Monthly Archives: September 2005

why it’s important for young people to have civic opportunities

James Youniss and Daniel Hart have summarized more than a dozen longitudinal studies that follow young people into adulthood and repeatedly ask questions about their civic engagement and values. The basic pattern is very consistent: those who participate in politics or community affairs or leadership roles at age 15 or 22 are much more likely to be involved at age 30 or 50. Probably the longest study is by Kent Jennings, which finds a relationship between participation in high school groups in the 1960s and participation in community groups by the same people in the 1990s.

One possible explanation is that some people have a personality trait, moral value, or other internal characteristic that predisposes them to participate when they are young and still applies when they are older. In that case, it would not matter much whether adolescents and young adults were given opportunities to participate civically. Assuming they had the right mental predispositions, they would participate whenever they had an opportunity, even if they had to wait for adulthood. Our goal, in that case, should be to change hearts and minds, to make people feel civically responsible.

If this theory applied, then we might also understand certain historical events as the result of shifts in values: for example, the Civil Rights Movement would be a product of new consciousness among African Americans (and to a lesser extent, among Whites). By the same token, we should be concerned about certain negative trends in values, like the big increase in materialistic values held by incoming college freshmen since 1966.

However, the evidence tends to suggest a very different view. Based on surveys of participants and non-participants, it does not appear that young people engage in service or politics because they have particular values beforehand. It seems to matter much more whether they are recruited to participate, and whether they have appropriate skills and knowledge. But if values do not determine participation, participation does change values and habits. When we compare participants who appeared similar before a civic opportunity, we often find that they behave quite different afterwards. This was true of comparable people who did and did not participate in the Freedom Summer campaigns of 1964. Such profoundly moving and terrifying work might be expected to leave a lasting mark (see Doug McAdam’s book, Freedom Summer). But the same is true to a lesser extent of young people who participate in student government or school newspapers. Even forty years later, they remain more civically engaged than other people who answered the same survey questions as they did.

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against “systematizing” in ethics

In a recent comment, Metta Spencer asks, “I?m … curious about your notion that systemizing ethical principles is not a good way to go. I would love to hear more about that. I suppose it?s more than just not being a Kantian, but i can’t fill in the blanks to guess what you mean, and there aren’t citations in these blog thingies.” I thought an answer would be worth a full post, so here goes. My position could be summarized as follows:

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a review

The book that John Gastil and I recently published (as editors), The Deliberative Democracy Handbook, has received its first review on Amazon. I hope it’s not the last review, because someone called “environmental planning professor (Virginia, USA)” has written:

I ordered this book hoping that it would indeed be a handbook that would be appropriate for teaching college undergraduates about this exciting approach to problem-solving and capacity-building. With gathering dismay I leafed through the chapters, finding one after another to be merely a collection of breezy comments, written principally by the originator of one or another slightly varying technique, that uncritically promoted the value of that technique. The material appears plucked from a foundation grant proposal. Surprisingly, considering the deep familiarity of the authors with these techniques, the book contains little in the way of actual operational advice. Rather, most of the chapters are unsupported and grandious [sic] claims for the utility of each approach, presumably designed to entice the reader to sign a lucrative consulting contract with the author. Folks, this is why we have academic research – to avoid empty and meaningless self-promoting efforts like this one.

I can’t respond without seeming defensive, but this is really quite unfair. First of all, the suggestion that that the authors are after “lucrative consulting contracts” is just mean. Our book has 42 contributing authors, about 38 of whom I know personally. Very few ever see a dime for consulting. All the ones I know struggle at low pay to create constructive opportunities for democratic participation in their communities and countries.

While the Handbook does not provide step-by-step advice, anyone who reads it with any sympathy will recognize a variety of methods and choices. Some chapters describe jury-style deliberations of randomly-selected citizens. Others are voluntary meetings embedded in local associations. Some are online. Some have the power to make binding decisions; others are discussion forums or study circles.

It’s true that the chapters are (with roughly three exceptions) written by people who are involved in the projects under discussion. Since they have invested sweat and passion in this work, they are probably biased in its favor. Thus there would have been advantages if we had used independent evaluators. However, that was impossible, since there is not enough money in the field of deliberative democracy to support extensive independent evaluation. Besides, independence has its disadvantages. These chapters are useful–in part–because they clearly express the practitioners’ perspective on what they are trying to do. Each chapter is a statement of goals and principles, and each is different from the others.

Moreover, the authors do not simply provide favorable anecdotes, although we did encourage them to begin each chapter with a compelling story or example. The authors also assemble whatever data and evaluation exists, and often they take pains to note drawbacks or unresolved challenges in their work.

In the field of deliberation, it would be useful to have more controlled, experimental studies. Such research could measure the effects of deliberation on individuals’ attitudes and behaviors. However, proponents of deliberative democracy are not solely interested in effects on individuals. We also hope that public deliberation will produce better policies, strengthen communities, and educate policymakers. A randomized experiment is not a good tool for assessing such broader outcomes. A combination of normative argument and case studies strikes me as the better approach. Again, there would be advantages to more independent research, but it is also valuable to let practitioners describe and defend their own experiences.

the politics of the New Orleans disaster

I agree with Maria Farrell and others that the New Orleans disaster has displayed aspects of American life that are grievously wrong. People died because they couldn’t afford to leave the flooded city. The government failed to help them, just as it had failed to protect them in the first place. The ones left behind were mostly African American and poor. Until the water destroyed their homes, they had lived in one of America’s many ghettos: large, socially isolated areas of poverty and high crime, also marked by very poor municipal services, blighted buildings, and a lack of business investment. I don’t think there is anything quite comparable to an American ghetto elsewhere in the developed world. There are poor neighborhoods in Europe, often inhabited by people of color. But they are much smaller and less dangerous than the ghettos of the US.

Obviously, these points have ideological significance. It is usually liberal leaders (along with some interesting libertarians, such as Jack Kemp) who emphasize the need to address massive poverty and racial exclusion. When voters observe the New Orleans ghetto after a disaster and recognize the vulnerability of its citizens, they may move leftward. Since the poverty and vulnerability are real, it is quite appropriate to draw ideological and political lessons from what happened this week. It’s also important to argue that people in New Orleans were victimized and are not to blame for the rioting. We want Americans to draw the lesson that inner-cities need more investment, not that the police should be more aggressive.

However ….

1) We shouldn’t let the issue become narrowly partisan. True, Bush responded to the crisis in a callow and offensive way; yes, his FEMA director is unqualified compared to James Lee Witt, who served under Clinton; and it’s a fact that the budget request of the Army Corps of Engineers was not fully funded. But exactly the same kind of disaster and botched response could have happened under Clinton. Besides, the people of New Orleans have been living under Democratic city and state administrations since Reconstruction. Their schools and police force have been terrible all that time. (I would support spending more per student than the $7,533 allocated by the Orleans Parish schools, and a big increase would require more state and federal aid. But New Orleans’ per-student spending has increased by 27 percent since 1999 and has risen faster than the national average. The results remain quite poor and cannot be blamed mainly on the feds.)

I doubt very much that it will work as a political strategy to try to focus blame on the Bush administration. In the short term, predictably, voters are divided along partisan lines in their estimate of Bush’s performance. There are so many possible targets of blame (including nature, local government, rioters, and long-standing federal policies) that only people who have a particular ideological frame have focused their anger on the president.

In the longer run, voters’ opinions of Bush will become irrelevant. I have always assumed that he would be unpopular by now. But his popularity doesn’t matter much. Republicans will run as outsiders in 2006 and especially 2008, when they will probably nominate an anti-Washington governor or a Bush critic like McCain for president. As for Democrats, they have a chance to win if they (a) figure out what they stand for and (b) find a plausible candidate. If they succumb to the temptation to bash the outgoing administration, voters will once again conclude that they have no answers to America’s problems.

2) We must respond in a way that will make it possible to rebuild New Orleans in a satisfactory way. That is going to require hope and cooperation. Unless individuals feel hope and solidarity, they will do just what Matthew Yglesias predicts and use their insurance money to move away from New Orleans. Hope should come from the fact that America is not simply “selfish and wicked.” It is also a robust democracy with comparatively competent government, strong nonprofit institutions, and an impressive tradition of civic innovation. We are much better than we were 25 years ago at city planning, historic preservation, wetland-conservation, and public engagement. We have models like the Listening to the City process, that convened 800 ordinary citizens to help plan the World Trade Center rebuilding. Even the federal government is getting better at engaging the public.

Anger will be part of any public discussions in or about New Orleans, and genuine rage should not be suppressed. But we cannot afford for outsiders to pursue partisan advantage, because the federal, state, and local governments must work together.

3) There should be an ideological dimension to the debates in town meetings, blogs, and op-ed pages, but there is more than one legitimate ideological perspective to consider. I lean toward the view that people in New Orleans are suffering because of our low levels of public investment and our lack of concern for African Americans. But I know libertarians who think that the New Orleans disaster is an illustration of government’s hubris. In classic New Deal style, the feds taxed and spent money to build levees and drain swamps, thus encouraging people to live in a dangerous place, against the logic of both market and nature. Burkean conservatives should want to preserve as much as possible of New Orleans’ distinctive heritage. Progressives should argue for rebuilding in new and better ways than before. This debate is interesting and important, but it will accomplish little if it narrows to an argument about impeaching George W. Bush (see these comments for a sample).

Laxdaela Saga: political freedom and psychological insight

On our way to Iceland, I read an Icelandic saga that we happened to have in our apartment (because my wife had read it in college). The sagas were written in the thirteenth century, when Iceland was reasonably well integrated into Christian Europe; but they are set 200-300 years earlier, in the days of the Icelandic Free State. This was an amazing polity, a nation formed by chieftains from Norway, Ireland, and other diverse places and cultures. They met annually at an assembly called the Althing, which functioned as a legislature–writing criminal and civil laws–and a court. They had no executive branch at all. This meant that there were no taxes and no public expenditures on things like temples and churches, roads, or armies. For the same reason, there no police power. The main sentence passed at the Althing was outlawry. An outlaw was supposed to leave Iceland. If he stayed, anyone could kill him.

Me and my girls at Thingvellir, where the Icelandic assembly began meeting in 930

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