The deep dive. Lawrence R. Jacobs and the Fed.
The illusion of American democracy. Political
science, public policy, and the Fed. Ever wonder
who is actually pulling the levers in Washington?
In this deep dive, we explore the groundbreaking
research of renowned political scientist Lawrence
R. Jacobs. From the hidden ways politicians use
polling to manipulate public opinion to the Federal
Reserve's bias toward finance and the complex
mechanics of health care reform, we unpack the
reality of American public policy. Whether you're
interested in the Affordable Care Act, election
administration or the unilateral power of the
presidency, this deep dive offers a nonpartisan,
evidence based look at how our democracy really
functions. Keywords Lawrence R. Jacobs, political
science, American democracy, public policy, health
care reform, Federal Reserve, political manipulation,
University of Minnesota, Center for the Study
of Politics and Governance. Have you ever watched
a high stakes political debate or maybe read
a headline about a massive new piece of legislation
and thought to yourself? How does this actually
work beneath the surface? Right. Not the sanitized
textbook version of how a bill becomes a law.
Exactly. Not the schoolhouse rock version, but
the real often hidden mechanics that move the
levers of power. The gears turning behind the
curtain. Right. So today we are going on a mission
to bypass those traditional narratives. We're
going to unpack the reality of American democracy
by exploring the incredibly prolific career of
a singular figure. Dr. Lawrence R. Jacobs. Yes.
He is a powerhouse political scientist holding
the McKnight Presidential Chair at the University
of Minnesota. And he has spent decades pulling
back the curtain on how our system actually operates.
And just to establish our source material for
you today, we are pulling these insights directly
from a comprehensive Wikipedia article detailing
his career, his 17 books and well over 100 scholarly
articles. Which is a massive intellectual footprint
to cover. It really is. What stands out about
his entire body of work, though, is this consistent
drive to measure what is actually happening in
Washington rather than what we simply told is
happening. And that is exactly our mission on
this deep dive. We want to figure out how American
politics actually works. So we're going to look
at the surprising ways politicians use public
polling. We'll explore why the U .S. and Britain
ended up with fundamentally different health
care system. Right. And we'll even follow the
money to see who really wins when the Federal
Reserve acts. OK, let's unpack this, starting
with one of the most persistent myths in modern
politics, the idea of the pandering politician.
It is the perfect place to start, largely because
it completely upends the conventional wisdom
we all take for granted. Right. If you ask almost
anyone, the assumption is that politicians are
constantly licking their fingers, sticking it
in the wind and just doing whatever the latest
poll tells them to do. Because they're desperate
for votes, right? Exactly. The narrative is that
they pander to majority public opinion just to
win elections. But Jacobs dug into this deeply
in his year 2000 book, Politicians Don't Pander,
which he co -authored with Robert Y. Shapiro.
And the data they uncovered tells a dramatically
different story. What's fascinating here is the
historical timeline they identified. The research
shows that prior to the 1970s, there were specific
conditions in American politics, particularly
within the structures of the political parties
themselves, that facilitated a genuine level
of government responsiveness to the public. But
then something changed. A fundamental shift occurred.
Yes. The policymaking process became increasingly
insular. By the 1980s and 90s, Jacobs and Shapiro
found that the motivations of politicians had
shifted entirely away from simply reflecting
majority opinion. But I want to push back on
that for a second. If they aren't listening to
the polls, why are campaigns and political committees
spending hundreds of millions of dollars on polling
every single election cycle? It's a great question.
I mean, what is the return on investment if they
are just ignoring what the public wants? Well,
they aren't ignoring the polls. They are weaponizing
them. Wow. According to the research, politicians
aren't using polling to figure out what policies
you want. They are using polling to figure out
exactly which words, arguments, and symbols will
change your mind to support the policies they
already intend to pass. So they use polls to
engineer consent. Precisely. They are testing
language to convince the public to back the agendas
favored by political elites, their allies, and
their donors. The polls are basically sophisticated
laboratories. So instead of asking should we
cut taxes, they are using focus groups to see
whether the phrase tax relief or economic stimulus
gets a better emotional reaction from a specific
demographic. Exactly. They already know what
they want to do. They just need the data to figure
out. how to sell it to you that reframes the
entire political theater and this isn't just
some Brief phenomenon from the 90s. In a 2015
follow -up book called Who Governs President's
Public Opinion and Manipulation, Jacobs and his
co -author James N. Druckmann trace this elite
manipulation back for decades. Right into the
presidential archives. Yes, all the way back
to Lyndon Johnson. Starting with LBJ, presidents
have systematically used private research on
public opinion to design their arguments and
shape their personal images. They use the data
to build their own personal popularity. Which
gives them the political capital to actually
def - defy the policy preferences of most Americans.
It is a profound realization about the modern
presidency. And this pattern of government unresponsiveness
isn't limited to domestic issues like health
care or taxes. It extends deeply into international
relations. It does. If we look at a 2005 study
published by Jacobs and Benjamin Page, we see
the statistical reality mapped out clearly in
foreign policy. Their analysis confirmed that
the views driving the foreign policy of senior
U .S. government officials do not align with
the general public. Okay, let me guess. They
align with the foreign policy experts instead.
Actually, no. They don't even align with the
policy experts. The statistical evidence from
that study shows that it is the views of business
executives that primarily drive U .S. foreign
policy. Business executives. That is heavy. And
I think it's really important to point out here
that this research spans multiple administrations
across different eras and political parties.
Right. We are looking at a systemic reality of
the modern executive branch, neutrally reported
by the data. But think about what this means
for you, the listener. It changes everything.
How does it change the way you watch a stump
speech or read a quote in a news article knowing
that the specific language being deployed was
likely engineered in a polling lab specifically
to trigger your pre -existing beliefs? It requires
a much more critical analytical lens from the
citizen. You have to constantly ask yourself
what underlying, perhaps unpopular policy is
being quietly packaged inside those carefully
tested symbols. Speaking of complex policies
that require a critical lens, I want to pivot
to an area that literally touches every single
one of us. And one where Jacobs has done some
of his most defining work. Health care. A massively
complicated subject. Oh, absolutely. Going back
to his 1993 book, The Health of Nations, Jacobs
looked at two countries that share a lot of cultural
and historical DNA. The United States and Britain.
Two very similar democracies. Exactly. It's like
giving two people the exact same ingredients
and they somehow bake completely different cakes.
In 1946, Britain created the National Health
Service, a completely nationalized system. Right.
Almost two decades later, in 1965, the U .S.
passed the Medicare Act, which was a much more
fragmented public -private hybrid. How do two
similar democracies end up with such dramatically
divergent results? The answer lies in the archives.
Jacobs demonstrated that these divergent paths
weren't random and they weren't just the result
of one public wanting something different than
the other. So what drove it? It was a highly
specific combination of three critical factors.
First, the preferences of the citizens at that
moment in history. Second, the organization and
power of interest groups. Like the doctors themselves?
Yes. For example, how unified the medical professionals
were in the U .K. compared to the highly fragmented
but very powerful American Medical Association
in the U .S. Got it. And the third factor. The
administrative capacity of the government institutions
themselves. Right. Because coming out of World
War II, Britain had essentially built a massive
centralized administrative state just to survive
the war. Exactly. Whereas the U .S. still relied
on a highly decentralized federalist system,
it was the unique intersection of those three
forces, citizen preferences, interest groups,
and state capacity, that dictated the dramatically
different architectural designs of their health
programs. It wasn't just a matter of political
will. It was a matter of institutional constraints.
Exactly. Here's where it gets really interesting,
though. We typically think about how public opinion
and interest groups shape a policy, like with
the NHS or Medicare. But Jacobs flipped that
entire premise on its head when studying more
recent health care legislation. The Affordable
Care Act. Yes. When looking at the ACA of 2010,
Jacobs collaborated with political scientists
Suzanne Medler and Ling Zhu. Instead of studying
how public opinion led to the creation of the
ACA, they studied how the passage of the ACA
actually created public opinion. This brings
us to a vital concept in political science known
as policy feedback. The traditional view, the
one we are taught in civics class, is that politics
creates policy. People demand a change, they
elect representatives, and those representatives
pass a law. Exactly. But Jacobs' research explores
the reverse. How policy creates new politics.
Passing a massive piece of legislation like the
Affordable Care Act alters the entire landscape.
So how does a law actually change how people
think? By changing their material reality and
their expectations. Over time, as people interact
with a new law, whether it's getting coverage
for a pre -existing condition or receiving a
subsidy, their baseline expectations shift. The
new law becomes the new normal. Right. The research
shows that a major policy actually changes public
opinion to support the law as people integrate
it into their lives. More than that, it spurs
Americans to alter their political behavior.
How so? to back the health reform that now benefits
them. The law itself becomes an engine for its
own political survival. Just think about the
implications of that for a second. The laws you
live under right now might be subtly reshaping
your own personal views over time, fundamentally
changing your expectations of government and
altering how you vote without you even realizing
it. The policy isn't just a set of rules. It
is an environment that actively shapes your political
psychology. It completely underscores why the
legislative battles in Washington are so incredibly
fierce. When political elites are fighting over
a major reform, they aren't just fighting over
a temporary budget allocation. They are fighting
to establish the long -term cognitive and behavioral
landscape of the American electorate. Win the
policy today and you might secure the voting
block for a generation. Let's follow that thread
of elite power and long -term strategy straight
to one of the most powerful institutions in the
world. The Federal Reserve. Exactly. Yeah. I
want to shift our focus to Jacob's research on
central banks, specifically his book Fed Power,
How Finance Wins, which he co -authored with
Desmond King. We talk a lot about Congress and
the president, but the Federal Reserve Bank is
arguably one of the most consequential yet least
understood institutions in our democracy. It
operates with a level of insulation that is practically
unheard of in other branches of government. Imagine
a massive imposing bank vault. In Fed power,
Jacobs and King launched a rigorous empirical
investigation into the Fed, paying particular
attention to its response during the 2008 financial
crisis. And their findings highlight a distinct
systemic bias toward the finance sector. When
you say a bias toward the finance sector, what
does that actually look like in practice during
a crisis? It looks like a prioritization of capital
access. When the system was collapsing in 2008,
the Federal Reserve utilized its immense power
to inject liquidity and stabilize the massive
financial institutions on Wall Street while Main
Street struggled. The research illustrates how
the mechanisms of the Fed are structurally aligned
to protect the heights of high finance, often
at the expense of broader economic relief for
ordinary citizens. The insulation that is supposed
to keep the Fed neutral actually makes it more
responsive to the banking sector it interacts
with daily than to the public at large. Exactly.
And Jacobs has continued to track this dynamic.
Right. The second edition of Fed Power was updated
in 2021. And just reporting the facts from the
source material, this update covered how massive
social movements like the Black Lives Matter
protests and the growing influence of progressives
within the Democratic Party actually placed unprecedented
pressure on the Biden administration regarding
the Fed. It shows that even a highly insulated
institution isn't entirely immune to the tectonic
shifts in social politics. And their scope of
analysis is expanding well beyond the United
States. now. Really? Yes. More recently, Jacobs
and King have been investigating variations across
multiple Western countries. They are analyzing
how different central banks regulate risk, how
they manage access to capital, and crucially,
how they respond to the economic inequality that
is often exacerbated by their own monetary policies.
It is a stark look at how institutional power
functions at the highest levels. And honestly,
hearing about all of this, politicians engineering
our consent with focus groups policies, programming
our behavior through feedback loops, and the
Fed favoring high finance words that it can feel
incredibly heavy. It can feel like the individual
citizen is just a pawn on the board. Exactly.
But to balance this picture of massive elite
power, I want to bring in another critical piece
of Jacob Z's research. In 2009, he published
a book with Fay Lomax Cook and Michael Extelli
Carpini called Talking Together, Public Deliberation
in America and the Search for Community. It is
a vital counterweight. to the narrative of elite
domination. It really is. It challenges the pervasive
myth of the apathetic American citizen. The research
and talking together was the first national empirical
study to look at how Americans actually attempt
to persuade each other about politics. And how
they meet in formally organized deliberative
forums. Think neighborhood councils, school board
meetings, and local zoning discussions. And they
found a wildly optimistic statistic. More than
one out of four Americans join organized deliberations
to discuss community concerns. That rate of participation
is remarkable. It means that engaging in deep
face -to -face deliberation is on par with traditional
political actions, like contacting a government
official or trying to persuade a neighbor to
vote for a specific candidate. Over 25 percent
of Americans are actively giving up their evenings
and weekends to get together and talk through
complex local issues. If we connect this to the
bigger picture, the contrast is striking. On
one side of the ledger, you have the insular
power of the Federal Reserve and you have politicians
using sophisticated data to manipulate public
discourse. But on the exact same stage, you have
the genuine grassroots desire of regular Americans
to deliberate, to connect and to solve community
problems. It shows that the Democratic impulse
at the citizen level remains remarkably robust,
even when the macroeconomic and federal institutions
above them become less responsive. That perfectly
bridges us to the next chapter. of Jacobs' career,
because he hasn't just spent decades diagnosing
these systemic issues from an academic tower.
He has actively worked to build up that local
civic infrastructure. In 2005, he founded the
Center for the Study of Politics and Governance,
or CSPG, at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey
School of Public Affairs. He took the theoretical
understanding of democracy and applied it to
actively training the people who run it. The
practical achievements of the center are substantial.
Under his direction, it became a regional hub
with a specific mission to foster conversations
and collaborations across deep partisan divides.
Which is incredibly rare these days. Very rare.
For example, CSPG developed the first online
nonpartisan professional training program for
election administrators. Which is such a crucial
under the radar piece of keeping a democracy
functioning. Yeah. We obsess over the candidates,
but the actual invisible mechanics of running
an election. safely and accurately rely entirely
on those local administrators. The center also
runs a highly influential leadership program
called the Policy Fellows. What stands out here
is the genuine bipartisanship of the network
it has built. Right. The alumni list includes
current U .S. Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat,
and former U .S. Senator Norm Coleman, a Republican.
They even convene an annual one -day retreat
for the entire Minnesota state legislature called
One Minnesota, and they work on similar engagement
initiatives across the Midwest. Commitment to
this nonpartisan community engagement has been
recognized widely. He was awarded the Minneapolis
University Rotary Club Citizen of the Year Award
in 2017, and the University of Minnesota gave
him their Outstanding Community Service Award
in 2014. It's a testament to his impact outside
the classroom. But there is one specific detail
in his teaching career that I find absolutely
fascinating. For nearly 15 years, Jacobs co -taught
a class at the Humphrey School with none other
than former Vice President Walter Mondale. That
is a rare pedagogical dynamic. You have a rigorous
empirical political scientist paired with a practitioner
who operated at the very highest levels of the
executive branch. The focus of their course was
profoundly serious, concentrating on the U .S.
Constitution and national security. But the specific
trend they analyzed together is vital for our
understanding of modern politics. They meticulously
tracked the growing pattern of unilateral exercises
of executive power across both Democratic and
Republican administrations since the end of the
Second World War. Meaning the use of executive
orders, national security memorandums and other
tools that essentially. bypassed the legislative
branch entirely exactly they were looking at
a systemic accumulation of power in the executive
branch that transcends partisan lines It is a
slow, steady concentration of authority that
fundamentally alters the balance of power envisioned
in the Constitution. It is intense stuff to study
for 15 years. But before we wrap up this journey,
I do want to share one wonderful detail about
his personal life. Because behind every prolific
academic churning out books on executive overreach
and central banking, there is a real human being.
Always nice to remember that. Jacob is married
to Julie Schumacher. They met in an English class
during their first year at Oberlin College. She's
now a Regents Professor of English at the University
of Minnesota, and she is a highly acclaimed novelist.
And an award -winning one at that. Yes. She actually
became the first woman to win the Thurber Prize
for American Humor for her brilliant book, Dear
Committee Members. It is a wonderful balance,
isn't it? You have Lawrence Jacobs analyzing
the manipulation of democracy, the power of central
banks, and the expansion of the presidency, sharing
a life with an award -winning humorist. It suggests
a profound appreciation for both the serious
mechanics of the world and the human comedy within
it. So what does this all mean? We have covered
a massive amount of ground today, exploring the
realities of the American system through Jacobs'
research. We started by unpacking how political
elites don't actually follow public polling to
write policy. Instead, they use it as a laboratory
to test language designed to engineer our consent.
We looked at health care, exploring how this
specific combination of interest groups and state
capacity creates entirely different national
systems. And how massive reforms like the Affordable
Care Act actually create feedback loops that
reshape the electorate's voting behavior over
time. We followed the money to the Federal Reserve
to see the structural bias toward the finance
sector during times of crisis. We traced the
steady expansion of unilateral executive power
since World War II. But alongside all of that
institutional dominance, we also found that millions
of regular citizens are still actively gathering
to deliberate and solve local problems. And that
institutions like CSPG are doing the quiet, vital
work of training election officials and bridging
political divides. This raises an important question
for you. When you consume information, are you
being informed or are you being managed? It's
a tough question to face. It is. The research
we've explored today suggests that the surface
level arguments we see on television and social
media are often just carefully tested symbols.
The real work of democracy and the real exercise
of power happens beneath the surface. It happens
in the administrative capacity of our institutions.
In the policy feedback loops that slowly change
our expectations and in the quiet ongoing accumulation
of executive and financial authority, we must
train ourselves to look past the careful engineered
message to see the underlying institutional gears
moving the money and the power. And I want to
leave you with one final, somewhat provocative
thought to chew on. We know from Jacobs' work
that political elites are spending millions on
private data, not to listen to your preferences,
but to figure out the exact symbols needed to
change your mind. To manipulate the public. Right.
So what would happen if voters flipped the script?
What if everyday citizens started organizing
and using their own data? to manipulate the politicians
right back. What if the same sophisticated tools
used to engineer our consent were crowdsourced
and used to engineer their compliance? Something
to mull over the next time you see a carefully
crafted, focus -grouped political ad on your
feed. Thank you so much for joining us on this
deep dive into the work of Lawrence R. Jacobs
and the hidden mechanics of our political system.
Keep asking the hard questions, keep looking
beneath the surface, and always keep questioning
the narrative. We will catch you on the next
deep dive.