Monthly Archives: November 2015

the Democrats’ problem is social capital

Notwithstanding the fiasco that is the GOP presidential primary so far, Matthew Yglesias warns, “The Democratic Party is in much greater peril than its leaders or supporters recognize, and it has no plan to save itself. … The vast majority — 70 percent of state legislatures, more than 60 percent of governors, 55 percent of attorneys general and secretaries of state — are in Republicans hands. And, of course, Republicans control both chambers of Congress.”

A major factor is the turnout gap. That is worse for Democrats in local and off-year elections but will persist in 2016. Today, the pollsters Greenberg/Quinlan/Rosner report that “unmarried women, minorities, and particularly millennials are less interested in next year’s voting than seniors, conservatives, and white non-college men are.”

Why do we see these gaps? On the whole, we engage in politics when we are brought into networks where political issues are regularly discussed and where people encourage each other to participate. This is a consistent finding of our own research on youth as well as much research on adults. Yglesias uses that theory to explain why unionized teachers vote in local elections:

Teachers talk to one another (they work together, after all) about questions of public policy (everyone talks at work about work, but public school teachers’ work ispublic policy), and they also have hierarchical channels of information dissemination (the union itself) through which this work talk can connect to practical politics.

(Yglesias is expanding on Eitan Hersh’s argument that “scheduling local elections at odd times appears to be a deliberate strategy aimed at keeping turnout low, which gives more influence to groups like teachers unions that have a direct stake in the election’s outcome.” Yglesias is contributing an explanation of why the union members vote.)

Let’s call participation in networks “social capital.” Since the 1970s, Democrats have lost social capital (of a politically relevant kind) and Republicans have not. The parties used to be on par, but the Republicans now have a meaningful advantage.

To illustrate, I show rates of regular religious attendance, membership in unions, membership in fraternal organizations, and a composite (defined as belonging to at least one of the three). The data come from the General Social Survey, which hasn’t asked about unions or fraternal associations since 2004. But in some ways, that’s OK, because I think the trend from 1970-2004 is the significant one, and the subsequent period has been unsettled because of social media and two high-profile presidential elections.

Observations:

Democrats have become less likely to attend religious services regularly; Republicans have not.
Democrats have always been more likely than Republicans to belong to unions, but their membership rate was considerably higher in the 2000’s than in the 1970s. (Of course, union membership for Americans as a whole has fallen more steeply.)
Republicans have lost some ground with fraternal associations, but those never provided a huge component of their social capital.
The Democrats show an overall decline; the Republicans do not.

Caveats: 1) These are only three measures of social capital, plus a composite of the three. There are certainly other varieties of engagement–but I selected the ones I thought were most important. 2) Democrats and Republicans are not fixed demographic groups with persistent members. It is not the case that people have remained Democrats but have become less likely to join unions or attend church. Rather, the American people have changed in various ways, and the subset that consists of Democrats who have social capital has shrunk. The trends shown above only tell part of the story, but I think an important part.

against methodological individualism

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According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry (by Joseph Heath) methodological individualism “amounts to the claim that social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors.” I find that I have written three blog posts that are critiques of methodological individualism from different angles. That makes me–I guess–an opponent of it.

In against methodological individualism, or why neighborhoods are not like broccoli, I proposed six reasons why not to treat the neighborhood in which a person lives as a variable that we can assign to the individual person as a causal factor. The neighborhood in which a person lives is neither straightforwardly the result of any individuals’ choices nor a factor that helps explain their actions. Rather, neighborhoods should be thought of as having their own place in causal models. The theorist who inspired these thoughts was Robert Sampson.

In more to life than individual attributes, I argued that we should study mechanisms, processes, and episodes as phenomena that we can generalize about and model, both as causes and consequences. If we always only try to understand rioters as individuals, we will miss what we could learn by studying riots as episodes. The theorists who inspired those thoughts were Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly.

And in is social science too anthropocentric? I offered a short review of Brian Epstein’s The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences. One of the conclusions of this book is: “facts about a group are not determined just by facts about its members.” For instance, it is a fact about the Supreme Court that it upheld the Affordable Care Act, but that fact was not determined by the opinions and votes of 9 members. Many other factors came into play, including the actions of the individuals who had created, constituted, limited, and chosen the court.

Many would agree with these points, none of which are original to me. But still a lot of social science is methodologically individualistic, especially the research that is meant to influence policy. In quantitative studies, often the data is a matrix with an individual in each row and a variable in each column. Instead of individuals, the rows may be cities, zip codes, years, or events like crimes or purchases. Still, those are really means or counts that describe groups understood as aggregates of individuals. (For instance, the poverty rate in a zip code is the proportion of the resident individuals who are poor.) And qualitative research is very heavily about what person A, who has descriptive characteristics X and Y, says about topic P in context C.

I think we are missing much that we could learn if we treated not only groups, but places, episodes, and other phenomena as causal.

does empowering young people in a community boost the community’s economy?

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(Los Angeles) We made this announcement today on the CIRCLE homepage:

CIRCLE receives W.T. Grant Foundation Support to Study Social and Economic Effects of Youth Civic Empowerment and Participation

Much research by CIRCLE and others finds that civic activities have social, physical, and economic benefits for the young people who participate. For instance, volunteer service boosts academic success. Meanwhile, a growing body of research finds that the levels of civic engagement in a community as a whole are related to that community’s economic resilience, quality of education, and security.

This body of research has not so far focused on the specific question of whether engaging young people in civic activities improves social and economic outcomes for communities as a whole over time. We hypothesize that young people’s civic engagement is especially important for the economic vitality of their communities, and we will test that hypothesis using data from Chicago neighborhoods and national data for counties.

why it’s especially important to deliberate in diverse schools

Does Twitter “smoosh” the public and private?

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In The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer explains why Twitter seems not to be as fun or as socially satisfying as some other networks. He thinks it uncomfortably and unsuccessfully “smooshes” together aspects of oral communication (spontaneity, rapidity, and interactivity) with aspects of written communication (permanence, sharability, and the capacity to reach strangers). Meyer thinks that “the more visual social networks have stayed fun and vibrant even as the text-based ones have not. Vine, Pinterest, and Instagram don’t traffic in words, which can be reduced to identity-based magnum opi [that should actually be magna opera], but in images, which are a little harder to smoosh. Visual conversations have stayed chatty, in other words.”

Meyer’s theorists are Walter Ong and Bonnie Stewart, but there are also hints of Habermas in the article: Ong is quoted on the “human lifeworld,” and Meyer notes ways that the public and the private “get smooshed.”

A core Habermasian insight is that there are different norms appropriate to private and public speech.

In public, you must make arguments that can persuade strangers. You must therefore provide adequate reasons and explanations for everything you say. Since you can’t assume that strangers understand your assumptions and experiences, you must make them evident. You are accountable for your remarks and should be responsive to reasonable critiques. You should (generally) take the same positions when talking to different people. When Mitt Romney complained to donors about the 49% of Americans who were “takers,” but he didn’t want the 49% to hear him, he became one of many public figures who have been caught violating the norms of public speech.

In private, the norms are authenticity, spontaneity, and responsiveness to the concrete other people with whom you have relationships. You should (generally) say what you really feel in the moment, although you are also obligated to care about what the individual who hears you thinks and feels. That may require tact. You need not fully explain your thoughts, and your explanations certainly need not convey entire, self-sufficient arguments to strangers. You are not responsible for treating everyone alike. In fact, you are obligated to favor some people, the ones you love and who love you. You have a right to privacy, so if you are videotaped saying something that you wouldn’t want strangers to hear, that is a violation of your rights.

It is dangerous to confuse these domains, to “smoosh” the public with the private. Often, marketing and political propaganda consists of pretending to have an authentic private conversation while actually influencing strangers. Voters mistakenly choose candidates based on their impressions of politicians’ private lives, which are irrelevant at best and fictional at worst. Meanwhile, powerful people privatize the public sphere by making policy decisions on the basis of personal relationships and inventing spurious justifications or avoiding rationales entirely. Prying journalists and governments violate privacy. And sometimes ordinary people retreat from the public sphere and either take no positions at all or develop irresponsible positions on public matters because they can’t or won’t interact with strangers as if they were real decision-makers.

I am not sure, however, whether Twitter exemplifies the smooshing of public and private that worries Habermas. Twitter is a fairly flexible platform. You can use the 140 characters to address the public, although that will often require embedded links. Or you can use the 140 characters to keep your close friends informed about your social plans. You can develop a persona as a public person or as a private one. The two can be confused, and awkwardness can arise. For instance, as Meyer notes, disclaimers that “RTs do not constitute endorsements” are odd ways of distancing a Tweeter from the content. But it could be that Twitter is a useful vehicle for both public and private conversations, and the feeling of tension simply reflects the parlous condition of our public life, more broadly.

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal