online organizations

I’ve been asked to write an article on how young political activists use the Internet. After an introduction about the political potential of the “commons,” I turn to various types of online youth activity. One short section concerns online political organizations. Comments would be welcome. I’m planning to say:

Political, ideological, and civic organizations have formed largely or entirely online, representing virtually all ideologies, identities, and agendas. Their organizational structures also vary greatly, but compared to offline groups, they are more likely to have anonymous or pseudonymous members. Anonymity has the advantage of allowing candor, which is especially beneficial for members of stigmatized groups (such as the only gay adolescent in a small community). It also allows people to experiment with novel identities. However, anonymity may have the disadvantage of making relationships relatively superficial and may permit behavior that is disruptive to the group itself. If members can adopt fictitious identities, then they can change their identities as soon as anyone threatens to expel or socially ostracize them.

Compared to offline groups, online ones tend to be easier to “exit” but harder to change by exercising “voice” (Hirschman), because there is no method of democratic decision-making that one can influence. Because exit is easy, groups tend not to discipline their own members by demanding contributions or particular forms of behavior in return for membership. Again compared to offline groups, online ones tend to be “thin” rather than “thick” (Bimber, p. 148). In a classic “thick” group, such as a family and ethnic group, members are committed to the survival and flourishing of the collectivity; but its purposes are changeable and subject to debate. In a “thin” group, members enter having some purpose, and view membership as instrumental to that goal. Although many online groups are “thin,” unstructured, and easy to exit, this is not true of massive, multiplayer games, whose participants invest considerable time in developing fictional characters. Often, they become highly committed to the flourishing of the game community as an end in itself.

However, most games are not political. Political or civic groups more typically allow members to visit a website, contribute money, and/or elect to receive email messages. A prominent example is MoveOn.org, a liberal organization in the United States that claims 2.3 million members as of January 2004. MoveOn was formed to oppose the impeachment of President Clinton, but now tackles issues that its members choose by voting. It has raised and spent millions of dollars to influence US policy. No information is available about the median age of MoveOn members or staff, but it has been described as an “an inter-generational grouping heavily peopled by young voters, something that most political constituencies lack” (Schechter, 2004).

explaining politics to the very young

We’ve got kids (one 4 and one 14), and sometimes it’s hard to explain the primary campaign to them. I’ve come up with the following key, which may come in handy for others who face the same predicament:

John Kerry = Pooh

Dick Gephardt = Rabbit

Al Sharpton = Gopher

Howard Dean = Tigger

Wesley Clark = Owl

John Edwards = Piglet

Joe Lieberman = Eeyore

Carol Mosely Braun = Kanga

Dennis Kucinich = Little Roo

George W. Bush = A Heffalump

Dick Cheney = A Woozle

Christopher Robin = The American People

federal leverage over education

I attended a forum today on No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the major federal education law. The event took place in a U.S. House office building on Capitol Hill; it was organized by the American Youth Policy Forum.

I have long wondered how the federal government gains so much power simply by spending $30 billion/year on education from kindergarten through 12th grade. That’s only 8 percent of education spending. NCLB is extremely unpopular in some areas, so I never understood why no local jurisdictions (or even states) have turned down the federal aid. Compliance is not mandatory; a state could pull out of the NCLB regime if it were willing to forego the money. From the complaints of many education leaders, it sounds as if the dollar costs imposed by NCLB are greater than the benefits. Today I learned that while federal monies cover 8 percent of the cost of k-12 education, they fund about half of state education agencies’ costs. In other words, half of the salary positions in state departments of ed are directly dependent on federal funding. So these state agencies feel a need to comply with NCLB; and they have regulatory power over local jurisdictions. I don’t know if this is true, but the source was knowledgeable, and it makes sense.

Cole Campbell in Press Think

I’m with Cole Campbell at a Kettering Foundation event in Ohio. Cole is the former editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and a consistently interesting thinker about the media. It so happens that he is also the current “guest blogger” on PressThink. I strongly recommend his piece, which is about the way that the press has created the Democratic primary story line so far. Howard Dean is now the almost-dead-former-front-runner. His “goose is cooked,” according to the latest punditry. But why was Dean the front-runner–indeed, the presumptive nominee–and why is he now on the ropes? All that voters have done is to participate in the overlooked Washington primary and the Iowa caucuses (where just 61,000 people participated). The rest of the epic of dramatic rises and collapses is all a media construction. Cole is able to call the press on this because they were wrong; Dean lost when they predicted that he would win. In the typical case, they are equally or more influential, but their predictions come true, so hardly anyone complains.

Cole adds that reporters refused to take any blame for their mistaken predictions, instead treating Dean as responsible for failing to live up to their expectations of him. Cole concludes:

Conventional wisdom was turned on its head tonight,’ NBC’s Tim Russert said during Monday night?s broadcast coverage of the Iowa caucus. Russert never owned up to who the keepers of conventional wisdom are– he and his colleagues. The press tells itself that it is not implicated in the politics it molds and shapes. It presents itself as a campaign innocent. But everyone involved knows better.

It occurs to me that Dean’s infamous scream during his “concession speech” gave the press some cover. They should have been saying: “We’re sorry that we called the election wrong.” Instead, they were able to say: “Dean’s really a loser. Who knew?”

Iowa thoughts

(Written in Oxford, OH): There is already too much post-Iowa punditry, but here are two points I would stress:

  • The two candidates who were endorsed by labor unions each got about 20 percent of union household votes. Unions were thus completely unable to deliver their own rank-and-file in a Democratic contest with a small turnout. This puts an exclamation point on a long sentence about the decline of labor power in America. I already thought that the SEIU and AFSCME endorsements of Dean reflected weakness. He had no significant prior relationship with them and owed them nothing. But they thought he had the best chance to win, and wanted to back a winner. In the old days, unions aspired to make winners, not ride along behind them.
  • There were substantial differences between the preferences that people expressed in “entrance polls” and the actual Caucus results. As reported, people changed their votes once inside the Caucuses. One letter to today’s New York Times claims that this is evidence of deliberation. “The heart of democracy is not pulling levers or punching out chads; it is government by discussion.” Another letter-writer complains that people were pressured by the “awkward social occasion” of a caucus to change their votes in favor of popular, mainstream candidates. Instead of deliberation, this writer sees peer-pressure. And many commentators detect strategic voting. People shifted to their second choices when they saw that their first choices lacked sufficient support to win delegates. I would say that deliberation is great; strategic voting is OK; and peer-pressure is bad.

    If we assume that there was some deliberation in Iowa (and not much peer-pressure), then we face a classic tradeoff. The Caucuses are especially valuable forms of democratic participation, but also especially difficult: lengthy, complicated, and “socially awkward.” Thus they trade quantity of participation for quality. This is often a choice in the design of democratic institutions.