This is the tiny rocking chair in which Jane Addams learned to read as a little girl, encouraged by her father, John (“double-D”) Addams, who served in the Illinois State Legislature with Abraham Lincoln.

Zoom out to Jane Addams’ bedroom, decorated with a painted portrait of Tolstoy and wallpaper in the William Morris style. That room is at the head of the stairs in the gracious Italianate Victorian building known as Hull-House where Addams lived for many years.

Zoom further out to the neighborhood where once the Hull-House Settlement, a whole complex of public buildings around green courtyards, once served its neighborhood of tenement houses, factories, and outdoor food markets. “Served” is not really the right word, because the neighbors co-created Hull-House and all of its programs with Addams. Their neighborhood was flattened–quite literally–in the 1960s to make room for the spare modernist blocks of the University of Illonois at Chicago.

Addams always kept her distance from universities. It is an irony that UIC was built on the bulldozed buildings of Hull-House, after the latter had taken its unseccessful fight to survive all the way to the US Supreme Court. But today UIC is a diverse, engaged, urban research university–not much like the University of Chicago from which Addams kept a critical distance. So perhaps the irony is not so painful.

Zoom further out to follow my taxi en route from Addams’ house to Midway Airport. Soon we pass the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center, built with beds for 500 although it often houses 800 young people amid rampant vermin and loose ceiling tiles that can be used as missiles.

We cross a vibrant Mexican-American shopping street, each storefront brightly decorated, and then return to quiet working-class districts of brick homes. Next comes the Cook County Jail, set on 96 acres of city land, housing 9,800 inmates and employing more than 10,000 people, ringed by double coils of concertina wire. Family members wait in line by the maximum security wing.

And then vast industrial lots near the railway yards–historic sources of Chicago’s wealth and its solid jobs. The lots are still huge and busy, but now machines handle the containers and move the heaps of gravel. Hardly a human being is visible for blocks at a time, although I spot a fat black cat hunting in the tall weeds.

(Posted at Logan en route to Chicago) Here I am addressing the question of whether parents or schools have the right to influence kids politically–a classic issue in political theory. I suggest that empirical research is relevant as well:

After the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, which gave corporations unlimited rights to spend money to influence elections, I am leaning in favor of a constitutional amendment to permit the regulation of campaign finances. The need will be even more pressing if the Court overturns Arizona’s system of public funding for candidates, as appears likely.

But it will not be easy to get the amendment right (even imagining that it can pass). Although spending should not be equated with free speech, regulating campaign spending does raise genuine First Amendment issues. Unchecked by courts, Congress could deliberately set the spending limit so low that incumbents would be safe. Or worse, it could ban some groups from spending while setting no limits on others. That is why the Supreme Court should have approved reasonable campaign finance laws (applying First Amendment scrutiny) and allowed us to leave the Constitution alone.

If we must amend the Constitution, I’m not sure I favor the leading proposal, which says: “Congress shall have power to set limits on the amount of contributions that may be accepted by, and the amount of expenditures that may be made by, in support of, or in opposition to, a candidate for nomination for election to, or for election to, Federal office.” (It also grants similar powers to state legislatures and gives Congress the right to enforce the limits.)

Would this text allow Congress to set a spending limit of $1 and prohibit any advertising? (Given incumbents’ ability to send free mailings and obtain free news coverage, they have incentives to set low limits.) Would this text permit Congress to ban newspapers from running articles “in support of” candidates? Perhaps a court would balance the new amendment with the First Amendment, but I am not sure that the plain text cited above would allow such balancing.

I lack the expertise and experience to write a better amendment, but I think it would have to invoke such principles as fairness to challengers and reasonable access to communications media, so that courts could strike down inappropriate limits. Ultimately, I am less enthusiastic about limits than about public funding for campaigns–which is fully constitutional until the Supreme Court says otherwise.

This chart from Alan I. Abramowitz, The Disappearing Center (Yale, 2010) deserves attention:

Turnout has risen for people who strongly identify with parties and has fallen for those who do not. Or … people who vote have become more attached to parties, while people who don’t vote have moved into the Independent column. Or some of both. As a result, an Independent is likely to be a non-voter and a voter is likely to be a partisan. This was far from true in the 1950s. I am not sure whether the trend is good or bad, but it is an important explanation of politics today.

(All the turnout rates shown above are exaggerated because of social desirability bias, but the relationships among partisanship, year, and likelihood of voting should be valid).

The Minority Leader with Tufts Trustee Alan Solomont at Tufts. She is pointing out that the hands on the cover of my book The Future of Democracy are of many colors.