Monthly Archives: October 2009

Elinor Ostrom wins the Nobel!

The Nobel Foundation announced yesterday that Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel prize in Economic Sciences. She is the first woman to win the prize and surely one of the few non-economists. When Lin was president of the American Political Science Association, she was a strong voice for civic education and has been a consistent supporter of CIRCLE–a coauthor of our paper on civic education in universities and co-editor of a book that includes my chapter on youth-led research. She was one of the small group of political theorists who originally envisioned the Summer Institute of Civic Studies that we finally turned into a real course at Tufts last July. She is a model practitioner of collaborative community-based research who combines patient, low-profile interactions with practitioners and high-level theory–each enriching the other. She has built an institution, the Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis, that I see as an ideal model for all “engaged” universities. Before the Nobel Committee snagged her, we awarded her the 2009 Tisch Research Prize.

I started last summer’s Institute by reading aloud Margaret Mead’s famous exhortation: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

I noted that Mead’s statement is false, because many other things (wars, governments, floods, plagues) have also changed the world. Mead is also wrong to imply that committed citizens always succeed, or that when they do the results are necessarily good. Mussolini and his fellow fascisti were committed–and even thoughtful in their way–yet they made the world a lot worse. I said that what we need is a real study of active citizenship that includes: (1) empirical evidence about when small groups of citizens can change the world; (2) moral analysis that tells us when their methods and their results are good; and (3) strategic advice about how to support and encourage their most effective and beneficial efforts.

Such research is scarce because social science tends to think first of institutions and macro-level changes, being skeptical about the impact of small-scale, deliberate, citizen politics. (In fact, we citizens have relatively modest effects. But what we do is the most important factor for us to understand; everything else is context.) Further, social science still cannot comfortably handle arguments about values. For their part, moral philosophy and political theory address values but cannot handle strategy. Yet a value or an ideal that has no practicable strategy is worse than nothing.

In my opinion, Elinor Ostrom is one of a small number of thinkers about citizenship who combine empirical insights, moral arguments, and strategies. The ideal for Lin Ostrom is a group of people who manage to overcome collective action problems, such as the “tragedy of the commons,” through voluntary action. The tragedy of the commons is enormously important–if we perish as a species, it may be because we fail to address such problems as climate change that can be understood this way. Yet Lin has shown empirically and with great rigor that people can voluntarily overcome collective-action problems–using appropriate rules and techniques, under appropriate circumstances.

Promoting such achievements requires a whole set of strategies, from constitutional and other legal provisions, to reforms of institutions, to research that reveals effective techniques, to civic education that imparts the necessary skills. As just one example of her many reform proposals, Ostrom argues that we should reverse the trend toward consolidating school districts, because each school board teaches its members participatory skills. Going beyond mere proposals, Ostrom has helped to build and lead institutions that promote and embody these ideas. The Nobel Prize will surely help endow the Workshop that she and her distinguished husband Vincent Ostrom have created.

In my ideal university, Ostrom’s methods and topics would be right at the heart of the whole enterprise. There is no more important question than “How can we improve the world?” The scarcity of really rigorous answers–not to mention the marginality of the very question–is a scandal. Ostrom’s work is a shining exception that richly deserves recognition. As one of my colleagues wrote last night, “this is the first Nobel Prize for civic studies.”

young Latinos and the decision to pursue college

According to a new report by my friend and former colleague Mark Hugo Lopez, “Nearly three-quarters (74%) of all 16- to 25-year-old [Latinos] who cut their education short during or right after high school say they did so because they had to support their family.” Almost ninety percent of Latinos “say that a college education is important for success in life,” a higher rate than in the population as a whole. Yet Latinos’ actual college attendance rates are low, and their expectations of going to college are not much higher. (Only 48% “say that they themselves plan to get a college degree.”) It sounds as if a significant part of the problem is a tradeoff between the short-term necessity of contributing to family income versus the long-term need for higher education. This is a trap if there ever was one.

skepticism about youth and diversity

Today’s young Americans–the Millennials–think of themselves as remarkably tolerant and appreciative of differences, including differences of race, ethnicity, culture, religion, sexual orientation, and country of origin. They are conscious that their generation is the most demographically diverse in history and that the public worlds of entertainment and politics have grown more diverse. Young people are extremely unlikely to oppose interracial marriage, to favor segregated neighborhoods, or to say that they wouldn’t vote for a Black presidential candidate. Those are traditional measures of racism–developed in the days of Jim Crow, when whites frequently gave what I would call the racist responses.

But young Americans do not hold particularly liberal views about race and policy, especially in contrast to their strongly liberal views on economic regulation, government support for education, and environmentalism. In last year’s National Election Study, when young white Americans (age 18-29) were asked their opinion about government assistance to Blacks, 59% were against (27% strongly so) and 18% in favor (2% strongly). A small majority (53%) thought the federal government should help Blacks get fair access to jobs.

Young Americans today are less likely to interact regularly with peers across the white/black or white/Hispanic line than they were when I was young. School-level racial segregation has increased. Monoracial religious congregations remain the norm as well. Thus most young white people have “mediated” rather than personal relationships with African Americans and Latinos–via news and entertainment.

I would propose the following rather pessimistic hypothesis. If you grow up in direct, daily contact with people of different races from your own, you may have various complex feelings that include negative prejudices, resentments, and memories of unpleasant experiences. But you may also have a realistic view of racial issues and some commitment to making things better. If, on the other hand, you grow up thinking that your world is highly diverse–but you have little actual contact with people of different races–you can convince yourself that you’re wonderfully tolerant and appreciative. Yet you can have no sense of the difficulty of actually working with people across racial lines.

Two pieces of evidence feed this suspicion. One is research about the negative correlation between perceived discussions of politics and racial diversity. For instance, in a CIRCLE working paper, David Campbell found that, “as the percentage of white students increases, black students are less likely to report that their teachers encourage political discussion in class, and as the percentage of black students increases, white students report less discussion in schools.” Campbell proposes that teachers shy away from controversial issues in diverse classrooms. But I and others have suggested an alternative theory. We think that when classrooms are homogeneous, students think that they have discussed difficult issues. When classrooms are diverse, students know that they have barely scratched the surface.

The second piece of evidence is autobiographical. I attended schools that were quite well integrated in the sense that the numbers of African American and white students were roughly equal. But those schools were internally segregated in terms of social networks, courses, activities, and trajectories after graduation. I think that experience–not uncommon in the 1970s and 1980s, when I was in school–left me with fairly complex but also realistic views about diversity, segregation, and the persistence of racism. I remain pretty self-critical and unsatisfied when it comes to racial issues. I am also quick to reject what I consider simplistic solutions. It worries me that Millennials may lack that sense of struggle.

who wants to deliberate?

Michael Neblo, Kevin Esterling, Ryan Kennedy, David Lazer, and Anand Sokhey have written a really important paper entitled “Who Wants to Deliberate – and Why?” It is a rich and complex document that reports the results from a new national survey plus an experiment.

Overall, the paper complicates and challenges the “Stealth Democracy” thesis of John R. Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse (my review of which is here). The “Stealth Democracy” thesis is that people have the following preferences:

    Best: government by disinterested, trustworthy elites. Second-best: direct democracy (referenda, etc.) to keep the actual corrupt elites in check. Worst: Participatory democracy that requires a lot of talk and work by citizens.

On the basis of their survey data, Hibbing and Theiss-Morse conclude that “getting people to participate in discussions of political issues with people who do not have similar concerns is not a wise move.” Deliberative democracy “would actually do significant harm.” According to the new paper, however, citizens hold ambivalent and complex feelings about each of the options listed above; and they are quite supportive of a fourth choice–deliberative representative democracy (a conversation between citizens and elected officials.)

One way to get a flavor of this fascinating paper is to compare survey questions from Hibbing and Theiss-Morse with new questions from Neblo et al:

  • Hibbing and Theiss-Morse: “Elected officials would help the country more if they would stop talking and just take action on important problems. [86% agree]
  • Neblo et al: “It is important for elected officials to discuss and debate things thoroughly before making major policy changes.” [92% agree]
  • Hibbing and Theiss Morse: “What people call “compromise” in politics is really just selling out one’s principles.” [64% agree]
  • Neblo et al. “One of the main reasons that elected officials have to debate issues is that they are responsible to represent the interests of diverse constituencies across the country.” [84% agree]
  • Hibbing and Theiss-Morse: “Our government would run better if decisions were left up to nonelected, independent experts rather than politicians or the people.” [31% agree, which Hibbing and Theiss-Morse consider high.]
  • Neblo et al: “It is important for the people and their elected representatives to have the final say in running government, rather than leaving it up to unelected experts.” [92% agree]

By asking questions that are opposites of Hibbing and Theiss-Morse’s items, Neblo et al. reveal that even most people who hold anti-democratic views are actually quite ambivalent. Most of those people also hold pro-democratic views. One way to make sense of the apparent contradiction is to think that people are in favor of real dialog and deliberation, but unimpressed by the actual debate in Congress. That, by the way, would be roughly my own view.

The other main source of evidence in Neblo et al is a field experiment, in which people were offered the chance to deliberate with real Members of Congress. They were more likely to accept if they had negative attitudes toward elected leaders and the debates in Washington. Again, that could be because they don’t reject deliberation in principle but dislike the official debates that they hear about or watch on TV. People who held those skeptical views were especially impressed by an offer from their real US Representative to deliberate. Individuals were also more likely to accept the offer to deliberate if they were young and if they had low education.

Further, if they showed up to deliberate, their opinions of the experience were very positive. According to the paper, “95% Agreed (72% Strongly Agreed) that such sessions are ‘very valuable to our democracy’ and 96% Agreed (80% Strongly Agreed) that they would be interested in doing similar online sessions for other issues.” These results are consistent with almost all practical deliberative experiments. So are the open-ended responses of participants:

    “It was great to have a member of Congress want to really hear the voices of the constituents.” / “I believe we are experiencing the one way our elected representatives can hear our voice and do what we want.” / “I thought he really tried to address the issues we were bringing up instead of steering the conversation in any particular direction, which was cool.” / “I realized that there are A LOT more sides to this issue than I had originally thought.”

The short answer to the question, “Who wants to deliberate?” seems to be: “A lot of people, but especially those who are most alienated from politics as usual.” That suggests that real deliberative democracy, as organized by the National Issues Forums, Everyday Democracy, AmericaSpeaks, and others, may be the best antidote to deep skepticism and alienation.

Strengthening Our Nation’s Democracy

Last summer, about 100 representatives of various strands of democratic reform work came together in Washington, DC to create a common agenda. Among the participants were advocates of electoral reform, voting rights, and campaign finance reform; practitioners of public deliberation and advocates of consulting with citizens; federal civil servants who have created and managed programs that involve collaboration with nonprofit groups and communities; grassroots community organizers; activists for participatory democracy overseas; and educators who are concerned about teaching civic skills to students and to communities.

Thanks to remarkable facilitation by AmericaSpeaks President Carolyn Lukensmeyer and a small team of other leaders, the whole group was able to pull together a single agenda after just two very long and intense days of discussion. The result is here .

I do not think this agenda is completely comprehensive–it’s mostly focused at the federal level and it’s perhaps not strong enough on culture change–but it is an extremely important document. If we can achieve this agenda, we will transform American democracy.