Anonymity and Democratic Citizenship

INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM OF ANONYMOUS PARTICIPATION IN DEMOCRATIC PROCESSES Around this time of year - the fall of an election campaign - if you google my name, here is what you typically will find. The first entry about me is usually my faculty web page. I like that. My professional identity has a lot to do with how I think of myself, and it certainly is the main reference point for my activities in the public sphere. It is an identity that I actively manage and can control to some degree, and it makes sense that this should be the first piece of information someone would find about me when searching a publicly available resource. If you scroll down a little further on the first page of search results, however, you are likely to find a link to The Huffington Post. This link will not take you to any material by or about me in the content of The Huffington Post itself, in whose pages I doubt my name has ever appeared. Instead, it will take you to a page created by The Huffington Post that instantaneously culls from Federal Election Commission disclosure information all financial contributions I have recently made to candidates for federal office, along with a map showing the location of my home. I don't like that at all. First, it' s creepy, and a little frightening - what if some nutty supporter ofthe opponent of a candidate to whom I contributed decides to retaliate? This site literally furnishes a road map. Still, that possibility is so remote that I don't give it any thought. What does bother me, however, is the much likelier prospect that my students, looking casually for information about me in a moment of boredom, are directed almost immediately to an aspect of my political life that I would rather they not know, or at least that I wish they had to work much harder to learn. This is because I teach Constitutional Law, a politically loaded subject in which it is very easy for students to dismiss - and therefore to fail to profit from - the teaching of professors whom they view as tainted by partisanship. I take great pains in this course to maintain an appearance of ideological and partisan neutrality, and I am convinced that it heightens my effectiveness for a very wide range of students. I try, in other words, to maintain a certain anonymity in my political life insofar as my students are concerned, even though I do not generally seek such anonymity in other domains of my life. In breaching my contextual anonymity, The Huffington Post - and indirectly the Federal Election Commission, whose resources are apparently organized in a way that makes this use possible - undermines my efforts to control the way I present myself in different domains, with potentially negative ramifications for my effectiveness in one of these domains: my life as a professional teacher of Constitutional Law. I find this mildly upsetting, but should anyone really care? Is the disclosure to my students of my political contributions in fact beneficial, and if so, to whom - to me? To my students? To the general public? Are my reservations reasonable, or unduly self-centered? Disclosure of my contributions in this format has not thus far affected my behavior. Should it? Would our political system be worse off if people in situations like mine stopped contributing to avoid disclosure, or is that precisely the decision to which citizens who wish to participate in politics ought to be put? Because Americans so often reductively equate democratic politics with voting, when we think of anonymity in democratic politics we typically think mainly ofthe secret ballot. But political participation in modern democratic life can take many forms:1 financial contributions to candidates, political parties, and advocacy groups; petition signing; political speech and debate; communication with and lobbying of officials; attending public meetings; holding office; and any of a host of other obligations of citizenship such as paying taxes, obeying the law, or performing public service or charitable work in one's community. …