The Democracy Index by Gerken Heather K

Author:Gerken, Heather K.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

Can the Democracy Index Help?

The Democracy Index might provide a useful start toward building professional norms and disseminating good policies. If we focus on the issues deemed salient to sociologists and anthropologists, the question is whether the Democracy Index could generate professional peer pressure among election administrators or disseminate a “script” as to what constitutes a well-run system.

It’s easy to see how the Democracy Index would at least provide a focal point for election administrators’ attention. Surely it would be hard for anyone to resist checking how his state or locality measured up on the ranking. Administrators would want to peek at the Index for the same reason that people “Google” their own names or give a book a “Washington read” (scanning the Index to see what was said about them). If the Index were well designed and put out by a credible group, there is good reason to think that one’s professional prestige would be increased by a high ranking, something that would be quite useful in a world where individuals and rulemaking bodies tend to mimic high-status people and institutions.72 The Index might develop into a professional touchstone for the field.

In addition to generating professional peer pressure, the Democracy Index could help disseminate best practices. As election administrators and political scientists work through the data, they should be able to identify what policies succeed and thus help create scripts for a well-run system.

Consider, for example, the role that the GPP has played in generating and disseminating best practices among government administrators. Why do state administrators pay attention to the GPP? Philip Joyce, one of its architects, argues that the GPP is so effective because it is published by Governing, a trade publication widely read and widely respected by state administrators.73 State administrators care about the GPP report even though Governing is read mostly by other state administrators. It may not affect an administrator’s political standing, but it matters to her professional standing.

Someone might worry that, consistent with the view of the National Association of Secretaries of State, there is too much local variation for a set of best practices to emerge within the field of election administration. I am frankly skeptical about that claim, at least when it is cast in broad terms. It is hard to imagine that we will not be able to identify some broad policies—funding, training policies, registration systems—that would be useful across jurisdictions.

I had a conversation about this with South Dakota’s level-headed secretary of state, Chris Nelson. Like many people in the field, Nelson insists that local variation precludes the development of best practices and offered me trenchant examples of federal regulations that were ill-suited to his state’s demographics. But he also told me about creating an electronic voter registration with the Department of Motor Vehicles that resulted in a thirteen-fold increase in registrations from one county alone.74 That type of innovation seems like just the kind of idea that could be exported to other states. For this reason, I think Ohio’s secretary

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