Tonight, I attended the 2004 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Public Lecture by Wisconsin political scientist Virginia Sapiro; her topic was, “What Does Civility Have To Do With Politics?” It was a rather wide-ranging talk that engendered a pretty good discussion from the audience, and not one that is easily summarized—particularly by someone who wasn’t taking notes. She came at the question from the perspective of the impact of politics on norms of civility rather than (as you might expect) the impact of the norms of civility on political discourse.

I did ask Dr. Sapiro her thoughts on reconciling our empirical knowledge that people learn more from negative campaigning with calls for civility, like the “I approve this message” requirement in McCain-Feingold, and she pointed out that it is possible to have a civil campaign that nonetheless compares candidates’ positions. I wonder about the relative effectiveness of that approach versus the more classic “incivil” negative campaign—do voters learn as effectively from “civil” ads—and whether civility is really more in the eyes of the beholder. Ads like the infamous mushroom cloud from 1964 or Willie Horton in 1988 probably weren’t considered uncivil by the campaigns (or, in the case of Horton, nominally unaffiliated groups) that produced them, but Barry Goldwater and Mike Dukakis probably didn’t agree with that assessment. Definitely plenty of food for thought.