the verdict on the Massachusetts Citizens Initiative Review

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Last summer, working with Healthy Democracy and the office of State Rep. Jonathan Hecht, we at the Tisch College of Civic Life organized the first Citizens Initiative Review in Massachusetts. A representative group of citizens deliberated intensively about a pending ballot initiative to legalize marijuana and co-wrote an informative statement about the initiative’s pros and cons that we helped to disseminate to voters. Watching them at work was a powerful antidote to the atmosphere of civic despair so prevalent in 2016.

Now a research team led by Penn State’s John Gastil has published an evaluation. These are some key findings (verbatim from this site):

The 2016 Massachusetts CIR panel achieved a high quality of deliberation, which enabled panelists to understand and consider key arguments for and against Question 4 (marijuana legalization ballot measure).

  • The 2016 Massachusetts CIR maintained either the same or a higher level of deliberation obtained in previous years and in other locations. The review provided participants with high quality information provided by strong teams of advocates and experts and created a respectful and open atmosphere for panelists to engage in deliberation.
  • The vast majority of participants reported learning enough about the measure, and most reported little difficulty processing information, arguments, and underlying values related to Question 4.
  • CIR panelists and neutral observers largely agreed in their assessment that the CIR was both analytically rigorous and conducted in a democratic fashion.

The 2016 Massachusetts CIR produced a clear and reliable Citizens’ Statement.

  • Claims made in the 2016 Citizens’ Statement generally were accurate and verifiable, though some elements reflected unchallenged expert testimony of indeterminate accuracy.
  • The 2016 Massachusetts Citizens’ Statement was clearly written in broadly accessible language, but the Statement could have been stronger with better direction in relation to the ordering of claims and the inclusion of values.

Voters rated the 2016 Massachusetts CIR Statement as useful and informative.

  • Nearly two-thirds of voters (65%) rated the Statement as “easy to read.”
  • The vast majority of voters rated the Statement as either “very informative” (42%) or “somewhat informative” (52%).
  • In deciding how to vote on Question 4, a third (32%) said the Statement was “very helpful,” and another 45% said it was “somewhat helpful.”

Voters shown the 2016 Massachusetts CIR Statement on Question 4 increased their issue knowledge and were eager to share its findings

  • Massachusetts voters were randomly divided into two groups—one reading just official information about Question 4 and the other reading those same materials, along with the CIR Statement. The CIR exposure group improved its knowledge scores on three of the four factual claims tested by becoming both more accurate in its beliefs and more confident in the correct knowledge those voters held.
  • Knowledge gains were found across three different voter groups, including those opposed to Question 4, those in favor, and those undecided on the measure.
  • A majority of voters (57-75%) said they would “probably” or “definitely” share these four pieces of information. This finding held true across all three voter groups (those opposed to, in favor of, or neutral on Question 4), though those in favor or opposed to the measure were somewhat more eager to share the information that aligned with their views.

When asked whether they would continue to believe findings in the CIR Statement even after being refuted by an alternative source, voters were divided. When the hypothetical refutation came from pro and con campaigns, roughly twice as many voters continued to trust the CIR versus those inclined to doubt it. When the refutation came from an “independent expert,” a plurality were more inclined to trust the expert.

save the date for Frontiers of Democracy: June 22-24, 2017 in Boston

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Frontiers of Democracy is an annual conference hosted by the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University with partners.

In 2017, the frontiers of democracy are threatened around the world. Leaders and movements that have popular support–yet are charged with being undemocratic, xenophobic, and illiberal–are influential or dominant in the Philippines, Russia, Turkey, Hungary, South Africa, France, Britain, and the United States, among other countries. Meanwhile, many peoples continue to face deep and sustained repression. Social movements and networks are confronting this global turn to authoritarianism. Please join us for a discussion of what we must do to defend and expand the frontiers of democracy.

You can enter your information here (shortlink: http://tinyurl.com/zp2qlpz) to let us know that you are interested in attending and to ensure that you receive additional information about the agenda and registering for Frontiers. (This is not a registration link.)

As always, the format of Frontiers is highly interactive; most of the concurrent sessions are “learning exchanges” rather than presentations or panels. We welcome proposals for learning exchanges for 2017. Please use this form to submit ideas (shortlink: http://tinyurl.com/jfdurwv).

Frontiers is a public conference that follows immediately after the Summer Institute of Civic Studies, a 2-week seminar for scholars, practitioners, and advanced graduate students. The Summer Institute requires an application, and admissions decisions are usually made in May. Prospective applicants should sign up on the Summer Institute’s webpage (shortlink: http://tinyurl.com/hgm64rb) to receive more information.

the bright side of one-party government: accountability

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Here’s an excerpt of Sarah Kliff’s interview with Debbie Mills, a Trump voter:

Are you surprised how much Republicans are talking about repeal [of Obamacare]?

No.

Did you expect — do you think they’ll do it, or do you think it’ll be too hard?

I’m hoping that they don’t, ’cause, I mean, what would they do then? Would this go away?

Yes, possibly.

The insurance?

It will go, if they repeal it. I mean, that’s what they promised to do in so many elections.

Right … so … I don’t know. … [snip]

Our interview began to make her a bit nervous.

You’re scaring me now on the insurance part … I’m afraid now that the insurance is going to go away and we’re going to be up a creek.

How could this happen? Why would vulnerable people vote against their own essential interests when they are aware of the stakes and have no altruistic or principled objections to the policy that’s at risk?

Kliff proposes that it was reasonable to doubt that Obamacare really would be repealed, since many political experts also predicted that it would become untouchable, like Social Security. Even to this day, there is a chance that Republicans will leave it alone. But, if we assume that Debbie Mills should have voted for Clinton over Trump to preserve Obamacare, then here are two familiar explanations for her choice:

  1. Trust. Nobody really knows that political leaders will do in the future. Nobody even knows what any given policy will accomplish. We all rely on information, interpretation, predictions, and promises from sources that we trust. I think many Trump voters did not trust Trump to do anything specific that he said, but they did trust his general competence and alignment with their interests. Meanwhile, they distrusted Clinton’s motivations. I believe they were wrong in these judgments, but the difference is not my superior rationality. Rather, we made different assessments of trustworthiness.
  2. Salience: Joseph Schumpeter observed in 1942 that “the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again. His thinking becomes associative and affective.” This was true, Schumpeter said, of “educated people and of people who are successfully active in non-political walks of life.” The reason was basically that each vote hardly counted, so it was irrational to spend a lot of time sorting through the “masses of information” that were already available in 1942–not to mention the vast masses today–to make careful judgments. In the absence of “immediate responsibility, ignorance will persist.” And voting, although a responsibility, is too small to compel much attention. Schumpeter originated this way of thinking about politics, but much subsequent psychological research has reinforced it.

I would add a third explanation, and this one is significant because it is likely to change.

  1. Divided government. For 28 of the past 36 years, the elected branches of the federal government have been divided between Democrats and Republicans. Even during the remaining eight years (two each under Clinton and Obama and four under G.W. Bush), Senate filibusters, opposing state governments, and courts have checked the majority’s power. This is one reason that net government spending–federal plus state plus local–rose by nearly 50% under a conservative-sounding president (Bush) and leveled off under under a liberal-sounding president (Obama). As long as the ideology of our most prominent leader is largely unrelated to the actual policies in place, voters get poor feedback from their choices at the ballot box. That makes them unlikely to learn.

I am not saying that it’s a Good Thing that we now face unified Republican government in most of the country. Mills will probably lose her health insurance, which could shorten or wreck her life. Many others will pay a severe price as well. It’s relatively easy for me to see the bright side, since I am not nearly as vulnerable.

But there is a bright side. If you believe in electoral democracy at all, you must acknowledge that voters will make mistakes severe enough to cost lives. The argument for electoral democracy is that voters will learn from such mistakes. But we have frustrated such learning for more than a generation. The political system has performed very poorly at times–killing half a million Iraqis, incarcerating 2 million Americans, allowing our industrial cities to whither wither away–but few citizens have had to rethink their prior assumptions about which ideology is better for them. The signal has been lost in the noise.

The signal is now about to be heard pretty clearly. Democrats and other progressives should amplify it by constantly drawing connections between the reigning ideology and its outcomes, and by refusing to mitigate the short-term damage. Then Trump’s 2016 victory will be Pyrrhic.

prospects for civic media after 2016

Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice is a new book edited by Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis. I contributed the introductory chapter, “Democracy in the Digital Age.” On Nov. 16, I joined Eric, Paul, Ethan Zuckerman (MIT), Colin Rhinesmith (Simmons), Beth Coleman (University of Waterloo), and Ceasar McDowell (MIT) for a book-launch discussion that focused on the role of media in the 2016 election and the prospects for civic media in the near future. Here’s the video.

separating populism from anti-intellectualism

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I’m a populist, yet I advocate the life of the mind. I’d like to see less elitism (of certain kinds) along with more intense and widespread intellectual inquiry. Unfortunately, the most prominent varieties of populism today are anti-intellectual. This is a problem rooted in social structures. Some of the solutions involve changing the way formal educational institutions work. Others involve enhancing intellectual life in informal contexts.

Let’s define “anti-intellectualism” as a rejection of advanced, specialized, complicated thought, which is viewed as antithetical to common sense. According to Mark Fisher (The Washington Post 7/17), Donald Trump is an explicit anti-intellectual:

He said in a series of interviews that he does not need to read extensively because he reaches the right decisions “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words ‘common sense,’ because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.” Trump said he is skeptical of experts because “they can’t see the forest for the trees.” He believes that when he makes decisions, people see that he instinctively knows the right thing to do: “A lot of people said, ‘Man, he was more accurate than guys who have studied it all the time.'” … Trump said reading long documents is a waste of time because he absorbs the gist of an issue very quickly. “I’m a very efficient guy,” he said. “Now, I could also do it verbally, which is fine. I’d always rather have — I want it short. There’s no reason to do hundreds of pages because I know exactly what it is.”

Presumably, Trump’s anti-intellectualism was more of a political asset than a liability in the campaign, and that tells us something about our culture. (On the other hand, one of the most curious and thoughtful political leaders in modern America–and a very fine writer–won the two previous presidential elections, so politics is not a vast wasteland.)

Let’s define “anti-elitism” as a rejection of the superior position, entitlement, and power of some privileged group. This is different from anti-intellectualism because an elite needn’t be defined by knowledge or expertise: the business class, for instance, usually is not. However, the two ideas often come together, not only in Trump’s rhetoric but in many other examples from American history. For instance, in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), Richard Hofstadter wrote:

The kind of anti-intellectualism expressed in official circles during the 1950’s was mainly the traditional businessman’s suspicion of experts working in any area outside his control, whether in scientific laboratories, universities, or diplomatic corps. Far more acute and sweeping was the hostility to intellectuals expressed on the far-right wing, a categorical folkish dislike of the educated classes and of any thing respectable, established, pedigreed, or cultivated. The right-wing crusade of the 1950’s was full of heated rhetoric about “Harvard professors, twisted-thinking intellectuals … in the State Department; those who are “burdened with Phi Beta Kappa keys and academic honors” but not “equally loaded with honesty and common sense”; “the American respectables, the socially pedigreed, the culturally acceptable, the certified gentlemen and scholars of the day, dripping with college degrees .. . the “best people” who were for Alger Hiss”; “the pompous diplomat in striped pants with phony British accent”; those who try to fight Communism “with kid gloves in perfumed drawing rooms “; Easterners who “insult the people of the great Midwest and West, the heart of America; those who can “trace their ancestry back to the eighteenth century or even further” but whose loyalty is still not above suspicion; those who understand “the Groton vocabulary of the Hiss-Achcson group.”

The businessmen who distrusted independent intellectuals represented one elite quarreling with a different one–Wall Street and Detroit struggled for influence with the Ivy League and the State Department. But the “far right-wing” rejected elites that they defined in terms of social privilege rather than intellectualism. For these people, the problem with Groton School alumni was not their sophisticated ways of thought but their social pedigree and arrogance. These right populists were against Wall Street and Harvard. Although Hafstadter is writing here about the right wing, some left populists share the same targets.

I think anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism come together because educational institutions serve two functions simultaneously.

On one hand, schools and colleges are spaces for intellectual inquiry. They are the most prominent and best supported places where people address unanswered questions of public importance, conduct deep and sustained conversations about unresolved topics, and model and teach the skills and values required for those pursuits.

At the same time, schools and colleges confer social status. A college degree is a prerequisite for occupying many of the advantaged slots in our social order. Educational institutions at all levels teach not only intellectual skills, but also manners, modes of social interaction, and ways of writing and speaking that mark out the advantaged class. And despite their protestations that they admit students fairly, they are dominated by children of privileged groups. For reasons that I’ve explored in some length, I don’t think this situation is likely to change markedly.

To make matters even more fraught, the genuine search for knowledge can be conducted arrogantly or else responsively. One can pursue the truth by studying other people and their problems in order to change those people (for good or ill), or one can listen and create knowledge together. Finally, claims to advanced knowledge can be trustworthy or not. After all, highly credentialed experts are the ones who told us to blast highways through inner cities, minimize fat consumption, and invade Iraq.

I think several trends worsen the conflation of populism with anti-intellectualism today.

First, although advanced intellectual inquiry occurs in some spaces that aren’t educational institutions–community organizing groups, online magazines, some religious communities, and hip hop–the state of “informal” intellectual life does not seem to be strong today compared to the past. Most of the people who can spend a lot of their time reading, writing, and talking about complex issues work as teachers or professors.

Second, tools for data collection, analysis, and influence are giving frightening amounts of power to people who possess and deploy information.

Third, in a post-industrial economy, the workforce is increasingly divided between people who work with their hands in low-status roles, and others who work with symbols and data. The former understandably wonder why they must pay for the latter, whether directly or via taxation. University of Wisconsin professor Kathy Cramer describes how she would visit small towns in her state and introduce herself “as a public opinion scholar from the state’s flagship university.” When she asked citizens what concerned them most, they often “expressed a deeply felt sense of not getting their ‘fair share’ …. They felt that they didn’t get a reasonable proportion of decision-making power, believing that the key decisions were made in the major metro areas of Madison [where Kathy works] and Milwaukee, then decreed out to the rest of the state, with little listening being done to people like them.” It became clear to Cramer that when they complained about people who didn’t work hard enough, they were “talking about the laziness of desk-job white professionals like me.” Why did their tax dollars have to pay for someone to drive around the state asking people political questions so she could write her books?

Finally, today seems like a time of growing deference to high-status people. As I wrote last fall:

We live at a time when billionaires, celebrities, and CEOs are given extraordinary deference, especially in comparison to run-of-the-mill elected officials, civil servants, union leaders, and grassroots organizers. Politicians, for instance, are constantly in contact with their wealthiest constituents. First-year Democratic Members of the House are advised to spend four hours per day of every day calling donors. Meanwhile, many advocacy groups are funded by rich individuals, not sustained by membership dues, so their leaders are also constantly on the phone or at conferences and meetings with wealthy people.

One solution is to identify, strengthen, and lift up informal spaces where people who haven’t attended college–at least, not recently–engage in intense intellectual work. When I interviewed the great community organizer Ernesto Cortés, Jr. (Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) co-chair and executive director of the West / Southwest IAF regional network), he told me this was his organization’s strategy:

Building talented, committed, enterprising relational organizers through recruitment, training, and mentoring. We develop their capacity to be reciprocal, relational organizers. Ask–what do Aristotle and Aquinas say? Explore the different traditions. Offer all kinds of seminars with a wide range of scholars from left, right, center. Develop their intellectual capacity, which is the capacity to be deliberative. Help them to understand labor, capitalism, the various faith traditions, strategic thinking. We offer what amount to postgraduate-level seminars in how to create effective leaders in an institutional context–not lone celebrity activists–people who build institutions that can then be networked together. …

Another example is the impressive array of liberal arts programs now being taught in prisons on a pro bono basis by professors. For instance, the Jessup Correctional Institution Scholars Program explains:

Our Program is dedicated to a simple concept: no one in society should be deprived of access to ideas. This has led all of us, through different paths, to seek opportunities to teach and learn outside the walls of the academy, built to keep people out on the basis of their social standing and financial means. And it has ultimately led us to bring intellectual discussion inside the walls of the prison, a space that too many people consider radically separate from society. We see society as a whole riddled with locked doors and those of the prison are just one more set that we hope to open.

Everyone in the program is a scholar, and we think of ourselves as on equal moral and intellectual footing – we strive to create course content as a collaboration between teachers and students, and to make classes free-ranging discussions and workshops more than lectures.

Another solution is to do the intellectual work of the university in ways that better engage laypeople. Guided in part by Albert Dzur, I argue that the way to accomplish this is not to teach graduate students and PhD researchers to be more modest and humble. That message never sticks with an ambitious group, and it’s not really the ideal, anyway. We actually need more courageous and enterprising research. Instead, we can recognize that engaging members of the public in creating and using knowledge requires highly advanced skills–it’s a form of democratic professionalism. We should teach, evaluate, and reward excellent democratic professionalism in the academy.

A third solution is for the academy to take more responsibility–at the institutional level–for communicating research and intellectual life. It used to make some sense to assume that academics conducted research and professional reporters selected and translated the most relevant findings for their readers or listeners via mass media. If that model ever worked, it doesn’t work now that 30% fewer people are employed as professional reporters. Just as institutions of higher education created public broadcasting, so they must now launch new forms of communication.

None of these three strategies will solve the underlying problem completely. The social underpinnings are problematic and require reform. Meanwhile, there are tempting political payoffs for politicians who demonize intellectual life. But these are three ways of fighting back.