I like to post here every work day, but a ‘flu that has been going around our family has hit me, and I’m too feverish to think straight. Having checked my email, I’m going back to bed.

Growing up in a politically competitive community turns out to have important educational advantages. Gimpel, Lay, and Schuknecht find that young people who live in communities with competitive elections are more knowledgeable about politics, more confident in their own capacity to make a difference, more trusting in government to be responsive, more tolerant, and more likely to discuss politics than their peers, holding many other factors constant.

Competition probably enhances civic learning because politicians and parties must reach out to citizens when elections are close. They reach out with messages that make people feel important and that convey interesting information. Also, regardless of how politicians behave, one can learn from growing up among roughly equal groups of Democrats and Republicans. In politically diverse communities, young people are exposed to divergent political views and understand that disagreement is inevitable. (The same advantage also arises from religious diversity.)

Political competitiveness can compensate for economic disadvantage. In fact, Gimpel and colleagues found that in poor communities with a mix of Democratic and Republican voters, young people grow up more knowledgeable than their peers who live in wealthy, single-party suburbs. Political competition boosts the level of discussion “by an amazing 17 percentage points among those with no plans to attend college,” because exposure to robust politics compensates for their relatively poor formal educations.

However, most Americans do not grow up in competitive districts. Only four incumbent Representatives were defeated in 2002, and only five in 2004. The same pattern occurs in many states. For example, in 2004, none of California’s 153 legislative seats changed parties. The 2006 elections are expected to be more competitive than usual. Yet even a loss of 15 Republican seats in 2006 would represent only 3.4 percent of the House of Representatives.

One reason for the lack of competition is that districts have been drawn with increasing sophistication to favor one party over the other. But communities have also become more politically homogeneous. No one redraws county lines to benefit politicians, yet the segregation of Democrats and Republicans at the county level increased by 47 percent during the last quarter of the 20th century. This is a bad sign for the next generation of citizens.

OCTOBER 3: CIRCLE TO RELEASE NEW COMPREHENSIVE SURVEY OF YOUTH CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

At the National Press Club in Washington, DC on October 3, from 9:30-11 am, CIRCLE will release findings from a major survey that includes numerous indicators of youth engagement as well as information about youth attitudes toward various social and political issues. This survey will update and expand the Civic and Political Health of the Nation Report, published in 2002.

Following the press conference, which is open to the public, CIRCLE will hold a first-ever “Practitioners’ Forum” from 11-2:30 to discuss practical implications of the new findings. There will be small group discussions on topics such as:

Youth Political Engagement and Trust in Government

The Civic Engagement of Immigrant Youth

Youth Community Service and Volunteerism

Tolerance and the Youth Generation

This will be an opportunity to influence how youth civic engagement is measured in the future and to inform CIRCLE’s efforts to connect research and practice.

The Practitioners’ Forum will include a lunch, and there will be limited space available. Please RSVP by September 22nd to Abby Kiesa, Youth Coordinator at CIRCLE, at akiesa@umd.edu.

SEPTEMBER 18: NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CITIZENSHIP (NCoC) TO RELEASE ‘CIVIC HEALTH INDEX’ REPORT

CIRCLE provided data, graphs, and analysis for an ambitious NCoC report that explores 40 key indicators of civic engagement over time. These indicators include political activity, civic knowledge, volunteering, trust, and philanthropy, among others. The report also looks separately at various segments of the US population, including youth.

The release will take place on Monday, September 18, 2006 from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. at the Marriott at Metro Center in Washington, DC. Prominent speakers (Robert Putnam, Harris Wofford, and others) will address various aspects of civic engagement.

There is no charge for the event and lunch will be served. Registration is required.

Reading Erik Erikson’s “The Eight Ages of Man” (1966) for other purposes last night, I came across an eerily prescient* passage on p. 290 that could describe the young British citizens who are alleged to have plotted to blow up airplanes:

Young people can also be remarkably clannish, and cruel in their exclusion of all those who are ‘different,’ in skin color or cultural background, in tastes and gifts, and often in such petty aspects of dress and gesture as have been temporarily selected as the signs of an in-grouper or an out-grouper. It is important to understand (which does not means condone or participate in) such intolerance as a defense against a sense of identity confusion. For adolescents not only help one another temporarily through much discomfort by forming cliques and stereotyping themselves, their ideals, and their enemies; they also perversely test each other’s capacity to pledge fidelity. The readiness for such testing also explains the appeal which simple and cruel totalitarian doctrines have on the minds of the youth of such countries and classes as have lost or are losing their group identities (feudal, agrarian, tribal, national) and face world-wide industrialization, emancipation, and wider communication.

*”Eerily prescient” appears 67,000 times on the Web, according to Google, which qualifies it as a clich?. Apologies.

I spent most of today in the kind of meeting that is most familiar to me. People in suits sat around a large, open table in an office inside the Washington Beltway, explaining what their alphabet soup of professional organizations think about No Child Left Behind and related topics. The terminology and style of the whole event was absolutely typical–with one big exception. The organizer was Peter Yarrow, the “Peter” of Peter, Paul and Mary. Dressed in a bright blue shirt and carrying his guitar, he stood in the middle of the absolutely standard DC conference room and started the meeting with a chorus of “Puff the Magic Dragon.” I would call it a “rousing chorus,” except that many of the education wonks were lip-synching. We also got to hear “Don’t Laugh at Me,” which is the theme song of Operation Respect, and several other Yarrow originals.