Monthly Archives: January 2014

new CIRCLE report on teaching news

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From the CIRCLE website:

With news sources changing rapidly and fragmenting along ideological lines, understanding how to use news and information media (“information literacy”) is an important civic skill. A new fact sheet by CIRCLE deputy director Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg explores the extent to which information literacy is taught in high school civics classes and how its teaching varies.

Using the data from CIRCLE’s National Civics Teacher Survey, which asked teachers about the courses they taught in Fall 2012, this analysis found that overall:

  • Civics teachers believe that information literacy is critical and that students must be able to identify and gather credible information
  • Less than half of teachers are very confident about teaching information literacy. A majority are interested in receiving more training and resources.
  • Teachers commonly use news articles as sources, and 80% discuss election-related issues at least weekly
  • AP and honors courses are more likely to incorporate information literacy than courses that are required for graduation.
  • Teachers who perceive more support are more likely to teach information literacy.

Read the fact sheet National Civics Teacher Survey: Information Literacy in High School Civics. The National Civics Teacher Survey was conducted as part of CIRCLE’s Commission on Youth Voting and Civic Knowledge.

new book–Civic Studies: Approaches to the Emerging Field

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Published today, Civic Studies: Approaches to the Emerging Field is a volume co-edited by me and Karol Edward Soltan and published by Bringing Theory to Practice and the American Association of Colleges and Universities as the third in their Civic Series. It is available for free download (pdf) or for purchase at $10 for the volume. Contents:

what defines conservatism?

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Popular political words like “liberalism” and “conservatism” often name disparate ideas and movements. No one controls their definitions, and therefore no one can complain if they are used for incompatible phenomena. For instance, “liberalism” can mean government interventionism or pro-market critiques of the state; and “conservatism” may be equally ambiguous. Yet we ought to be able to say something about the central tendencies of conservative thought. A helpful generalization should have three features:

1) It should be trans-historical and global, not limited to current US terminology.

In the US today, conservatives often present themselves as being critical of the nation-state and bureaucracy. But that has not been true of, for example, Christian Democrats in Europe.

2) It should be reasonably encompassing of the movements that have actually called themselves “conservative.”

For instance, if one defines conservatism as libertarianism, that omits traditionalist and communitarian conservative movements. If one defines conservatives as people who want to return to the past, that omits Newt Gingrich types who are utopians about technology and markets.

3) It should be charitable.

You should define a political idea in a way that a proponent would accept before you debate his or her views. For instance, although I have not read Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind, I am highly skeptical of Robin’s definition of “conservatism” as “animus against the agency of the subordinate classes.” According to Robin, “conservatism “provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite.” But what conservative would accept this characterization?

I would propose that the heart of conservative thought is resistance to intellectual arrogance. A conservative is highly conscious of the limitations of human cognition and virtue. From a conservative perspective, human arrogance may take several forms:

  • the ambition to plan a society from the center;
  • the willingness to scrap inherited norms and values in favor of ideas that have been conceived by theorists;
  • the preference for any given social outcome over the aggregate choices of free individuals;
  • the assertion that one may take property or rights away from another to serve any ideal; and/or
  • the elevation of human reasoning over God’s.

Now, these are separable claims. You can be an atheist conservative who has no objection to elevating human reason but deep concerns about state-planning. That is why conservatism is a field of debate, not a uniform movement. But it’s also possible to build coalitions, since, for example, Christian conservatives and market fundamentalists can unite against secular bureaucracies. Their reasons differ, but it is not only their practical objective that unites them. They also share a critique of the bureaucracy as arrogant.

If this is a fair description of conservatism, it should roughly describe the main tendencies of thinkers who have called themselves “conservative” over a broad sweep of time. I think it does. And some aspects of this definition are still visible in today’s Tea Party Republican Party. But our whole ideological spectrum is confused and atypical. If my definition of conservatism generally fails to describe the Republican Party, that may be because the GOP is not conservative in a deep sense. Meanwhile, as I argued in “Edmund Burke would vote Democratic,” it is sometimes the left in the US that seems most appreciative of local norms and traditions, most concerned about “sustainability” and fearful of human arrogance, and most resistant to planning and social control.

is the US a racial democracy?

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My friend Jason Stanley and his colleague Vesla Weaver have written an important New York Times piece arguing that the US is a “racial democracy,” by which they really mean a society that fails to be a democracy because of racial injustice. They argue that:

  1. Compared to other Americans and other groups around the globe, African Americans are far more likely to be targeted by the police, arrested, tried, convicted, and incarcerated. These disparities are far out of proportion to any differences in actual criminality.
  2. Involuntary contact with the criminal justice system suppresses political participation. Not only do felony convictions and prison sentences directly block voting, but being stopped, questioned, and/or searched by the police also reduces turnout. Stanley and Weaver note that 90 percent of the times when police stop young minorities, no evidence of wrongdoing is found.
  3. Disenfranchisement is a profound injustice. The authors cite Aristotle to the effect that “humans fully realize their nature in political participation, in the form of discussions and decision making with their fellow citizens about the affairs of state. To be barred from political participation is, for Aristotle, the most grievous possible affront to human dignity.”

I would endorse the argument and even add three points to it:

  • Black students are far more likely to be subjected to harsh discipline within schools, and that has also been found to suppress political participation (whereas feeling that one is a valued member of a school community encourages political engagement). Evidently, the school represents the state and sends a powerful message of exclusion or inclusion.
  • Several studies find that felony disenfranchisement laws depress the turnout of people who were never convicted of felonies, especially African Americans, in part by reducing the amount of election-related activity in their communities. In other words, if many residents cannot vote because they have felony convictions, canvassers don’t bother with the whole neighborhood.
  • Especially in poor minority neighborhoods, police sometimes shut down other forms of civic engagement beside voting. In one of our focus groups in Baltimore, for example, a young man said, “Democracy is … where everybody has an opinion. Like you got some places, it’s dictatorships where the people don’t have any opinion on nothing. … Because like everybody said here they had a situation where the police have come into your neighborhoods and told you all to go back in the house or do this or do that.  You know, so that’s not democracy.”

But although I generally endorse the argument, I do want to raise a complication. If one simply surveys a national sample of young Americans using a high-quality method, young African Americans will report voting at a rate at least as high as that of young White Americans. We find that pattern in our own surveys (calling cell phones as well as landlines), and the US Census finds it, too. According to the Census, 58 percent of African-American youth voted in 2008, the highest turnout rate of any youth racial/ethnic group since 1972. This is a surprising result because educational attainment and income strongly predict turnout, and young Black Americans still lag on those measures. One would conclude that being Black is, net of other factors, a positive correlate of voting.

To be sure, these surveys omit incarcerated youth, a point that Stanley and Weaver make, citing Becky Pettit’s book, Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress. The omission of prison populations from polls is a blatant problem, and a subtler bias could arise if the same factors that suppress turnout (e.g., harsh school discipline and unfair encounters with police) also reduce the likelihood of answering a survey.

Nevertheless, the high turnout of young African Americans who participate in surveys is a significant fact. Stanley and Weaver say, “one in 9 young black American men experienced the historic 2008 election from their prison and jail cells.” That implies roughly six percent of all young Blacks (including women), and even subtracting that proportion from the turnout rate in surveys would still leave a high level of voter participation. We wouldn’t predict that pattern if all we saw was a set of White-dominated institutions suppressing Black political participation. They try to do that, but they get some pushback. African Americans respond by mobilizing, with some support from outside the community. This does not excuse the injustice, but I think we get a distorted picture of “democracy” if we see only the policies of official institutions and neglect the agency of citizens.

a symposium on civic studies

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(New Orleans) I am here for a daylong symposium on “Civic Studies” at the Southern Political Science Association. It starts with an author-meets-critics session about my book, which is offered as one example of civic studies, along with Paul Dragos Aligica’s new book, Institutional Diversity and Political Economy: The Ostroms and Beyond.

According to our latest definition:

  1. Civic studies is the intellectual component of civic renewal, which is the movement to improve societies by engaging their citizens.
  2. The goal of civic studies is to develop ideas and ways of thinking helpful to citizens, understood as co-creators of their worlds. We do not define “citizens” as official members of nation-states or other political jurisdictions. Nor does this formula invoke the word “democracy.” One can be a co-creator in many settings, ranging from loose social networks and religious congregations to the globe. Not all of these venues are, or could be, democracies.
  3. Civic studies asks “What should we do?” It is thus inevitably about ethics (what is right and good?), about facts (what is actually going on?), about strategies (what would work?), and about the institutions that we co-create. Good strategies may take many forms and use many instruments, but if a strategy addresses the question “What should we do?”, then it must guide our own actions–it cannot simply be about how other people ought to act.

The phrase “civic studies” was coined in 2007 in a joint statement by Harry Boyte, University of Minnesota; Stephen Elkin, University of Maryland; Peter Levine, Tufts University; Jane Mansbridge, Harvard University; Elinor Ostrom, Indiana University; Karol Soltan, University of Maryland; and Rogers Smith, University of Pennsylvania.

Civic studies is not civic education. Nor is it the study of civic education. However, once it is fully developed, it will influence how citizenship is taught in schools and colleges.