Via Crooked Timber: Alex Tingle has created a great online gizmo that allows you to see how much dry land will vanish as seawater rises by x meters. A rise of 14 meters (the maximum Tingle allows) would put the bank of the Potomac at the south porch of the White House.

… Not a bad deal if you live there.

I’m in Dayton, OH, for a seminar at the Kettering Foundation. I had written a chapter last fall describing the interaction of two generations on our college campuses. I wrote that some Boomer professors (ex-participants in the tumultuous sixties and seventies), “developed a new perspective” during the 1980s and 1990s. “While still reformist and egalitarian,” they became “increasingly pragmatic, open-ended, and solicitous of institutions, of existing communities, of civic culture, and of public deliberation, regardless of its outcome.” Meanwhile, they took new scholarly interest in public deliberation, civil society, civic virtue, and related themes. In the 1980s, they encountered Gen-X students who were alienated from formal politics but idealistic and interested in direct service. The result was a rash of experimentation, including service-learning, deliberation in classrooms and on campuses, community-based research, and work that celebrated cultural diversity as an asset.

A colleague wrote a spirited critique of my chapter, as lengthy as my own contribution. She argued that the real trends in higher education during the period that I described included a neoconservative assault on intellectual freedom and a rise of economic insecurity that undermined democracy. Under those circumstances, she implied, it was futile to retreat into small-scale service-learning and community-research projects. We don’t need civil deliberation as much as radical, ideological critique. Those who do civic work on campuses present ourselves as non-ideological and open to all views; but actually we are moderates or incrementalists, closed to more radical alternatives.

The discussion began. Unfortunately, my colleague was on the phone (rather than present in person) because her flight had been delayed by 24 hours at O’Hare. Suddenly, a disembodied corporate voice in the background told her to get on the plane, and she had to stop participating. That seemed to support her point about the source of real power in contemporary life.

But seriously: No one who promotes civic renewal is ideologically neutral. Certainly, I have an ideological position (a relatively comprehensive worldview) that supports my own commitment to civic work, at least at this moment. My view includes these premises: people can create wealth through voluntary collective action in a society like ours; although private property is fine, capital mobility is problematic; it’s possible to build economic institutions that are rooted in communities; social problems have cultural roots and cannot be fully solved through welfare programs; mid-20th-century public institutions are obsolete but there are emerging models that are less centralized.

Although I believe these premises–provisionally–I don’t like to use them as arguments in favor of civic work. That’s not because I’m afraid of controversy, but rather because I recognize that people come to service-learning, deliberation, local media work, and other civic activities for a variety of reasons. That heterogeneity seems healthy to me. I don’t think it’s necessary to spell out a comprehensive worldview that would alienate some potential partners. Like any social movement, the movement for civic renewal requires some ideololgical ambiguity to allow it to encompass diversity.

It probably won’t surprise you that there’s a positive relationship between political participation and social/economic development. In countries where people are doing better (living longer, attending more years of school, spending more money), they also vote, protest, and petition more.

I’ve illustrated that relationship with this graph. The United Nations Development Programme’s Index of Human Development is on the y-axis, and the percentage of the population that votes and says they join petitions, boycotts, or protests (averaged together) is on the x-axis. The graph only includes countries with a history of real elections, and it misses most poor countries, because they don’t participate in the World Values Survey. There were 62 countries in my sample, but I deleted some of their names to make the graph legible:

The correlation is compatible with several rival theories. Maybe participation helps with development, or maybe affluence gives people the luxury to participate. Or maybe there’s another underlying cause, such as trust, sociability, the quality of the media, or the size of the middle class. I’d like to believe that political participation is good for development (as Amartya Sen and others have argued), but I don’t have the data to prove that.

I can, however, note some interesting patterns.

1. There’s a cluster of former British colonies that chose to participate in the World Values Survey and that show similar results. These countries (near the bottom-left of the graph) under-perform economically considering the robustness of their civic participation. (Or they over-achieve as democracies, considering their poverty.) Within that group, however, there’s a correlation between democratic participation and social development. In the cases of Tanzania and India, I think we’re still seeing the legacy of centralized democratic socialism–which tolerated and even encouraged participation but monopolized economic power.

2. Singapore has achieved high social development with low civic engagement. It’s a rare enough case that no one should argue for the Singapore model. Several of the major new democracies in Eastern Europe and Latin American also have relatively low civic engagement, considering their level of social development, but they are not far from the norm.

3. The World Values survey asks people whether they take “local community action on issues like poverty, employment, housing, racial equality.” Answers to that question did not correlate at all with socio-economic development. Therefore, I dropped that indicator from the graph. However, it’s important to note that “local community action” is most common in the poorest countries (Bangladesh, Tanzania, and China). It is more common in the USA than in other developed democracies.

Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly has just published my article on civic renewal. The pdf is available here. The article begins:

Our formal political system is coarse, unproductive, and short-sighted. Outside of formal politics, however, a robust movement is beginning to renew civic engagement in America. In this article, I define what I mean by “civic” work. I then describe some important current examples and contend that the whole field is growing stronger and more unified. (This independent analysis supports the results of a new book by Carmen Sirianni and Lewis A. Friedland entitled The Civic Renewal Movement.) Finally, I argue that this kind of work should matter to academic philosophers–and vice-versa.

This is my effort to pull together all my professional work since 2001 (leaving aside certain themes in moral philosophy that I’ve been writing about). Every section of the article appeared first on this blog, but the printed version is more coherent. The heart of the essay is a list of important, ongoing, practical experiments. Before I get to that list, I propose an argument for the importance of civic renewal, defined in a certain way. I then use network mapping software to show that the various experiments on my list are interconnected. At the end, in what amounts to a defense of my eccentric professional work, I argue that civic engagement is essential for the discipline of political philosophy at this point in its evolution.

The future is inscrutable, and I’m bad at prognostication, but I suspect that Congress will pass no major immigration bill in the near future. Clearly, the congressional leadership would like to pass a bill so that they can avoid attacks for “doing nothing.” However, the gap between the House and Senate looks huge. For most Republican Members of Congress, it’s preferable not to vote up or down on a final bill that will be a compromise and not fully satisfactory to anyone. It’s better to have two bills stuck in conference committee and to be able to attack one or both. This is a great opportunity for Republican candidates to distance themselves from the congressional leadership and the president.

The risk, from a Republican point of view, is that a stalled bill will continue to divide the caucus and anger some key constituencies (especially anti-immigrant activists and conservative Latinos) right through November. Nevertheless, that’s a smaller risk for them than having to pass a compromise bill without any Democratic votes. If they’re lucky, TV will show footage of National Guardsmen watching the southern border and expressing support for their new mission. (I don’t think deploying the Guard requires any legislation.) The GOP leadership can also try to make something else–homeland security or gay marriage–the legislative priority in the fall. Meanwhile Republican candidates can inveigh against their own leaders for failing to pass the legislation that they think their own constituents want. The result will be the status quo (plus a short-term deployment of the Guard).