An interesting NPR segment on campaign finance reform in federal elections (two years after the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Law passed) may not seem related to arts management issues. But frequent readers will anticipate what I’m going to say: it is.
The law sought to disentangle federal candidates from the ‘soft money’ that seemed to be distorting the election process. In a nutshell, it was an attempt to make a very complex system, with thousands of disconnected decision-makers, behave in a slightly different way. The NPR piece gave the legislation a generally positive review, saying that it did achieve it’s primary goals, but also suggesting that the money is slowly finding other ways into the process again.
Great, you say, a civics lesson. But here’s the bigger point: When you want to influence how part of the world works (especially when that part of the world involves lots and lots of people making individual decisions), you can either focus on changing the players, or you can work to change the game. In the case of McCain-Feingold, they could have focused all attention on the values of the candidates, provided seminars and workshops to educate them, and wagged their fingers in the air about the bad choices they all seemed to be making (which they did a bit of, to be sure). However, the focus of the intervention was to change the ‘rules of the game’, to require and encourage decisions that were closer to the world they wanted.
On average, the idea goes, people will make choices based on the rules and incentives most obvious to them at the time of their choice. We may wish that the world’s citizens took a longer view, and many do, but on average (and especially under stress), we don’t. I hear the complaint frequently in my university, for example, that students focus too much on their grades and not on learning. And yet we don’t take a moment to consider the incentive system that might lead them in that direction (just look at their course requirements and grading procedures, for example).
Arts managers are in the business of encouraging large groups of individuals (their community) to make a specific set of choices (attend, contribute, engage, support, volunteer, attend more, etc.). We’ve spent a lot of time blaming the players for their behavior (they’re not smart enough, not civic-minded enough, have short attention spans, favor flash over substance, etc.). It might be interesting, instead, to focus a part of that frustrated energy on considering the context of their choices, and the incentives, rules, and guidelines that might encourage them to choose us more often.
