participatory budgeting in the US

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Participatory Budgeting means asking deliberative groups of citizens to decide how to invest public money. It began in Brazil, when (as I understand the story) the Workers’ Party finally took over after years of military dictatorship. They had promised amazing benefits for all but couldn’t afford their promises, so they created a more democratic process for allocating capital budgets. The process saved their popularity and has survived when conservative parties have rotated into office. It has been found to promote equity and efficiency as well as civic engagement.

Certain elected officials in the US have begun using PB to allocate their own discretionary budgets. Those include Chicago Alderman Joe Moore and New York City Councilperson Brad Lander. PB is being used in a few whole municipalities as well. Gabriel Hetland and Abigail N. Martin report in The Nation that Occupy Wall Street participants have been debating, and in some cases, advocating PB as a way of bringing “participatory democracy inside” the government. The advocates have formed the Community Democracy Project (CDP) to advance PB. The critics, however, are “deeply skeptical of anything that smacks of cooperation with the state.” (Back to the Sixties, anyone?)

Generation Me?

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A new article by Jean Twenge and colleagues is getting extraordinary attention from the news media and is being hotly debated in fields concerned with youth civic engagement.* The article argues that young people today–the so-called Millennial Generation–are relatively self-interested, unengaged, distrustful, and unconcerned about social justice and the environment compared to their predecessors. The main evidence is a set of trends like those shown below, which are taken from the vast and highly-respected federal survey of high school students known as Monitoring the Future. These particular questions are behavioral (e.g., Do you think about social problems? In your personal actions, do you make an effort to conserve energy and help the environment?).

Several of the declines are significant, and one could add other such trends. Participation in face-to-face meetings, interest in the news, working on community projects, joining unions, attending religious services, and joining clubs and groups have all declined for youth since the 1970s. Although youth turnout was higher in the presidential elections of 2004 and 2008 than it had been during the 1990s, turnout in off-year elections was consistently higher from 1974-1994 than in 1996-2010. (Off-year elections are arguably better measures of youth engagement than presidential elections, since the latter are more volatile and subject to choices by a few campaign managers.)

On the other hand, as Twenge et al. concede, the youth volunteering rate has climbed since the 1970s. They dismiss that increase as a result of external forces (mandates and rewards for community service), but most large-scale trends in youth behavior can be attributed to context rather than choice. Certainly, whether you vote or join a union has a lot to do with the behavior and resources of parties and unions, respectively. The long-term decline in trust for other people is deeply troubling, but few analysts would be satisfied with saying that young people refuse or fail to trust other citizens. The social context is surely responsible.

Twenge et al. move from the trends shown above (notice all those wavy, non-parallel lines) to two kinds of broad generalization. One is a thesis that civic engagement is down–overall. That conclusion requires combining and weighing many different variables. If one chose presidential-election turnout, Internet-use, and volunteering as the key measures of engagement, the trend would be up instead of down. So the narrative is sensitive to choices about what to include and emphasize.

Their second generalization involves generations. Almost any civic trend will show frequent ups and downs–as in the graph above. A generation is a way of simplifying that complex story. You are even simplifying if you lump together all the young Americans who were born in the same specific year. Distinguishing contemporaries by their educational attainment, race, gender, religion, and ideology would reveal dramatic gaps at any given point as well as divergent trends over time. In fact, differences in civic engagement by social class utterly dwarf changes in average youth civic engagement over time.

Below is an illustration from a CIRCLE report that is supposed to make the point that young people differ an awful lot in their civic engagement. Averages are basically uninformative. (Click the graphic for the report.)

Twenge et al. interpret and simplify complex data in a way typical of psychologists. They administer a battery of survey measures to a particular group of youth (182 San Diego State University undergraduates) to see how the measures cluster. They do not choose their measures randomly but use items that will help them explore specific psychological constructs, such as self-esteem, altruism, conformity, communitarianism, and narcissism. They conclude that rising narcissism really underlies the trends in the larger population.

There is nothing technically wrong with this method. The authors do not use their undergraduate sample to make generalizations about frequencies or trends in the national population, but only to build a conceptual model for interpreting national trends. For that purpose, their sample need not be nationally representative, although it would be interesting to see whether the same patterns emerge, for example, among high school dropouts.

My concern is not technical but philosophical. As I argued at more length recently, civic engagement is not primarily a psychological construct having to do with motives, personal values, and behaviors. It is rather (or also) a set of  actions and values that a good society needs from its citizens. Which behaviors and values are most important depends on one’s theory of a good society. Perhaps volunteering and voting in presidential elections are most valuable, in which case we are in good shape. Or perhaps trust is more important, in which case the decline has been profound and inexorable. The answer lies not in psychological research but in our conception of a good community. Further, the causes of civic engagement and disengagement are unlikely to reside inside young people’s heads. If, for example, being contacted by a political campaign is an indicator of civic engagement, then the reason for the decline from 1972-2o08 was a set of choices by campaigns, not by youth.

In short, I think Twenge et al. provide a helpful reminder that the civic engagement of our young people has changed in many ways, at least some of which are troubling. Their article could be misleading, however, if it led readers to assign too much importance to personality traits or to ignore enormous differences among young people, or if it seemed to prove that certain behaviors are most important for democracy.

*“Generational Differences in Young Adults’ Life Goals, Concern for Others, and Civic Orientation, 1966-2009,” Jean M. Twenge, PhD, and Elise C. Freeman, MA, San Diego State University; W. Keith Campbell, PhD, University of Georgia; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, online. PDF currently available here.

blaming the individual, blaming the war

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“The government is going to want to blame this on an individual rather than blame it on the war” — John Henry Browne, defense attorney for the US staff sergeant accused of murdering 16 Afghans [NY Times].

I have lately been dwelling on the question of human agency versus social context or structure. It is a major theme in Cathy J. Cohen’s book, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics, which I am in the midst of reviewing. And it came up explicitly in committee work last weekend.

We were discussing standards for civic education, and the question arose whether to make “agency” (probably not by that name) a core educational value. In practice, this would play out in settings like a history class on slavery. The older historiography emphasized structure: slavery as an overwhelming influence on the victims. Recent historiography has recovered the agency and creativity of slaves. The danger in a k-12 classroom would be teaching kids that slavery was basically OK because the victims were still agents and made choices.

The staff sergeant accused of the Afghanistan massacre made a choice that vast numbers of other US soldiers have not made and would not make. To deny his responsibility for what he allegedly did is to deny his agency and that of his fellow soldiers–it would make them all seem like automata or victims instead of responsible professionals. At the same time, he wouldn’t have done what he did if he hadn’t been sent for the third time, against his will, into a bloody counter-insurgency war halfway around the world. So the context or structure matters.

That is an extreme case, for which the word “evil” seems appropriate, but the same logic arises when kids drop out of high school or have  unprotected sex. These are acts that involve both context and agency. How we weigh the two will affect how we respond.

In my view, we should not simply aim to make structures better (e.g., get out of Afghanistan or improve schools). Those are valid goals, but people should also have agency. Institutions and policies will turn out better if we all help shape them; also, actively shaping the world is an aspect of a flourishing human life. In concrete terms, that would mean not only reforming education so that kids have better outcomes, but enlisting youth in reforming education. At our best, we now strive to enhance the human capital or market power of young people. We rarely even try to enhance their political agency.

We should also recognize agency wherever it does emerge. Even in extreme cases, like prisons and war zones, people are agents as well as objects. Dismissing their action as the mere product of structure or context diminishes them. On the other hand, to assess the limits and constraints on their agency is a precondition of enhancing it. If you think that kids are simply choosing to drop out of high school and are not in any sense being pushed out, you will diagnose their situation wrong. Likewise, it’s naive to think that American soldiers in Afghanistan have been placed in situations where they are free to do a lot of good.

new report on voter mobilization from the Black Youth Project

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The Black Youth Project has released an important report entitled “Youth, Race, and Voter Mobilization” (PDF). Some points that caught my eye:

Being contacted about an election strongly predicts voting. Young people who are contacted are 15%-30% more likely to turn out. (This statistic is consistent with our own research. Part of the reason may be that people who are already registered or who are socioeconomically advantaged are more likely to be contacted. But randomized experiments have also found that being encouraged to vote has a positive impact on turnout.)

The Republican Party has historically been much more likely to contact young people than the Democratic Party, although the  gap favored the Republicans by only two points (within the margin of error) in 2008.

Both parties have become more likely to contact young people, and  both parties are most likely to contact African American youth. Thus African American youth were the most contacted racial/ethnic group in 2008–and had the highest turnout rate that year.

The fact that 30% of young African Americans reported being contacted by the GOP is surprising, especially because they voted overwhelmingly for the Democrats. The most widely reported examples of the GOP “contacting” Black youth were negative: robocalls designed to suppress turnout. Perhaps the Republicans deserve more credit than those stories imply, or perhaps some of the GOP contacts that young African Americans reported were negative.

I was under the impression that political activity was channeled through the Obama campaign to an extraordinary degree in 2008, to the detriment of independent grassroots political groups. In fact, 18 percent of youth were contacted about the election by non-party organizations, the same rate as in 2004 and much more than a any time in the previous two decades. Of those who were contacted by non-party organizations, young African Americans were especially likely to receive contacts from churches (21%), friends (21%), and neighborhood and community organizations (17%). The finding about friends is consistent with our research that political discussion is particularly common among working-class, urban African Americans.

The Black Youth Project draws a clear conclusion from its research. Black youth will vote if contacted. Their 2012 turnout will depend on whether the parties, campaigns, and independent groups choose to talk to them. In turn, that could affect the outcome of the election.

Dickens and the right to be loved

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It’s a philosopher’s cliché that every right implies a “correlative duty.” If I have a right to live, you have a duty not to kill me. If my kid has a right to an education, someone has a duty to pay for it–whether that’s me or the people of my town, state, or nation.

One of our greatest needs as human beings is to be especially loved by someone else: first as a child, then as a partner or a close friend. The need for partial or exclusive love may vary somewhat, but it is strong and widespread.

Alas, in many cases, no one has a duty to love a particular person. If you have a serious need but no one is required to meet it, you do not have a right. When people have unmet needs without rights, that is a genuine tragedy. It is an example of a problem that may not be solvable politically, i.e., that might still trouble an ideal society.

Dickens’ Great Expectations (which I just finished reading to my aforementioned child) provides an extraordinary number of cases in which it is debatable or problematic whether A has a duty to love B. For instance:

  • Pip is orphaned and raised by his sister, who does not love him and perhaps resents the obligation. But her husband loves Pip–despite having a questionable obligation to do so–and later Pip fails to reciprocate. Presumably, Mrs. Joe acquired a duty to love Pip against her inclination, and Pip is obliged to love Joe just because Joe loved him beyond duty.
  • Compeyson has an obligation to Mrs. Havisham to love her because he wooed and promised to marry her, but he has no intention of fulfilling his duty.
  • Estella is orphaned as a baby and given (with her assent) to Mrs. Havisham, who does not love her and who teaches her to be unable to give love.
  • Magwitch loves Pip (or the idea of Pip as a gentleman) in a way that puts Pip under a most unwelcome obligation. But Pip comes to love Magwitch because of the latter’s need.
  • Pip loves Estella, and she acknowledges a kind of right to be loved in return, but she insists she cannot give it.
  • Mrs. Havisham’s family becomes Pip and Estella, yet she does not love either until late in the novel.
  • Pip and Herbert love one another (Platonically) as friends, even though they begin by physically fighting over Estella. Pip secretly assists Herbert in order to love him without conferring an obligation.
  • Pip assumes that Biddy will love him as a wife once he settles for her, but he has no right to marriage. His willingness to accept her friendship indicates his moral progress.

In Dickens’ original ending, harmony was restored among Pip, Joe, Biddy, and Herbert, but Estella and Pip were never united. I assume that was because they had no right to each others’ love, having acted badly. Bulwer-Lytton persuaded Dickens to change the ending so that they were united, although the last sentence is slightly ambiguous as to their future. Presumably, Dickens was persuaded that they deserved each other. But even with its more conventional happy ending, the novel still makes one wonder: Who has a right to the love of whom?