Center for Political Participation

Silas Russell, a 2007 graduate of Allegheny, discussed his experiences with Occupy Wall Street in Pittsburgh.

By Mary Solberg

  For Silas Russell, a 2007 graduate of Allegheny College, the Occupy Wall Street movement is personal. It is, he says, “a movement of ordinary people” like him and the 20,000 Pennsylvanians for whom he works as a political organizer for SEIU PA, Pennsylvania’s largest union for health care workers.

     “People need to take back power,” Russell told a luncheon gathering Nov. 10 at Quigley Hall on the Allegheny College campus. “We cannot have an economy that is controlled from the top.”

     In his work, Russell sees firsthand the effects of an unstable economy and how the average worker struggles to maintain financial security.  Little wonder that the Occupy Wall Street movement appealed to him; he was intrigued with its call to equalize the financial playing field in America. In the early fall of 2011, he started working as an organizer for Occupy Pittsburgh, camping out the first week in a park on Grant Street in the Steel City.

     “At this point,” he added, “the movement is too big to fail.”

     By the looks of the packed audience at Quigley’s Henderson Auditorium, the movement is too big to be ignored, too. Fittingly titled “Occupy Quigley,” the panel discussion included Russell, who came from Pittsburgh for the day, and Political Science Professor Bruce Smith, and Economics Professor Russell Ormiston. While attentive to the two professors, students were clearly intrigued by Silas Russell and his activism. Several stayed afterward to talk to Russell about Occupy activities in Pittsburgh.

     During a question-and-answer segment, Kimberly Langin ’13 asked Russell if he thought the Occupy movement was anti-capitalist.

     “Occupy is a movement that wants to have capitalism work for everybody,” Russell said.

     For Professor Smith, Occupy Wall Street makes him sentimental for his own days of activism. “It’s in the American gene,” he explained. “It’s radical, it’s democratic. It’s Jeffersonian.”

     For any movement to be successful, Smith added, it needs three things: skilled organizers, meetings that continue on a regular basis after the initial weeks, and promotion of public policies that address the majority of people, in Occupy’s case, the 99 percent of Americans for whom it claims to speak for.

     “Absence of leadership is not good, and actions like stomping on the flag can sully the movement,” Smith said.

     Professor Ormiston views the Occupy movement “through the lens of the American worker.” From 1979 to 1990, union membership in the United States fell by one-third, creating the issue of income inequality that Occupy is protesting.

     “From 1945 to 1979, the social contract was that if workers worked hard they’d be rewarded,” Ormiston explained. “From 1979 to 1981, a new mode of thinking came to the fore [with more imports from Asia and with the firing of striking air traffic controllers].”

     The gradual decay of unions has affected the power of the American worker, but no one—even the Democrats—haven’t addressed the tough questions on how to help. In the past couple decades, there haven’t even been any significant protests of this decline. As Ormiston said, “We don’t protest erosion.”

     That erosion, combined with the recent economic recession, has created the perfect environment for a movement such as Occupy to appear. The Occupy movement, Ormiston explained, “has changed the conversation.”

Vanessa Williamson discusses her forthcoming book on the Tea Party and her many interviews with Tea Party activists across the country.

By Mary Solberg

Does the Tea Party matter? If you ask Vanessa Williamson, she’d say yes and no. OK, so maybe that’s not as definitive an answer as political pundits would hope for, but it pretty much sums up the complexity of the movement.

Williamson, co-author of the forthcoming book The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford University Press), told a packed audience at Quigley Hall, Allegheny College, that while the Tea Party’s popularity is declining now, it has had a lasting impact on American politics.

“The Tea Party motivated older conservatives to vote, it helped move the Republican Party to the right, and it reinvigorated the Republican Party at a time of crisis,” Williamson said at the Sept. 22 lecture.

Conversely, though, the Tea Party’s popularity has declined from September 2009 when 70,000 activists converged on Washington, D.C., Williamson added, saying, “That was really the peak of Tea Party activism. But as more people have become aware of what the Tea Party is, its popularity began to decline.”

In 2010, the Tea Party did not elect conservatives in moderate areas, and may not even have increased the Republican landslide in the midterms, Williamson said. Nevertheless, the movement has had an impact, particularly in light of the emergence of Tea Party candidates, ongoing news coverage and its prevalence in major polls and surveys. Perhaps the most significant acknowledgement of its impact was this fall when CNN joined the Tea Party in hosting a Republican primary debate in California.

Williamson, a doctoral candidate in government and social policy at Harvard University, captivated her audience—ironically—with her straightforward discussion of the Tea Party. Instead of presenting a pro or con presentation on the controversial organization, Williamson’s viewpoint as an academic came off as refreshing. She discussed what it was like to interview Tea Party members throughout the country.

Audience members asked Williamson about the makeup of Tea Party activists and what she thought of them. The people she interviewed reminded her of kindly grandparents.

“The Tea Party is made up of mostly older white people who own their own homes and have pensions. They weren’t hit hardest by the Great Recession, but there’s a real element that the American dream was betrayed for some of them,” Williamson said.

Unfortunately, she maintains that many Tea Party members, while educated, are misinformed on issues. Williamson blamed an intense polarization of values in America today, where people seek like-minded people and groups that espouse only what they believe in. No one has to prove a point, in other words.

“They believe in things that are just not facts,” Williamson said, adding, “There is no accountability.”

Herb Klions, a retired psychology professor from Allegheny, was in the audience and asked Williamson if she thought the Tea Party would have taken a different direction had Hillary Clinton, now secretary of state, beat Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

“I think the Tea Party would have been a little different. The symbolism would not have been as potent, but conservatives still would have been upset,” Williamson said.

Williamson, whose primary research interest is the politics of taxation, co-wrote her Tea Party book with Theda Skocpol of Harvard. Before studying at Harvard, she served as the policy director for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. She received her bachelor’s degree in French language and literature from New York University, and her master’s from NYU’s Institute of French Studies.

To pre-order The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, go online to Oxford University Press or Amazon.com.

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Meadville, Pa. – Sept. 13, 2011 – As part of research on the viability of local political parties in the United States, the Center for Political Participation at Allegheny College released the results of a new poll of nearly 500 local party officials from across the nation. 

Overall, the picture seems bright for local party organizations.  A vast majority of the party leaders surveyed (78 percent) believe their party committee is doing better than in the past.  “Given the vital role that local parties play in our democracy, it’s good to hear they are doing well,” said Daniel M. Shea, director of the CPP and lead author of the study.

Democratic and Republican party leaders generally agreed on a range of issues, from the use of particular technologies to the types of activities party committees should sponsor.  “In many respects, there was a great deal of consensus,” Shea said.  

There was, however, one glaring exception:  whether they believed elected officials should stand firm on their principles or try to find areas of compromise when grappling with difficult issues.  Seventy-eight percent of Republican leaders contend that elected officials should stick to their principles and not seek compromise solutions, while 12 percent of Democratic chairs said the same.   Conversely, 88 percent of Democratic chairs thought politicians should find compromises.  Just 22 percent of GOP leaders held a similar view.  “There are always modest partisan differences when you talk to local party leaders,” Shea said. “Yet this disparity is stunning.  I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Shea expressed concern about what these results might suggest for future budget negotiations in Congress. “It is hard to imagine middle-of-the-road solutions springing from Congress when 8 out of 10 local GOP party leaders expect their elected officials to stand firm,” he said.  “And you can bet all members of Congress pay close attention to these party chairs, given the next primary election is always just around the corner.”

A related finding was that 78 percent of the chairs believe Americans are more polarized than in the past, and 65 percent believe their own communities are more polarized than in previous years.

In 2010 the CPP conducted three polls on political civility in an attempt to gauge what the average American voter was thinking. The new poll, conducted this summer, went directly to the leaders of local party committees.   They were asked numerous questions about their organizations and their personal views regarding the tone of politics in general.  

Other key findings of the summer survey include: 73 percent of the chairs say that politics has become less civil in the past few years and 68 percent believe nasty politics is harmful to our democracy.   On a more encouraging note, the CPP study found that 90 percent of party leaders polled believe that aggressive but respectful politics is still possible.  

This summer’s Survey on Local Party Vitality was conducted via e-mail through Survey Monkey, Palo Alto, Calif., between July 15 and Aug. 1.  Questionnaires were sent to approximately 1,500 Democratic and 1,500 Republican local party leaders.  In all, 475 party leaders returned the survey, yielding a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percent.  Fifty-eight percent of the respondents were Democrats; 42 percent were Republicans.

Read/download survey data:

Survey on Local Party Vitality: Survey Frequency | Party Crosstab

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