Today, a group of teachers from Azerbaijan visited my office. With help from Streetlaw (on whose board I serve), they are teaching their students to deliberate about current issues, as a form of civic education. Since I have long worked on deliberation and civic education, both separately and in combination, I was interested to hear their experiences. Meanwhile, Professor Gabriel Murillo from Colombia, a leading proponent of public deliberation, happened to be visiting. I know Prof. Murillo from past work with the Kettering Foundation, so I accompanied the Azeris to his talk. He lectured in English on the role of deliberative democracy in development. An Azeri interpreter provided simultaneous translation into Russian, since not all of the delegation from Azerbaijan speaks Azeri. Dr. Murillo said at one point that he thinks in Spanish; I sensed that he was translating words like “consentimiento” into English as he spoke. The Azeri translator presumably had to think in his own (Turkic) language as he generated Russian words from Dr. Murillo’s English. And some of his colleagues who know Azeri better than Russian may have had to translate into their native language to understand what he was saying. At one point, an Azeri of Russian ethnicity stood and bravely asked Dr. Murillo a question in Russian, which several people helped to translate into English so that Dr. Murillo could reply. The whole point of his speech was the need for communication in a pluralistic society, and that’s exactly what we experienced–albeit through the medium of English.
Monthly Archives: March 2005
what worked for Dean worked better for Bush-Cheney
I didn’t share in the enthusiasm for Howard Dean’s campaign, and partly that was because I feared that the very methods he pioneered would work much better for the right than for the left. Decentralized networks like Dean’s are perfect if you have a constituency that’s habitually engaged in politics, rich in connections and network ties, able to make financial contributions, and technically savvy. If, on the other hand, much of your constituency is alienated, demoralized, offline, and without money, then big, disciplined institutions like labor unions, conventional parties, and churches are awfully useful.
Marty Kearns has picked up a telling article by Michael Barrone that describes the Bush-Cheney campaign in the same terms that many leftists used to celebrate Dean. Bush’s reelection campaign was, to a large extent, a volunteer-driven, broad-based network. To be sure, Bush raised big bucks–but so did Kerry. The difference may well have been the strength of the decentralized network that supported Republicans.
Some people argue that new network technologies lower the cost of participation, thereby “empowering” ordinary people. That may be true to an extent, and I hope it is. But participation also requires a civic identity: a sense that one is an effective, responsible, committed, important member of a community. A civic identity is much more common, and much easier to develop, among wealthy professionals than among poor and middle-income people, who have good reasons to doubt that they can be effective, valued participants. Networked technologies rarely create civic identities; instead, they amplify the power of the engaged. Thus the decentralized networks that played roles in the 2004 campaign were dominated by relatively affluent volunteers–as shown by the rise of Dean, the victory of Bush, the impact of the “527” groups, and the irrelevance of labor unions.
student government
Research by Daniel McFarland and Carlos Starmanns finds that there’s a great variation in the quality of high school student governments. Some have elaborate and evolving constitutions that establish significant powers for students over budgets and discipline. Others are merely clubs whose members are chosen in popularity contests. This is an important issue, because research since the 1960s has consistently found that students are more committed to democracy and have better skills if their schools offer student “voice.”
In general, the wealthier the school’s population, the more power is given to its student government. However …
Alternative schools?charter, magnet or private?seem to offer opportunities for meaningful political participation greater than even the wealthiest public schools. Student councils typically consist of 20 to 40 officers, regardless of school size, so these generally smaller schools enable a greater percentage of students to hold office. And because alternative schools tend to have a clear mission, their constitutions try to uphold school values?by encouraging the election of moral exemplars, for example. However, alternative schools also tend to give faculty tighter control over students (including reins on elections), leading McFarland and Starmanns to wonder whether such schools raise citizens who are not used to thinking for themselves.
I’m interested in whether it’s the poverty of neighborhoods or low per-pupil spending that seems, all else being equal, to predict a weak or non-existent student government. We at CIRCLE plan to do some simple statistical analysis to evaluate whether the level of per-capita school spending correlates with students’ civic engagement, controlling for other factors. If schools without adequate funds tend to sacrifice student government, that would be one of several ways in which low funding could hamper civic education.
network mapping, civic education, & social capital
If you interview community members or leaders of local organizations and ask them what other organizations they work with, you can use software to generate a “network map” that shows all the linkages among organizations and allows you to identify any gaps in the network. For an example of such a map, see my depiction of major links in today’s civic renewal movement. (I generated this image using TouchGraph’s GoogleBrowser, so the connections represent links between websites, not reports of actual collaborations.)
Network mapping seems promising to me as a tool for community organizing: it allows you to see how your community could be strengthened by forging new connections among nodes that are not in contact. It also seems promising as a form of civic education. Students could perform network-mapping of their schools or communities and learn a lot about civil society.
Indeed, yesterday, three University of Maryland students began a network-mapping pilot project in Prince George’s County, MD, under my direction. They are terrific students, but since there are only three of them, they probably won’t be able to achieve more than get the process rolling so that others can follow after them. I am hoping that they’ll generate at least an interesting preliminary graph that will tell us something about the place of the University in the County.
By the way, when scholars like Robert Putnam estimate “social capital” by asking people how many associations they belong to, whether they invite friends over for dinner, and whether they trust other people, I would say that they are using proxy measures to assess the strength and density of actual collaborations in a community. Thus I would say that a network map is a more direct (although more labor-intensive) measure of “social capital” than anything based on survey data. This is partly because I believe the purpose of social capital is to address social problems; I am not interested in connectedness or sociability for its own sake.
youth civic engagement: an “institutional turn”
Maybe every generation in every democracy gives its elders reasons to worry about the future. Citizens are made, not born; each generation needs deliberate, critical guidance from the older ones.
Looking at recent trends in the US, we see particular problems, including: a steep decline in youth interest in public affairs (graph); low levels of knowledge; widespread skepticism that it is possible to make a positive difference; and a decline in youth turnout of about one third (pdf) until the uptick last November. (As a discrete act, voting can be over-emphasized; but it is a useful proxy for knowledge, connectedness, and commitment.)
I see two basic ways to interpret these trends and respond to them. One is to assume that there is something wrong with the pyschology of young people: their knowledge, skills, and values. These deficits may not be their fault; we can blame schools, the media, parents, and others. But the deficits are located inside young people’s heads (so to speak). If that’s the situation, then we should be interested in the efficiency of various “interventions”–civic education programs, community service opportunities, or voter-canvassing drives–to change young people’s psychology while they are still in a formative stage of life.
The other “model” assumes that the problem is not inside youth’s heads, but in major institutions that are not worthy of being engaged. For example, maybe kids don’t read newspapers because newspapers aren’t that great to read. Maybe they don’t vote because the vast majority of elections are decided when the districts are drawn. Maybe they aren’t interested in “public affairs” because public issues are not being framed in useful ways.
In this model, youth attitudes, knowledge, and skills are not simply “dependent variables” that should be raised as much as possible through interventions such as “civic ed.” They are rather (or partly) symptoms of a need for deeper social change.
There may nevertheless be arguments in favor of programs that work directly on young people’s minds and hearts. It is easier to change social studies than reform politics. Thus if we can enhance civic skills through better social-studies education, maybe we can help the next generation to press for political reform (on its own terms, not ours). Or if we can raise youth turnout through get-out-the-vote efforts, which seems to have happened in ’04, then maybe we can create a more competitive and unpredictable electorate, thereby changing campaigns and politics. Nevertheless, working on kids’ pyschology is an indirect strategy, and it’s worth constantly asking two more basic questions: What kind of polity is worthy of full engagement? And how do we get there?