Category Archives: civic theory

complexity and nuance about public opinion

Last Monday, I gave a talk at Colgate University. I claimed that if you read a lot of mainstream survey research, you’re likely to conclude that “people are stupid and they hate each other,” but this negative assessment reflects some bias. A student, Colgate senior Clementina Aboagye, told Maddie Koger of the Colgate Maroon-News:

“I think it was important that we had someone like Peter Levine who comes from an institution like Tufts University to present us [with the idea] that as much as we may disagree with each other, we still have complexities in how we think — that it’s important we search for gray areas because politics isn’t so black and white,” Aboagye said. “Those gray areas are important for us to not only converse about, but also to give each other space to speak — even when we don’t agree, because we can’t always agree — and we live in a world where people’s experiences and access to things determine what kind of ways in which they think — that deserves consideration.”

The very next day, a majority of American voters chose Donald Trump, concluding a campaign marked by polarized media, misinformation, hostility, and attacks (from one side) on basic liberal norms. Yet I still think there’s truth in the argument I offered at Colgate, which you could watch in full here.

The previous week, I had given American University’s annual Lincoln Scholars Lecture on “What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life.” Although my topic was quite different, this talk also offered a more positive view of civic life than one would glean by focusing only on an ugly and dangerous national election. According to Ridha Riyani’s summary in the AU Eagle newspaper, I said,

“We disagree because we care, and we need to do it better. …

[Levine] ended with a call to action, reminding attendees that civic life extends beyond national politics and requires thoughtful collaboration. 

“In conversation, we can move towards greater wisdom,” Levine said. “We communities are capable of changing the rules.”

I would not argue now that all we need is to listen generously across differences and explore the complexity of other people’s views. We must also stand up against injustice. Confrontational nonviolent civil resistance was a major theme in my AU talk, and I have been preparing for a Trump victory for several years. Still, there remains a place for listening, bridge-building, and collaboration, and I strive to offer useful concepts and skills for those purposes.

explaining a past election versus deciding what to do next

The Internet is saturated with explanations of the 2024 election. Some of these “quick takes” are dispassionate, while others take the form: If only Harris had done what I know is right, she would have won.

The challenge is epistemic: it’s virtually impossible to explain a single past event that involves many decision-makers (in this case, about 150 million of them).

Explaining the decisions of a few powerful people is hard enough, but at least then we can use evidence about their individual values, goals, and personalities. For instance, we can investigate why Napoleon ordered the main assault at the Battle of Borodino in 1812. However, says Tolstoy,

It was not Napoleon who directed the course of the battle, for none of his orders were executed and during the battle he did not know what was going on before him. So the way in which these people killed one another was not decided by Napoleon’s will but occurred independently of him, in accord with the will of hundreds of thousands of people who took part in the common action. It only seemed to Napoleon that it all took place by his will (War and Peace, 10:28)

It’s easier to explain the pattern displayed in a large set of cases (inductive reasoning). John Burn-Murdoch observes that every incumbent government in the world that has faced an election in 2024 has suffered major setbacks. John Sides argues that inflation lowered Biden’s approval rating, and the incumbent’s approval predicts reelection.

But these generalizations cannot explain the single event of the 2024 US presidential election. Generalizations inevitably involve variance, and 2024 is obviously anomalous. Should we even categorize Harris as the incumbent, when she was a vice president stepping in for a president and running against the previous president?

We can also look at patterns within the population to try to explain why individuals voted. For instance, Michael Tesler assembles evidence that few American women vote from gender solidarity and race consistently trumps gender as an explanation of voting.

This is a valid approach that will yield more precise insights once we have voter files and better survey analysis for 2024. But this method also has limitations for the purpose of explanation. As the (true) cliché reminds us, correlation is not causation. Besides, individuals vary in ways that are not captured in generic surveys. And we must distinguish carefully between two tasks: explaining why large numbers of people voted for each candidate, versus explaining the marginal change since 2020. Big blocs of the electorate vote predictably, yet much of the conversation is about changes at the margin. Our whole discussion would be different if Harris had won by 4 points instead of losing by less than one point, but either way, most people would have voted the same.

To emphasize the last point: I strongly suspect that a male Democrat would have fared no better than Kamala Harris, or even possibly worse. One of many pieces of supportive evidence is the fact that people whose survey answers indicated sexism already tended strongly to oppose Joe Biden in 2020 (Spencer 2021). I doubt that sexism explains the marginal change between 2020 and 2024, yet that hardly makes sexism irrelevant, since it helps to explain the 2020 baseline. Whether you feel that sexism is at stake may reasonably reflect your own depth of concern about misogyny in our society; this is not simply a statistical question. Put another way, whether you explain the result in terms of sexism depends on whether you are trying to a) combat misogyny or b) win an election. The explanation is relative to its purpose.

We might conclude that it is fruitless to make a model to explain any particular case. But that is exactly what we must do before we act. Even if there is no way to know now what would have happened had Harris acted differently, Harris and her team had to do something. In September, they needed a prospective model of the single case that confronted them: the election.

In 1903, Charles Sanders Peirce coined the term “abduction” (or “abductive judgment”) for the logic that explains a single case. Abduction is a pragmatic necessity because we always act in specific circumstances. In my view, valid abduction never depends on a single claim. There is no way to test whether one premise caused a given outcome in a given case. Rather, a good abduction consists of many linked components: a whole model. And it is appropriate for the model to contain facts, values, and strategies.

Thus, if you were Kamala Harris in September, you needed a coherent account of the current US electorate (facts), what you sought to achieve as a president (values), and how various messages and methods would affect the outcome (strategy). You had to guard against biases (believing facts because they confirmed your values), but you were entitled to bring your self into the analysis. For one thing, this was a model for how you should act, so it had to motivate you and your team and sound authentic coming from you.

We cannot tell which parts of Harris’ implicit model were right or wrong–and it remains possible that her model was as good as it could have been. But what we need now is a model to guide our own next steps.

Since I am not running for president, my model should not be designed for that purpose–although I might start armchair strategizing in 2026 or so. For now, I need a model that guides my actions as a concerned citizen during the Trump Administration. To a limited extent, my model might be guided by my retrospective assessment of the 2024 presidential campaign–but not by much. The main question, as always, is what should we do?


Sources: Spencer, Bettina. “Impact of racism and sexism in the 2008–2020 US presidential elections.” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 21.1 (2021): 175-188; Peirce, C.S. 1903. Lectures on Pragmatism, Lecture 1: Pragmatism: The Normative Sciences. See also: using a model to explain a single case; overestimating the impact of leaders; What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life

a garbage-can model of political ideologies

Summary: This short essay explores four models for understanding political parties and ideologies:

  1. Each party has an ideology that represents positions that fall somewhere on the left-right spectrum;
  2. Each party represents a temperament or underlying principle, such as traditionalism or progress;
  3. Each party represents an interest-group coalition, such as the workers or business;
  4. Each ideology represents whatever its major associated political party stands for at the moment. In turn, per Cohen, March and Olsen (1972), any political party is a “collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work.”

I argue that the first three models don’t fit US politics by themselves, and the last one (a “garbage-can” model) has some validity.

We are familiar with a model in which each political party promotes an ideology, and we can place the various parties’ ideologies on a spectrum to tell how far apart they are, where the median lies, and whether the right or left is more influential. When this model is applied to US politics empirically, the typical finding is that our parties have moved apart or “polarized.”

Verlan Lewis (2021) has argued that most empirical measures of polarization do not inquire into the content of the left or right positions. They identify statistical clusters that they label as ideologies, but they do not tell us what the ideologies stand for. Closer inspection reveals that the meaning of the ideological labels has changed drastically over time.

As Lewis notes, “in the 1960s, liberal MCs [Members of Congress] tended to vote against tax increases and in favor of tax cuts, while conservative MCs tended to vote just the opposite.” This statistical relationship was very strong. The words “liberal” and “conservative” later changed their meanings so that conservatives are now the tax-cutters.

Lewis also illustrates his critique of the standard “static” model with the examples of three 20th-century senators: “‘Cotton’ Ed Smith (D-SC, 1909–1944), Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson (D-WA, 1953–1983), and Ron Wyden (D-OR, 1996–present).” All three have the same ideological score–left of the median–on the influential DW-NOMINATE scale, yet “Smith was a racist demagogue who opposed the New Deal, Jackson was a ‘neoconservative’ who supported both the Great Society and the Vietnam War, and Wyden is a ‘progressive liberal’ who opposes racism, has sought to reform entitlement spending, and opposes militarism.”

Lewis concludes, “As we can see, what it meant to be a ‘liberal’ MC in the 1930s was very different from what it meant to be a ‘liberal’ MC in the 1970s, and both are very different from what it means to be a ‘liberal’ MC today.” 

We might try to detect some underlying values or dispositions that define ideologies over time. One candidate: conservatives want to preserve something or return to the past, whereas progressives want to move forward.

I think that American progressives from 1932 until 1970 were, indeed, temperamentally oriented to change, while conservatives during that period wanted to hold onto traditions. Since then, however, I observe that progressives often want to preserve and conserve institutions that have become traditional (neighborhood public schools. welfare programs, unions) whereas conservatives from Reagan and Gingrich to G.W. Bush (not to mention Trump) embrace radical change. The temperamental orientation of the ideologies has switched.

A third possible model assumes that parties change their positions–and even their temperaments–but they retain the same core interest groups over time. We might expect a given country to have a party for the workers and one for the bourgeoisie, with potentially a third for the peasants. Perhaps the US has only bourgeois parties, but Republicans rely on business-owners and professionals from suburbs and small towns in the North, while Democrats depend on farmers plus urban industrial workers.

The problem with this third model is that the parties prove surprisingly likely to change their interest groups. Indeed, upscale professionals in northern suburbs are now at the heart of the Democratic coalition, while rural people in the South are core Republicans; and Northern industrial workers tilt to the GOP. Each of these groups has switched sides.

Nor is this pattern unique to the USA. The UK Labour Party, formed to represent industrial workers, drew 38 percent of the most advantaged social stratum in the 2024 General Election, compared to the Tory’s 18 percent. Labour performed a little worse among semi-skilled and skilled laborers than among managerial and professional employees. In France, the supposedly left-wing New Popular Front performed worst among workers (ouvriers), and was the top choice of the managerial class (cadres). The German Social Democratic Party, formed in 1875 to represent workers, now performs better among white-collar workers with high education.

if these models based on issues, temperaments, or interest groups fail, what model could work? I’d turn to Cohen, March and Olsen (1972), who posited that any “organization is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work. … To understand processes within organizations, one can view a choice opportunity as a garbage can into which various kinds of problems and solutions are dumped by participants as they are generated” (Cohen, March & Olsen 1972).

If this model applies to politics, then a given party is not a manifestation of any specific principles, nor an agent for a given demographic coalition. It is a space within which various actors can participate, yielding various outcomes over time. In turn, an ideology–at least in a regime like the USA–is mainly the name for that set of views that is currently held by one of the parties.

In that case, it is not illogical if the word “liberal” comes to mean entirely different policy positions over time; that is the outcome of people dumping “various kinds of problems and solutions” into the garbage can of the Democratic Party, which then represents “liberalism.” (And the same for the GOP and conservatism.)

In fact, I don’t think the garbage-can model quite works for US parties. They do retain some philosophical premises and portions of their coalitions over substantial periods, and to some extent, their changes in positions reflect changes in the external world. For example, the parties may have switched their positions on isolationism versus interventionism because the main perceived adversary was communism for 45 years–but not before or after that.

Still, the first three models don’t fit by themselves, and the garbage-can model has some validity.


Sources: Lewis, V. (2021). The problem of Donald Trump and the Static Spectrum Fallacy. Party Politics27(4), 605-618; Cohen, M. D., March, J. G., & Olsen, J. P. (1972). A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative science quarterly, 1-25. See also: Mapping Ideologies as Networks of Ideas; in defense of institutions as “garbage cans”; what if political parties structure our thinking for us?; UK election results by social classsocial class inversion in the 2022 US elections;  class inversion as an alternative to the polarization thesisclass inversion in France and what does the European Green surge mean?

what you need to know for collective action

The graphic with this post shows the outline for “Introduction to Civic Studies,” which I am offering for 50 Tufts undergraduates this spring, and also for my 2022 book What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life (with an associated website).

To trace one portion of the argument: There is not much point in asking what’s wrong with the world or how things should be unless you can also address the question: “What should we do?” And there is not much point in asking that question unless you are part of–or can form–a functioning “we” that is able to act collectively, assembling and deploying assets.

Functioning groups require rules (broadly defined) as well as attitudes, such as trust.

In order to create rules and trust, it is helpful to know how to:

  • Develop explicit models (simplified representations) of the social situation that can guide your action and that you can modify in the light of experience
  • Analyze institutions in terms of components, such as their biophysical circumstances, the choices that they create for participants, and their outcomes. You should be able to analyze institutions that you want to launch or sustain, so that these entities can persist and even grow. You may also need to analyze institutions that you oppose, to reveal their vulnerabilities.
  • Treat your own group as a common-pool resource: that is, as a good that benefits everyone involved but that can be used up or degraded. Common-pool resources are difficult to finance and sustain, yet some flourish. The ones that succeed usually employ wise principles. Therefore:
  • Apply design principles that enable successful collective action, such as establishing clear boundaries around the the group and its assets, developing efficient processes for resolving conflicts, and using light but graduated sanctions for members who violate the rules.
  • Preserve and expand social capital (otherwise known as “collective efficacy” or “community cohesion”): the social ties and interpersonal commitments that enable further action.
  • Practice skills that organize people (rather than simply mobilize them to take specific actions), such as one-to-one interviews and decision-making meetings.

The second through fifth points come from the work of Elinor Ostrom, although you may decide to analyze institutions into different components from the ones she identified, or apply different design principles, if your experience yields different lessons.

This is not all you need to know, because additional challenges arise when you face conflicting beliefs about good means and ends or when you encounter oppressive power. We will move onto those topics for the rest of the semester. But the list shown here is necessary.

Foucault the engaged scholar

I admit that I had long understood Michel Foucault as a “universal intellectual” — a thinker who conveys an original and general stance to the public, the nation, or the masses, serving as their conscience. If this intellectual is radically critical of the status quo, and his audience is the whole public, then the implication is: Revolution! Examples of revolutionary universal intellectuals include Rousseau, Marx, and Sartre.

Placed in that tradition, Foucault can be frustrating. He held a distinctive and original (albeit evolving) stance, he participated in radical politics in Tunisia and France, and he reached a global audience, yet he eschewed recommendations and explicit moral judgments. He seemed to conceal his own views, to the extent that he held them.

My take on Foucault has been changed (and my appraisal has been much improved) by reading three interviews conducted between 1976 and 1981 that are included in Rabinow’s and Rose’s The Essential Foucault anthology. These conversations have also revised my understanding of his major works.

In the 1976 interview, Foucault describes “universal intellectuals” as I did at the start of this post, but he says that “some years have passed since the intellectual has been called upon to play this role” (1976, 312). A universal intellectual works alone and addresses everyone. In contrast, a “specific intellectual”–a type that emerges after World War II (1976, 313)–works within an institution where knowledge and power come together. Examples include nuclear physicists, psychiatrists, social workers, magistrates, administrators, planners, and educators. They possess genuine knowledge that gives them influence. Since the failed revolution of 1968, it has become clear that beneficial social change depends on them, not on revolutionaries who fight the state (1976, 305). Specific intellectuals are becoming politically conscious and connected across disciplines and national borders (1976, 313).

And Foucault works with them. He doesn’t go into much detail about his own activities in these interviews, but we know that psychiatrists have read his works about mental illness and sexuality, prison administrators have read his book on prisons, and people who train professionals have assigned his texts; and he acknowledges their influence on him. Thus his audience is not “the people,” and his contribution is not a philosophy. Instead, he is a professional historian who contributes information and insights to various conversations that are also informed by the behavioral and social sciences and law.

In a 1981 interview, Didier Erihon suggests that “criticism carried about by intellectuals doesn’t lead to anything” (1981, 171). This is meant as a challenge to Foucault, whom Erihon assumes is an intellectual.

Foucault first notes that the previous twenty years have seen substantial changes–beneficial ones, I presume–in views of mental illness, imprisonment, and gender relations, issues on which he had worked intensively.

Next, he observes that progress does not result from political decisions alone; any policy requires implementation, and its impact depends on the people who implement it. At any rate, that is how I would gloss these words:

Furthermore, there are no reforms in themselves. Reforms do not come about in empty space, independently of those who make them. One cannot avoid considering those who will have to administer this transformation (1981, 171).

It follows that to influence the “assumptions” and “familiar notions” of practitioners is “utterly indispensable for any transformation” (172). (Compare my recent post on institutions).

Foucault concludes his response by criticizing the ways that universal intellectuals (whether famous or aspiring to fame) typically criticize society. He says, “A critique does not consist in saying that things aren’t good the way they are. …. Criticism consists in uncovering [everyday] thought and trying to change it” (1981, 172).

The key point, for me, is that “trying to change” something requires a strategy, and Foucault wants to abandon the strategy of changing everything all at once by telling The People that society is bad and should be different. His alternative strategy is to engage well-placed practitioners.

In the 1980 interview, Foucault elaborates his doubts about criticism that takes the form of denouncing existing things, ideas, or people:

It’s amazing how people like judging. Judgment is being passed everywhere, all the time. Perhaps its one of the simplest things mankind has been given to do. And you know very well that the last man, when radiation has finally reduced his last enemy to ashes, will sit down behind some rickety table and begin the trial of the individual responsible (1980, 176).

Foucault diagnoses Parisian intellectuals’ love of denouncing each other as a result of their “deep-seated anxiety that one will not be heard or read.” This anxiety motivates the “need to wage an ‘ideological struggle’ or to root out ‘dangerous thoughts'” (1980, 177).

The interviewer counters, “But don’t you think our period is really lacking in great writers and minds capable of dealing with its problems?” (1980, 177). Later, the same interviewer asks, “If everything is going badly, how do we make a start?” (1980, 178).

Foucault resists both pessimistic premises. “But everything isn’t going badly,” he exclaims (1980, 178). He describes a “plethora,” an “overabundance” of interesting ideas and people who have pent-up curiosity. The task, he proposes, is to “multiply the channels, the bridges, the means of information” so that more people with “thirst for knowledge” can learn from more other people (1980, 177).

In a passage that reminds me of Dewey’s The Public and its Problems (1924), Foucault describes his “dream of a new age of curiosity” (1980, 178). He says, “I like the word [curiosity]. It evokes ‘care’; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist.” (1980, 177). In the age of curiosity that he envisions, “people must be constantly able to plug into culture in as many ways as possible” (178-9).

Given Foucault’s understanding of his own role as a “specific intellectual,” he must have been at least somewhat concerned about his reputation. He was not only a historical specialist who helped fellow practitioners to become conscious of shared prejudices and to discover alternatives. He was also (and mainly) a world-famous French philosopher, a purported representative of movements like post-structuralism and postmodernism, whose public lectures on general subjects in venues like the Collège de France and UC-Berkeley were packed with aspiring philosophers, and whose interviews about the condition of the world were published in Le Monde and Libération.

I am not sure how he navigated this tension, not having read the biographies. But it’s clear that it worried him. In the 1980 interview, part of a series on major intellectuals in Le Monde, Foucault asks not to be named. The interview (still archived on Le Monde’s website), is headlined, “The Masked Philosopher.” It begins:

Here is a French writer of some renown. Author of several books whose success has been affirmed well beyond our borders, he is an independent thinker: he is not linked to any fashion, to any party. However, he only agreed to grant us an interview about the status of the intellectual and the place of culture and philosophy in society on one explicit condition: to remain anonymous. Why this discretion? Out of modesty, calculation or fear? The question deserved to be asked–even if, by the end of this conversation, the mystery will undoubtedly have dissipated for the most perceptive of our readers…

Foucault explains that he would like to try being anonymous “out of nostalgia for a time when, since I was quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard” (my translation). In other words, we cannot hear Foucault well unless we shake the model of a famous thinker who offers big ideas. He wants us, instead, to ask whether the claims about specific phenomena that we find in his works ring true or false and whether they are useful or not for our purposes.


Sources: Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power” (1976), “The Masked Philosopher” (1980), and “So is it Important to Think?” (1981), all in Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, The Essential Foucault (The New Press, 2003), but I retranslated the 1980 interview myself because of a misplaced modifier in the anthology. See also: Vincent Colapietro, “Foucault’s Pragmatism and Dewey’s Genealogies: Mapping Our Historical Situations and Locating Our Philosophical Maps,” Cognitio, 13/2 (2012), p. 187-218; Foucault’s spiritual exercises; does skepticism promote a tranquil mind?; and Civically Engaged Research in Political Science