Monthly Archives: February 2005

how institutions socialize young people for citizenship

In 1928, Karl Mannheim argued that people tend to form stable civic identities in their late teens. As adolescents emerge from the relatively narrow horizons of their families and neighborhoods, they confront the broader world of governments, ideologies, parties, and nation-states. They must adopt some stance toward this world, whether it is passive acceptance, alienation, enthusiastic embrace, or personal obligation. After people form a stance, the effort required to change their minds is too costly unless major historical events intervene and require a reassessment. Given the relatively low salience of public life, inertia tends to dominate for the rest of our lives.

If Mannheim was even partly right, then it is important to ask how our institutions socialize young people for lifetimes of civic and political participation. The impact of these institutions is likely to change as their structure and behavior evolve. Thus a study of institutional change is crucial for our analysis of political development.

I suspect that the following are some of the most significant ways in which American institutions have changed their effects on political socialization over the past 25 years:

  • Electoral politics: Thanks to sophisticated gerrymandering, there is ever less competition for state legislatures and the US House. As a result, young people grow up without the experience of debate in their communities and may conclude that controversy is unnecessary or artificial, something that Washington political elites stir up for tactical reasons. The lack of competition also means that elected officials are relatively insulated from accountability and relatively uninterested in seeking young people?s support. We know from field experiments that young people often vote when asked. The decline in political competitiveness means that they are less likely to receive a request to vote.
  • Meanwhile, sophisticated marketing strategies and technologies have allowed consultant-driven campaigns to focus their efforts on groups of people with known voting histories. Young people have unknown voting preferences and are relatively unlikely to participate. Thus they are usually left off target lists. To make matters worse, their services as volunteers are not needed as much as in the past, because campaigns depend on expert consultants, mailing lists, and professionally produced advertising.
  • Civil society: As Elinor Ostrom notes, ?Some aspects of the science of association are both counterintuitive and counterintentional, and thus must be taught to each generation as part of the culture of a democratic citizenry.? Associations have incentives to recruit young people and teach them skills necessary for the organizations? maintenance. If associations recruit fewer members, that is bad for political socialization. Unfortunately, some important organizations that once recruited young people have lost membership. The most obvious examples are labor unions. In 2000, just 13% of 15-24s were union members, far less than fifty years ago. Religious congregations can also teach civic skills. But regular religious attendance among high school seniors declined from 41 percent in 1976 to 33 percent in 2000. During this period, high school seniors did not show any major change in attitudes toward religion, but they became considerably less likely to participate in organized religious groups.
  • The news media: The modern mass media are fragmented and allow people to opt out of news more easily than in the past. There also may be more sorting by level of knowledge; some newspapers provide highly sophisticated information to global audiences via the Internet, while other news sources (such as commercial web portals and music radio stations) provide extremely superficial coverage tilted toward entertainment. Organs that might serve diverse audiences, such as metropolitan daily newspapers, are endangered in the current market. Meanwhile, most people feel that news programs have become less civil, perhaps because they must compete more avidly for ratings. Diana Mutz and Byron Reeves have found that people are entertained by angry debates, yet such confrontations reduce trust in government and politics.

    • There is a problem with youth civic engagement, but it’s important not to locate the problem inside young people’s heads if the real cause of their alienation lies in institutions.

    the Iraqi election, suicide bombing, & rational choice theory

    An election is partly a public good, in the precise economist’s sense. If representatives are selected peacefully and officials are made accountable to the majority, that is a good thing for most people. This good is indivisible. I cannot decide to forgo the benefits to me personally of democratic elections, nor sell my stake to someone else. Like national defense or the ozone layer, elections benefit all (or at least the whole majority faction), if they serve anyone.

    There is a well-known problem with public goods. Whether a democratic election occurs depends on many people’s behavior, yet each person benefits regardless of what he or she does. For example, you gain from our political system?whether or not you vote. Thus you may be tempted to free-ride and let others bear the burden of voting. Or you may feel that it’s pointless to promote this public good, since others are unlikely to do their share.

    Continue reading →

    Ruth Simmons

    Ruth Simmons is the President of Brown University. I had a chance to hear her speak and then joined her for a dinner yesterday. In the speech, she described her path from a small, East-Texas town where she was the twelfth child of sharecroppers to the presidency of an Ivy League university. I was particularly interested in her description of Houston in the 1950s. She said that a tight network of very talented Black teachers and ministers, plus a few lawyers and doctors, led the community and collaborated closely to help young people–they raised money for college tuition, picked out students’ clothes, taught and counselled them. Because of segregation, these adults had no options other than to hold a few professional jobs within the Black community. This restriction was deeply unfair, but it meant that children who came from deep poverty had access to skilled and charismatic people in their own neighborhoods.

    Dr. Simmons’ parents were suspicious of schooling and constantly told her to take her nose out of books. She suggested three reasons for this attitude: her parents worked with their hands and distrusted “idleness”; they were afraid that Ruth might question racial injustice and be killed; and they worried that she might lose touch with (and respect for) her own family. A final reason could have been a kind of “bargain with reality.” Since other opportunities had always been closed for African Americans, especially in rural East Texas, sharecroppers developed a pride in manual labor and a hostility to books to help validate their own lives. But Simmons was also exposed to community leaders for whom education was a route to freedom. Despite centuries of oppression, her teachers and other professionals prepared youth to become leaders in the hope that better opportunities would arise. I suspect that their hope was an essential precondition of the Civil Rights Movement.

    the president’s budget and civic education

    The Bush Administration’s budget proposal for education is available online. For those concerned about civic learning, here are two key points:

  • Funding for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools is cut in half, from $672 million to $317 million. This is the office that manages character and civic education, including grants to produce curricular materials, train teachers, etc.
  • The budget makes high school reform a major priority. There will be a big fight over what that means. Some believe that the standards-and-accountability regime that’s now in place for grades 3-8 should be extended upward to grades 9-12; others think that high schools should be made smaller, more various, and more connected to communities. In principle, we could do both; but in practice, there are likely to be major tradeoffs between the two approaches. For one thing, a standards-and-accountability regime will drive schools toward standardization, which will make it more difficult for them to develop idiosyncratic curricular themes, such as public service or American history. Many in the “civic ed” world see great promise in small, themed high schools, especially ones that emphasize civic values.

    The budget is somewhat ambiguous about how to reform secondary education. On one hand, the title of the relevant subhead is “Finishing the Job: Bringing NCLB to High Schools,” and money is earmarked for mandatory “testing in grades 9?11 in language arts and math.” On the other hand, the following passage implies some flexibility:

    • This initiative provides $1.2 billion to help States implement a high school accountability framework and a wide range of effective interventions. In return for a commitment to improve academic achievement and graduation rates for secondary school students, States will receive the flexibility to choose which intervention strategies will be most effective in serving the needs of their at-risk high school students. Allowable activities would include vocational education programs, mentoring programs, and partnerships between high schools and colleges, among other approaches. A portion of the funding will be used for randomized trials and evaluations to identify the most effective intervention strategies to enable school administrators to make better choices on what educational strategies to adopt.”

    I read this as a negotiated statement. Those who simply want high-stakes testing to be expanded through the 12th grade probably have the upper hand, but they have made some room for people who see other ways to reform high schools.

    [cross-posted from the CMS Community blog]

    handbook of public deliberation

    John Gastil and I are busy organizing the production of our co-edited volume, The Handbook of Public Deliberation: Strategies for Effective Civic Engagement in the 21st Century. Jossey Bass will publish it this summer. Of the 19 chapters, 16 describe very concrete and practical approaches to public deliberation; thus the book will offer a diverse menu of choices for civic groups, governments, school systems, and others to use. (The three remaining chapters are overviews of the field.) Since almost all chapters have been written by teams, usually comprised of both scholars and practitioners, there are 44 authors in all. Coordinating everyone’s participation has been quite a job for John and me. However, we’ll reach a milestone tomorrow when we submit a fully edited and complete manuscript.

    The cover design to the right is preliminary. We’ve asked for more people, more evident diversity, and less office ceiling. (Apparently, that’s the publisher’s office, and one arm belongs to our editor.) Still, I like the informality and zest of the basic design.