Author Archives: Peter Levine

“News for a New Generation”

Susan Sherr has written an important paper by that title, which is on the CIRCLE website. She interviewed producers of newspapers, magazines, tv shows, and websites that are specifically aimed at youth. She also conducted focus groups of the youth themselves.

The producers believe that young people have very short attention spans, are easily impressed by fancy visual presentations, and are mainly interested in practical news about local issues–things that may affect them directly. One said, “So for instance while most papers might lead with something really important that happened in the UN that day, we’re more likely to focus on, you know, a rapist caught in a neighborhood where a lot of our readers live.” Another said, “like on the money page, it’s not going to be about stock, company mergers, and you know the New York Stock Exchange guy resigning, it’s going to be about how to keep a job, how to get a job, what to do if your boss is a jerk, are they reading your e-mail, things like that.”

Participants in the focus groups suggested that the producers are largely but not completely correct. The young adults claimed that they want more local news and more positive news. “I’ll pay attention more to the things that pertain to New Jersey or New York. … Anything that is global, I don’t really pay attention to, I don’t know why. If it has anything to do with the president I don’t listen to it. It just doesn’t interest me.”

However, these young people despise tricks, such as visual effects designed to exaggerate the importance of stories or “teasers” that promise a topic that is then delayed. They claim to be turned off by elaborate graphics. They have a low tolerance for statements that they believe they have heard before (for example, that the “war on terrorism” will go on for a long time).

Many of the young adults in these focus groups could not identify Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings, but they reacted extremely negatively to both men. “He looked, like, constipated all the time. He wasn’t moving his mouth, he didn’t seem like, it kind of is like when you call up and you need help and they don’t help you. And they act like they hate their job, that is what he sounded like.”

teaching the teachers

I’m just back from Washington College in Chestertown, MD (a classic liberal arts college), where I taught social studies teachers a little about liberalism and classic republicanism–a standard topic in political theory. I presented liberalism as the combination of the following five ideas:

1. “Individualism,” meaning (specifically) that each and every government institution must make every individual better off than he or she would be otherwise, or else it is oppressive.

2. Politics is a necessary evil, the price of living in a community.

3. The private realm can be clearly distinguished from the public realm, and only the latter may be regulated.

4. The state should not make people good, nor do we need good people to have a good government. A decent polity can instead be preserved through checks-and-balances and other constitutional mechanisms.

5. The government should be neutral with respect to various ways of life, unless those ways of life involve one person violating the rights of another.

Civic republicanism is then a particular criticism of liberalism that says:

1. Political communities have intrinsic value, and are not merely “cooperative venture[s] for mutual advantage? (John Rawls).

2. Politics is desirable and advantageous, because it’s the only place where people can exhibit certain excellences, such as public spiritedness, eloquence, and patriotism.

3. The so-called private realm is often a legitimate public concern. For example, the state should support educational institutions that (to some degree) shape private opinions and beliefs.

4. A good government can only exist where citizens are fairly virtuous; and promoting virtues is an appopriate role for the state.

5. The government should favor certain ways of life over others. Above all, the state should honor lives of public service and civic engagement.

Although almost everyone feels some affinity for both sets of propositions, it’s much harder to make civic republicanism plausible for an American audience than to persuade them of liberalism.

an appetite for public work?

The Washington Post interviewed some undecided voters who had watched John Kerry’s convention speech on Thursday. One viewer “said Kerry made her feel that she had a role to play as a citizen. ‘He seemed to be saying we all have to make this happen. Give me a shovel. I want to dig,’ she said. ‘With Bush, it’s like he’s going to take care of it and we’re supposed to go about our business.” Another said: “He was energizing me. I felt like I need to go out and do something for the country.”

I don’t actually see much evidence of this theme in Kerry’s speech; so far, I’m not convinced that he would substantially increase opportunities for citizens to create public goods or to protect America. However, I do find it heartening that people want those opportunities.

The public role of ordinary citizens has shrunk over the last century. This is partly because professionals and experts have taken over many traditional duties of citizens, from managing towns to setting educational policy to lobbying. (Lin Ostrom notes that four percent of American families included a member of a government legislature, council, or board in 1932, compared to roughly one percent today). At the same time, many civic functions have been privatized. For example, Americans often pay companies to provide neighborhood security or to watch their small children.

All that is left for citizens to do is to complain, vote, and volunteer. Volunteering can be valuable, but it is usually squeezed between work and family time. Moreover, conventional volunteering tends to mean direct, face-to-face service that does not change policies or institutions or grant much power to those who participate. A national survey of Americans conducted in 2002 found that many volunteered, at least occasionally, but only 20 percent of the volunteers (and 10 percent of young volunteers) described their participation as a way to address a ?social or political problem.? In a qualitative study of Minnesota citizens completed in 2000, respondents said that volunteering often consigned them ?to positions of mediocrity with the assumption that they lacke[ed] the capacity to work on big issues that impact the community.? At its best, public service is demanding, creative, responsible, serious business.

It is typical not only of the Bush administration but of modern government in general that no one could think of much for citizens to do after 9/11 other than volunteering to help neighbors; shopping to boost GNP; and possibly enlisting in the military. Our 2002 survey found that young Americans wanted to serve, but weren’t actually doing anything more than they had in 2000–probably because no one was asking them to work in demanding ways.

A president who really wanted to increase opportunities for public work could implement many concrete policies to that end. (See “Idea #4” at the end of this mini-essay, and some proposals for getting citizens involved in national security, here.)

deliberation when the stakes get high

John Gastil and I are editing a book that will be published early in 2005, probably with the title Handbook of Public Deliberation. Each chapter is written by people who organize a different form of meeting or online discussion about public issues. The authors constitute a small but impressive international community of practice.

I’ve been thinking about the future of this movement and the challenges it will face if it really gains traction. To date, most public deliberation in the US has low stakes. In some cases, there is no serious effort to change public policy to match the results of the public conversation. The goal of a meeting may be to build networks of citizens, to develop new ideas, to teach people skills and knowledge, to change attitudes–but not to influence government. In other cases, deliberation does have direct consequences for policy. For example, the budget of the District of Columbia is much influenced by the annual Citizens Summit organized by America Speaks. However, such cases arise under especially favorable circumstances, when the local political leadership is either very enlightened or has special incentives to share power with a deliberating group of citizens.

If public deliberation ever becomes a (non-partisan) political movement, then citizen deliberations will be able to achieve concrete influence even when the conditions are unfavorable. But then I think deliberation will face challenges that have not been difficult so far, because the stakes have been low.

First, who’s at the table? In a low-stakes deliberation, it’s fine to recruit volunteers, as long one aims for diversity of background and opinion. However, as soon as the stakes go up, organized interests will start to send their own foot-soldiers, armed with instructions. Interest-group politics is an acceptable and unavoidable part of democratic politics: “sewn in the nature of man,” as Madison put it. But interest groups are not evenly distributed; for instance, there are effective national groups for developers and landlords, but not for renters or the homeless. Second, some groups are not internally democratic or transparent; they don’t represent the groups in whose name they speak. And finally, because of basic collective-action problems, interest groups tend to form around narrow concerns rather than broad ones. Narrow concerns can be legitimate, but interest-group politics introduces a bias against general values.

We are used to these problems in conventional representative political institutions. Public deliberation is supposed to be an alternative. But interest groups may be at least as effective in high-stakes citizens’ deliberations as in Congress or the town council.

Proponents of random-selection use all these points in their favor. Since meetings of recruited volunteers can be stacked with committed partisans, they advocate randomly selecting citizens to participate. But random selection has its own problems. It’s expensive and practically difficult. It’s not embedded in local networks and associations, so its legitimacy may be questioned. And even in the best cases, the agenda and framing of the discussion can be biased, or perceived as biased.

Then there’s the problem of fairness and equality within a discussion. In a paper entitled “Against Deliberation” that should be read by everyone in the movement (see Political Theory, vol. 25. no. 3 [June, 1997], pp. 347-76), Lynn M. Sanders notes that ?some citizens are better than others at articulating their concerns in rational, reasonable terms.” Some are ?more learned and practiced at making arguments that would be recognized by others as reasonable ones.” Some people are simply more willing to speak; for example, studies of US juries show that men talk far more than women in deliberations.

Furthermore, some people ?are more likely to be listened to than others.” For instance, studies of US juries show that they tend to elect white males as forepersons. Studies of US college students show that white students have much more influence than Black students in joint collaborative projects, even controlling for age, socioeconomic status, height, and attitudes toward school.

I have observed the organizers and moderators of low-stakes public deliberations overcome these problems. They deliberately support participants who might be disadvantaged in the conversation. Today’s public deliberations are likely to be more equitable than juries or teams of college students, because moderators are trained and focused on equality. But what about tomorrow’s deliberations? When the stakes go up, individuals with more status or skill will fight back against efforts to support less advantaged participants. They will depict such efforts as “politically correct” or otherwise biased, and they will use their status, confidence, and rhetorical fluency to win the point.

Barack Obama (part ii)

Barack Obama’s speech was partisan, needless to say. It was delivered at a major party’s national convention, it endorsed the party’s national ticket, and it was rooted in the core values of the Democratic Party, more than in the legitimate but different values of the GOP. (I disagree with some conservatives who apparently believe that Obama’s speech was to the right of the Democratic mainstream. In its elements as well as its overall spirit, it struck me as conventionally Democratic.) However, there is more than one way to be partisan, and some ways are better than others for our political culture.

In all my teaching and professional work, I am relentlessly non-partisan and aim to be neutral with respect to most of today’s controversial issues. I’m professionally concerned about our political culture, not about particular policies. I have never before singled out for praise a partisan speech or even an individual politician. But I do believe in parties–and in intense partisan competition–as mainstays of democracy. Everything depends on how the partisans play.

So consider the most quoted passage from Tuesday’s speech:

The pundits, the pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq.

We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America. In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or do we participate in a politics of hope?

There is a lot of simple truth in this, especially in the first paragraph. To be sure, Obama takes some shots at unnamed opponents who are allegedly exploiting the Patriot Act, who are cynical, and who won’t admit that Democrats are religious or that Republicans have gay friends. In other words, he uses rhetoric against the other party, and I’m not sure that all his implicit charges are 100% fair. However, the critique is oblique and general, not scathing and personal, and for the most part he competes to be more inclusive and more unifying. His aim is to appear more positive about all segments of the American population than the other side is. He is also positive and optimistic about the main features of the political system itself.

Imagine that both major parties competed with this kind of rhetoric, instead of constantly imputing wicked motives to each other. Based on evidence like this, I strongly suspect that the rate of participation would rise. We might even see citizens trust one another more.