in Indiana

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I’m in Indiana for the rest of the week, to:

talk with the Council of Chief State School Officers’ State Collaboratives on Assessment and Student Standards–a mouthful of an acronym (if there ever was one), but the point is to improve standards for k-12 civics in a large group of states that are part of this collaboration;

meet with the Center for Civic Literacy in Indianapolis

consult with the Indiana Humanities Council on projects related to the humanities and civic engagement in Indiana; and

visit and speak at the Political and Civic Engagement Program (PACE) at Indiana University in Bloomington.

would we be better off without any horse-race polls?

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A “horse-race” poll is one that asks people whether they plan to vote and, if so, for whom. These surveys are appearing at the rate of half a dozen per day right now. I don’t think the tide can be stemmed, because we have a constitutional right to ask other people about the election and print the results. And I acknowledge that I follow polls obsessively, checking them several times a day and reading all about the minutiae of party weighting, robocalls versus live calls, and “house effects.” CIRCLE will even ask horse-race questions on our own youth poll, soon in the field.

But what if they all just went away?

Although there would be pros and cons, I think we’d be much better off. The theoretical framework that helps explain why is Jürgen Habermas‘ distinction between instrumental and communicative reason.

With instrumental reason, you know what you want and you deploy resources, including speech, to get what you want. For that purpose, horse-race polls are very useful. For instance:

  • If you are Karl Rove, you are now moving money to House races instead of supporting Mitt Romney, because the presidential race looks lost to the GOP, while the House is more “in play.”
  • If you are a leftish critic of Barack Obama and you live in a blue state, you are probably contemplating not voting (in response to the Pakistan drone bombings and many other issues). You might feel differently if you thought that Romney was about to take your state and the national election was close.
  • If you work for the president’s re-election campaign, you’re not paying any attention to uncompetitive states, like California, Texas, and New York (combined population = 83 million), but you’re suddenly very interested in Nevada (pop. 2.7 million).
  • If you are Barack Obama, you think you’re ahead, and so you’re inclined to run out the clock, rather than, for example, explain what you propose to do about difficult public problems.
  • It’s possible that if you are a Republican, you are losing interest in voting for president, which would make the polls a self-fulfilling prophesy.

One way to assess instrumental action is in terms of the outcomes. From my perspective, Karl Rove’s targeting his millions is bad because he is supporting the wrong people. But lefties’ boycotting an uncompetitive election is fine, even though I am not personally moved to protest this president. (For the record: I voted for Nader in 1996, when I was certain that Clinton would win. This election is closer, and I much prefer Obama to Clinton.)

But we shouldn’t simply assess instrumental action by its outcomes, because that damages other values. In politics, one of the fundamental values is equality: everyone should count for the same. Another value is some version of integrity: you should say what you believe. And deliberation is a value: we should exchange reasons with our fellow citizens and give everyone a hearing. We should deliberate out of respect for other people and also because we might be wrong: deliberation is an opportunity to learn.

If you are sure what you want to happen and you have a pretty accurate sense of how your fellow citizens are going to vote, reasons become relatively unimportant, and some citizens count more than others. Forget about reasoning with all those New Yorkers and Texans: the electoral college outcomes in their states are utterly predictable. Forget about what should count as the best argument for your core positions, because those may not be  tactically valuable things to say. Pick the issues and arguments (no matter how trivial) that seem most likely to win you electoral college votes.

That’s advice for candidates and PACs, but individual citizens may regard the election as a spectator sport and believe that it’s interesting and worth their attention just insofar as the outcome looks close. That is wrong because our job is to decide how to vote and then move on to making other decisions that improve the world. Horse-race polls just distract us.

civic engagement makes Tufts students happier

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Thanks to a grant from the Bringing Theory to Practice project, my colleagues and I have been able to study the relationship between civic engagement and “psychosocial well-being” among Tufts students by means of a large, longitudinal survey and some qualitative research. One conceptual framework that informs our research comes from the psychologist Corey Keyes, who has shown that people fall on a continuum from “flourishing” to “languishing” that is quite separate from the continuum that runs from mental illness to its absence. Flourishing has huge mental and physical health benefits–regardless of whether one has a mental illness. People can say they are flourishing if (among other things) “their own daily activities [are] useful to and valued by society” and they have a “sense of belonging to, and comfort and support from, a community.” We propose, in turn, that programs and projects of civic engagement can boost flourishing.

At Tufts, according to a summary by Michelle J. Boyd, Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, Jonathan Zaff, and me:

Current [civic] engagement … was related to higher flourishing scores (Keyes, 2002). … Students who recently engaged in civic activities, most notably activities perceived to be focused on social change, had significantly better scores on indicators of psychosocial well-being (e.g., connection with others, intrinsic motivation toward learning, strategies for managing stress). Furthermore, students who were engaged only for the first semester did not show a lasting psychosocial benefit, and students who had lower socioeconomic backgrounds were less likely to become highly engaged. Moreover, we found that the students who were civically engaged through courses did not necessarily experience better psychosocial outcomes unless they viewed the activities as aimed at social change.

Sometimes, people ask us whether civic engagement is a solution to specific student pathologies, such as alcohol abuse and depression. I think the evidence for that is much weaker than the evidence for flourishing. At least in our Tufts undergraduate sample, civic engagement is a path to finding meaning, purpose, and satisfaction.

the youth vote on PBS NewsHour and elsewhere in the media

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Below is a thoughtful and well-reported segment on the youth vote. Judy Woodruff has been covering youth issues with depth and consistency for several cycles and goes beneath the simple, horse-race question (“Will they vote for Obama or not?”) that most reporters ask. She also has a recent blog post with more information. I’m in this clip for a little while, but CIRCLE’s influence on the reporters’ fieldwork and agenda satisfies me much more than my own quotes. (That was also the case with a recent New York Times piece by Susan Saulny.)

Watch In Swing States, Elusive Youth Voters are Jaded, Undecided on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Here are some other recent articles that use our work:

the most redistribution since the Johnson Administration

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In today’s Times, Eduardo Porter argues,

Future historians could well conclude that Mr. Obama led the biggest redistribution of wealth in decades.

The Affordable Care Act, which levies new taxes on the wealthy to expand access to health care for the near poor, seems on track to become the biggest increase in government redistribution since the Johnson administration. …

The Obama fiscal stimulus also did much to assist the most vulnerable Americans. It expanded the food stamp program and the earned-income tax credit. It extended unemployment insurance and sent $800 checks to poor and middle-class families. Over all, the Congressional Budget Office found that total government taxes and transfers reduced the nation’s income inequality by more than a quarter in 2009, the most in at least 30 years.

I think this story has been unaccountably overlooked by upper-middle-class liberals who are remote from welfare programs and over-influenced by symbolic issues, such as the “public option” (which was dropped from the health care bill). They use symbolic issues to measure the administration’s economic progressivism, when the graph above is a much better index. I was on a bus full of liberal academics when the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act last summer, and I was the only one who cheered–not because the decision would help Barack Obama, but because, as Porter notes, the top 1% of taxpayers will each pay $52,000 under the ACA to fund up to $2,000 for each family in the bottom 50%.

The graph is full of paradoxes and challenges. Note, for example, that even though Bill Clinton presided over growth and low unemployment, inequality (both before and after government taxes and transfers) grew rapidly during his eight years, echoing the trends first seen under Reagan. On the other hand, both pre-tax and post-tax inequality fell in the last years of GW Bush–perhaps just as a result of the money that rich people lost in the markets.

Of course, factors well beyond the control of a president affect inequality, but Porter cites evidence that the intentional policies of the Obama administration have helped cut inequality substantially.

I cite this graph because I think it displays important and overlooked trends. I do not mean to imply that redistribution is a good in itself, or that a reduction in the GINI inequality coefficient is necessarily a sign of progress. (Consider the fall between 2007 and 2009: bad years for everyone.) Government spending is only beneficial if the people who get the money benefit broadly, in terms of agency, freedom, and well-being as well as cash. But the argument about the Obama administration should begin with the premise that it has redistributed wealth–just as Romney charges, and left-liberals often deny.