Wisconsin residents see democracy decline

Seven years ago, at age 73, Sheila Plotkin stepped onto the glossy tiles of the Wisconsin State Capitol with a protest sign in hand and her husband by her side. She saw a sea of law enforcement. 

Due to increased security, police officers escorted the couple and other members of the public to the Senate. There, Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald was signing a contempt order for 14 Democratic senators who fled the state to avoid voting for the controversial budget repair bill — later called Act 10 — that all but ended collective bargaining rights for public sector employees in Wisconsin.

As Plotkin, a retired teacher, and her husband left, the elevator unexpectedly stopped at the second floor. Plotkin said an officer stepped forward and took their photo. 

Plotkin told protesters gathered outside that she felt like she was in a “czar’s castle” being escorted by “the palace guard.”

“I was so angry. I was so distraught,” Plotkin recalled. “I said, ‘This is not my Wisconsin,’ and then I broke down and started to cry.” 

Since that moment in March 2011 — after weeks of protests that drew national attention with crowds estimated at up to 100,000 people  — Plotkin found it distressing to see Wisconsin’s democracy being “nibbled away.”

She is among the growing segment of Americans questioning the strength of democracy. 

A poll commissioned by the Democracy Project found that over two-thirds of Democrats, Republicans and independents feel very or somewhat concerned about the current state of American democracy. The Edelman Trust Barometer, which has been gauging public faith in institutions for 18 years, said 2018 saw the “steepest, most dramatic general population decline the Trust Barometer has ever measured. 

Aside from voting, Wisconsin residents have a limited number of remedies when they disagree with their elected leaders. In some states, voters can initiate laws and even overturn decisions made by elected officials. Wisconsin voters do not have those options, but they have one potentially potent weapon: Recall.

Eighteen other states allow for citizens to recall their elected officials. Just 10 states, including Wisconsin, include provisions for recalling any elected member of government. 

That is how Orville Seymer got his start in political activism in 2002.He was part of Citizens for Responsible Government, which formed after news reports revealed that hundreds of Milwaukee County employees, including then-County Executive Tom Ament, stood to collectively earn up to $900 million in additional pension payments.

The group launched a series of recall elections against Ament and county board members who had voted for the backdrop payments. When Seymer and his compatriots hit the streets to gather 73,000 signatures in 60 days to recall Ament, the response was overwhelming: 182,957 signatures in just 28 days.

The scandal eventually forced Ament and seven board members out of office and launched now-Gov. Scott Walker into the county executive’s seat. In 2012, Walker himself was recalled, but a majority voted to retained him as governor. 

Citizen power on the rise?

Unlike Plotkin, some political observers in Wisconsin say the power of the individual is actually getting stronger. Brett Healy, president of the conservative-leaning think tank the MacIver Institute, said there are numerous organized and well-funded groups for Democrats, Republicans and special interests that people can join to exert influence.

“If you care about democracy, your country, your state, you’re going to join with others and make your opinions heard,” Healy said. 

In Wisconsin, the percentage of residents saying they strongly or somewhat agree that the government is run by “a few big interests looking out for themselves” has gone from 79 percent in 2013 to 84 percent in 2015, according to surveys by the Marquette University Law School Poll. Results showed Democrats and independents were consistently more pessimistic than Republicans on this point. 

A 2017 Marquette survey also found that just 47 percent of Wisconsin residents polled said they trusted state government “to do what is right” either “just about always” or “most of the time.” 

Partisanship crowds out citizens

Former state Sen. Tim Cullen believes several factors have led to the weakening of citizen power. He cited hyper-partisanship, the need to raise significant campaign donations and officials’ desires to be re-elected. 

A Democrat, Cullen served in the Senate in the 1970s and ’80s and again 2011–15. After he returned to public life, Cullen said he noticed legislators seem to act primarily in allegiance to their parties.

“The political system is rigged in a way that in their own self interest of getting re-elected — which is an overwhelmingly important thing to most of them — it doesn’t help them get re-elected to be working with the other party,” said Cullen. 

Jacob Stampen, a UW-Madison emeritus professor of educational leadership and policy analysis, said his research reveals a growing partisanship has made state lawmakers more indebted to party bosses than to the public. Stampen has been tracking voting in the Legislature since 2003. His first analysis of voting was as a graduate student at UW-Madison in the mid-1960s. 

Back then, Wisconsin politicians coalesced around ideas and not just party affiliation. He described it as a “healthy political system” in which lawmakers were “much more constituency-oriented.”

When he again started tracking every legislative vote in 2003, Stampen noticed a sharp increase in partisanship. He believes corporate influence has drowned out the interests of citizens.

“Overall, I conclude that in the 1980s and 1990s, Wisconsin’s political system became increasingly polarized, dependent on financial support from lobbyists, and corrupt,” Stampen said in a paper about Wisconsin legislative politics from 1966 to 2006. 

Dale Schultz, a former Republican state senator, also observed that politicians are more attentive to big campaign donors than citizens. 

Kathy Cramer, a UW-Madison professor of political science and author of a book about Walker’s rise in Wisconsin, said recent scholarship confirms that “policy decisions most closely correspond to the political leanings of the wealthiest people in the population, and not so much to other people.”  

We, the Irrelevant

Plotkin, a retired teacher of 28 years who lives in McFarland, formed a citizens’ group, We, the Irrelevant, after the summer of 2015, when the Legislature voted in a surprise move to severely weaken the public records law by exempting key government records. This deeply unpopular move later was removed from the budget by Walker and the GOP legislative leaders.

The group uses public records requests to gauge the power of citizens to influence Wisconsin state government. 

Plotkin began by examining three bills. One dissolved the nonpartisan Government Accountability Board, the state’s ethics and campaign watchdog, replacing it with separate elections and ethics commissions with appointees of both parties. 

A second bill exempted politicians from John Doe investigations, such as the one thrown out by the right-leaning Wisconsin Supreme Court that had probed coordination between Walker’s campaign and conservative groups. 

The third bill raised campaign contribution limits, allowed candidates to coordinate with so-called issue-ad groups and eliminated the requirement that campaign contributors list their employers.

 “I began to ask myself, ‘Who’s asking for these changes? Are citizens asking for this? Are they hearing from constituents saying ‘Get rid of the GAB’?” Plotkin said. 

The short answer? No. The group found that Republicans who currently run the Legislature had received 6,215 letters, emails and phone calls against those three bills and 312 in favor. Despite the overwhelming public opposition, all three measures passed.

Businesses win, citizens lose

Robert Rolley, a retired Department of Natural Resources wildlife research biologist, said he has seen regular citizens lose influence to business interests since Walker took office. 

“There is a long history in the DNR of listening to public input prior to making management decisions,” said Rolley, who worked at the agency for 25 years. “What has changed is which citizens the DNR Board and administration is interested in listening to.”

Plotkin said she fears many people feel they no longer have influence on government.

“Indifference is a killer of democracy, and I’m hoping if Donald Trump has done nothing else, he has awakened those people who never thought voting mattered. If he’s made enough of them angry, I hope they vote.”