I was in DC very briefly today to testify on measuring civic engagement in federal surveys. The 2009 Kennedy Serve America Act charged the Corporation for National and Community Service and the National Conference on Citizenship with assessing America’s “civic health.” Congress authorized them to choose the indicators of civic health and to “sponsor a panel of experts, such as one convened by the National Academy of Sciences” to advise. I testified before that panel at the National Academy.

Realistically, we’d be lucky if we could put half a dozen new items on several large-scale federal surveys and keep them going for many years. These items would have to be relatively non-controversial, or else they wouldn’t be politically sustainable. At one point, a federal survey asked, “How many friends do you have, if any?” This did not go over well. Other topics that government agencies probably shouldn’t investigate with surveys include trust in the government itself and the racial diversity of social networks.

Today, Robert Putnam argued that the measures should be neutral with respect to different conceptual schemes and policy debates. He argued, for example, that his own concept of “social capital” should not drive the choice of questions, nor should a survey be designed to assess any current policy, such as AmeriCorps. Good questions would allow multiple theories and policies to be tested over time. That was thoughtful and generous advice, but one needs some kind of conceptual basis to choose items. Otherwise, why not ask about preference for vanilla ice cream?

I had talked about the correlation often found between trust and civic engagement. A federal official remarked that he’d been told that trust was part of civic engagement. He wanted more conceptual clarity from the experts on the topic. His first impulse was to expect the clarity to come from psychometric research. In other words, we would ask numerous questions of the same population and determine empirically which ones cluster together. Those clusters would become the elements of civic engagement; items that didn’t correlate might be dropped.

Psychometrics has value–and has been done in our field–but it won’t settle the question of what to ask. Communities probably need citizens to engage in various ways, including group membership, charity, protest, debate, running for office, etc. Achieving the right amount and proportion of those activities is presumably important. But they need not correlate in individuals. The people who protest need not be the ones who give money to charity.

In short, civic engagement is not one or more psychological constructs. It is a set of behaviors, values, and attitudes possessed by members of a community. One needs a conceptual and normative scheme to decide which ones should count.

To the extent that empirical data are relevant, I think the most important question is which set of behaviors correlates with good social outcomes at a community level. For example, what levels of protest, membership, public work, debate, and charity are socially optimal? But note that the definition of a “good” social outcome is contentious, and we are engaging civically when we debate it. Social benefits are not simply outcomes of civic engagement. Instead, civic engagement affects which outcomes we pursue (and measure). This circularity makes it impossible to pick the measures of civic engagement that are the best predictors of good outcomes for individuals or communities.

My own framework would emphasize activities that involve collectively choosing and then advancing social goals. Deliberative and communicative activities would loom large in my ideal poll. Membership in groups and working on public problems would also be important. I think Bob Putnam was right that no one’s theory should determine the choice of survey questions–and if his won’t, mine certainly shouldn’t. But I suspect that the best we can do is to pool items that reflect as many serious current theories as possible so that we have opportunities to test them empirically. We cannot anticipate theories that may arise later, but we must build the most durable apparatus we can.

[Addition: I should have noted that thanks in part to to the Corporation and the National Conference on Citizenship, the federal government has been measuring civic engagement on the annual Current Population Supplement, so the discussion was not about how to start but how to refine/expand the effort.]

We will be in California until Feb. 27. I will be treating my Internet addiction and cacoethes scribendi by not blogging during that time.

The fourth annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies will be an intensive, two-week, interdisciplinary seminar at Tisch College, Tufts University. It will bring together advanced graduate students, faculty, and practitioners from diverse fields of study for challenging discussions of questions such as the following:

• What kinds of citizens (if any) do good regimes need?
• What should such citizens know, believe, and do?
• What practices and institutional structures promote the right kinds of citizenship?
• What ought to be the relationships among empirical evidence, ethics, and strategy?

The daily sessions will take place from July 9-19, 2012, at the Tufts campus in Medford, MA. The seminar will be followed (from July 19 at 6 pm until July 21 at 3 pm) by a public conference in downtown Boston on similar themes. Participants in the seminar are required to stay for the public conference. See reflections on the 2011 conference here:

The Institute is organized by Peter Levine, Tisch College, Tufts University, and Karol Soltan, University of Maryland, with guest seminars by distinguished colleagues from various institutions and organizations. The 2012 syllabus is still under development but will repeat much of the same content as in 2011. You can also read more about the motivation for the Institute in the “Framing Statement.”

Tuition is free, but students are responsible for their own housing and transportation. A Tufts University dormitory room can be rented for $230-$280/week. Credit is not automatically offered but special arrangements for graduate credit may be possible.

To apply, please email your resume, an electronic copy of your graduate transcript (if applicable), and a cover email about your interests to Peter dot Levine at Tufts dot edu. You may also sign up for occasional announcements even if you are not sure that you wish to apply

For best consideration, apply no later than March 16, 2012.

Today I signed a contract with Oxford University Press for a new book, tentatively entitled We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting for: The Philosophy and Practice of Civic Renewal.* The manuscript still needs some revision but should, I think, reach the bookstores in 2012.

The overall argument is that citizens must combine direct work with talking and listening if we are to address our most serious public problems. Better government will not suffice. Through civic engagement (collaboration plus deliberation), we can address even our worst crises. But civic engagement is blocked or frustrated by the policies, priorities, and structures of large-scale institutions. To expand its scope and power will require changes in institutions, in the way we organize ourselves in civil society, and even in how we define and think about politics. Fortunately, those changes are within reach if individuals and small groups of citizens direct their political activism in the right ways. I try to draw a line from what you and I can do as individuals all the way through to how society can solve major problems.

Chapter 1: Overview: The Public and Our Problems

I argue that problems like the incarceration epidemic and our inability to adjust to fundamental economic change cannot be solved by policy reforms, even though existing policies are damaging. I use examples to show that these crises can be addressed by civic engagement, properly understood.

Chapter 2: How to Think About Politics: Values, Facts, and Strategies

This relatively short chapter is really a justification of the book’s method and a call for people to think differently about politics. I claim that mainstream academic thought divides facts from values, and both facts and values from strategies, in ways that block the solutions of serious problems. Scholarship also deprecates deliberate human action and agency. The rest of the book is supposed to illustrate an alternative, which my colleagues and I have called “civic studies.”

Chapter 3: Values: What Makes a Good Democracy

This is the philosophical chapter. It is an argument for collaboration and deliberation. In part, the argument is epistemological (although I never use that word, because I aim for a non-technical style throughout). I claim, in other words, that we can only know what to do if we combine working with talking and listening in a particular, open-ended way. This position contrasts with various forms of elitism, technocratic and scientific approaches to politics, and ideology. Thus much of the chapter consists of an argument against these alternatives. (It is too long and I am looking for ways of compressing it.)

Chapter 4: Facts: The State of American Democracy

This chapter (which all peer reviewers have considered the strongest part of the book) has two parts. The first is an argument that our politics and civil society have been profoundly corrupted, not only by money–although I gave money sustained attention–but also by the demise of institutions committed to engaging citizens and deliberating the common good. The second part summarizes the development of new and highly promising alternatives, almost all of which remain fairly small. A coda considers the 2008 Obama Campaign as a case study of our current situation. Both Obamas were deeply schooled in exactly the alternative civic culture that I praise. But once they obtained national power, they could not implement what they had learned at the community level, precisely because of the deep corruption of our public institutions.

Chapter 5: Strategies: How to Accomplish Civic Renewal

This is the chapter in which I try to draw a line all the way from the intentional work of small groups (like you and me) to the solution of large-scale public problems. One key step is to argue that a nascent community of at least one million Americans are already experienced in, and committed to, the combination of deliberation and collaboration that we need. We must turn that significant minority into an organized political force that expands the role of civic engagement.

*I am ambivalent about my tentative title. It seems descriptive of the content of the book. The phrase, which I find moving, does not belong to Barack Obama but can be traced back to the Civil Rights Era (as he fully acknowledges). I am not endorsing but respectfully criticizing the president’s approach to civic renewal. After a few years, I doubt that “We are the ones …” will evoke the 2008 Obama Campaign as narrowly as it does now. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to use the phrase if it suggests that the book is about Obama or simply endorses him. I am open to suggestions …

Our colleagues at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and the National Conference on Citizenship recently released a report on the civic health of Massachusetts. My organization, CIRCLE, did much of the underlying statistical analysis, although the Harvard team of students deserve full credit for the report and its argument.

One aspect we contributed was the suggestion that “public work” could be measured by identifying individuals who say they both attend public meetings and “work with neighbors to fix or improve something.” Our idea is that people should talk and listen with peers and act, letting their conversations guide their actions and their practical experience inform their discussions. Deliberation without work is empty, but work without deliberation is blind.

Using our definition, the report finds that 5.7% of Massachusetts residents do public work. Our measure is obviously imperfect. Leaving aside the usual problems of biased survey responses, this is an imperfect measure because you could attend meetings that had nothing to do with your working with neighbors. Or you could do real public work outside your neighborhood.

Nevertheless, I believe it’s a useful proxy measure for comparison purposes. The rate in Massachusetts is a full percentage point greater than the national rate (4.7%). Particular groups are more or less involved. For example, Native Americans are nationally the most likely group to meet the definition, perhaps because of traditions of collaborate governance. Public work (as we define it) correlates with education, so that 10% of Massachusetts college graduates participate, but no one in the Massachusetts sample who had less than a high school diploma met the definition.