In health, we’ve seen an influential and valuable shift to Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER): measuring which of the available drugs or other interventions works best for specific purposes, in specific circumstances. Why not do the same for democracy? Why not test which approaches to strengthening democracy work best?

My colleagues and I played a leading role in developing the “Six Promising Practices” for civic education. These are really pedagogies, such as discussing current, controversial issues in classrooms or encouraging youth-led voluntary groups in a schools. Since then, we have been recommending even more pedagogies, such as Action Civics, news media literacy, and school climate reform. I am often asked which of these practices or combinations of practices works best for various populations, in various contexts, for various outcomes. This question has not really been studied. There is no CER for civics.

Likewise, in 2005, John Gastil and I published The Deliberative Democracy Handbook. Each chapter describes a different model for deliberative forums or processes in communities. The processes vary in whether participants are randomly selected or not, whether they meet face-to-face or online, whether the discussions are small or large, etc. Again, I am asked which deliberative model works best for various populations, in various contexts, for various outcomes. There is some relevant research, but no large research enterprise devoted to finding out which deliberative formats work best.

Some other fields of democratic practice have benefitted from comparative research. In the 2000’s, The Pew Charitable Trusts funded a large body of randomized experiments to explore which methods of campaign outreach were most cost-effective for turning out young people to vote. Don Green (now at Columbia) was an intellectual force behind this work: one motivation for him was to make political science a more experimental discipline. CIRCLE was involved; we organized some of the studies and published this guide to disseminate the findings. Our goal was to increase the impact of youth on politics.

Our National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NLSVE) is a database of voting records for 9,784,931 students at 1,023 colleges and universities. With an “n” that large, it’s possible to model the outcome (voter turnout) as a function of a set of inputs and investigate which ones work best. That is a technique for estimating the results that would arise from a whole body of experiments. We also provide each participating campus with a customized report about its own students that can provide the data for the institution to conduct its own experiments.

So why do some fields of democratic practice prompt research into what works, and others don’t?

A major issue is practical. The experiments on voter turnout and our NSLVE college study have the advantage that the government already tallies the votes. Given a hard outcome that is already measured at the scale of millions, it’s possible to vary inputs and learn a great deal about what works.

To be sure, people and community contexts are heterogeneous, and voter outreach can vary in many respects at once (mode, messenger, message, purpose). Thus a large body of experiments was necessary to produce insights about turnout methods. However, we learned that grassroots mobilization is cost-effective, that the message usually matters less than the mode, and that interactive contacts are more efficient than one-way outreach. We believe that these findings influenced campaigns, including the Obama ’08 primary campaign, to invest more in youth outreach.

Similarly, colleges vary in their populations, settings, resources, missions, and structures, but NSLVE is yielding general lessons about what tends to work to engage students in politics.

Other kinds of outcomes may be harder to measure and yet can still be measured at scale. For example, whether kids know geometry is hard to measure–it can’t be captured by a single test question–but society invests in designing reliable geometry tests that yield an aggregate score for each child. So one could conduct Comparative Effectiveness Research on math education. The fact that mastering geometry is a subtler and more complex outcome than voting does not preclude this approach.

But it does take a social investment to collect lots of geometry test data. For years, I have served on the committee that designs the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) in civics. NAEP scores are valuable measures of certain kinds of civic knowledge–and teaching civics is a democratic practice. But the NAEP civics assessment doesn’t receive enough funding from the federal government to have samples that are reliable at the state or local level, nor is it conducted annually. This is a case where the tool exists, but the investment would have to be much larger to permit really satisfactory CER. It is not self-evident that the best way to spend limited resources would be to collect sufficient data for this purpose.

Other kinds of outcomes–such as the quality of discourse in a community–may be even more expensive and difficult to measure at scale. You can conduct concrete experiments in which you randomly vary the inputs and then directly measure the outcomes by surveying the participants. But you can only vary one (or a few) factors at a time in a controlled experiment. That means that a large and expensive body of research is required to yield general findings about what works, in which contexts, for whom.

The good news is that studying which discrete, controllable factors affect outcomes is only one way to use research to improve practice. It is useful approach, but it is hardly sufficient, and sometimes it is not realistic. After all, outcomes are also deeply affected by:

• The motivations, commitment, and incentives of the organizers and the participants;
• How surrounding institutions and communities treat the intervention;
• Human capital (who is involved and how well they are prepared);
• Social capital (how the various participants relate to each other); and
• Cultural norms, meanings, and expectations.

These factors are not as amenable to randomized studies or other forms of CER.  But they can be addressed. We can work to motivate, prepare, and connect people, to build support from outside, and to adjust norms. Research can help. It just isn’t research that resembles CER.

Democratic practices are not like pills that can be proven to work better than alternatives, mass produced, and then prescribed under specified conditions. Even in medicine, motivations and contexts matter, but those factors are even more important for human interactions. It’s worth trying to vary aspects of an intervention to see how such differences affect the results. I’m grateful to have been involved in ambitious projects of that nature. But whether to invest in CER is a judgment call that depends on practical issues like the availability of free data. Research on specific interventions is never sufficient, and sometimes it isn’t the best use of resources.

Let’s say that modernity has the following features, which tend to arise together fairly rapidly because they are causally linked. Their arrival is the process of modernization:

1. Instead of using a small number of traditional tools to affect nature and other people, we begin investing substantial resources in a continuous process of inventing and improving tools.
2. Traditional values–moral, spiritual, and aesthetic–are subject to doubt. One response is a fragile conservatism about the inherited values. Another is heroic creativity: making up new values. Another is imitation: self-consciously replicating values from the past or from other places. A fourth is nihilism: losing commitment to values in general.
3. Instead of assuming that roles (responsibilities and powers) derive from individuals’ social status, which people typically inherit, we view roles as the result of contracts, which can be renegotiated.
4. We become increasingly skillful at choosing efficient and effective means to a given end, but less confident about being able to choose good ends. Many people become relativists or subjectivists, assuming that ends are simply what individuals happen to want.
5. In addition to relating directly to people whom we know, we have frequent and important interactions with strangers, often via abstract media such as money or written orders.
6. People become increasingly fungible, not only in market systems but also in organizations of all kinds.
7. Social roles constantly differentiate and specialize; and complex systems develop to train, evaluate, and coordinate specialists. Many of the specialists work on inventing or improving the systems for coordinating people like themselves.

I see modernization as momentous. That sometimes makes me dissent from widely-held opinions:

1. I disagree that we are living in a time of especially rapid change, at least in the OECD countries. The really big shift occurred during modernization, which had happened in countries like the USA by 1910. Constant novelty still arises as a result of #1, #2 and #7 (above), but new tools and fashions are superficial developments compared to the wrenching shift from pre-modernity to modernity.
2. I often disagree that capitalism is the underlying cause of social problems. For one thing, the same problems occur under state socialism. If “capitalism” meant free markets, it would be something quite different from socialism. But capitalism is mainly a system in which large organizations–firms and governmental agencies–employ and coordinate specialized workers. That is a feature of modernity, not specific to market systems.
3. I have doubts about the term “postmodern.” Most of the moves made by postmodern thinkers were well known to Nietzsche and others in 1890. To be sure, the heroic, create-new-values strand of modernity was especially dominant ca. 1900-1960, and the skeptical, doubt-all-grand-narratives strand has been more prevalent since then; but both were available as soon as modernity arose.
4. I am less impressed by cultural differences across space–but more struck by changes over time–than many people seem to be. I start with the assumption that life in France and in China ca. 1500 was pretty similar, as is life in Paris and Beijing today. The big difference is before and after modernity in each country.
5. I interpret imperialism a bit differently from many people. I have no doubt that it has been exploitative, cruel, and traumatic. But I don’t see it as the imposition of “Western” culture on “non-Western” societies as much as a phenomenon of modernization. To be sure, it was much worse to be on the receiving end of colonialism and to have modernity thrust on you at gunpoint, rather than to profit as an agent of modernization. But the imperialist countries typically shed their traditional cultures by modernizing while they exerted power abroad. Today, people all over the world are just as authentically “modern” as Europeans are, and global modernity contrasts with European traditions as much as with other traditions.

Modernity is neither good nor bad; it is liberating and traumatic. It isn’t recent–we’ve had a century of it already. But it is a change compared to two centuries ago, and therefore older social theories don’t apply without serious modification.

See also: Dubai, Uganda, and today’s global political economy;  the rise of an expert class and its implications for democracy; on modernity and the distinction between East and West; Lifeworld and System: a primer; two cheers for the West; and postcolonial reaction