How To Influence U.S. Arts Policy

We often write about musician-related politics and legislation here on MW, but one thing we haven’t done is tell you how you can get involved with influencing arts policy in the United States.

Contact your representatives

The first way to get involved is to contact the elected official that represents you. There is a great list of links at usa.gov that I have copied here. From this list you should be able to find every one of your state and federal representatives.

• President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden – Send questions, comments, concerns, or well-wishes to the President or his staff.
• U.S. Senators – Search for your senators by name, state, or congressional class; and visit their websites.
• U.S. Representatives – Find contact information for your U.S. representative by typing in your zip code.
• State Governors – Select your state to access e-mail, telephone, and postal contact information for your governor.
• State Legislators – Search for state legislators and topical legislative information, by U.S. states and territories.

The 3 most effective ways to contact your representatives are a personal visit, a hand-written letter or a phone call. An email is another great way to contact your representatives, and yes, yes, yes, everyone should email their representatives. But we all know how easily emails are ignored – especially form emails – and you will be more effective if your representatives know their constituent has taken time out of his or her day to contact them with a visit, a letter or a phone call.  Certainly, an email is better than nothing, and if you are short on time, the very minimum you should do is send your representative a form email.

More recently, President Obama has begun leveraging web 2.0 technologies to help citizens contact his administration. Blogs, comments, videos, informal polls, and other techniques that have become commonplace on Facebook are starting to show up at the government level, especially on Barack Obama’s own website. It’s likely that this use of technology will continue to grow at the governmental level (see: SenateHub, the U.S. Senate’s new YouTube channel), which may improve transparency and communication between the government and it’s people. But with hundreds and hundreds of comments added to each blog post on BarackObama.com, you are more likely to get your message across with a call to your elected officials.

Every contact you make with your government makes a difference. Even on the most divisive subjects, many elected officials receive very little daily feedback from their constituents. Just a few phone calls or letters can make a big difference come voting time.

Keep up with arts-related news

Voting records are made public and if you are not happy with a vote your representative made, you should by all means call them and remind them that they are expected to answer to their constituents. A great website that lists all voting records in a logical and thorough way is VoteSmart.org. Visit the Voting Records area of their website to look up your representatives records.

One of the best places for musicians to find arts-specific information on policy and government is the website of the Americans for the Arts at artsusa.org.  This is a super-website that contains information on arts-based legislation, research, advocacy and how to contact our representatives.  The website even gives you the ability to search your area for the local media outlets, in the event that you’d like to contact them as well.  I can not recommend this site enough.  You can even subscribe to the RSS feed for their arts advocacy news and keep up with legislation and policies that directly impact our industry and careers.

Vote for elected officials that vote for the arts

Being a citizen advocate for the arts can start well before arts-related legislation incites you to call to your representative.  When you go into the voting booth to vote for your local, state or federal representatives, make sure that you know where they stand on the arts.

Americans for the Arts runs a very effective organization called the Arts Action Fund, which tracks voting records of congressional representatives and secures written arts policies from political candidates.  They recently released the Congressional Arts Report Card (note: links to PDF file), which details all of the arts-related legislation voted on in the 110th congress (2007-2008) and how each house and senate member voted.  Look up your state and see how well your representatives did.

Stay informed

That worst thing that we can do as members of the arts industry is to hide our heads in the sand and hope things turn out right on their own.  Historically, support for the arts has often come up against opposition by other interest groups and even representatives themselves.  A belief that art is optional, that art education is a luxury, that art funding is superfluous (at best) or immoral (at worst), pressure to block certain art from being made, ineffective copywrite law, an emphasis on business and defense spending to the exclusion of “culture spending” – the United States arts industry must always be active in government – if not to be supported as we hope to be, then at least to be left alone.

Put another way, our democracy will always have room for differing opinion and discussion on the arts, but if we allow the discussion to carry on without us, we may be very disappointed in the end result.  As artists, it’s our responsibility to make sure our views and opinions are always represented.

The methods listed here for getting involved in politics are nothing new, but can’t be overlooked.  The best way to make sure pro-musician legislation is a part of the U.S. government is to remain both informed and politically active.  If there is an issue that impacts your life or career – call your representatives!