The Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion

Identity Politics in Twenty-First Century America

David Ericson, David Ericson, David F. Ericson, David F. Ericson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781135160623
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica culturale

Assessing the limits of pluralism, this book examines different types of political inclusion and exclusion and their distinctive dimensions and dynamics. Why are particular social groups excluded from equal participation in political processes? How do these groups become more fully included as equal participants? Often, the critical issue is not whether a group is included but how it is included. Collectively, these essays elucidate a wide range of inclusion or exclusion: voting participation, representation in legislative assemblies, representation of group interests in processes of policy formation and implementation, and participation in discursive processes of policy framing.

Covering broad territory—from African Americans to Asian Americans, the transgendered to the disabled, and Latinos to Native Americans—this volume examines in depth the give and take between how policies shape political configuration and how politics shape policy. At a more fundamental level, Ericson and his contributors raise some traditional and some not-so-traditional issues about the nature of democratic politics in settings with a multitude of group identities.

1 Introduction

David F. Ericson

The essays in this volume explore the contemporary politics of inclusion and exclusion. Collectively, they attempt to answer two major questions. Why are particular social groups excluded from equal participation in particular political processes? How do those groups become more fully included as equal participants with other groups in those processes? The critical issue is often not whether a group is included but how it is included. Though most of the essays consider both processes of inclusion and exclusion, readers will be able to sort the essays in terms of whether they focus more on inclusion (Asal, Cruz, Friedman and Scotece, Lien, and Sullivan and Strach) or exclusion (Basiliere, Novkov, Roth, and Rubaii-Barrett).

Another way of distinguishing the volume essays is whether they focus more on how “politics determine policies” or “policies determine politics.”¹ The Basiliere essay suggests a particular politics that the trans-gendered might pursue to create more favorable public policies, while the Friedman and Scotece essay shows how Latino members of Congress are attempting to do just that. The Rubaii-Barrett essay demonstrates how local political constellations are more or less conducive to the political inclusion of recent immigrants, while the Lien and Cruz essays detail how Asian Americans and New York Puerto Ricans, respectively, have included themselves. From the “policies determine politics” side, the Asal essay examines the factors that have led to the political incorporation of “minorities at risk” across the Americas.² On a more micro-level, the Roth essay argues that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has produced a disability politics in the United States dominated by bureaucrats and special interests to the exclusion of the disabled themselves. The Sullivan and Strach essay chronicles how “policies determine politics” through the concept of governance, in terms of how various federal policies require private agents to do the work of government.³ The Novkov essay analyses both dynamics in explaining how race-conscious judicial decisions precipitated a “colorblind” conservative politics that is now producing a quite different set of decisions. Again, most of the essays in the volume consider both dynamics to some extent, despite their emphases on one or the other.

Relative to the current scholarship, the volume essays interrogate the limits of pluralism. In first presenting his pluralist model in the 1950s, Robert Dahl recognized that not every social group has equal access to the key processes of policy formation in the “American hybrid.”⁴ Since then, William Connolly, among others, has developed this social fact into a sweeping critique of the pluralist model.⁵ Regardless of whether one views unequal access as a qualification to the pluralist model or as a refutation of the model, the fact remains that particular social groups are excluded from equal participation in a range of political processes in a range of ways in the United States and other nations around the world. Political inclusion and exclusion fall on a continuum; they are not dichotomous variables. They are also frequently process specific.⁶ Still, as many of the essays in the volume remind us, some groups are excluded from equal participation in more political processes than other groups are, while other groups are excluded from any meaningful participation in all but the most trivial political processes in the nations in which they reside.

In total, the volume essays discuss five political processes in which particular social groups are more or less included: 1) voting participation (Lien); 2) representation in legislative assemblies (Friedman and Scotece); 3) representation of group interests, whether actually or virtually, in processes of policy formation (Basiliere, Cruz, Friedman and Scotece, Roth, and Rubaii-Barrett); 4) representation of group interests, again whether actually or virtually, in processes of policy implementation (Cruz, Roth, Rubaii-Barrett, and Sullivan and Strach); and 5) participation in discursive processes of policy framing (Basiliere and Novkov). Noticeably, several essays (Basiliere, Cruz, Friedman and Scotece, Roth, and Rubaii-Barrett) traverse multiple processes and policy domains.

The essays

Operating at a macro-level of analysis, the Asal essay compares the overall level of political inclusion across the Americas.⁷ Asal uses an index of minimal political inclusion to measure whether minorities at risk in the nations of the Western hemisphere achieved, or failed to achieve, inclusion from 1870 to 2000. He tested a number of societal variables that might explain why previously excluded groups were included. His results were often counter-intuitive. He uncovered no spillover effects from the extension of the franchise to women or other measures of democratization to the rate of inclusion of politically marginal groups. Instead, he found that modernization variables had the most exploratory power. Using a comparative-historical method that is rarely used in studies of political inclusion, Asal establishes a baseline for studying specific cases of inclusion and exclusion, including, of course, in the United States.

The Lien essay documents the political participation of Asian Americans. As their percentage of the population rises in the United States, Asian Americans have become a larger percentage of the electorate. In terms of voting and other forms of political participation, Lien argues that Asian Americans have not lagged behind other groups but it only seems that way because they are more recent immigrants and, therefore, have yet to hurdle the citizenship and voter registration barriers in the three-step voting process that is almost unique to the United States. Once Asian Americans have leaped those barriers, she shows that their voting rates are as high, or higher, than those of other recent immigrant groups.⁸

In modern democratic societies, a process of representation typically links voting to actual influence on public policy. Lien notes that the number of both elected Asian American and Latino officials has increased dramatically in the last decade. Still, both ethnic groups remain heavily disenfranchised in the United States and, consequently, under-represented in Congress.⁹ The Friedman and Scotece essay takes a different tack on the congressional representation of Latinos by analyzing the “home styles” of seven Latino members of Congress from the Los Angeles area.¹⁰ In an interesting twist on the “voting is symbolic” and “representation is substantive” assumptions of many social scientists, Friedman and Scotece demonstrate that the “home styles” of Latino members of Congress often emphasize the symbolic nature of representation, which may be particularly important for traditionally under-represented groups. Just as Lien’s study is significant for the multiple ways it measures political participation, Friedman and Scotece’s study is significant for the multiple ways it analyzes political representation.¹¹

Political participation and congressional representation are the political processes that social scientists study most often in the United States. They are the most binary forms of political inclusion and, hence, the easiest to quantify.¹² The Cruz essay explores political participation more qualitatively within a particular social context. In overlapping narratives of the critical events that transformed the Puerto Rican community in New York during the 1960s, Cruz explains the many, often disparate ways that New York Puerto Ricans attempted to increase their political influence. Their most significant achievement was the “Puerto Rican Amendment” to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which specifically barred voting discrimination against their community, but, in many ways, that victory was a hollow one.¹³ The status of New York Puerto Ricans as partly inside and partly outside New York politics is the story that Cruz tells in rich historical detail. His lesson is the crucial role historical contingency, on the one hand, and political willfulness, on the other, play in the success of social movements.

Processes of policy formation may also include particular social groups by proxy or, in the vernacular, by virtual representation.¹⁴ Public policies may then serve the interests of a particular group even when that group is disenfranchised and not actually represented in the processes by which the policies are made. The Sullivan and Strach essay starts from the presumption that governments often make policies without the participation of the social groups that are most directly affected by them. Yet, their focus is not on how those policies may or may not serve the interests of excluded groups but rather on how governments rely on individual group members to implement those very policies. Sullivan and Strach present four case studies of this process of governance: 1) (emerging) obesity policy; 2) Native American citizenship; 3) veterans’ education benefits; and 4) tax expenditures. In each case, they show that private agents do much of the work that we traditionally associate with state actors. They thus locate political inclusion and exclusion within the processes of government, not outside those processes as either inputs or outputs.

The Nadia Rubaii-Barrett essay analyzes local immigration policies from a more traditional “virtual representation” perspective. She finds a wide variation in those policies. Some cities have funded day laborer centers to broker employment opportunities for undocumented immigrants, while other cities have imposed fines on landlords who rent living spaces to undocumented immigrants and on employers who hire them.

Policy-exclusion is then no more a dichotomous variable than process-inclusion is. Typically, however, the interests of social groups that are more adequately represented in the processes by which policies are made are better served by those policies than groups that are less adequately represented. This dynamic is one of the dynamics that Friedman and Scotece discuss in terms of Latino representation in Congress.¹⁵ Cruz describes how New York Puerto Ricans demanded more adequate representation in the processes by which the delivery of social services were made in New York precisely because they believed that their interests were not being well served. Rubaii-Barrett demonstrates that this situation is the norm at the local level for politically marginal groups but she underscores the exceptions. Her essay does important work in developing a multidimensional model that explains this local variation in immigration policy better than existing unidimensional models. Her essay also does important work in reminding us that most public policy in the United States is made or at least implemented at the local level, not at the federal or state level.¹⁶

The Basiliere essay theorizes the complicated issues the transgendered confront in achieving the social and legal recognition that is a prerequisite to their political inclusion as a distinctive group of people. Writing in an advocacy mode and building on the scholarship of radical feminist, gay, and lesbian theorists, Basiliere calls for transcending binary gender distinctions. She notes that if feminist, gay, and lesbian politics, and for that matter racial politics, have taught us anything it is that binary distinctions distort a much more complex reality in which many people are neither one nor the other.¹⁷ Those distinctions then function to oppress people who do not fit either category. The Basiliere essay breaks new ground in examining the politics of the transgendered community, outlining a two-pronged strategy for their inclusion within the now-dominant gender and development framework.

The Roth essay is the most similar to the Basiliere essay as a piece of advocacy but it is written in a more personal style.¹⁸ Roth notes how the disabled, unlike the transgendered, have gained legal recognition through the ADA. At the same time, the disabled remain socially and politically marginalized. Roth details how the ADA actually further marginalized them by creating a “disabilities bureaucracy” that purports to virtually represent their interests but really does not. Yet even if it did, he argues that the disabled would still face a participation deficit in the implementation of the policies that most directly affect their lives, often literally so.

Roth explicitly raises the problem of citizen inclusion in administrative processes of policy implementation, a problem that the Sullivan and Strach essay also raises and the Cruz and Rubaii-Barrett essays raise more implicitly. Both the Roth and the Sullivan and Strach essays suggest that citizen inclusion in more formal democratic processes, such as voting and representation in legislative assemblies, is insufficient to democratic practice in modern administrative states.¹⁹ Roth also suggests that the disabled exemplify the difficulties all people confront in building more democratic societies. Their supposed lack of physical ability to fully participate in democratic processes is a synecdoche for the other abilities other people supposedly lack for full democratic participation.

Finally, the Julie Novkov essay analyzes the processes by which public policies are culturally framed. This framing then acts as a boundary condition for future policy formation, either as a warrant for or a barrier to more inclusive policies. In a rich, historical mapping of the cultural framing of race-conscious judicial decisions as “colorblind,” Novkov demonstrates how that framing left a large opening for conservative opponents of those decisions to turn the decisions against themselves. The recent Supreme Court ruling that local school districts can not use race as a factor in assigning children to public schools because it is not a “colorblind” policy perfectly illustrates this “backlash.”²⁰ By focusing on legal discourse as a particularly important site for the cultural framing of public policies, Novkov offers a postmodern twist to the now-iconic adage that “policies determine politics.”

The implications

All the essays in the volume discuss the controversies that either governments or groups face in either excluding or being excluded from equal participation in particular political processes. They also dis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: Politics of Inclusion
• Part II: Politics of Exclusion