Chapter 15 Exercises

These exercises are designed to translate the chapter's empirical material into knowledge of the actual political environment that surrounds you. State and local government is the level at which "doing your homework" has the highest marginal return: the data is publicly available, the actors are accessible, and most of your fellow citizens are not paying attention.

Plan to spend 60 to 90 minutes on each of the first three exercises and at least three hours on Exercise 8 (the Democracy Audit). Several exercises ask you to record specific data; keep a running document.

Exercise 1 — Identify your state legislator and committee assignments

Open OpenStates.org (a project of the Plural Policy / former Sunlight Foundation lineage; the most comprehensive public database of state-legislator information in the country). Enter your home address. The site returns your state-house member and your state-senator.

For each of the two:

  1. Record the name, party, district number, and length of service.
  2. Click through to the legislator's profile and record the committee assignments. Most state legislators sit on three to five committees; the chair of a committee has substantial agenda-setting power.
  3. List three bills the legislator has sponsored or co-sponsored in the most recent legislative session. Read the official summaries.
  4. Find the roll-call votes on two pieces of recent contested legislation (the OpenStates "Bills" page filters by passage status; pick something that passed by a narrow margin or that touched a politically salient issue).

Compare what you found with what you can learn about your US House representative (Chapter 7's Democracy Audit). Note the differences in accessibility, in committee specialization, and in level of public attention. Most state legislators have far smaller staffs and far smaller media followings than members of Congress; many will respond personally to constituent emails.

Write a one-paragraph note on what surprised you about your state legislators. (Common surprises: the legislator has been in office longer or shorter than you expected; the committee assignments are weirdly specific; the bills have nothing to do with the issues that come up in state-level news coverage.)

Exercise 2 — Identify your school-board members and the next election date

Open BallotReady.org or the website of your county elections office (the URL usually follows the pattern [county]countyelections.gov or similar). Find the school-board members for the district that serves your address.

  1. Record each board member's name, their term, their professional background outside of the school board, and the date when they next stand for election.
  2. Identify when the next school-board election is — for most districts, this is an off-cycle election (April, May, August, or November of an odd year), held when general turnout is low.
  3. Read the agenda of the most recent school-board meeting. The agenda is almost always posted on the district website 72 hours before the meeting (state open-meeting laws require advance notice).
  4. Note the public-comment portion. School-board meetings have become significantly more contested since 2020. How long is the public-comment portion budgeted? How many speakers signed up at the last meeting? What kinds of issues did they raise?

Describe in three to five sentences what you observe. School-board agendas are a particularly clear window into the actual texture of local government — the items range from "approval of payment to vendor X" to "consideration of the proposed sex-education curriculum revision," all in the same meeting.

Exercise 3 — Analyze your county's annual budget — top three categories

Find your county's annual budget on the county government website. (Counties post this; if it is hard to find, search "[your county] adopted budget [year] PDF.")

  1. Identify the total expenditures for the most recent completed fiscal year.
  2. Identify the top three spending categories by dollar amount. For most counties, the largest categories are the sheriff's office and corrections, followed by health and human services, followed by roads and infrastructure. The schools may or may not be in the county budget, depending on whether your district is independent or is funded through county channels.
  3. Compute the per-capita spending in the top category (divide the dollar total by the county's population).
  4. Compare with a neighboring county of similar size. The comparison illuminates how much variation there is even among ostensibly similar local governments.

Write a half-page summary of what the budget tells you. Pay attention to where the money does not go as much as where it does. (Public health, mental health, libraries, and parks are often the smallest line items, despite being the public-facing services people think of first.)

Exercise 4 — Trace a state ballot initiative from petition to vote

Pick a state ballot initiative from the most recent election cycle. If your state allows initiatives, pick one from your state. If not, pick one from a heavy-initiative state (California, Oregon, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Washington).

Trace the initiative through its lifecycle:

  1. Origin. Who proposed the measure? Was it a single advocate, an organized campaign, an ideological organization?
  2. Signature gathering. How many signatures were required? How many were collected? How much was spent on the signature drive (data available through state campaign-finance disclosures)?
  3. Ballot title. Who wrote the title and summary that voters saw? In most states, an attorney general or an official board writes the official summary; both sides usually litigate the wording.
  4. Campaign. What was total spending for and against? Where did the money come from? Out-of-state donors are often substantial.
  5. Outcome. What was the final vote? Was the measure adopted, and if so, has it been implemented or struck down by litigation?

Write up your findings as a one-page case note. The exercise gives you a granular picture of how direct democracy works in practice — and how much it costs.

Exercise 5 — Compare your state's gubernatorial powers to a neighboring state's

Pick your state and one neighboring state. Use the National Governors Association website and the Council of State Governments "Book of the States" (most current edition available online or through a university library) to compare:

  1. Term length and term limits. Two consecutive terms? Lifetime limits? No limits at all?
  2. Veto authority. Line-item veto present? Pocket veto? Reduction-in-amount veto (the ability to lower an appropriation amount without striking the line)?
  3. Appointment power. How many appointments require state-senate confirmation? Are department heads independently elected or appointed?
  4. Budget authority. Does the governor have item-by-item budget control, or does the legislature dominate the budget process?
  5. Pardon power. Sole pardon authority, shared with a board, or vested in the board entirely?
  6. Executive-order authority. Has the state legislature or supreme court placed limits on emergency executive-order powers since 2020?

Describe in two paragraphs how the two states' governors differ in formal power. Conclude with one paragraph on whether the formal-power differences seem to track the ideological color of the state, or are mostly historical accidents. (Both patterns exist; Texas is a low-power-governor red state, while Wisconsin is a high-power-veto purple state. The pattern is not what you might guess.)

Exercise 6 — Steel-man strong-mayor vs. council-manager city government

Pick two cities of comparable size in different states: one with a strong-mayor structure (Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Houston, Atlanta) and one with a council-manager structure (Phoenix, San Antonio, Dallas, Charlotte, Sacramento).

In two paragraphs each:

  1. Steel-man the strong-mayor case. Why do reformers in some cities argue for moving toward strong-mayor structures? (Hints: clearer accountability, faster decision-making in crises, ability to drive a coordinated agenda across departments.)
  2. Steel-man the council-manager case. Why did Progressive-era reformers, and many contemporary city-management scholars, prefer the council-manager form? (Hints: insulation from political-machine corruption, professional management with technical competence, focus on administrative quality over personality politics.)

Then describe a recent specific decision in each of your two cities — a budget choice, a personnel issue, a crisis response, a major project. Note who made the decision, how the decision was reached, and how the public reacted. Use the comparison to assess which structure seems to produce better outcomes for that kind of decision.

The honest answer is usually "it depends on what you are optimizing for." That is the right answer to record.

Exercise 7 — Identify any tribal government jurisdiction in or near your area

Check the Bureau of Indian Affairs Tribal Leaders Directory. The directory lists all 574 federally recognized tribes and their geographic locations.

  1. Identify the nearest federally recognized tribe to your home address. If your home address is on tribal land, identify the tribe whose lands you are on and the treaty or executive order that established that relationship.
  2. Find the tribal government's website. Most tribes maintain comprehensive sites describing their council, their courts, their departments, and their constitutional structure.
  3. Note the structure: how many council members, how the chief / chairperson / chairwoman / president is selected, what the term lengths are, what the major departments do.
  4. Identify one current legal or policy issue in which the tribe is engaged with the state or federal government. (Examples: water rights, gaming compacts, hunting and fishing rights, environmental review, criminal jurisdiction post-McGirt, child welfare under ICWA.)

If you live in a metropolitan area without a nearby tribal government, find the nearest urban Indian center or off-reservation tribal community organization. Tribal sovereignty is sometimes invisible to non-Native residents in metro areas, but most metro areas have substantial Native American populations and organized civic infrastructure.

Write a half-page note on what you learned. Tribal governments are mentioned in most American Government textbooks only briefly; the goal of this exercise is to make their reality concrete.

Exercise 8 — Democracy Audit: state-and-local layer

This is the major Democracy Audit installment for this chapter. Build on what you began in Chapter 7 (federal representatives) and integrate the work from Exercises 1, 2, and 3 above.

Create a single document — call it your State-and-Local Civic Map — with the following sections:

  1. Your state legislator's voting record. A short chronological list of contested votes (5 to 10 from the most recent session) with your one-sentence assessment of where the legislator landed and whether you agree.

  2. Your county's spending priorities. The top five categories of county spending, their dollar amounts, and a short note on whether those priorities reflect what you see in your county's daily life. (For example: if the county is spending heavily on jails but the local jail population has been falling, note that.)

  3. Your school district's policies. Identify three policies your district has adopted in the last two years on issues that have been politically contested somewhere in the country (curriculum, library content, mask or vaccine policy, equity-related programming, parental notification, school-resource-officer presence). Record each policy and your district's specific approach.

  4. A special district that touches you. Identify one — water, fire, transit, library, parks — and record its board members, its annual budget, its taxing or fee authority, and the most recent significant decision it made.

  5. The next election. What state, county, city, or special-district seats are on the ballot in the next 12 months in your area? Record each contest, the candidates filed (if known), and the date.

  6. Your map of leverage. In one final paragraph, describe where in this state-and-local landscape you have the most realistic leverage as an individual citizen. Showing up to a school-board meeting? Calling a state legislator's local office? Voting in a special-district election? The leverage points vary by context. The exercise is to identify your own.

This Democracy Audit installment is not optional reading material. The empirical claim of the chapter is that state-and-local government is where most government happens; the test of that claim is whether you can locate yourself in the system. By the end of Exercise 8 you should be able to.

The federal level will continue to dominate the news. The state-and-local level will continue to dominate your daily life. The audit makes the second proposition concrete.