Media Outreach

One of the easiest ways that an academic can test the “pracademic” waters is to make him or herself available to journalists to grant media interviews. Of course, some academics have a much greater use to reporters than do others, but political scientists are considerably better placed in this respect than are scholars in many other disciplines. Rarely is a historian of quotidian life in Romantic Era Germany, a cultural anthropologist studying customs officials in West Africa, or even a political theorist immersed in the eighteenth-century writings of Edmund Burke approached by a journalist to comment on a developing story. But those of us studying American politics in general and state and local politics in particular can provide commentary on a wide range of issues in the daily news. What should we make of the latest allegations of kickbacks to county commissioners from local developers? Will the latest legislative ethics violations by state party leaders hurt the Republican Party in the fall elections? What is the effect of a gubernatorial veto on a controversial bill concerning tenure for public school teachers? The possible questions are as numerous as they are diverse, and, admittedly, many fall outside the realm of our particular expertise.

Although political scientists have much to offer journalists—theoretical insights into political attitudes or behavior, an overview of general principles, and even juicy quotes—scholars need to learn what journalists are seeking if they are to derive any benefits from engagement with the media. First, scholars need to speak to journalists in layman's terms. Reporters covering a local politics beat must write stories that capture the fancy of the general public. This public is certainly not interested in the latest theoretical or methodological debates consuming our discipline. Scholars who are only able to speak in the formal language of Downsian rational choice, logit models, or cross-sectional time-series will be of little use to practitioners in the Fourth Estate. As such, journalists quickly learn to avoid scholars who can only carry on conversations by devolving into techno-speak. Second, scholars need to be available and willing to respond quickly to journalists' queries. Reporters work on increasingly tight deadlines. More than sophisticated analysis, journalists who cover politics want practical insights. Many simply want a succinct comment to flesh out their story. Making yourself readily available—via cell phone, e-mail, or social networks, especially Twitter—increases the likelihood that you will be contacted. It is even kosher to get in touch with reporters working on a developing story to inform them of your availability and expertise on the issue.

Interacting with the media can be time-consuming. Yet scholars should not view the relationship as all give and no take; rather, it has the potential to be symbiotic. Veteran journalists can offer a wealth of knowledge, insights, and linkages for enterprising political scientists to tap and mull over. Engaging journalists on a regular basis can even force scholars to reconsider their theoretical frameworks and empirical models. A healthy interaction with the media can elicit new research questions for scholars to pursue, offer opportunities to probe existing theories, and suggest new data and research designs. A good relationship with the media can also help a scholar disseminate his or her research to a broader audience.

Quite serendipitously, I learned how significant media interaction could be for generating scholarship during my first tenure-track faculty position at the University of Denver in the early 1990s. Even though my graduate training at the University of Wisconsin–Madison concentrated on subnational American politics, when it came to Colorado politics and the state's peculiar institution of direct democracy, I was a greenhorn. With limited exposure to the plebiscitary practice and scant academic background on the topic, I knew virtually nothing about the politics and practice of direct democracy in the Centennial State. But only several weeks into my new job, two of the state's most prominent journalists called the political science department looking for someone with whom they could speak about state politics and, specifically, the initiative process. Since I was teaching an introductory state politics course that fall, our secretary referred them to me. Little did I know at the time that those two conversations with newsmen—each lasting less than 20 minutes—would inspire my next major research project and ultimately shape the contours of my scholarly career. My first book, Tax Crusaders and the Politics of Direct Democracy (1998), was, in a sense, a more elaborate response to the initial questions asked by those reporters. Using comparative case studies, this book examines the origins, financing, and “faux populist” support of three anti-tax ballot measures—including Colorado's notorious 1992 TABOR amendment—in an effort to problematize our theoretical understanding of the participatory process of direct democracy. I began writing the first case study profiling anti-tax crusader Douglas Bruce's efforts to enshrine TABOR in the Colorado Constitution that fall.

In addition to providing new scholarly avenues to pursue, building close relationships with the media can aid scholars when they are trying to reach a broader audience. Journalists regularly pitch potential stories to their editors. By talking with journalists on a regular basis, many have developed an interest in my scholarly research. As a result, I have been fortunate to pitch numerous news stories based on the findings of my scholarly research. Journalists have written about the “educative effects” of ballot measures, the spillover impact of initiatives on candidate races, the role that “veiled political actors” play in clandestinely financing initiative campaigns, and the impact of “outside money” on candidate races largely because of the relationships I have cultivated with them over the years. Developing a working relationship with journalists creates reciprocity, which in turn enables scholars to have a greater impact on public policy through the wider readership that their research receives.

Of course, responding to media requests is not entirely risk-free. Journalists may sometimes get a quote wrong or take comments out of context. They may use academics as foils, juxtaposing the detached erudition of a scholar with the everyday concerns of John Q. Public. However, these are exceptions to the rule. Far more often, journalists know the value of an academic weighing in on a story and will do their best to situate quotes in their proper context and emphasize the main points of what can be rambling, off-the-cuff conversations. Experienced journalists tend to keep conversations short, as they already know the background of the story, the main players, and their story's angle; what they are looking for is balanced filler from an authoritative, academic voice, which they will usually place near the end of the story.

It is also possible to become overextended by media work, wasting time and granting interviews on areas beyond one's expertise and even breeding jealousy or contempt among colleagues. A senior colleague once quipped to me, “Is there anything you don't comment on, Smith?” Of course, we should only strive to comment on stories that pertain to our own area of expertise. Referring reporters to colleagues who have greater expertise in other substantive areas can enhance your department's public profile while simultaneously ingratiating yourself with both the reporters and your colleagues. Despite the risks, on balance, the scholarly benefits of making oneself readily available to the media far outweigh any of these potential costs.

Nonprofit Service

Serving on the board of a nonprofit organization is another opportunity for a political scientist to apply his or her professional expertise to public service. Like working with the media, these outside activities are often seen as purely altruistic public service in which the nonprofits benefit from scholars who kindly lend their time and expertise. Yet volunteering with a nonprofit organization can generate scholarship, not only by inspiring new research questions, but also by the very practical benefit of providing academics extraordinary access to original data. Each nonprofit board and group, of course, offers its own opportunities.

My first entry into the nonprofit world occurred in the late 1990s when I was teaching in Colorado. A friend, Rich Braunstein, who was a graduate student at the University of Colorado–Boulder, teamed up with me to create a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, the Citizens Institute for Voter Information in Colorado (CIVIC). Our nonprofit was born out of our own frustration with the Colorado secretary of state's inability—or unwillingness—to make campaign finance records available to the public in a timely, inexpensive fashion. Although her office had ample resources and technological expertise to collect and disseminate campaign finance records electronically, then-secretary of state Vicky Buckley steadfastly refused to do so. Instead, her office charged exorbitant fees for accessing public records, including campaign contribution and expenditure campaign finance filings. Individuals interested in perusing the filings had two options. They could visit the secretary of state's Denver office in person and, in 15-minute intervals, access campaign data in a read-only format at a video terminal. Photocopies cost $0.50 a page, with records often running hundreds of pages. Alternatively, an individual could make a one-time payment of $3,000 for uninterrupted online access to the records—but even at this rate, the data were made available only as read-only files. Either option made it exceedingly difficult to scrutinize and manipulate the data in even the most rudimentary ways. As a result, studying campaign finance in Colorado was cost-prohibitive for graduate students and faculty, to say nothing of the general public.

The goal of CIVIC from the start was to provide free, public access to campaign finance records on Colorado elections as a nonpartisan voter information resource. We would purchase digital campaign finance records from the Office of the Secretary of State and make them accessible, searchable, and, most important, free of charge to the general public. Naïve as we were, we thought our mission would be well received as a public service. But the office stonewalled us at every turn, even claiming to the press that our efforts would lead to security issues and nefarious tampering with public records. We persisted, however, and, using both our own money and seed money from a few small grants, we purchased the data, hired a computer programmer and database guru, and launched our website. Our efforts were met with tremendous success. Within the first election cycle, our website received more than 25,000 hits.

Our experience with CIVIC demonstrates how one act of public service can quickly snowball to others. Because of the success of CIVIC, Braunstein and I were asked to testify before several committees in the Colorado legislature, which was considering new laws that would require the secretary of state to publish campaign finance records online. We joined forces with several organizations, including the Colorado League of Women Voters, Colorado Common Cause, and the Colorado Public Interest Research Group (CoPIRG), and drew on our electronic data files to evaluate the effectiveness of Colorado's Fair Campaign Practices Act (FCPA). Numerous media outlets asked us to assist their journalists in using our site to access data for their campaign finance news stories. In the end, our success ultimately led to our demise. In 2001, secretary of state Buckley's replacement, Donetta Davidson, who was keenly aware of our efforts, directed her office to enforce electronic report filing and make all campaign finance records available online.

During the short-lived existence of CIVIC, Braunstein and I had access to the campaign finance data we purchased and processed for dissemination on the website. In addition to writing op-eds and providing content for the website, I used these data for several research projects that led to publications, including an analysis of the effects of campaign contributions on ballot measure success, a study of contributions to candidate and party committees in the state, and a historical examination of the financing of growth and transportation ballot initiatives in Colorado. Braunstein drew on the data for his dissertation. Although our CIVIC situation was unique in that we were the organization's founders and its goal was specifically to gather data, even service on established nonprofit boards with broader missions can present many advantages to a scholar.

Indeed, since the late 1990s, I have served on the board of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC) Foundation, a nonprofit based in Washington, DC. Funded by various philanthropic foundations, the BISC Foundation's mission is to provide research, education, and training to reinvigorate the use of the initiative process by the progressive community. Many advocacy organizations set up sister 501(c)3 affiliates as their nonprofit arms. The BISC Foundation is such an entity, providing nonpartisan research reports that track ballot measure developments across the states, compiling contributions and expenditures on ballot initiative and referendum campaigns, conducting public opinion research on support and opposition for potential ballot issues, and offering training workshops for state and local progressives who are interested in working for and against a range of ballot measures. Today, the educational BISC Foundation and its larger advocacy affiliate have grown into a multimillion-dollar operation with a half-dozen paid staff, making it the nation's premier organization for assisting progressives to become more effective in fighting for and against ballot measures.

The BISC Foundation originally tapped me for its board because they wanted a scholarly perspective. My research on the financing of ballot measures and my later work with Caroline Tolbert on both the “educative effects” of ballot initiatives on voter turnout and candidate support and the ways in which political parties increasingly use ballot initiatives as wedge issues to divide their opponent's base dovetailed nicely with BISC's mission. In addition, as an unabashedly progressive organization, the foundation's staff found my book Educated by Initiative (2004, coauthored with Tolbert) to be useful not only in providing a theoretical framework for understanding how progressive groups could use the initiative process to their advantage, but also as a means to raise awareness among the donor community about the importance of ballot measures in fundraising efforts.

One of the benefits that academics working closely with a nonprofit organization can enjoy is that the staff 's need for immediate, tangible results can implicitly challenge scholars to ask more relevant questions. For example, while BISC was impressed with Tolbert's and my finding that ballot measures could promote civic engagement and drive turnout, as an advocacy “think and do tank,” the staff wanted to know precisely who was motivated to vote and by which measures on the ballot. Which specific measures could be used by progressives to promote a liberal agenda and, conversely, which might drive conservatives to the polls? Not only were the staff 's questions more grounded and applied than those typically asked by academics, they had broad normative implications. BISC encouraged me to try to answer these important questions and offered me their resources to do so. As a result, I designed several state-level surveys with pollster Celinda Lake to ask registered voters whether a range of potential and actual ballot measures in different electoral contexts mobilized them. These public opinion surveys—which cost tens-of-thousands of dollars—provided the basis for my coauthored work with Tolbert and Todd Donovan, published in Public Opinion Quarterly and the Journal of Politics, examining who is mobilized by ballot measures and how these measures can affect candidate races.

As with engaging the media, serving on a nonprofit board comes with considerable costs. It is always a concern that when one works closely with a nonprofit organization, one's scholarship might become compromised and biased by a group's politics (albeit, nonpartisan) or mission. When serving on the board of a nonprofit organization, it is crucial for academics to not allow their scholarship to be influenced, much less captured, by the organization with which they are affiliated. That said, academics have much to gain from exposure to professionals whose job it is to promote a particular cause or influence elections, as these goals avail new research questions and data sources.

Furthermore, the amount of time consumed by starting and maintaining a nonprofit can be immense, as Braunstein and I discovered when we founded CIVIC. These efforts can also be a financial drain. Unlike a seat on a corporate board that is essentially a golden parachute for many ex-politicians, serving on a nonprofit board is not a ticket to wealth. To leverage outside fundraising, most nonprofits insist that all board members make an annual contribution (tax deductible, of course) to the organization, anywhere from a couple of hundred to thousands of dollars. Nonprofits typically do not even provide board members with an honorarium or per diem for attending semiannual meetings. Board members are expected to pick up their own travel, hotel, and meal costs. But the attendant benefits of serving on a nonprofit board can be substantial, whether they offer access to proprietary data or grounded reactions to one's scholarly work.

Legal Expert Consulting

A third type of significant public service is serving as an expert witness. Because the role of an expert witness can be lucrative, scholars from many different disciplines engage in this work, despite the many pitfalls (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2005), and numerous individuals have written about it (Eaton and Kalman Reference Eaton and Kalman1994; Wuffle Reference Wuffle1984; Wuffle Reference Wuffle1985). As others have discussed, the siren call of billable hours for providing affidavits, declarations, or expert testimony can compromise a scholar's ethics and objectivity (Aprile Reference Aprile2006) and taint his or her academic reputation (McGaffey Reference McGaffey1978)—which, as Kousser (Reference Kousser1984) points out, is the only significant asset a scholar possesses. Scholars need to maintain their academic integrity, even if they must provide expert testimony that does not mesh exactly with a legal team's argument.

One aspect of academic expert witnessing that has gone relatively unexamined is the potential scholarly payoff. Although much has been made of the fact that legal experts are sometimes asked to act more as advocates than objective observers, much of the data that are used in legal cases can be redeployed for scholarly ends. Following the conclusions of several federal and state lawsuits, I have received permission from legal counsel to use data I collected or assembled for work products as the basis for subsequent scholarly articles. By jettisoning the legal arguments that condition these kinds of work products in favor of theories and expectations grounded in the academic literature, scholars can employ the empirical data amassed for lawsuits as the foundation for new research.

For example, in 2006, I was hired as an expert by the plaintiffs in a Washington state lawsuit challenging the veracity of signatures submitted for a ballot initiative. Some months later, I found out that my frequent coauthor, Todd Donovan, was also being retained by the same lawyers. Donovan was hired to provide an historical overview of fraud in the signature-gathering process in initiative campaigns, whereas I was retained to conduct an empirical analysis of the over 266,000 signatures collected on initiative petitions submitted by paid petition gatherers. Soon after the lawsuit was withdrawn, Donovan and I decided to collaborate on an article to fill a gap in the scholarly literature concerning the incidence of fraud in the petition-gathering process. I contacted the attorneys who had retained us to inquire whether the plaintiffs would be willing to grant us permission to use the data we analyzed in the case for a scholarly paper. Permission in hand, we combined our efforts to write a book chapter in an edited volume, Election Fraud: Detecting and Deterring Electoral Manipulation, which examined allegations of fraud in the signature-gathering process of ballot measures. As with my media and nonprofit work, this scholarly research has led to subsequent expert witness opportunities in cases of alleged fraud in the signature-gathering processes of ballot measures.

Over the years, my scholarship has been boosted by my work as an expert witness for Colorado on several lawsuits dealing with campaign finance and ballot measures. In the early 2000s, I was retained by the state's attorney general to conduct a content analysis of television ads broadcast and direct mail pieces distributed in Colorado between 1999 and 2003 to help defend a state law defining electioneering communications as near-election communications that unambiguously refer to a candidate and target voters. After our victory before the Colorado Supreme Court, I was granted permission to draw on the original data collected for the lawsuit as part of a larger study on state campaign financing for a co-authored chapter in John Green's widely-used edited volume, The State of the Parties. Most recently, in 2009, I was hired by a group of plaintiffs who successfully challenged the state secretary of state's effort to enforce a 2008 ballot initiative restricting labor unions' campaign finance activities. The successful measure, Amendment 54, placed severe restrictions on the associational and campaign contribution activities of contract holders of sole-source government contracts, including labor unions and their political committees. In assessing the impact of the initiative, my work product analyzed the long-term trend of organized labor's campaign contributions to candidates, political committees, issue committees, and political parties. Following our victory before the Colorado Supreme Court, I asked for permission to use the data I had collected for an essay on direct democracy to be published in a forthcoming edited volume on Colorado politics