Educated by Initiative: The Effects of Direct Democracy on Citizens and Political Organizations in the American States

5. The Education of Special Interests

5 The Education of Special Interests Progressive Era reformers expressed high hopes that the initiative process would help eliminate or at least curtail the power of special interests, particularly within the legislative process. At the time, the corrosive in›uence of corporate interests was visible in many state legislatures, as party bosses and their legislative minions frequently succumbed to the pressures of the business lobby.1 In his seminal treatise, Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum, James W. Sullivan partially justi‹ed citizen lawmaking on the grounds that “Congress and the legislatures have each a permanent lobby, buying privileges for corporations, and otherwise in›uencing and corrupting members.”2 In particular, state legislatures were “so discredited,” in the words of University of Wisconsin –Madison professor Paul Reinsch, “that they offer no ‹eld for political action of a high type, and so they naturally became the instruments of the ‘great interests.’”3 Direct legislation, reformers such as Sullivan and Reinsch claimed, would help dispel the legislative clout of lobbyists doing the bidding of vested economic interests. By the 1910s, numerous elected of‹cials had jumped on the direct democracy bandwagon. One of the most visible elected Progressives, Republican governor Hiram Johnson of California, coasted to victory in 1910 on a sweeping platform that included his support of the initiative and referendum. At the turn of the century in California, corporate lobbyists, especially those doing the bidding of the Southern Paci‹c Railroad (dubbed the Octopus in a 1901 novel by Frank Norris), had a stranglehold on the state legislature.4 In his 1911 inaugural address, Johnson asked rhetorically, “How best can we arm the 87 people to protect themselves hereafter?” He responded that “the ‹rst step in our design to preserve and perpetuate popular government shall be the adoption of the initiative, the referendum, and the recall” because “the ‹rst duty that is mine to perform is to eliminate every private interest from the government, and to make the public service of the State responsive solely to the people.” While the initiative was not a “panacea for all our political ills,” Johnson viewed it as essential to “place in the hands of the people the means by which they may protect themselves.”5 Other reform-minded politicians like Johnson, who ran as Teddy Roosevelt’s vice presidential candidate on the Bull Moose (Progressive) ticket in 1912, contended that citizen lawmakers would be empowered to shape public policy directly, bypassing special interests. Not all reformers shared Governor Johnson’s certitude, however. A handful of Progressive Era scholars doubted that only citizens would use the initiative. By 1916, in a review essay, Professor Robert Cushman cautioned that interest groups were increasingly using the process to promote measures that negatively affected the workings of state government and “the welfare of the community.”6 Cushman’s concern that the initiative could become easily co-opted by the same interests it was intended to eliminate continues to be articulated today. Many contemporary observers perceive that special interests have “derailed” citizen lawmaking, with “special interest groups using and abusing the initiative process” with relative impunity.7 As Thomas Goebel, a historian of the development of the initiative in America, laments, “As a tool to create a government able to withstand the in›uence of corporate interests, [the initiative] has been a conspicuous failure.”8 Rather than probing the instrumental effects of citizen lawmaking by examining the substantive impact interest groups have had on public policy via the initiative, we reverse the causal ›ow of inquiry. We take a critical look at how the process of citizen lawmaking has shaped—and continues to shape—interest group activity in the American states. We consider four aspects of how citizen lawmaking effects the terrain of state politics as it pertains to interest groups. First, contrary to the expectations of Progressive 88 EDUCATED BY INITIATIVE reformers, we amass evidence of how the initiative process has led to vigorous interest group participation in the ‹nancing of ballot campaigns in the two dozen states that permit the process. Second, using comparative state data, we examine the extent to which citizen lawmaking has led to larger and more diverse interest group systems than are found in states lacking the process. Third, we investigate the initiative process’s impact on an individual’s propensity to give money to interest groups. Finally, we inquire how the initiative process itself has...