to, that would be fine. But it’s not random. It is a narrow, unrepresentative bunch. That’s concerning in a democracy, because as they say in D.C., if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.
America’s half-million elected positions don’t generally pay that well, but why isn’t simple power — that tried and true motivation — enough for this group?
If that’s the main reward of being in office, we’re going to get a really skewed and unfortunate set of candidates. The majority of the people that I talked to in the surveys, if they wanted to run for office, it was to help people or to do something in a particular policy area — the environment, pro-choice, pro-life, economic development.
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What campaign obstacles loom largest in the minds of millennials?
The biggest is money. In the book, I take an extensive look at how we differ from other countries in this way. Most other countries think we’re crazy, the way that we have politicians raise all their own money themselves — the idea that that ends up being about 70 percent of their time.
Nobody likes to ask for money. Beyond that, there’s this broader systemic feeling like, “That would change me,” or “That might corrupt my ability to focus on the issues that I care about.”
The cost of mounting a serious campaign for a state legislature averages $88,000 and can, in California, be as high as $354,455, you write, and it takes about $1 billion to run for president.
It’s disgusting. California is ridiculous. All but three of the industrialized, advanced democracies give public funding to political parties. Those that don’t give free media time, which is where most of the money in big campaigns has to go. We do almost nothing to help political candidates.
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But there are costs beyond money.
The increasing surveillance of political candidates, even at the local levels. The idea that you’d be watched 24/7. Certainly the presidential campaign brought this to the fore. The way that we treat people who are trying to be our public servants — there’s no simple space to be human.
For women, there are also all kinds of double standards. Then there’s the idea of an angry black person. Obama was phenomenally good at not looking like the angry black man so that he wouldn’t scare white people. Women and minorities have to think about these things. It is a great privilege of whiteness, and maleness, not to.
The majority of college students are women, and law schools are close to gender-balanced, so why does the gender gap among elected officials persist?
One hypothesis is that voters are biased and that they are systematically voting against women as candidates. But generally, those are small, marginal differences. The biggest problem is that there aren’t enough women candidates.
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Women are smart, and they look at the way we’ve set up the role of candidates right now in our country and think, first of all, that doesn’t look like much fun. Secondly, I don’t have the time in my life to do this — there are major structural differences still between the lives of men and women. And third, I’m not even sure that if I could get to that position that I’d get something I want out of it.
You discuss a similar gap for people of color, who make up about a third of the population but hold less than 15 percent of elected offices.
As with women, there’s socialization that is often not the socialization you’d need to run for office. But there’s an interesting difference. Women live interspersed with men, whereas minorities tend to geographically segregate. You can imagine, particularly if minorities are living in areas that are dominated by the Republican Party, that they might think twice about running. Also, race, and its connection with class and with income, works totally differently than gender does. The minorities in my study were far more concerned than the white students about having to support members of their families in the future — and not just their kids, but their parents, maybe cousins. The black, Hispanic, and particularly Asian-American students in my sample cared about this the most — the opportunity cost of a forgone private-sector salary to go into the public sector.
There’s been a reported post-election spike in women expressing interest in running for office. Is that fleeting or lasting?
Part of it will depend on how awful Trump policies are for women. Is he dumb enough to go after abortion? Because that will galvanize young women.
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You suggest increasing campaign finance, backing off from “gotcha” negative campaigning and press coverage, and shunning candidates like Trump and Ted Cruz who show, as you put it, “blatant disrespect for others.” Since you wrote the book, of course, Trump won. What would be your revamped strategy in light of Trump’s victory?
We are constantly looking for a savior in the form of an outsider. W. Bush played the cowboy and was able to trump Al Gore through that. It’s hard to have hope about democracy rising from what feels like ashes right now. But American democracy is constantly rising from ashes. Machiavelli calls this “going back to the beginnings.” If we can’t get what we want, as a people, out of the federal government because it’s been taken over by unthinking or selfish or not-well-trained people, I hope we’ll start to turn to the state and local governments and reshape those and make those stronger. And I think women and minorities need to be in the lead of this new movement, because they are the outsiders that we’ve been seeking.