Henry Brady's Political Science for the People

By Genevieve Shiffrar, December 8, 2003

How may ordinary citizens best help shape their government? How may people best benefit from their government? These two interlocking questions form the armature on which political scientist and public policy analyst Henry Brady has sculpted his life's work.

Widely considered one of today's most innovative and multifaceted political scientists, Professor Brady has approached these questions through an amazing range of topics, such as civic volunteerism, the impacts of the media on elections, the transition to democracy in former Soviet-bloc countries, coalitions in political parties, and access and confidentiality issues pertaining to social science data.

As director of UC Berkeley's Survey Research Center and UC Data (Data Archive and Technical Assistance), Henry Brady also widely is seen as a virtuoso in his ability to employ a wide range of research methodologies to explore a subject, including survey research, field experiments, psychometrics, econometrics, mathematical modeling, and interviewing.

Brady has always shown interest in a very wide variety of topics and approaches. As an undergraduate at Harvey Mudd College, he majored in physics and mathematics. He was a master of divinity student briefly before beginning his Ph.D. in economics and political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He began teaching at UC Berkeley's School of Public Policy from 1978 to 1984, and he taught at Harvard and the University of Chicago before returning to Berkeley in 1990, with appointments in the Goldman School of Public Policy and the Department of Political Science in the College of Letters & Science.

His 1995 book Voice and Equality: Civic Volunteerism in American Politics was considered a "modern masterpiece of political science" by the book review editor of American Political Science Review. A 1992 book, Letting the People Decide: The Dynamics of a Canadian Election won the Harold Adams Innis Award for the best book in the social sciences published in English in Canada. He wrote these, like most of his articles, papers, and book chapters, in collaboration with other scholars.

What follows is a sample of Brady's research. His efforts to improve voting technology are described, along with examples of his research on social welfare programs and the roles of dialogue and information in the formation of public opinion regarding foreign affairs.

Voting Systems

Brady has co-written a series of papers about voting technologies and residual votes (ballots that do not have a valid vote). One of his first publications in this area, "The Butterfly Did It: The Aberrant Vote for Buchanan in Palm Beach County, Florida," demonstrated that they butterfly ballot had caused at least 2000 Gore voters to mistakenly cast their votes for Patrick Buchanan in the 2000 presidential election. He since has risen to national prominence as an advocate for replacing punch card ballots. The national media seeks his opinion regularly regarding voting systems, and the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals postponed briefly the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election based in large part on his research.

In a September 15, 2003 press conference after the Ninth Circuit Court decision, Brady described the ways in which punch cards machines fail. He defined the problem in his characteristically clear manner: "People come to the polls. They mean to vote. They intend to vote. They try to vote. They make a mark on the system trying to vote, but the system does not record their vote." The problem has many sources, including the following.

• In Votomatic machines, the names of the candidates are not on the punch card ballot which is inserted into the machine.
• While the ballot is in the machine, a user cannot be sure that the stylus, which is used to punch out the pre-scored chad on the ballot, actually removed the chad.
• If a voter takes the ballot out of the machine to check that the chad is removed completely, the voter only sees numbers next to the pre-scored chads—thus making it very hard to "check-your-work" with punch card ballots.
• More generally, since punch card voting machines work differently than anything else, the machines are not intuitive to use.

Brady's research shows that approximately one and a half votes out of every hundred cast will not be properly recorded when punch card ballots are used. This is certainly a problem in its own right, but when specific groups have a higher residual vote rate than other groups, a discriminatory unfairness results. For example, in neighborhoods with very high percentages of minority voters, Brady has shown that up to seven or eight votes are not counted for every hundred cast. Once new systems are implemented the residual vote rate in highly minority neighborhoods drops to a level consistent with other populations, less than 1%.

Impact of Welfare on Various Populations

Henry Brady's interest in improving voting systems illustrates his central concerns: helping ordinary citizens shape their government and finding ways for people to best benefit from their government. On this latter topic, Brady has conducted research very different from voting systems, such as examining the effectiveness of welfare reforms for various populations. He notes, "We want to design social programs that encourage people to contribute to society, so having people work to receive welfare is probably a good idea. But at the same time, we must also ask ourselves, under what conditions can someone actually succeed at work?" 

Brady outlined an example in the study, "Expensive Children in Poor Families": "My co-authors and I showed that a mother with a disabled child is more likely to lose her job. If her child gets sick and she asks to take time off but her employer declines the request, the mother is forced to choose between her child and her job. The mother chooses her child, as do most in this situation. I think that that is the right thing to do, but how can we accommodate her needs?"

The catch-22 that mothers find themselves in becomes complicated further when insurance issues are factored in. Brady continues, "Low-wage employment typically does not provide health insurance. Once a mother with a disabled child gets a job, she often no longer has the health insurance benefits needed to pay for the medical needs of her child."

Agricultural workers form another example of a special population that requires extra consideration when developing welfare policy. According to Brady, "There is a really interesting dynamic where people can get agricultural work in the summer, when it is available. The unemployment rate for this type of work in the summer is only 2% - 4%, but in the winter when work is scarce, the unemployment rate is 20%."

Brady is concerned that the seasonal aspect of this work is not reflected in recent welfare legislation. Specifically, "agricultural workers traditionally have received welfare in the wintertime to make ends meet. In the past few years, welfare has become time-based: one can receive it only for a certain finite amount of time." Once farm workers reach their time limit, they face the prospect of having no income the following winter. Brady and his colleagues raise the issue that somehow we must make it possible for agricultural workers and other special groups to have steady income to meet the basic needs of their families.

Deliberative Opinion Poll

A very different project in which Brady has been involved is a deliberative opinion poll assessing Americans' points of view on US foreign policy decisions. In a deliberative poll, analysts gather a representative sample of constituents and engage them in discussion about a particular topic with a range of experts. In this case, Brady and Jim Fishkin, the scientist who developed the deliberative opinion poll process, worked with MacNeil/Lehrer Productions to arrange a three-day event in January 2003, before the Iraq War was declared. The event was capped by a two-hour live television broadcast hosted by Jim Lehrer. (Read more about this poll on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer website.)

The participants were interviewed before and after the deliberative poll to see how their opinions regarding US policy towards Iraq had changed. Brady summarized the results: "We found that the people who participated were much more likely to decide that we had to go into Iraq multi-laterally; that we had to work with international institutions more, and that we had to have very good reasons for going in. We had to have evidence that Iraq really did have weapons of mass destruction." In short, the poll revealed that the participants became much more cautious, and at the same time, they became much more concerned about US military action in Iraq.

Brady played a central role in ensuring that the deliberative opinion poll was as fair as possible. Staff from the Survey Research Center conducted the initial interviews to select a random pool of participants to represent the American public. The experts with whom the participants consulted represented a wide spectrum of current American political ideology and included people from the Council on Foreign Relations, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, the Aspen Institute, Peace Action, and the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Professional moderators facilitated the sessions to ensure that everyone felt free to become involved in the conversations and to ask questions.

At the end of the event, participants asked questions of Richard Haass, director of policy planning at the State Department who represented the current Bush administration and of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who represented the Democratic Party viewpoint and who was the National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter.

To Brady, a high point of the event came when one of the participants in the deliberative poll asked Brzezinski "whether foreign policy has become so specialized and so complex that it is impossible for average citizens to have informed opinions about foreign policy." Brzezinski replied "I probably would have said yes, but my experience this morning makes me think otherwise. I was told—I hope that's true—that you are really a cross-section of the American public. If you are, you're damn good." For Brady, the reply showed that the deliberative opinion poll could bring together ordinary people, a cross section of America, to discuss complex issues and arrive at questions so insightful as to impress a former national security advisor.

It is telling that Henry Brady found so rewarding Brzezinski's remark about analytic abilities of ordinary Americans. It reveals Brady's conviction in the power of social science to make issues clear. It also reveals Brady's belief in the potential of the American citizenry to make their country, and the world, a better place.