This one-minute video introduces a project that Tufts engineering faculty and students and I have begun, with Better Together America and some pro bono advice from the Harvard Law School Transactional Law Clinics. In essence, we are trying to improve Americans’ know-how for launching and sustaining organizations, on the theory that civic organizations preserve democracy.

In the short length of this video, I don’t quite make the case that declining membership is a cause of declining trust in institutions. One piece of evidence (not in the video) is a statistical model that uses American National Election Study 2020 data to predict whether people will agree with this sentence: “Much of what people hear in schools and the media are lies designed to keep people from learning the real truth about those in power.”

In my model, education, age, and ideology are unrelated to how people answer this question. Women and white people are slightly more trusting. However, dwarfing those relationships is the role of civic engagement. People who say that they have recently worked with others to deal with an issue facing their community are far less likely to believe that schools or the media routinely lie.

Other measures of civic engagement (such as volunteering) also predict trust; and civic engagement predicts other liberal and democratic dispositions in addition to trust.

I believe that one of the obstacles to broader civic engagement is a lack of nuts-and-bolts knowledge. Therefore, helping people to form and sustain groups will strengthen civil society, which alone can save democracy.

See also: to restore trust in schools and media, engage people in civic life; tools people need to preserve and strengthen democracy, 16 colliding forces that create our moment, etc.

I’m thinking about the differences among strategies, policies, and skills, mainly because the Tufts Civic Studies Major, which I direct, aims to teach all three. I assume that definitions of these concepts have been extensively discussed, but without consulting any literature, I’m inclined to categorize them as follows:

• Skill: The ability to do something useful. A skill can be quite concrete (e.g., conducting an interview) or more abstract (leading a team). Developing a skill often involves imitation, practice, and perhaps a dose of theory. Typically, we attribute skills to individuals, although I suppose that a group can be skillful.
• Policy: A choice that an institution makes that affects people and/or nature. Such a choice need not be conscious and deliberate. However, if something happens by necessity, I wouldn’t call it a policy. A policy is something that the institution could change by choosing otherwise. Therefore, policy-analysis is about identifying the choices available to institutions, predicting their consequences, and assessing which one is preferable.
• Strategy: A planned sequence of actions by an individual or group that aims to accomplish some goal. A strategy that’s worthy of that name considers the opportunities, constraints, risks, and threats, including the possible reactions of other people and groups. A strategy can leave room for revision and improvisation, but it needs enough detail to inform action. Therefore, learning about strategy involves identifying possible courses of action and their likely impact and assessing which course is preferable.

These categories relate and overlap in many ways. Policy analysis and strategic planning are skills. Good strategy involves the application of available skills. (For instance, the first part of a strategy might be to deploy skilled people to recruit members.) A strategy can aim to affect policy. A policy can be part of a larger strategy. Institutions may enact and implement policies to develop skills. And so on.

Nevertheless, these concepts are sufficiently distinct that I hope that we offer each to our students.

I would also note that skills, strategies, and policies can be good or bad. The difference depends on their ethics and their outcomes–both their means and ends. Therefore, normative analysis and argumentation must complement any education about skills, policy, and strategy.