Frontiers of Democracy: Innovations in Civic Practice, Theory, and Education

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The Third Annual Conference in Civic Studies at Tufts, Co-sponsored by The Deliberative Democracy Consortium, The Democracy Imperative, and the Tisch College of Citizenship.

Please join us for this two-day gathering of educators and activists to explore the theory and practice of citizenship. (It will begin in the evening of July 21 and conclude in the afternoon of July 23). Through interactive sessions, we will focus on "citizenship" as creativity, agency, and collaboration – not as a form of membership that separates those who are in from those who are out.

Join us for a series of learning exchanges, presentations, and conversations on:

  • Engaging—and being engaged by—the online public:  How are online technologies being incorporated into democratic governance and education?
  • The "neutrality" challenge: Concerns over neutrality challenge educators and practitioners alike. In public life, the question is how to balance the commitment to a politically neutral process with the desire to achieve more equitable outcomes. In the classroom, the question is how to present all perspectives on an issue yet take a definitive stance in an effort to educate for democracy. What are the politics of neutrality, on campus and in public life?
  • What role is there for innovative theory in civic practice? For example: how might Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel-prize-winning research on "common pool resources" help citizens, public officials, and other leaders share the work of sustaining deliberative democracy.

Scholars, students, activists,  educators and others interested in this topic are welcome to use this form to apply to attend. Registration costs $120, $30 for students. Free admission for participants in the Summer Institute of Civic Studies. Scholarships are available for select applicants who demonstrate financial need.

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

The Civic Studies, Civic Practices Conference concludes the third annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Tisch College. This intensive, two-week interdisciplinary seminar brings together advanced graduate students, faculty and practitioners from diverse fields of study for challenging discussions about the role of civics in society.

DRAFT SCHEDULE

For a draft conference schedule (subject to change), please see this page.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

For information about practical matters, please visit our FAQ page.

harnassing institutions to serve communites’ knowledge needs

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These are some notes for my talk at an MIT conference tomorrow. Most in the audience will be librarians, joined by various practitioners and scholars of new media.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation got its money from newspapers. The Knight brothers were in the newspaper business, and the Foundation has made substantial investments in the profession of journalism. But journalism (as we once knew it) is in crisis, and the Foundation realizes that the public interest is best served not by trying to save newspapers or reporters, but by finding the most effective means to meet the real needs that newspapers, at their best, have served. Hence in 2007 the Foundation launched The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.

In turn, the Commission was wise enough to realize that “information” is only a piece of the problem. Information is inert: all by itself, it doesn’t produce judgment, motivation, decisions, actions, or power, let alone wise decisions and beneficial actions. Already in 1934, T.S. Eliot was asking prophetically:

    Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

    Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Today, information is available in such profusion that our chief problem may be TMI, too much information, not too little. According to a recent article in Science by Martin Hilbert and Priscila López, if all the information created so far by human beings were entered on high-density compact disks, the pile of disks would reach past the moon.

I acknowledge that some important information is unavailable, either because no one has invested in producing it or because powerful elites are keeping it secret, and we still need to fight for information. Librarians and journalists are among the people who wage that fight on the public’s behalf. But access to information is far from our only need. As the Knight Commission found:

    Skilled people, appropriate technologies, and reliable and relevant information are the building blocks of a successful communications environment. What generates news and information in that environment, however, is not just those building blocks. It is engagement–specifically, people’s engagement with information and with each other.

I think that when people “engage,” some of the things they do include:

  • Discussing information with other people, including people who have different values and interests, in order to make sense of it;
  • Using their knowledge to help them manage public resources, run organizations, and work on public problems together. In turn, their experiences as they work together generate information, knowledge, and understanding;
  • Recruiting other people, including young people, to be interested and concerned about important public issues and giving them the skills they need for interpretation, analysis, collaboration.

I start with the bias that we need institutions for these purposes. I am open to the idea that we need institutions less than we used to, because now we have virtual networks (like Facebook, or the Internet itself) that cut the costs of discussion collaboration. But I see no evidence that these networks have yet revived our democracy. And I think the tough questions to ask are:

  • Can a loose, voluntary network really recruit people who lack motivation and interest in public affairs?
  • Can a loose voluntary network reliably bring people into conversation with others who are different from themselves?
  • Can a loose voluntary network be accountable to all its members in a fair way?
  • Can a loose, voluntary network hold governments and businesses accountable consistently, over time?

There was never a golden age of American democracy, but we did once have pervasive institutions that recruited members, got them interested in public affairs, digested and interpreted information for them, encouraged them to talk and reach their own conclusions, and brought their members into conversation with people who were different. In the 1970s …

  • about 65 percent of Americans said they read the newspaper every day. They might subscribe for the classifieds, the comics, or the sports, but a newspaper had an incentive to interest them in public affairs and provided a dose of commentary and debate.
  • almost 30 percent of Americans or their spouses belonged to labor unions. They joined because their workplaces were unionized, but the union had incentives to interest them in politics and to develop their political skills.
  • more than 60% of Americans said they had attended a face-to-face meeting within the past year, thanks in large part to the prevalence of identity organizations, from the Knights of Columbus to the NAACP. Like newspapers and unions, these groups recruited, trained, interpreted information, and encouraged discussion.

The various streams of civic life didn’t flow together often enough, but there were times when unions and chambers of commerce, priests and rabbis, journalists and politicians, met and talked with one another within their own communities.

But all of these institutions have fallen on very hard times, shedding most of their members and resources. So we need to leverage new institutions for similar purposes. Here are three ideas, derived from the Knight Commission report but expanded by me:

1. A Communications Corps.

Literally millions of young Americans are involved today in structured community service programs, whether service-learning classes in their schools or universities, after-school programs like 4-H and Campfire Girls, or the full-time positions supported by AmeriCorps. This is a powerful infrastructure.

Young people tend to have relatively strong skills for using digital media, which they could contribute to serve their communities. But, being young, they have relatively narrow knowledge of public life. Thus they have much to learn by serving their communities’ information needs.

Existing service programs range in quality, but some are insufficiently challenging. The programs would educate better if they had more ambitious learning objectives.

The Knight Foundation recommend a “Geek Corps”: college students would serve nonprofits by providing IT support. I would amend that proposal in two ways. I would open the corps to non-college youth, recognizing that only about one quarter of our young adults really have the four-year college experience, and their peers (including the one third who drop out of high school) also have much to contribute. In fact, given limited resources, I would focus on young adults who have never attended college.

Second, I wouldn’t make it a “geek” corps, implying a focus on setting up servers and tweaking software. I would make it a “communications corps,” with a heavy emphasis on making videos, writing text, interviewing neighbors, and facilitating online discussions. Corps members would still be assigned to local nonprofits, but their job would typically be to produce videos for the website, not to get the office network running.

One model is a free-standing corps, parallel to YouthBuild, City Year, Public Allies, ViSTA and the like. I would be more inclined to infuse the communications work into the programs of these existing “corps,” while employing a relatively small number of youth as full-time trainers and developers who would serve the rest of the service world.

2. Universities as Community Hubs

Higher education is a big sector, with $136 billion in annual spending and $100 billion in real estate holdings. But it is not just any big business. Its fundamental mission is the production and dissemination of knowledge and the promotion of dialogue and debate.

But universities need to dedicate themselves to their own communities’ knowledge needs, not only in abstract statements, but as a matter of real investment. Providing timely information of local relevance and with input from neighbors trades off against other intellectual pursuits. Overwhelmingly, rewards and prestige flow to scholars whose work is original and generalizable. Communities need work that is true, relevant to them, and accessible to them. Universities can produce some of both, but they cannot add more local work without subtracting a bit of something else. Creating community information hubs within higher education requires at least a modest shift of priorities.

Universities must also aggregate the scattered knowledge produced by their professors, students, and staff. One of the advantages of the traditional metro daily newspaper was its format–a manageable slice of information every day, with the top news on the front page, a few hundred words of debate in the letters column, and space for the occasional in-depth feature. In contrast, a great modern university produces a flood of material for an array of audiences. Universities need to think about common web portals that accumulate and organize all their work relevant to their physical locations.

They must adopt appropriate principles and safeguards. You can do good by going forth into a community to study it, to portray it, and to stir up discussion about it. Or you can do harm. Much depends on how you relate to your fellow citizens off campus. Relationships should be respectful and characterized by learning in both directions. In this context, “research ethics” means far more than the protection of human subjects from harm; ethical research is directed to genuine community interests and needs and builds other people’s capacity for research and debate. Like faculty, students must be fully prepared to do community service well, and held accountable for their impact.

3. Sustained Face-to-Face Dialogue in Communities

Face-to-face discussions of community issues have been found to produce good policies and the political will to support these policies, to educate the participants, and to enhance solidarity and social networks. They turn mere information into public judgment and public will. I am still moved by the Australian participant in a planning meeting who said, “I just can’t believe we did it; we finally achieved what we set out to do. It’s the most important thing I’ve ever done in my whole life, I suppose.”

Hampton, VA, the fourth-place winner in the international Reinhard Mohn Prize for the best civic engagement process in the world, exemplifies what sustained, embedded deliberation looks like. Hampton did not just invite citizens to participate in one high-profile discussion that was somehow linked to policymaking. Instead, Hampton has a mosaic of school counsels, neighborhood councils, police councils, a Youth Commission, public city planning processes, Participatory Budgeting (where large groups of citizens allocate capital spending). It also provides relevant training opportunities, including civic education in the schools and a suite of courses for adults called “Diversity College.”

I would draw the conclusion that is also implicit in the title of Carmen Sirianni’s recent book, Investing in Democracy. You can’t get community dialogues on the cheap. They take a long-term effort and resources that are normally a mixture of money, policies, and people’s volunteered or paid time.

There must be some kind of organizer or convening organization that is trusted as neutral and fair and that has the skills and resources to pull off a genuine public deliberation. Libraries and universities are among the institutions that can play that role.

People must be able to convene in spaces that are safe, comfortable, dignified, and regarded as neutral ground. Again, libraries and universities can help.

There must be some reason for participants to believe that powerful institutions will listen to the results of their discussions. They may be hopeful because of a formal agreement by the powers that be, or even a law that requires public engagement. Or they may simply believe that their numbers will be large enough–and their commitment intense enough–that authorities will be unable to ignore them. In the terms of John Gaventa’s Power Cube, the discussions cannot be “invited.” They must be “created” or “claimed.”

There must be recruitment and training programs: not just brief orientations before a session, but more intensive efforts to build skills and commitments. Ideally, moments of discussion will be embedded in ongoing civic work (volunteering, participation in associations, and the day jobs of paid professionals), so that participants can draw on their work experience and take direction and inspiration from the discussions. There must be pathways for adolescents and other newcomers to enter the deliberations.

why it is good to talk to people across the political spectrum

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Three lively discussions about civic education within two weeks: one at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan, the next at James Madison’s Montpelier, the third in DC. A similar topic, but the participants came from very different places on our wide political spectrum.

At CUNY, at least one participant believed that No Child Left Behind was a right-wing strategy to privatize all public schools. (The theory goes: once schools fail to meet the Adequate Yearly Progress benchmarks, students will be given vouchers.) Another speaker simply called charter schools “private” and saw them as a manifestation of creeping market fundamentalism. I don’t know whether these views represented consensus in the room, but no one challenged them. There was some talk about trying to revive the “open classroom” movement of the 1970s. A distinguished and experienced scholar said that he had expected Barack Obama’s election to change everything, but when that failed, he was now ready to give up on politics.

At Montpelier, at least one participant felt that any federal intervention in education is unconstitutional (because education is not listed among the enumerated powers). Thus to try to influence the federal government to support civic education would be to mis-educate our students, who should be learning that the government has wantonly exceeded its constitutional limits. No Child Left Behind is a liberal plot to get the federal government deeply implicated in our schools. There was much talk about teaching the founding documents of the Republic. Some people felt that we should stay out of politics and policy completely and instead create small, alternative spaces where teachers and students could explore first principles.

These contrasting thoughts clear one’s head, challenge one’s clichés, and take one back to first principles. What is the proper role of a national government in civic education? What should students learn, and how? And how can we even consider national standards, if our adults disagree so profoundly about the core purposes of education?

(The participants in DC seemed less explicitly ideological to me, perhaps because they were much more numerous, predominantly centrist, and focused on pending policy changes.)

why political recommendations often disappoint: an argument for reflexive social science

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In an essay entitled “Why Last Chapters Disappoint,” David Greenberg lists American books about politics and culture that are famous for their provocative diagnoses of serious problems but that conclude with strangely weak recommendations. These include, in his opinion, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), Walter Lippman’s Public Opinion (1922), Daniel Boorstin’s The Image (1961), Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind (1987), Robert Shiller’s Irrational Exuberance (2000), Eric Scholsser’s Fast Food Nation (2001), and Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason (2007). Greenberg asserts that practically every book in this list, “no matter how shrewd or rich its survey of the question at hand, finishes with an obligatory prescription that is utopian, banal, unhelpful or out of tune with the rest of the book.” The partial exceptions are works like Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation that provide fully satisfactory legislative agendas while acknowledging that the most important reforms have no chance of passing in Congress.

The gap between diagnosis and prescription is no accident. Many serious social problems could be solved if everyone chose to behave better: eating less fast food, investing more wisely, using less carbon, or studying the classics. But the readers of a given treatise are too few to make a difference, and even before they begin to read they are better motivated than the rest of the population. Therefore, books that conclude with personal exhortations seem inadequate.

Likewise, some serious social problems could be ameliorated by better legislation. But the readers of any given book are too few to apply sufficient political pressure to obtain the necessary laws. Therefore, books that end with legislative agendas disappoint just as badly.

The failure of books to change the world is not a problem that any single book can solve. But it is a problem that can be addressed, just as we address complex challenges of description, analysis, diagnosis, and interpretation that arise in the social sciences and humanities. Every work of empirical scholarship should contribute to a cumulative research enterprise and a robust debate. Every worthy political book should also contribute to our understanding of how ideas influence the world. That means asking questions such as: “Who will read this book, and what can they do?”

Who reads a book depends, in part, on the structure of the news media and the degree to which the public is already interested in the book’s topic. What readers can do depends, in part, on which organizations and networks are available for them to join and how responsive other institutions are to their groups.

These matters change over time. Consider, for example, a book that did affect democracy, John W. Gardner’s In Common Cause: Citizen Action and How It Works (1972). After diagnosing America’s social problems as the result of corrupt and undemocratic political processes and proposing a series of reforms, such as open-government laws and public financing for campaigns, Gardner encouraged his readers to join the organization Common Cause. He had founded this organization two years earlier by taking out advertisements in leading national newspapers, promising “to build a true ‘citizens” lobby—a lobby concerned not with the advancement of special interests but with the well-being of the nation. … We want public officials to have literally millions of American citizens looking over their shoulders at every move they make.” More than 100,000 readers quickly responded by joining Gardner’s organization and sending money. Common Cause was soon involved in passing the Twenty-Sixth Amendment (which lowered the voting age to 18), the Federal Election Campaign Act, the Freedom of Information Act, and the Ethics in Government Act of 1978. The book In Common Cause was an early part of the organization’s successful outreach efforts.

It helped that Gardner was personally famous and respected before he founded Common Cause. It also helped that a series of election-related scandals, culminating with Watergate, dominated the news between 1972 and 1976, making procedural reforms a high public priority. As a book, In Common Cause was well written, fact-based, and clear about which laws were needed.

But the broader context also helped. Watergate dominated the news because the news business was still monopolized by relatively few television networks, agenda-setting newspapers, and wire services whose professional reporters believed that a campaign-finance story involving the president was important. Everyone who followed the news at all had to follow the Watergate story, regardless of their ideological or partisan backgrounds. In contrast, in 2010, some Americans were appalled by the false but prevalent charge that President Obama’s visit to Indonesia was costing taxpayers $200 million per day. Many other Americans had no idea that this accusation had even been made, so fractured was the news market.

John Gardner was able to reach a generation of joiners who were setting records for organizational membership.* Newspaper reading and joining groups were strongly correlated; and presumably people who read the news and joined groups also displayed relatively deep concern about public issues. Thus it was not surprising that more than 100,000 people should respond to Gardner’s newspaper advertisements about national political reform by joining his new group. By the 2000’s, the rate of newspaper reading had dropped in half, and the rate of group membership was also down significantly. The original membership of Common Cause aged and was never replaced in similar numbers after the 1970s. John Gardner’s strategy fit his time but did not outlive him.

Any analysis of social issues should take account of contextual changes like these. Considering how one’s thought relates to the world means making one’s scholarship “reflexive,” in the particular sense advocated by the Danish political theorist Bent Flyvbjerg. He notes that modern writers frequently distinguish between rationality and power. “The [modern scholarly] ideal prescribes that first we must know about a problem, then we can decide about it. … Power is brought to bear on the problem only after we have made ourselves knowledgeable about it.”** With this ideal in mind, authors write many chapters about social problems, followed by unsatisfactory codas about what should be done. As documents, their books evidently lack the capacity to improve the world. Their rationality is disconnected from power. And, in my experience, the more critical and radical the author is, the more disempowered he or she feels.

Truly “reflexive” writing and politics recognizes that even the facts used in the empirical or descriptive sections of any scholarly work come from institutions that have been shaped by power. For example, in my own writing, I frequently cite historical data about voting and volunteering in the United States. The federal government tracks both variables by fielding the Census Current Population Surveys and funding the American National Election Studies. Various influential individuals and groups have persuaded the government to measure these variables, for the same (somewhat diverse) reasons that they have pressed for changes in voting rules and investments in volunteer service. On the other hand, there are no reliable historical data on the prevalence of public engagement by government agencies. One cannot track the rate at which the police have consulted residents about crime-fighting strategies or the importance of parental voice in schools. That is because no influential groups and networks have successfully advocated for these variables to be measured. Thus the empirical basis of my work is affected by the main problem that I identify in my work: the lack of support for public engagement.

Reflexive scholarship also acknowledges that values motivate all empirical research. Our values–our beliefs about goals and principles–should be influenced and constrained by what we think can work in the world: “ought implies can.” Wise advice comes not from philosophical principles alone, but also from reflection on salient trends in society and successful experiments in the real world. An experiment can be a strong argument for doing more of the same: sometimes, “can implies ought.” If there were no recent successful experiments in civic engagement, my democratic values would be more modest and pessimistic. If recent experiments were more robust and radical than they are, I might adopt more ambitious positions. In short, my values rest on other people’s practical work, even as my goal is to support their work.

Finally, reflexive scholarship should address the question of what readers ought to do. A book is fully satisfactory only if it helps to persuade readers to do what it recommends and if their efforts actually improve the world. In that sense, the book offers a hypothesis that can be proved or disproved by its consequences. No author will be able to foresee clearly what readers will do, because they will contribute their own intelligence, and the situation will change. Nevertheless, the book and its readers can contribute to a cumulative intellectual enterprise that others will then take up and improve.

*In 1974, 80 percent of the “Greatest Generation” (people who had been born between 1925 and 1944) said that they were members of at least one club or organization. Among Baby Boomers at the same time, the rate of group membership was 66.8%. The Greatest Generation continued to belong at similar rates into the 1990s. The Boomers never caught up with them, their best year being 1994, when three quarters reported belonging to some kind of group. In 1974, 6.3% of the Greatest Generation said they were in political clubs. The Boomers have never reached that level: their highest rate of belonging to political clubs was 4.9% in 1989. (General Social Survey data analyzed by me.)

**Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 143

participatory budgeting in Recife, Brazil wins the Reinhard Mohn Prize

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The best civic engagement process in the world is participatory budgeting in Recife, according to 11,600 German citizens who voted for their favorite among a set of impressive nominees. In “participatory budgeting,” large groups of citizens deliberate and vote to allocate municipal capital budgets. Many evaluations have found juster decisions, much lower corruption, and higher levels of democratic legitimacy as outcomes.

I consulted on the Reinhard Mohn competition and also nominated Hampton, VA for the prize. Hampton came in fourth (in the world) with 1,935 votes. I liked Hampton because the city has systematically embedded deliberation and public participation in most of its systems–education, policing, budgeting, parks and recreation, and planning–for decades. Hampton now also uses participatory budgeting.

On the other hand, I understand what the German voters were thinking. Brazil is the birthplace of participatory budgeting, which is one of the most impressive democratic innovations of the last quarter century. Recife seems to be the best example–notable (among other things) for having a separate youth participatory budget. As one astute voter wrote, “In this project I was particularly impressed by the children’s citizen budget. This makes it possible for people to experience and learn about the basic principles of democracy from a very young age. Anyone growing up with that experience will naturally engage in democratic processes as an adult.”