Author Archives: Peter

About Peter

Associate Dean for Faculty and the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Tufts University's Tisch College of Civic Life. Concerned about civic education, civic engagement, and democratic reform in the United States and elsewhere.

three ways of thinking about fluctuations in polls

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With the national presidential polls suddenly looking very tight, here are three ways of looking at the state of the election.

  1. An election is like a race. As in a race, the contenders stand in some relation to each other at any given moment. They can increase or reduce their speeds, but it’s an advantage to be in front, and more so as time passes. If an election is like a race, then it becomes increasingly important who’s ahead as the finish line approaches. A race course may have features that favor one or the other contender at a given moment. For instance, each presidential candidate gets a burst of speed after her or his convention, and a debate offers a chance for one of them to speed up or stumble, but the last stretch will be pretty level and even. In that case, it is bad news for Clinton that her lead had dissipated as we’ve moved through September. Much depends on whether that trend continues or reverses in the next few weeks, because by mid-October, a candidate who trails has little time to make up the gap. (That conclusion follows from the race metaphor.) It supports the idea that Trump has as much as a 40% chance of winning.
  2. An election is an event that occurs at one moment (although kind of a stretched-out moment nowadays, thanks to early voting). Polls ask people how they will vote once the big moment comes. It’s not clear when our predictions are most accurate, and accuracy may not necessarily increase over time. Instead, we might think of each of the many hundreds of polls taken so far as a measure of how the public will vote once the actual election comes. The best estimate, from this Bayesian perspective, averages all the polls taken so far. It does so not only to maximize the sample size but also to negate the random variations in competitors’ standing due to recent events. As Sam Wang says, “I still expect Clinton’s lead to increase again, on the grounds that she has led all year. Previously, I noted that the national Clinton-vs.-Trump margin in 2016 has averaged 4.5 percentage points. The standard deviation is 2.2 points, comparable to the four Presidential elections from 2004 to 2012. … Today, conditions seem right for regression to the mean.'” There is no such thing as regression to the mean in a race, where the leader accumulates an increasing chance of winning. But this second way of thinking about the election avoids the race analogy. Wang‘s own Bayesian prediction is a little more complicated, but it gives Trump only a 14% chance of winning.
  3. An election is an event that will happen at one moment in the future, and each poll is a prediction of what will happen when that moment comes–but the sample that responds to pollsters varies depending on recent events. Democrats, for instance, may have become marginally less likely to answer surveys in the last two weeks because of some generalized discouragement–or Republicans who were going to vote for Trump all along may have become more willing to answer the pollsters’ calls. If this theory applies, I think we should act as Wang recommends, because we should treat the variations in response rates as pretty random. But we might view the real vote as similar to a single poll and ask whether the experience of actually voting will encourage or discourage the people who have been favorable to Clinton or to Trump all along. We cannot tell the answer to that question from poll data, but we might propose reasonable hypotheses about it.

Since I don’t know which of these theories is true, I’m inclined to estimate the odds of a Clinton win somewhere between the Bayesian estimate (86% or so) and the horse race estimate of only about 60%.

how schools teach about political parties

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According to a new paper released today by CIRCLE:

  • Forty-three states require students to learn about political parties; however, the language in the standards nearly always promotes a simplistic understanding of the role that political parties play in a democracy.
  • Only eight states ask students to study the ideological underpinnings of the two major political parties.
  • Only 10 states ask students to study controversial political issues and their relationship to political parties.
  • There is very limited support for learning about political ideology. When states do include language about ideology, it is most commonly mentioned in history/social studies standards and very rarely linked to contemporary political parties.

“This generation has grown up in a vitriolic and polarized political climate. In order to sort through the noise, young people need to have a deep understanding of the ideological values that divide us and how those values do, and do not, map onto political parties,” reports Paula McAvoy, lead author of the study and program director for the Center for Ethics and Education at UW-Madison, who completed this study with Rebecca Fine and Ann Herrera Ward.  “Our team’s findings show that state standards stop short of asking students to make meaningful connections between partisanship, ideology, and the issues of the day.  If schools are to fulfill their mission of preparing young people for political participation, teachers need to be encouraged to bring these ideas into the classroom.”

“Understanding what major political parties are and what they stand for is essential in navigating politics and elections in the U.S., but very little support exists.  These findings emphasize the need to strengthen standards and support teachers in U.S. civic education,” said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, Director of CIRCLE. “Encouraging this type of learning about politics, elections and voting is a major reason why we are collaborating with other organizations to support teachers during this election year via the Teaching for Democracy Alliance.” For more on this Alliance see here.

For CIRCLE’s full briefing, please see here or the interactive map here. More research and background on youth civic education can be found on CIRCLE’s Quick Facts on Civic Education page.

CIRCLE’s 2016 Election Center will continue to offer data products and analyses providing a comprehensive picture of the youth vote, including the Youth Electoral Significance Index, which offers insight into key states where young people have the potential to shape the 2016 general election.

credentials for specific skills and their implications for liberal education

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Potential employers of young workers tend to value degrees (high school and college), courses, majors and grades, and previous jobs. Those are all experiences that a person completes, rather than direct evidence of one’s capacity to do a given task. In a tight market, employers can raise the bar, so that–for example–65% of new openings for executive assistants and executive secretaries now require a BA, even though only 19% of the people who now hold such jobs have college degrees. This is bad news for the two-thirds of young people who have not attained at least a bachelors degree. It’s also a potential loss for employers, who may be missing the people who would do the best work although they haven’t accumulated the most highly-valued experiences. One widely promoted solution–getting everyone through college–seems both unrealistic and needlessly expensive.

Why do employers use college degrees and other major experiences to select employees? I would propose these explanations:

  1. Employers are actually looking for concrete skills, such as the ability to write a coherent memo or schedule a meeting. In the absence of direct measures of such skills, they use college completion as a rough proxy. That is unfortunate because it isn’t a precise measure, it can discriminate on the basis of social class, and it drives colleges and universities to advertise highly concrete skills as their outcomes even though that distorts their real educational mission.
  2. Employers have a more general theory of “merit,” which may encompass broad literacy and numeracy, self-discipline, social skills, critical thinking, etc. Employers may feel, furthermore, that the competition to enter and then complete a selective college is a measure of such merit. They need not believe that merit is innate to use it as a selection criterion. Success in school could result from investments in the home, community, school, and college, and still be an indicator of value for an enterprise. The content of the education may be fairly unimportant to the employers; the point is that school/college is a difficult competition, and those who get through it are more likely to contribute to their enterprise. By the way, if this theory applies, then getting everyone through college would only raise the goalposts; employers would start looking for graduate degrees. The idea of general “merit,” however, is highly problematic–not only morally, but also because completing a fancy college may not show that you are well suited to a particular job. Once again, the most truly qualified candidates may be left aside, which is waste of human potential as well as an injustice.
  3. Employers may value the goods that liberal education explicitly promises: genuinely critical thinking, reflection on the good life, sensitivity to culture, truth about nature and humankind, etc. This explanation may apply in a few workplaces, but I must say I am cynical about it. Most organizations have fixed ends or objectives and are really only interested in critical reflection about means (if they’re open to criticism at all). But the heart of a liberal education is critical reflection about ends: about the nature of a good life and a good society. Starting with Socrates, some have concluded that if you are seriously critical of ends, then you must be independent of institutions, although that might make you a poor employee in most organizations. In the classic text that first defined “the liberal arts,” Seneca wrote, “I respect no study, and deem no study good, which results in money-making.” To be sure, Seneca was a slave-owning aristocrat who had plenty of money to start with. One can find a compromise between the highest goals of a liberal education and the need to put food on the table. But the two objectives at least seem in tension.
  4. A variant of the previous theory is that employers seek a certain kind of cultural capital that results from a liberal education. When they choose employees from colleges like the ones they attended, it’s not because they prefer radical thinkers. It’s because they want to work with people who know and appreciate the same body of culture. This variant of the theory requires less idealistic assumptions than #3, but I still doubt that it applies in most organizations (other than small white-collar enterprises).

To the extent that the first theory applies, it would make sense to measure a diversity of concrete skills, one at a time, and provide portable certificates for individuals who can demonstrate them. That would allow people who demonstrate a given skill to win relevant jobs even though they may not be on a path to college. It would allow employers to choose more appropriate workers, and perhaps with less invidious bias. It would allow colleges that actually teach specific skills to gain credit for doing so. It would make space for organizations like my own to certify concrete political and civic skills that might lead to jobs or leadership roles. At the same time, it would relieve colleges from having to sell their bachelors degrees as indicators of concrete skills. Instead, they could offer genuine liberal education.

I acknowledge the risk. If prospective students only care about jobs, or are forced by economic circumstances to put employment first, and if employers only care about concrete job skills, then organizations that teach and certify job skills could put the liberal arts (k-16) out of business. But I think that maybe the liberal arts would be better off claiming that they enhance the soul and the community, instead of living off an inefficiency in the labor market.

See also: Bourdieu in the college admissions office; games, digital badges, and alternative assessments in civics; the controversy over badges.

two kinds of populism

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Last May, at a campaign rally, Donald Trump said, “the only important thing is the unification of the people – because the other people don’t mean anything.” Jan-Werner Müller quotes that phrase both in his book What is Populism? and in a useful summary article that he wrote for The Guardian. Müller defines “populism” so that it describes Trump, Hungry’s Viktor Orbán, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Britain’s Nigel Farage, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but not Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn. The difference isn’t their placement on a left-right spectrum but their attitude toward diversity. In his book (p. 101), Müller writes:

Not everyone who criticizes elites is a populist. In addition to being antielitist, populists are antipluralist. They claim that they and they alone represent the people. All other political competitors are essentially illegitimate, and anyone who does not support them is not properly part of the people. When in opposition, populists will necessarily insist that elites are immoral, whereas the people are a moral, homogeneous entity whose will cannot err.

Müller thinks that populists despise actual participation because the bestpolicy can already be deduced from a correct understanding of “the people.” If populists support referenda, it’s only because they expect their view to win. When they lose elections, they are prone to declare them illegitimate. Their fundamental stance is inconsistent with immigration and an independent civil society, both of which threaten an imagined uniformity of identity and beliefs.

The results are very dangerous (p. 102):

Populists can govern, and they are likely to do so in line with the idea that only they represent the idea of the people. Concretely, they will engage in occupying the state, mass clientelism and corruption, and the suppression of anything like a critical civil society. These practices find an explicit moral justification in the populist political imagination and hence can be avowed openly.

Note that Müller’s account avoids attributing views to populists that they would dispute. It doesn’t assume, for instance, that Trump is a representative of “deplorables,” defined by their racism and sexism. It takes his explicit views at face value and explains their dangerous implications.

That said, “populism” can have a different meaning. It can be explicitly and fundamentally pluralist. In her recent book Populism’s Power: Radical Grassroots Democracy in America, Laura Grattan writes:

Radical democratic actors, from grassroots revolutionaries, to insurgent farmers and laborers, to agitators for the New Deal, Civil Rights, and the New Left, have historically drawn on the language and practices of populism. In doing so, they have cultivated peoples’ rebellious aspirations not just to resist power, but to share in power, and to do so in pluralistic, egalitarian ways across social and geographic borders.

In the examples that Grattan explores, populists who celebrate “the people” (in contrast to corrupt elites) do not merely tolerate diversity or accommodate themselves to it. They are actively enthusiastic about pluralism, inventing “alternative” spaces and styles of engagement, inviting disparate actors to join in their festivals and parades, emphasizing freedom of speech and assembly as core values, and usually preferring to retain some distance from the state. In fact, one of their political liabilities is their tendency to splinter because they fear uniformity.

In the US context, being populist in that sense requires a concern for racial and ethnic inclusion. However, traditions of pluralist populism go back to Old World countries that were more ethnically homogeneous. Mikhail Bakhtin recovered the medieval spirit of carnivals, of special feast days, and of places set aside to be fairs. In the carnival, all social strata, deviant groups, odd individuals, and exaggerated behaviors were welcomed and expected to mix on terms of equality. The spirit of carnival was populist in the sense that it encompassed the whole people and undermined hierarchies and distinctions, but at the same time it celebrated differences, novelties, and creativity. It was part of what Grattan calls “the language and practices of populism.”

The carnival was a world apart. It didn’t reliably improve the everyday world of authority and control except by giving people circumscribed times and places in which to escape and create ephemera together. Democratic revolutions drew on the carnival tradition, but not in sustained or satisfactory ways. I think that countering Trumpian populism requires liberal norms: limited government and individual rights guaranteed by written laws and independent courts. These protections are necessary but not very vibrant and participatory. We also need a dose of pluralist, carnivalesque populism to answer the grim version on offer from men like Donald Trump.

Here is Grattan’s talk at this year’s Frontiers of Democracy Conference.

See also: is Trumpism akin to the European right?; the word “populism”; why the white working class must organize; Gerald Taylor on property, populism, and democracy; against a cerebral view of citizenship; St. Margaret of Cortona and medieval populism; and a darker As You Like It.

join us at the National Conference on Citizenship, Oct 13-14

The National Conference on Citizenship is always an important gathering of Americans who strive to improve our nation’s civic life. This year, the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University is an equal partner in sponsoring and planning the conference. It will be highly interactive and will focus on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I urge allies and colleagues to join us there. The official invitation follows:

Are you concerned about civic life in America?  Are you frustrated by fractured communities, divisive politics, and processes that exclude many of our people?  Do you feel we can do better?  Do you have solutions you want to share with others?

Then join fellow citizens, government leaders, and innovative entrepreneurs who are working to design and support engaged and resilient communities at the 2016 Annual Conference on Citizenship in Washington, DC.

The 2016 conference is Co-hosted by the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University and will specifically focus on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in civic life. Unless we make progress on these issues, we cannot move our country forward. 

Click here to view the agenda at-a-glance.

The 2016 conference will be highly interactive. Participants will help shape the agenda for civic renewal in America and will leave with contacts and practical ideas to strengthen their own work. There will be opportunities to address unresolved and contested issues in civic life.

The National Conference on Citizenship draws practitioners in fields like; democracy and political participation, service, civic education, community development, community organizing, public deliberation, health and wellness, youth development and workforce development, public arts and humanities, collaborative governance and work with government agencies, civic technology, and social entrepreneurship, and people from other fields interested in improving America’s civic life.

Please join us for this important convening and invite other colleagues whose voices need to be heard. Register today!