Monthly Archives: October 2019

teaching about institutions, in a prison

Leave a reply

The Tufts University Prison Initiative of the Tisch College of Civic Life (TUPIT) is my institution’s contribution to the national movement for prison education. Colleges and universities are offering classes, degree programs, and special events for people in prisons or for incarcerated people along with students who come from “outside.” Sometimes, corrections staff and scholars of criminal justice also participate in these programs as learners, educators, or both.

In the era of mass incarceration–and in the wake of massive cuts to prison education programs–these efforts are far too small to fill the need, but they offer valuable opportunities and potential models for broader reform. Some of my favorite colleagues are deeply involved in prison education, and that includes the Founding Director of TUPIT, Prof. Hilary Binda, and her colleagues here at Tufts.

Thanks to TUPIT, I got to guest-teach a class at MCI-Concord last week. The class consisted of about 25 incarcerated men who are working on associates degrees. I presented my current working model for institutions, which I had also presented a few days earlier in the very different environment of a Tufts brown-bag series.

I told the students at MCI Concord that they should decide whether we’d focus on the prison as an institution, or spend more time on other examples. I’d say that we talked about prisons about half the time during the 2-hour conversation, but we also discussed families, gangs, schools, businesses, the foster-care system, and even biological systems such as forests. At least one student was interested in understanding the self as an “institution” that could fit the model. At Tufts, in contrast, the main institution that we’d discussed was “science”—mainly because that was the topic of the brown bag series in which I presented. Science and a prison make a pretty sharp contrast, but the model covers both.

For me, a goal was to test the validity of the model with this particular group. I think it largely passed muster, although many classes are too polite to share their reservations, and this was an exceptionally polite class, by any standard.

Certain aspects of the model seemed illuminating for at least some students. For example, the diagram shows a two-way arrow between biophysical conditions and the action space, which is composed of rules, norms, etc. Students at MCI-Concord generated the insight that the walls and barbed wire around the prison are biophysical conditions that both shape, and are shaped by, the rules and norms on the inside.

Among the interesting topics that arose was the distinction between a rule and a norm. Which is the right word for “Don’t snitch” within MCI-Concord? It is not an official rule; in fact, it violates the official rules. But it may be more than a norm, since it is enforced by the community, with clear consequences. Maybe it is a community-imposed rule.

I took one major challenge away from the conversation. The model that I presented is static or cross-sectional. It analyzes how an institution functions at a given time. The students wanted to know how people develop and change as they pass into, out of, and through multiple institutions. I suggested to them that they might be thinking that way because they’re taking a course that is all about personal transformation, but I also acknowledged that personal change is a concern for everyone, everywhere. So I came away feeling that the model of institutions should somehow connect to a model of personal development.

Finally, a word about the origins of this model. Where did I get this diagram, and why do I claim it might be valid? Essentially, it is my simplification of the Institutional Analysis and Design Model developed by Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues, which she presented in her Nobel Lecture. That is a pretty strong pedigree. I have simplified it in order to make it more general. The kinds of cases that Ostrom investigated are well modeled by game theory. They involve actors with fairly fixed goals who interact by bargaining. But human beings also interact in other kinds of situations, e.g., when we don’t know what we want and we are open to discussing it, or when our interests fuse due to very strong emotional attachments. My more general model is meant to cover bargaining situations, deliberative situations, loving relationships, and more. I am also interested in explicitly analyzing the role of power in institutions—not that Ostrom was blind to power, but I think she interpreted it too narrowly. I have claimed that power operates on every element of this model.

how to assess candidates in a presidential primary

Leave a reply

Voters in a primary are a bit like members of a hiring committee. They have a batch of eager candidates and must choose one to represent their party and–they hope–hold the office.

I have served on dozens of hiring committees, including some for nonprofit CEOs and senior university administrators. Head-hunters give consistent advice about how to assess candidates. They advise committees not to ask how a candidate will or would address issues in the future. Candidates don’t really know, because their strategies will depend on the details of the issue and the other stakeholders’ actions. They almost inevitably give platitudinous responses: “I will bring people together, build consensus, and then move decisively.” “I will identify the ineffective programs and phase them out.” Such responses have zero informational and predictive value. Instead, committees should ask candidates how they actually addressed challenges in their previous work, and what they learned from that experience. This is more informative.

I don’t think that advice applies to voters in legislative elections. A legislator faces decisions about whether to vote yea or nay on bills. Newly elected legislators–back-benchers–do little else than vote yea or nay. It makes sense to ask legislative candidates (especially newcomers) how they would vote.

I realize that voters around the world are cynical about politicians’ promises. But I think cynicism should be reserved for their very general rhetoric about outcomes. “I will bring the country together” or “I will generate 5% growth” — these are promises waiting to be broken. (If they come to pass, it’s mostly good luck.) On the other hand, when candidates say, “I will support HR 1234,” that is quite predictive. It’s good to ask them how they will vote.

But presidents are more like CEOs than legislators. To be sure, they face decisions about whether to sign or veto bills, but those are rarely their decisive actions. Most of their impact results from hiring, firing, and guiding subordinates and jawboning all kinds of independent actors: 535 members of Congress, foreign heads of state, civil society actors and corporate leaders. (They also have the bully pulpit to address the nation, but the impact of that is somewhat overrated.)

We’d like to know how well they’ll do in those conversations and what their (precise) objectives will be. But what they say how they will deal with other people has limited value. It’s currently fashionable to place Democratic candidates on a scale from accommodating to tough, where the question is how they will handle their relationship with Republicans. I don’t think how they present themselves on the campaign trail predicts that very well at all.

Candidates should publish policy briefs, and we should read them. The main reason is that a campaign is a precious opportunity for a national debate about issues, influencing citizens’ knowledge and values. But policy briefs are not very informative about a candidate’s actual performance as president.

A brief may tell you something about the candidate’s goals and values. A Democratic candidate who says “Medicaid for all,” is conveying more progressive ideals that a candidate who asks, “How will we pay for that?” But an actual Democratic president will not choose between those two policy positions. She or he will: (1) choose one or two issues to emphasize at key moments, (2) deal with members of Congress across the spectrum about those issues and the many issues that arise for other reasons; and (3) decide whether to sign or veto the actual bills that emerge from Congress–if any do. Asking candidates how they will perform those tasks is not terribly informative, because the question yields platitudes of the form, “I will bring people together and move forward together” or “I will rally the troops and drive change through.” (Those sound different, but neither describes what they will actually do.)

The 2020 Democratic Primary has generated an especially large number of interesting policy proposals. The Warren campaign, in particular, has made a meta-issue of having detailed policy briefs. (“I have a plan for that.”) I like the message that Warren is detail-oriented and interested in policy, a major contrast to the incumbent and probably predictive of how she would govern. I like the ethic of presenting specific ideas to the voters: it takes people seriously as thinkers. I also think the policy debate among candidates may have some influence on other actors–Members of Congress, interest groups, and the public–which is beneficial. But I would still take the headhunters’ advice and focus more on how candidates have actually dealt with challenges than on what they say they would do if they were president.

Deliberative Democracy Consortium conference on whether deliberation is feasible

Leave a reply

From this official registration page:

On October 30 and 31, the Deliberative Democracy Consortium is convening researchers, scholars, and deliberative democracy practitioners in Washington, D.C., to explore the intersection of deliberative democracy with human cognition, social and emotional intelligence, and moral decision making.

We will explore questions such as:

1) Given what we know about human cognition and moral development, is deliberative democracy feasible?

2) At what scale?

3) Under what conditions?

This meeting will give scholars, practitioners, funders, and others an opportunity to explore both the promise and the limitations of deliberative democracy in the context of human behavior and development. The meeting may result in an edited volume; future convenings; an action plan; a statement of shared values; promising partnerships; etc.

Agenda

Evening of Wednesday, October 30 – 5:00pm – Reception with no host bar and heavy hors d’oeuvres

Thursday, October 31 – 9:00am – 4:00pm – All day meeting – Continental breakfast (8:30am) and lunch included

I’ll be moderating a panel. Part of our session description (still under construction) says:

The traditional “civics class” description of democracy assumes that citizens reason independently about issues, listen to and learn from each other, and then select leaders or policies that represent their views. It is consistent with liberal democratic tenets of individual and minority rights, free speech and the rule of law. 

The Behavioral Revolution presents a very different premise: human beings are deeply biased, and the reasons we express are mainly justifications for opinions we already held without conscious choice. Meanwhile, New Institutionalism suggests that even when individuals reason well, the processes that yield decisions in groups add arbitrariness and bias. These are two of the most influential currents in the study of human beings, and both tend to support arguments for expertise and unregulated markets, technocracy, or authoritarianism. Specifically, right-wing authoritarian populism is on the rise.  …

How can deliberative democracy address these problems of citizen capacity and the consequent vulnerability of liberal democracy?

Please join us.

decoding institutions

Leave a reply

Today I presented at Tufts’ Science, Technology & Society lunch seminar series on how knowledge and power interrelate. My basic thesis was that knowledge is produced by institutions, which are fields of power. Assessing knowledge therefore requires analyzing institutions (not claims about facts by themselves).

The general model I am assuming works like this.

Actors can be individual people or (at larger scales) such entities as firms, bureaus, or even nations. They have goals; mental constructs such as philosophies, identities, or ideologies; and relations with each other.

They interact in an Action Space, such as a market, a democratic election, or a scholarly publication. Their interactions vary, but actors always make choices shaped by rules, norms, and goods.

A “norm” is a shared expectation that has a positive moral valence. For instance, Robert K. Merton’s CUDOS Norms for science are values that are widely expected. An actual “rule,” on the other hand, structures outcomes but may not have a positive moral valence. Merton also coined the phrase “Matthew Principle” for the general rule that, in science, the person who is already most famous gets the most credit. That rule conflicts with the CUDOS norm of Universalism.

Action Spaces affect, and are influenced by, biophysical conditions, general social circumstances (e.g., poverty), and other institutions.

The institution as a whole has Inputs and Outputs. Insofar as the institution involves knowledge, Inputs may include ideas, opinions, and knowledge-claims and it may produce new ideas, opinions, and knowledge-claims.

We can assess the whole process in terms of value criteria, such as justice. Such assessments not only influence institutions; they are also shaped by institutions. In fact, we don’t have information or values that we can use for assessment except for those that have emerged from institutions. The interaction is reciprocal.

Each element of the whole system is a target for power. To use Stephen Lukes’ Faces of Power framework: one “face” involves actors influencing other actors within an Action Space; a second “face” involves changing the rules of the Action Space; and a “third face” involves changing either norms or the actors’ mentalities, or both. But we could add many more “faces” as we consider each element in the diagram.

We rarely assess knowledge directly, because we are rarely in a position to have justified true beliefs all on our own. Instead, we must assess knowledge as the product of institutions. But that is not a relativist claim, because some institutions are better than others. Assessing the value of an institution requires taking it apart and assessing its components.

See also: adding democracy to Robert Merton’s CUDOS norms for science; is all truth scientific truth?; tools for the #resistance; and a template for analyzing an institution

revisiting Against Deliberation in the age of Trump

Leave a reply

In Introduction to Civic Studies, we recently discussed Lynn M. Sanders, “Against Deliberation,” Political Theory, June 1997 v.25 no. 3

Here are some illustrative arguments from her important piece:

“Appeals to deliberation, I will argue, have often been fraught with connotations of rationality, reserve, cautiousness, quietude, community, selflessness, and universalism, connotations which in fact probably undermine deliberation’s democratic claims.” (p. 2)

“Some citizens are better than others at articulating their arguments in rational, reasonable terms. Some citizens, then, appear already to be deliberating, and, given the tight link between democracy and deliberation, appear already to be acting democratically.” (p.2)

“Deliberation is a request for a certain kind of talk: rational, contained, and oriented to a shared problem” (p. 13). “Arguing that democratic discussion should be rational, moderate, and not selfish implicitly excludes public talk that is impassioned, extreme, and the product of particular interests. (p. 14)

“Prejudice and privilege do not emerge in deliberative settings as bad reasons, and they are not countered by good arguments. They are too sneaky, invisible, and pernicious for that reasonable process. So worrying about specifying what counts as a good argument, or trying to enhance reason-giving either via the formulation of better rules and procedures or by providing the time, money, and education necessary to become a responsible deliberative citizen, does not engage some of the most serious challenges to the possibility of achieving democratic deliberation. Some people might be ignored no matter how good their reasons are, no matter how skillfully they articulate them, and when this happens, democratic theory doesn’t have an answer, because one cannot counter a pernicious group dynamic with a good reason.” (p. 4)

I see these as serious concerns. Rose Marie Nierras and I found that many activists from the Global South felt them acutely. (Levine, Peter and Nierras, Rose Marie [2007] “Activists’ Views of Deliberation,” Journal of Public Deliberation: Vol. 3 : Iss. 1 , Article 4.)

But I also sense that the main problem has shifted, requiring a reevaluation of these arguments against deliberation.

It’s true that reason-giving can favor the privileged because they are good at it (or they can hire professional reason-givers, such as lawyers), and because they are basically OK with the social system in which reasons are exchanged.

But it is also a characteristic of privilege not to feel any compulsion to give reasons. It is the autocrat who says, “Because I said so.” Donald Trump is completely unwilling to give or hear reasons, and he may have developed that attitude as a result of extreme socio-economic privilege. His opponents and critics want reasons from him and are willing to give reasons for their demands.

Indeed, there is a long tradition of the people demanding reasons, and authoritarian elites trying to evade reason-giving. When we have that tradition in mind, it’s natural to equate deliberation with political equity. On the other hand, when we think about formal deliberative bodies within a stable but imperfect state–American juries, for example–we worry that deliberation and equity can conflict, because those with advantage prevail in such discussions.

As with many issues, Donald Trump reminds us of the positive case.

See also Habermas with a Whiff of Tear Gas: Nonviolent Campaigns and Deliberation in an Era of Authoritarianism; postmodernism and Trump;