| Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash
Part VI of the “Pocketbook Politics” Series
Academicians have studied “Pocket Politics.” As stated in Part I, this series was inspired by studies in the 1990s in Sweden about the country’s “pocketbook voting.”
There are already books and essays about “Pocketbook Politics” and related topics. Among them is an essay on The Moral Economy of Shopping, which discusses the following publications:
1. ELIZABETH COHEN, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Knopf, 2003.
2. MEG JACOBS, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, NJ and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press, 2005.
3. HELEN TANGIRES, Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
4, SHARON ZUKIN, Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 2004.
For more details, interested readers can click on this link.
Meredith Rovine of the University of Pennsylvania reported, “New study challenges the conventional wisdom that Americans are ‘pocketbook voters.'” The study was conducted by Diana Mutz, Samuel A. Stouffer, Professor of Political Science and Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, and Edward Mansfield, Hum Rosen Professor of Political Science in the School of Arts & Sciences.
“It is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and demonstrates why the role of the economy is easily misinterpreted in research on American elections.
“Journalists frequently assert that Americans are ‘pocketbook voters,’ relying on their economic self-interest in making voting decisions,” said study co-authors Mutz and Stouffer.
However, to this journalist’s limited knowledge, it is the first time a writer presents how a political party can theoretically motivate their paying members to form cooperatives (co-ops) as an exercise of “Pocketbook Politics.” The co-ops can be organized among the political party’s state and local sub-chapters. The political party’s national headquarters can invest at least a third of its annual fundraising total to purchase more shares in all the state-chapter co-ops.
In the 2024 presidential election, the Democratic Party’s Harris-Walz slate raised more than $1.7 billion. Therefore, all interested political party members become shareholders and real decision-makers of the party’s finances and future earnings from investments in back-to-basics businesses.
An American formal social experiment on “Pocketbook Politics” can be replicated in the Philippines, a former American colony. According to this columnist’s educated guess, the United States turned over local governance in the mid-1930s to a “Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands” patterned probably after the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Some Americans fondly consider the Philippines the United States’ “Unofficial 51st State.” Perhaps the twin elections can validate this columnist’s and some of his Facebook friends’ belief that suffrage can best be exercised if voters become stakeholders of cooperatives organized purposely to push “Pocketbook Politics.” In this scenario, political primary elections and caucuses are determined by the state-by-state conventions of co-op members.
The United States and the Philippines will hold presidential elections in November and May 2028, respectively.
Suppose Gov. Andy Beshear is genuinely interested in pushing “Pocketbook Politics,” starting in the Bluegrass State. In that case, he may motivate the University of Kentucky to form a Think Tank to study the mechanics of creating a national organization.
In the meantime, the “Pocketbook Politics” Facebook Group can form what this columnist calls for a better name, a “Common Sense Think Tank.” It may specialize in proposing to the people of the Philippines to adopt “Pocketbook Politics” as the ultimate remedy for the scandalous vote-buying practice of vested interests in controlling national and local elections. This journalist is one of the few Filipino writers, if not the first, to call the controlling vested interest “The Imperial Manila” (TIM). “Uncle TIM” replaced the American “Uncle Sam” as the colonial power in the Philippine archipelago.
