Civic Studies mini-conference

Leave a reply

Soon after the volume entitled Civic Studies is published, a daylong discussion of the same topic will take place at the Southern Political Science Association meeting (January 10 in New Orleans).

As Karol Soltan and I write in the volume, the phrase “civic studies” is quite new. A group of scholars coined it in 2007 in a collaborative statement entitled “The New Civic Politics: Civic Theory and Practice for the Future.” Civic Studies does not mean civic education, although it should ultimately improve civic education. Instead, in the words of original framework, Civic Studies is an “emerging intellectual community, a field, and a discipline. Its work is to understand and strengthen civic politics, civic initiatives, civic capacity, civic society, and civic culture.”

The framework cites two definitive ideals for the emerging discipline of civic studies “public spiritedness” (or “commitment to the public good”) and “the idea of the citizen as a creative agent.” Civic studies is an intellectual community that takes these two ideals seriously. Although new, it draws from several important strands of ongoing research: the Nobel-Prize-winning scholarship of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom on managing common assets; deliberative democracy; public work; the study of public participation in development; the idea of social science as practical wisdom or phronesis; and community-based research in fields like sociology.

Here is the agenda for the mini-conference:

Civic Studies “Conference Within a Conference”: Fri Jan 10 2014, 9:45 to 11:15am

Author Meets Critics for Peter Levine’s “We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For”

Author: Peter Levine (Tufts University)
Critic: Olivia Newman (Harvard University)
Critic: Ryan McBride (Tulane University)
Critic: Thad Williamson (University of Richmond)
Critic: Rumman Chowdhury (University of California, San Diego)
Chair: Susan Orr (College at Brockport, SUNY)
* Albert Dzur participating remotely via skype

Fri Jan 10 2014, 1:15 to 2:45pm
Roundtable “What is Civic Studies?”

Participant: Karol Soltan (University of Maryland)
Participant: Peter Levine (Tufts University)
Participant: Tina Nabatchi (Maxwell School Syracuse University)
Participant: Thad Williamson (University of Richmond)
Chair: Peter Levine (Tufts University)

Fri Jan 10 2014, 3:00 to 4:30pm
Teaching Civic Studies

Participant: Katherine Kravetz (American University)
Participant: Timothy J. Shaffer (Wagner College)
Participant: Alison Staudinger (University of Wisconsin, Green Bay)
Participant: Donald Harward (Bates College)
Participant: Susan Orr (College at Brockport, SUNY)

Fri Jan 10 2014, 4:45 to 6:15pm
Author Meets Critics for Paul Aligica, Institutional Diversity and Political Economy: The Ostroms and Beyond

Author: Paul Aligica (George Mason University)
Critic: James Bohman (Saint Louis University)
Critic: James Johnson (University of Rochester)
Chair: Karol Soltan (University of Maryland)
Critic: Samuel Ely Bagg (Duke University)

radio interviews talking about my book

Leave a reply

Here are six radio or podcast discussions on my book, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For. Most are call-in shows:

  • This is the audio of me and John Dankosky talking about my book on “Where We Live” (WNPR-Connecticut) on Oct. 25. As a bonus: at min. 26:40, hear Ralph Nader call in and say that everyone should read it.
  • On Nov. 12, I spent 30 minutes on “Topical Currents” with Joseph Cooper, Bonnie Berman and Paul Leary on WLRN in Miami. We discussed why Miami ranks so low on civic engagement. A caller advocated for mandatory voting. My favorite part was when they played Sweet Honey in the Rock’s version of “We Are the Ones ….” They asked, “Professor, was that the inspiration for your book?” Yes, indeed.
  • Here is the audio of my hour-long conversation on Nov. 5 with Kathleen Dunn on Wisconsin Public Radio. This one got quite a few callers, but I thought the conversation got a little vague–my fault. One interesting question was about polarization, and the premise was that liberals are mainly responsible because they all rally around “their” president.
  • This is the audio of my conversation with John Gambling, a self-described moderate conservative radio host on WOR in New York City. His main topic was civic education, but he also asked about my book. He seemed to like the idea that civil discourse is an important aspect of civics in schools–he aims for civility on his radio show.
  • This is an audio podcast of me talking with Frank LoMonte, Executive Director of The Student Press Law Center. He asked me about my book while interviewing me about free speech in schools.
  • Jack Russell Weinstein interviews philosophers for Prairie Public Radio. Here I am on his show “Why? Philosophical Discussions About Everyday Life”–again, talking about the book. This is the most reflective conversation, and we talked about the flawed constitutional structure of the US as well as ordinary civic engagement. Jack told an interesting story about opposing a local development project that the city’s leaders favored–and they were right. That was an opportunity to discuss the value of expertise and also the need to update our methods for discussing issues with political leaders.

qualms about a bond market for philanthropy

Leave a reply

Today’s New York Times describes a nascent plan for a philanthropic bond market. The main proponent, Lindsay Beck, “says she has long believed that charitable money is often misallocated; some of the most effective organizations struggle to raise funds, while some of the least effective charities are allocated millions.” She proposes that people and firms that want to do good with their money (and gain tax advantages) should buy bonds in nonprofits that show strong evidence of effectiveness.

This proposal is just an example of the broader movement toward social entrepreneurship, social impact investing, and (more generally) the application of business principles to philanthropy. It makes sense insofar as nonprofits provide services with market value that their clients cannot afford. For example, a homeless person could and would buy a meal if he had the cash. If a nonprofit provides the meal for free, funders naturally want to know how many meals they can buy for their dollar.

But there’s another way to look at nonprofits: as associations created, managed, and sustained by citizens in their communities. De Tocqueville thought that democracy flourished in America only because we had such associations to complement the state and the market.

Investing in nonprofits to deliver services ignores these issues:

1. Power. Of course, the golden rule has always applied (“He who has the gold, rules”). But traditionally, if you wanted to be a philanthropist in your community, you had to meet with leaders of civic groups, and they’d have agendas of their own. You had the cash, but they would be able to bestow positive or negative publicity. Their members could vote in local elections that would affect your interests. They would have relationships with other organizations in town, from the newspaper to the church. You could not just get up and leave town without substantial costs. There was some power on both sides of the table, which meant that they could decide what they wanted and ask you for it. In a philanthropic bond market, all the power lies with the donor.

2. Learning: In a traditional nonprofit, the leaders and other members decide what they want to do. They deliberate and learn from practical experience. That means they can fail, or face internal conflicts, or apply bad values. It also means that they learn the Tocquevillian art and science of association, and they can transfer their learning to other organizations and to politics. On the other hand, in a philanthropic market, social entrepreneurs create products and sell them to investors. Very few people learn, and no one must learn how to reason and negotiate with people who lack money and power.

3. Social capital: My colleagues Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg and Chaeyoon Lim and I have found that communities have better economic prospects if they have more nonprofit organizations per capita. We argue that it’s not because the nonprofits provide goods and services efficiently. In fact, fewer, bigger nonprofits might be more efficient. It is rather that participants in hands-on local associations develop networks, relationships, and loyalties that are valuable economically. If investments flow to highly efficient nonprofits, then social capital will be wiped out.

4. Value questions. It is not self-evident that we should reduce recidivism (which is the example cited in the Times article). Maybe we should fight to cut the arrest and incarceration rates instead. A program to cut recidivism offers a service that can be quantified and measured: $x reduces the prison-return rate by y%. It thereby legitimizes the criminal justice system. I am not necessarily in favor of more radical changes, but I think they should be discussed, and the decision should not be made by the people with cash. Again, I realize that wealthy donors have always had disproportionate power, but a bond market just takes away all the friction and resistance. Donors can buy a lower recidivism rate (while taking tax benefits) without any accountability for the moral tradeoffs and complexities.

5. Process. If you believe in democracy at all, you believe in certain processes for making decisions collectively. These processes vary, but in general, they involve a degree of deliberation and some equality in the power to determine the outcomes. Democratic processes are inefficient. They slow down service-delivery and they impose their own costs. (Someone has to pay for the meeting rooms, the snacks, the facilitation, and the recruitment.) To the extent that philanthropists can pay for pure outcomes, they will not invest in processes. And then we will have fewer meetings and other democratic processes in our communities.

I suppose we can have a bond market for investments in pure service-delivering nonprofits and also an array of locally rooted, deliberative associations that control their own destinies. But I worry that the money, attention, and energy will shift to the former and the Tocquevillian basis of our democracy will continue to erode.

the panopticon is impossible, or why citizens must collect information

Leave a reply

(en route to Austin, TX) Yesterday, we heard an exemplary presentation on Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) by Berkeley professor Meredith Minkler, who is one of the leaders of the field. She told a perfect story of a research project that was a collaboration between university-based scholars and laypeople: in this case, workers in Chinese restaurants in San Francisco. The workers provided guidance that made the research interesting, original, and important. My colleague Sarah Shugars has a summary.

I was struck by a minor point that brings up a larger issue. The Berkeley researchers knew that non-fatal accidents are very common among restaurant workers. Their worker colleagues noted that restaurants’ first aid kits tend to contain only Band-Aids. The team therefore calculated the percentage of restaurants that do not maintain satisfactory first aid kits. In order to generate that statistic, they had to know how many Chinese restaurants there are. The City of San Francisco did not know. The restaurant workers contributed a precise count.

Now, a city could count its Chinese restaurants. It could send one of its paid employees to count, or it could hire a contractor for that purpose. But many of our political theories just assume that the state knows things. We take that for granted. On the contrary, knowing something as simple as how many Chinese restaurants exist raises layers of problems:

  • The state must care about the topic in order to collect the data. (To be fair to San Francisco, its health department participated in this project. My point is a general one about the need for the state to care.)
  • The state must pay for the data, which is not free. Collecting the data may be more expensive for the state than for other parties. For instance, Chinese restaurant workers can read signs in Chinese; most city government employees cannot.
  • The state must define the concept, which almost always raises value questions. (What is a genuinely “Chinese” restaurant? Why separate Chinese restaurants into their own category?)
  • The state must employ agents who act with integrity. For instance, a state employee who counts Chinese restaurants could take bribes to leave out some restaurants so that they would avoid scrutiny. That would ruin the data.
  • The state must collect the information competently. As I noted recently, “The same US government that can apparently tap almost any telephone in the world cannot harvest information that people voluntarily provide on the government’s own website regarding their eligibility for insurance.”
  • The state must pay attention to the data it collects. After all, “the state” is actually a whole bunch of human beings who do not automatically know what their colleagues know, let alone act on that knowledge.

Clearly, states should collect information as the basis of sound policy. We shouldn’t ask restaurant workers to do all the research about restaurants. But collecting good data is itself a political achievement. We can’t just presume it will happen. Nor is the best way to obtain it always for the state to buy it. For one thing, citizens can benefit from being the researchers. In this case, the same restaurant workers who collected the basic data also won significant reforms in city law. The process of data-collection took effort (for which they were paid on the grant), but it also gave them political power.

(See also “Why Engineers Should Study Elinor Ostrom“)

new journals related to civic renewal

Leave a reply

Scholars working on civic engagement, civic education, and related topics have no shortage of publication venues, including free, online–but peer-reviewed–journals:

The International Journal of Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement has published its first issue. Articles include “Rethinking Peer Review: Expanding the Boundaries for Community-Engaged Scholarship” by Sherril B. Gelmon, Cathy M. Jordan, Sarena D. Seifer, and “A Research Agenda for K-12 School-based Service-Learning: Academic Achievement and School Success” by Andrew Furco.

The Journal of Public Deliberation (JPD) is now up to volume 9, issue 2.  The new issue includes articles on stakeholders and citizens in deliberation; participation in the New York Public Schools; and the effects of non-neutral moderators. The current editorial team has done a great job, but they are handing it over to a great new team of Laura Black, Tim Shaffer, and Nancy Thomas.

The Journal of Civic Literacy has launched its website and invites research on “the causes and consequences of low levels of literacy, the role of public education, the comparative efficacy of available curricula and programs (what is working? why and how?), the connections between the current media environment and deficient civic understandings, and the role of civic literacy in defining ethical and trustworthy public service.”

The eJournal of Public Affairs is published by Missouri State University and affiliated with the American Democracy Project. “Public Affairs” means different things to different people, but this journal is actually devoted to civic engagement, civic education, and closely related topics.

Partnerships: A Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement comes out of North Carolina Campus Compact but has national reach and is also a peer-reviewed, open-access journal.

The Journal of General Education (“A Curricular Commons of the Humanities and Sciences”) is edited by Jeremy Cohen, who has a deep commitment to civic education, free speech, and public media. So, although its topic is “general education” at the undergraduate level, it is an important site for discussions of civic education and engagement.

[Added later:]

The Good Society is a distinguished journal of political theory, now turning to what we call Civic Studies. It is not open-source because of the contract with the publisher, but articles are freely available for two months after publication. In any event, it is a fine journal.

And Public, from Imagining America, is a peer-reviewed, multimedia e-journal focused on humanities, arts, and design in public life.