Monthly Archives: June 2015

the seventh annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies is underway

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We will be meeting daily for 6-7 hours of seminar discussion for the next two weeks. The syllabus is here. This year’s participants include professors and civic activists from Zimbabwe, Liberia, Mexico, the Netherlands, and Singapore, as well as professors, graduate students, NGO leaders, social entrepreneurs, and a civil servant from the US. Today we will be considering some topics that I’ve blogged before: why Margaret Mead’s exhortation to “change the world” is inspiring but flawed; Seamus Heaney’s vision of a “Republic of Conscience”; the relationship between education/human development and civic engagement; the work of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom; and Elinor Ostrom’s own framework.

“Run Like a Girl … for Office”

My colleagues Nancy Thomas and Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg have an article in Diversity & Democracy entitled “Run Like a Girl … for Office: How Higher Education Can Advance Gender Equity in Politics.”

It’s very obvious that far too few women hold political office in the US. Until my colleagues started working on this topic last year, I had been naively thinking that the problem would gradually fade as younger women capitalized on their strong gains in education; or that the barriers were things like campaign financing or family-leave policies that would yield to rather direct policy reforms. But Kei and Nancy have developed and assembled evidence that the problem is partly psychological–a persistent lack of confidence among younger women. And, like most psychological problems, this one has social roots: in this case, the disparate ways that educators treat girls and boys, even when they want to be equitable. The article ends with practical suggestions for colleges and universities, who form the target audience for Diversity & Democracy.

why I still believe in institutions

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(on the DC-Boston shuttle) Over the past 48 hours I have participated in three consecutive meetings in which an important point of debate has been whether to reform or rebuild institutions–flawed and disliked as they may be–or to look for “disruptive” changes and looser forms of community. In one meeting, in a tech space in Cambridge, I was one of the most “institutionalist” participants and was invited to defend that view. In a different meeting, near Dupont Circle in DC, I was perhaps one of the least institutionalist.

This is why I believe what I do. The graph shows levels of engagement for working class American youth in the 1970s and 2000s, using the kinds of survey measures developed in the seventies. Note that all forms of engagement are down except for volunteering, on which more below.


Note also that each of the key institutions that recruited working class youth in the 1970s had: a business model that allowed it to grow large and to be independent; arguments for joining that didn’t require any preexisting interest in civic engagement; incentives to recruit working class younger Americans; and a self-interest in making these members interested in politics. The newspaper offered sports and classifieds but put news on the front page. The church offered salvation and family but socialized people to participate. The party offered jobs and other benefits. You joined a union because the job was unionized.

All these institutions are shattered today. The only form of engagement that has expanded–volunteering–has become more of an institution. Many schools and some large districts require service. Others fund service programs and recruit volunteers. That is why volunteering has grown.

I know we live in an age of networks and personal choice. I still believe that unless we can build functional equivalents to the institutions of the later 20th century, we will not have mass participation in our democracy.

Hannah Arendt and thinking from the perspective of an agent

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In the following passage from On Revolution (pp. 42-3), Hannah Arendt is criticizing the Hegelian tradition of German philosophy (including Marx) that purports to find fundamental meanings in the narrative of world history.  I think that her words would also describe mainstream social science, which attempts to explain ordinary events empirically rather than philosophically:

Politically, the fallacy of this new and typically modern philosophy is relatively simple. It consists in describing and understanding the whole realm of human action, not in terms of the actor and the agent, but from the standpoint of the spectator who watches a spectacle. But this fallacy is relatively difficult to detect because of the truth inherent in it, which is that all stories begun and enacted by men unfold their true meaning only when they have come to their end, so that it may indeed appear as though only the spectator, and not the agent, can hope to understand what actually happened in any given chain of deeds and events.

The more successful you are in social science, the more you can explain who acts and why. By explaining “deeds and events” that have already happened, you make them look determined. You seek to reduce the unexplained variance. But when you are a social actor, it feels as if you are choosing and acting intentionally. The unexplained is a trace of your freedom.

Arendt does not assert that the spectator’s perspective is epistemically wrong, but that it reflects a political fallacy. It has the political consequence of reducing freedom.

On p. 46, she gives an example: the French Revolution has been understood in ways that hamper the agency and creativity of subsequent revolutionaries. She even argues that revolutionary leaders have submitted to being tried and executed because they assume that revolutions must end in terror. Thus all later upheavals have been

seen in images drawn from the course of the French Revolution, comprehended in concepts coined by spectators, and understood in terms of historical necessity. Conspicuous by its absence in the minds of those who made the revolutions as well as of those who watched and tried to come to terms with them, was the deep concern with forms of government so characteristic of the American Revolution, but also very important in the early stages of the French Revolution.

If you are a political agent, you believe that you can invent or reconstruct “forms of government” to reflect your considered opinions. Deliberate institutional design and redesign seems both possible and valuable. But if you think of history as inevitable and driven by grand forces (the World Spirit, the class struggle), by root causes (capitalism, racism), or by empirical factors (income, gender, technology), then institutional design seems to be an outcome, not a cause; and the designers appear to lack agency. “Civic Studies” can be seen as a reorientation of the humanities and social sciences so that they take an agentic perspective and therefore avoid the “political fallacy” of determinism.

See also: Roberto Unger against root causes and the visionary fire of Roberto Mangabeira Unger