the separate conservative base

While I was away last week, Democracy Corps published a study based on focus groups of core Republican voters in Atlanta and Independents in Cleveland. The core or “base” Republicans held several beliefs that really separated them from other voters. They thought that Obama and the Democrats were deliberately trying to destroy the American economic system to pave the way for an authoritarian takeover. They believed that they had special information or insights because they watch people like Glenn Beck who report news that is deliberately hidden by the rest of the media. They felt an obligation to spread this news to other Americans, because the only thing keeping most of their fellow citizens from resisting the Democratic Administration was a lack of information. In contrast, Independents were dissatisfied with and skeptical about the Obama Administration so far, but they believed the president was trying to do a good job and shared their basic values.

According to the Democracy Corps, “the conservative Republican base represents almost one-in-five voters in the electorate, and nearly two out of every three self-identified Republicans.” That would imply a major tactical problem for Republicans. Participants in the Democracy Corps focus groups were highly skeptical of the GOP and will demand evidence that the party really shares their views. They will want to hear Republican candidates and party leaders say very explicitly that Obama (or at least Pelosi and Reid) are trying to destroy America. But those claims are exactly what alienate Independents and moderate Republicans.

For the Democrats, the lesson of the focus groups would basically be to ignore the Republican base, who mainly pose a threat to the GOP. Democrats should be careful not to let themselves believe that their important critics are right-wingers who see Obama as a socialist who was born in Kenya. The critics who matter to Democrats are Independents who see Obama as a good and smart American citizen who’s trying to help–but who has spent too much money too fast on things like auto and bank bailouts.

I think this is the right advice for Democrats, but I also suspect that the Democracy Corps study overestimates the prevalence of the views they found in the Atlanta focus groups. Participants in those groups matched about one in five voters in their answers to specific poll questions. That’s the basis for saying that they represented 20% of the electorate and two thirds of Republicans. But the focus group participants also expressed “adulation” for Glenn Beck. “More than half of the respondents in our conservative Republicans groups indicated that they try to watch or listen to Beck on a daily basis, with some going to great lengths to ensure they (and their families) do not miss a thing.” Beck’s daily audience is less than 3 million. The number of ballots cast in 2008 was 131 million. John McCain got 60 million votes. So even if you triple Beck’s daily audience to estimate the number of voters who closely share his views (and if you assume that all his viewers are eligible to vote), you still get a proportion of the electorate that’s more like 7% than 20%–and a proportion of Republican voters that’s more like 15% than 66%. That’s good news for Republicans because it means they can ignore their own relatively small “base” without as serious a penalty as the Democracy Corps study suggests. For Democrats, it just underlines the importance of addressing the criticisms of moderates, not the attacks by extreme conservatives.

progress on building a Boston civic network

I am in DC and heading for California for several days of family vacation with our college kid. I’m going offline–no blogging or Facebook notes until about next Thursday. Meanwhile, my Tufts students and I have been mapping the civic networks of Somerville, MA and planning a public website though which people will be able to coordinate their service and civic activities in the Boston area. Our progress is chronicled on this class blog. Most recently, we have been trying to choose a name for our project and make some aesthetic decisions about the planned public site. Comments by friendly outsiders are welcome.

what makes high quality service?

(Washington, DC). I am here for the annual grantees’ meeting of Learn & Serve America, the federal program that funds community service as part of education (“service-learning”). In my own Tufts class last week, funded by L&SA, I asked my students to read the “Starfish Story,” which is very widely used to motivate service. (I have previously satirized the story, here).

    Once a man was walking along a beach. The sun was shining and it was a beautiful day. Off in the distance he could see a person going back and forth between the surf’s edge and and the beach. Back and forth this person went. As the man approached he could see that there were hundreds of starfish stranded on the sand as the result of the natural action of the tide.

    The man was stuck by the the apparent futility of the task. There were far too many starfish. Many of them were sure to perish. As he approached the person continued the task of picking up starfish one by one and throwing them into the surf.

    As he came up to the person he said, “You must be crazy. There are thousands of miles of beach covered with starfish. You can’t possibly make a difference.” The person looked at the man. He then stooped down and pick up one more starfish and threw it back into the ocean. He turned back to the man and said, “It sure made a difference to that one!”

I asked my class to compare the Starfish Story to some principles that have adopted by our Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts. We say:

    The College … strives to operate its community partnership activities in accordance with the following principles:

  • To focus its programs in communities where Tufts University campuses are located: Boston’s Chinatown, Medford, Somerville, Grafton, the Mystic River Watershed and Talloires, France.
  • To plan, conduct, and manage teaching, service and research activities in full collaboration with community partners. To take into consideration the impressive assets of local communities as well as the problems and challenges that they face.
  • To fully orient and prepare people from Tufts to be effective in their community work. To elevate the knowledge of community representatives about Tufts. To maximize both (a) contributions to the education of Tufts students and to faculty research, and (b) benefits to communities.
  • To support university and community representatives to jointly define high standards of quality, and to produce work that meets these standards. To document, evaluate and disseminate information about both educational outcomes and community benefits.
  • To support and elevate faculty participation in community partnerships through their teaching, research and public service activities.

Some of the differences that my students identified …

The guy in the Starfish story doesn’t “plan.” He doesn’t appear to work in a community where he has roots or can be held accountable to the recipients of his service as fellow citizens. He doesn’t collaborate with the starfish. He doesn’t have standards of quality, certainly not ones that the starfish have helped to develop. There is no connection to research to learning. If the man in the story benefits from his actions, he is not conscious of the benefit.

you’re a parrot

From Alex and Me by Irene Pepperberg (which I’m not reading, but my wife Laura is):

    The students occasionally took Alex to the washroom, where there was a very large mirror above the sinks. Alex used to march up and down the little shelf in front of the mirror, making noise, looking around, demanding things. Then one day in December 1980 when Kathy Davidson took him to the washroom, Alex seemed really to notice the mirror for the first time. He turned to look right into it, cocked his head back and forth a few times to get a fuller look, and said, ‘What’s that?’

    ‘That’s you,’ Kathy answered. ‘You’re a parrot.’

    Alex looked some more and then said, ‘What color?’

    Kathy said, ‘Gray. You’re a gray parrot, Alex.’ The two of them went through that sequence a couple more times. And that’s how Alex learned the color gray.

I have no idea what was really going on in Alex’s brain, but I do believe I understand why this story seems so touching. Alex learns that he happens to be a parrot. I happen to be a human being–and not just any human being, but exactly the one who happens to look back at me in mirrors (and who’s about as gray as Alex was). It all seems a matter of luck. You could be you, you could be someone else, you could be a very smart African gray parrot, or you could be a sea slug. I imagine a creature walking, crawling, or flapping through life until the point when it is suddenly told what it is. What a blow that could be! Our identity seems completely vulnerable to the whims of chance, not even slightly under our control. I only hope that Alex–if he really learned what he was–was glad about it. That’s about the best we can hope for.

Elinor Ostrom wins the Nobel!

The Nobel Foundation announced yesterday that Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel prize in Economic Sciences. She is the first woman to win the prize and surely one of the few non-economists. When Lin was president of the American Political Science Association, she was a strong voice for civic education and has been a consistent supporter of CIRCLE–a coauthor of our paper on civic education in universities and co-editor of a book that includes my chapter on youth-led research. She was one of the small group of political theorists who originally envisioned the Summer Institute of Civic Studies that we finally turned into a real course at Tufts last July. She is a model practitioner of collaborative community-based research who combines patient, low-profile interactions with practitioners and high-level theory–each enriching the other. She has built an institution, the Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis, that I see as an ideal model for all “engaged” universities. Before the Nobel Committee snagged her, we awarded her the 2009 Tisch Research Prize.

I started last summer’s Institute by reading aloud Margaret Mead’s famous exhortation: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

I noted that Mead’s statement is false, because many other things (wars, governments, floods, plagues) have also changed the world. Mead is also wrong to imply that committed citizens always succeed, or that when they do the results are necessarily good. Mussolini and his fellow fascisti were committed–and even thoughtful in their way–yet they made the world a lot worse. I said that what we need is a real study of active citizenship that includes: (1) empirical evidence about when small groups of citizens can change the world; (2) moral analysis that tells us when their methods and their results are good; and (3) strategic advice about how to support and encourage their most effective and beneficial efforts.

Such research is scarce because social science tends to think first of institutions and macro-level changes, being skeptical about the impact of small-scale, deliberate, citizen politics. (In fact, we citizens have relatively modest effects. But what we do is the most important factor for us to understand; everything else is context.) Further, social science still cannot comfortably handle arguments about values. For their part, moral philosophy and political theory address values but cannot handle strategy. Yet a value or an ideal that has no practicable strategy is worse than nothing.

In my opinion, Elinor Ostrom is one of a small number of thinkers about citizenship who combine empirical insights, moral arguments, and strategies. The ideal for Lin Ostrom is a group of people who manage to overcome collective action problems, such as the “tragedy of the commons,” through voluntary action. The tragedy of the commons is enormously important–if we perish as a species, it may be because we fail to address such problems as climate change that can be understood this way. Yet Lin has shown empirically and with great rigor that people can voluntarily overcome collective-action problems–using appropriate rules and techniques, under appropriate circumstances.

Promoting such achievements requires a whole set of strategies, from constitutional and other legal provisions, to reforms of institutions, to research that reveals effective techniques, to civic education that imparts the necessary skills. As just one example of her many reform proposals, Ostrom argues that we should reverse the trend toward consolidating school districts, because each school board teaches its members participatory skills. Going beyond mere proposals, Ostrom has helped to build and lead institutions that promote and embody these ideas. The Nobel Prize will surely help endow the Workshop that she and her distinguished husband Vincent Ostrom have created.

In my ideal university, Ostrom’s methods and topics would be right at the heart of the whole enterprise. There is no more important question than “How can we improve the world?” The scarcity of really rigorous answers–not to mention the marginality of the very question–is a scandal. Ostrom’s work is a shining exception that richly deserves recognition. As one of my colleagues wrote last night, “this is the first Nobel Prize for civic studies.”