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engaging America’s interested bystanders

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The Google Civic Innovation Team (Kate Krontiris, John Webb, Chris Chapman, and Charlotte Krontiris) have released an important strategic report based on original research. They argue that 48.9% of American adults are “Interested Bystanders” to civic life. These “people are paying attention to issues around them, but not actively voicing their opinions or taking action on those issues.”

Looking more closely at how the Interested Bystanders think about politics and civic life (and the actual civic actions that they take), the Google Team uncovers some interesting gaps. For instance, “many Interested Bystanders believe they have the most power at the local level, [yet] most participants reported voting only at the national level.” They also divide the 48.9% into eight archetypal groups, each of which would respond to different messages and opportunities.

The main implication for civic organizers and innovators: “you don’t have to design for activists or the apathetic. You can design for Interested Bystanders and still reach a huge market of people and have a huge impact.”

Kate Krontiris and colleagues advocate a strategy that sounds, at first glance, different from the argument of my book We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For and the findings of “America’s Civic Renewal Movement: The View from Organizational Leaders” by Eric Liu and me. Both documents argue that we ought to focus on a small (but demographically diverse) cadre of civic leaders in America–not 48.9% but more like 0.5% of the population–because only about one million grassroots organizers have the experience and motivations to engage other Americans in civic life. These are the people who not only attend meetings but call meetings; who not only vote but get out the vote. They are already at work on civic renewal in America but need better tools, policies, funds, and other supports.

It’s important to have more that one strategic proposal on the table, so I enthusiastically welcome the Google report even if it lands in a different place from my own work. In any case, these strategies may turn out to be complementary. The “One Million” grassroots civic leaders about whom I write are essential for reaching the “Interested Bystanders” whom Kate and her colleagues describe. In some ways, the Google Team is writing for the One Million–or for an even smaller set of national leaders who have the capacity to engage the One Million through their organizations. They advise these civic leaders to engage the next 48% of the population, which sounds smart to me.

It is a familiar option to try to change a society by engaging a relatively well-placed minority as leaders. Consider W.E.B Du Bois’ early embrace of the Talented Tenth strategy, for example. The advantage is realism: not everyone is ready to participate, and anyone who tries to catalyze a significant change has too few resources to engage the whole population. The potential disadvantage is exclusivity. Marxist revolutions based on “vanguards” have all turned, in my view, into nightmares.

Thus it is very important to my argument that America’s grassroots civic activists are (empirically) a diverse group–diverse in terms of demographics, styles of engagement, and substantive beliefs. My paper with Eric Liu begins to explore the kinds of people who  engage through Ducks Unlimited, PICO, Tea Party Patriots, and United We Dream, among others. Their diversity is important not only for equity and representativeness but also because there is no serious prospect that people this different from each other could turn into a clique or interest group. The question is whether we can get them all working–in different and even competitive ways–to engage their fellow citizens in public life. The “Interested Bystanders” report is a helpful step.

how our two-party system frustrates political innovation

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I was in Spain this past week for a pair of political science conferences. My visit came soon after an election in which two new parties emerged: Podemos (leftist and innovative in how it engages voters) and Ciudadanos (center-right and also somewhat innovative). Naturally, many conversations turned to these parties and to party competition in general. I return feeling jealous of multi-party systems because they present opportunities for civic innovation.

The United States has had the same two parties for 155 years because we use single-member districts. A third party that at first attracts less than 50% of the vote in every district wins no seats at all and can’t get off the ground. Also, despite our important regional differences, we have essentially one national public sphere, so regional parties don’t arise to win majorities in their own areas. A case like Bernie Sanders from Vermont is anomalous and arguably getting more so. In 2012, voters chose straight Democratic or Republican tickets more than at any time since 1952.

If the question is how best to represent the public, a two-party system is not intrinsically worse than a multi-party system that emerges from proportional representation. Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem proves that no system is really ideal in that respect. If voters are given many choices, no party is likely to gain a majority, and then either a minority leads the legislature or there must be some horse-trading to produce a majority coalition that voters did not deliberately select. In a two-party system, the people choose the majority, but only because their choice has been restricted.

The problem, then, is not that our system is especially unrepresentative but that certain kinds of innovations and opportunities are blocked. In the US, as everywhere else, people form new groups that reflect their views, not only about how the world should be but also about how they will relate to each other and make decisions. These groups vary enormously, from terrorist cells led by charismatic clerics to New Left assemblages in which all the decisions are made by consensus and anyone can enter or exit at will.

Let’s assume that some groups are better than others and, indeed, that a few are very good. Because they start as small associations, they cannot directly govern at large scales. They need more than ideals and ways of interacting with their own members; they also need strategies for influencing law, government, and the economy. In a word, they need leverage.

In a system that encourages new parties to form and compete for power, one powerful form of leverage is available. The intellectuals and grassroots activists who emerged from the Occupy-style social movement in Spain naturally formed a political party, Podemos, to reflect both their views of national policies and their ways of self-organizing. It remains to be seen whether they can remain faithful to their origins as a social movement now that they are a formal political party with seats in the legislature and control over some cities and provinces. But that path was available and they took it.

Innovation is not intrinsically good. ISIS is highly innovative. But it is crucial that a political system allows new entrants: not just individuals who haven’t run for office before, but new kinds of people with new ideas. Otherwise, it hardens into an oligarchy.

In the US, people still come together in all kinds of movements and networks within civil society. #BlackLivesMatter, Occupy, and the Tea Party are just some of the high-profile recent examples. If you looked more closely, you would see many more of these groupings, some with narrower ranges of issues, less explicitly political agendas, or more idiosyncratic organizational forms.

Such movements and networks often talk about scale and leverage. In the US, they think first about trying to change public opinion, influence the media, or recruit new members. Occasionally, they also talk about running candidates for office. In the Tea Party’s case, they have used primary campaigns to obtain some influence over a major party. But they cannot gain momentum by launching new parties of their own and coming before the electorate with their own platforms, leaders, and organizational structures. And this is why the discussion of large-scale strategy is so frustrating in the US.

This problem is going to be especially acute for the left for the next few years. On the right, the Tea Party and libertarian movements have found ways to compete within the GOP. The seemingly open and competitive Republican primary campaign means that conservative activists have a strategy for leverage: pick one of the candidates. Although only two or three of the Republican contenders have plausible chances, the competitive start of the campaign makes the GOP presidential primary look like an opportunity for diverse activism on the right.

On the Democratic side, the unprecedented dominance of Hilary Clinton means that supporting a campaign is really not a way to innovate in politics. Clinton and her staff can innovate if they want to. As a voter, you can support Clinton if you agree with her more than with the Republicans. Otherwise, you must innovate outside of formal politics.

I exaggerate because there are other Democratic presidential candidates, and more could enter. But the lack of a candidate who reflects (for instance) any of the recent ferment about race and racism is a symptom of our situation.

My point, again, is not that our elected leaders fail to represent the people. Some Democratic Members of Congress represent predominantly urban African American communities and are reasonably in sync with their constituents. The point is rather that no one–other than established party leaders–can seriously innovate within electoral politics on the Left for the time being. I predict that will produce a lot of frustration unless someone can figure out an alternative form of leverage.

See also community organizing, community-engaged research, and the problem of scale; beyond small is beautiful; leverage as a moral issue; and “En EE UU, el populismo es bastante razonable.”

America’s Civic Renewal Movement: implications for youth engagement

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(Detroit) On April 16, Tisch College released “America’s Civic Renewal Movement: The View from Organizational Leaders” by me and Eric Liu, the founder and CEO of Citizen University and executive director of the Aspen Institute Citizenship and American Identity Program.

At Tisch College, we define “civic renewal” as efforts to increase the scale, impact, and equity of civic engagement in the United States. With support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, we interviewed 20 leaders from large, national organizations that organize civic engagement about strategies for civic renewal.

The focus of this report was not youth, nor were many of the interviewees young people. Nevertheless, the key findings are applicable to efforts to increase the scale and impact of youth civic engagement.

First, several of the organizational leaders interviewed for the paper lamented the lack of youth in formal settings, such as public hearings or lobbying efforts. They suggested that youth are interested but are not invited or encouraged to participate in these ways. Bill Muse from the National Issues Forums Institute said that younger people are rarely enlisted as moderators of community conversations, but when they do moderate, they do a fantastic job. Lenny Mendonca of McKinsey & Co., who serves on several influential nonprofit boards concerned with democracy, said that most of his peers are “people like me, middle-aged white men who want to help.” He wants to see younger people, people of color, and non-English-speaking people in leadership roles.

Second, the paper makes the case that the grassroots activists who enable civic participation are essential for civic renewal. Large and powerful institutions such as the federal government, school systems, political parties, and the mass media lack incentives to support civic engagement; and average Americans have had too little civic experience to demand more. But there are grassroots civic leaders who are deeply invested in civic activities. They have the skills and motivations to create new opportunities for others.

The paper finds that civic organizations as diverse as Citizens for Self-Governance, Ducks Unlimited, MoveOn, Student Veterans of America, and United We Dream (all included in the study) work on civic renewal—although without using that term—but do not yet form a coherent network. Among the twenty organizations, some have reasonably compatible political agendas, but few work together. The paper makes a case for network-building in the cause of civic renewal.

The paper also proposes a taxonomy. Groups can be large (reaching many people) or deep (helping their members to achieve profound personal change). Groups can be ideologically and philosophically diverse, or they can be focused on a shared agenda. The authors find a lack of organizations that are large and also diverse; this appears to be a gap not only among the interviewees’ groups but in the whole current landscape of American civil society. And they find that the large groups struggle to be deep, and vice-versa.

For instance, Scott Reed of the faith-based PICO network said that his organization “invests lots and lots of time to connect with people and develop relations.” But “scale is what we are trying to figure out … because we are nowhere near where we want.” Meanwhile, Anna Galland of MoveOn acknowledged that the online organization has “tremendous scale and little depth.” MoveOn’s goal, she says, is to “move from a list of 8 million to horizontal connectivity.”

Young people are coming of age at a time that the interviewees described as highly polarized, unequal, and corrupt. They are also developing their civic identities when there is not yet a robust network for civic renewal, although there are many impressive groups that could form such a network.

For people primarily concerned with civic education and civic engagement, the paper poses questions about how to build a base of active supporters, how to connect them into more effective networks, and how to offer young people organizations that are deep as well as large, and diverse as well as focused.

Read the full report here. For more on Tisch College’s research on civic renewal, go here. This post is cross-posted from the CIRCLE site.

defining “games”

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I am reading Josh Lerner’s Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics because it makes an important argument. Games are fun for specific reasons; most political processes fail to be fun because they lack those elements; and we could make politics more fun without sacrificing serious purposes if we learned from game design. That’s the great value of the book, but here is a philosopher’s digression ….

Lerner (p. 29) defines games as “systems where players engage in artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in measurable outcomes.” My ears perk up at any definition of “games” because Ludwig Wittgenstein famously avoids defining that word in his Philosophical Investigations. There he observes that games come in many different forms and asserts that no single feature defines them all. Games constitute a family of cases, each of which resembles several others even though they are not all alike in any particular respect. We know how to use (and teach) the word “game” even though we cannot define it in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. This observation is important for Wittgenstein because he believes that language is a heterogeneous set of games. And we think in language. Thus our thought is a set of practices that lack a common feature, yet we can learn to think and communicate.

Lerner offers a definition. He emphasizes relevant and important features of many practices that we call “games”–features that we should heed when we design political processes, which is Lerner’s interest. One wouldn’t need his definition to understand the word “game”: I have been playing games for almost half a century without thinking in Lerner’s terms. His doesn’t exactly work as a literal definition, because, for instance, a business competition could easily be an “artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in measurable outcomes” such as profit and loss. If that competition is devoid of fun, we wouldn’t call it a “game,” except metaphorically. Also, if you showed Lerner’s definition to someone who had never played a range of games, it wouldn’t communicate what he has in mind. This person might think of standardized tests, duels, court cases, and other artificial conflicts that we don’t usually call “games.”

This is not a criticism of Lerner. I think his definition plays its intended role in his book. He presumes some real world experience with games and provides many vivid examples to expand one’s store of cases. His definition points to general tendencies in those examples that are important in a different context, politics. That is a typical and appropriate way to advance an argument. But I am left thinking that Wittgenstein was right about the indefinability of the word “game.”

(As a digression on this digression: Wittgenstein wrote in German, and the word “Spiel” means both “game” and “play.” For Lerner, the differences between the English words “game” and “play” are important; to make politics more game-like is different from making it more playful. Does Wittgenstein fail to see a common denominator to all “Spiele” because that word encompasses play as well as games? I don’t think so: all of his examples are actually “games” in the English sense. His argument works perfectly well when translated.)

medieval iconoclasm and modern prejudices

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More than 1,000 years ago, the Christian world was consumed with a violent conflict over religious images: whether they should be venerated or destroyed as idols. That conflict, which brought down emperors, has resonances today. But even before the days of ISIS, modern historians were mining the obscure quarrels of medieval Christian iconoclasm for evidence of their own prejudices.

For instance, in this passage, John Julius Norwich (1929-) explains why iconoclasm declined during the 9th century:

The times, too, were changing. The mystical, metaphysical attitude to religion that had originally given birth to iconoclasm was becoming less fashionable every day. Of the eastern lands in which it had first taken root, some had already been lost to the Saracens; and the populations of those that remained, beleaguered and nervous, had developed an instinctive distrust of a doctrine that bore such obvious affinities with those of Islam. There was a new humanism in the air, a revised awareness of the old classical spirit that stood for reason and clarity, and had no truck with the tortuous, introspective spiritualizings of the Oriental mind. At the same time a naturally artistic people, so long starved of beauty, were beginning to crave the old, familiar images that spoke to them of safer and more confident days. And when, on 20 January 842, the Emperor Theophilus died of dysentery at thirty-eight, the age of iconoclasm died with him.

I don’t like to speak evil of the living, but this is pretty bad. I can pass over the undocumented and surely exaggerated claims (“less fashionable every day”; “so long starved of beauty”). I can forgive the emphasis on royal biography and chronology as explanations for larger trends, because the medieval sources focus on affairs of court. It’s much harder to ignore Viscount Norwich’s view of “the Oriental mind” as irrational and mystical.

Edward Gibbon, although just as judgmental as Norwich, organized his prejudices differently. In the Decline and Fall, he associates the veneration of images with the “long night of superstition,” when Christians forgot the “simplicity of the Gospel” for the “worship of holy images.” The “holy ground was involved in a cloud of miracles and visions; and the nerves of the mind, curiosity and skepticism, were benumbed by habits of obedience and belief.”

He is talking about the centuries when Norwich’s “old, familiar images” were still venerated. But then Leo III began the iconoclastic era. Although the emperor was less learned than a classical Roman, “his education, his reason, and perhaps his intercourse with the Jews and Arabs” made him criticize images. Leo came from the East and may have been influenced by the still-further-eastern Muslims. Yet Gibbon has no hesitation in claiming that Leo’s movement showed “many symptoms of reason and piety.”

Ultimately, it was a female ruler who restored the “idols,” which were always “secretly cherished by the order and the sex most prone to devotion; and the fond alliance of the monks and the females obtained a final victory over the reason and the authority of man.” A final victory, that is, until the “reformation of the sixteenth century, [when] freedom and knowledge had expanded all faculties of man: the thirst of innovation superseded the reverence of antiquity; and the vigor of Europe could disdain those phantoms which terrified the servile weakness of the Greeks.”

If you’re going to use medieval theological controversies to reinforce modern stereotypes, Gibbon’s version at least seems to make more sense that Norwich’s. Norwich tries to establish a spectrum from the iconoclastic East to the reasonable West. But consider the Pilgrim Fathers who founded New England. Surely they favored “tortuous, introspective spiritualizings”; and their churches were stripped of all images, even crosses. Their brethren in Cromwell’s England and Protestant Holland also smashed religious pictures, as did the later secular republicans of revolutionary France and civil war Spain. “According to Georg Kretschmar, ‘Calvin built up the most precise and radical position opposed to the icon theology of the 787 Council of Nicea.'” As a consequence [of Calvin’s iconoclastic writing] Protestant places of worship have a stark austerity in comparison to Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Churches.” Yet, according to Norwich, a starkly austere church is “oriental,” whereas one bedecked with sparkling icons recalls the “old classical spirit that stood for reason and clarity.”

The moral of this post is not that historians are biased or that orientalism prevails. I have cited just two writers, one of them dead since 1794. Real professional historians work hard not to let such prejudices determine their views. But Gibbon and Norwich are influential authors–the first redeemed by his superb style and enlightened spirit; the second, a poor substitute.