{"id":33776,"date":"2025-03-24T11:16:39","date_gmt":"2025-03-24T15:16:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=33776"},"modified":"2025-03-24T11:16:41","modified_gmt":"2025-03-24T15:16:41","slug":"building-a-democracy-helpdesk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=33776","title":{"rendered":"building a democracy helpdesk"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>This one-minute video introduces a project that Tufts engineering faculty and students and I have begun, with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bettertogetheramerica.org\/\">Better Together America <\/a>and some pro bono advice from the Harvard Law School Transactional Law Clinics. In essence, we are trying to improve Americans&#8217; know-how for launching and sustaining organizations, on the theory that civic organizations preserve democracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/grQ5PPmxPNo?si=HRa39fLA56RtVgYH&amp;start=11\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n\n\n\n<p>In the short length of this video, I don&#8217;t quite make the case that declining membership is a <em>cause<\/em> of declining trust in institutions. One piece of evidence (not in the video) is a statistical model that uses American National Election Study 2020 data to predict whether people will agree with this sentence: &#8220;Much of what people hear in schools and the media are lies designed to keep people from learning the real truth about those in power.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In my model, education, age, and ideology are unrelated to how people answer this question. Women and white people are slightly more trusting. However, dwarfing those relationships is the role of civic engagement. People who say that they have recently worked with others to deal with an issue facing their community are far less likely to believe that schools or the media routinely lie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<iframe title=\"predicting trust in institutions\" aria-label=\"Bar Chart\" id=\"datawrapper-chart-r78SO\" src=\"https:\/\/datawrapper.dwcdn.net\/r78SO\/1\/\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"width: 0; min-width: 100% !important; border: none;\" height=\"137\" data-external=\"1\"><\/iframe><script type=\"text\/javascript\">!function(){\"use strict\";window.addEventListener(\"message\",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll(\"iframe\");for(var t in a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"][t]+\"px\";r.style.height=d}}}))}();\n<\/script>\n\n\n\n<p>Other measures of civic engagement (such as volunteering) also predict trust; and civic engagement predicts other liberal and democratic dispositions in addition to trust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I believe that one of the obstacles to broader civic engagement is a lack of nuts-and-bolts knowledge. Therefore, helping people to form and sustain groups will strengthen civil society, which alone can save democracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>See also: <a href=\"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=33182\">to restore trust in schools and media, engage people in civic life<\/a>; <a href=\"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=33196\">tools people need to preserve and strengthen democracy<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=33723\">16 colliding forces that create our moment<\/a>, etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This one-minute video introduces a project that Tufts engineering faculty and students and I have begun, with Better Together America and some pro bono advice from the Harvard Law School Transactional Law Clinics. In essence, we are trying to improve Americans&#8217; know-how for launching and sustaining organizations, on the theory that civic organizations preserve democracy. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,26,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advocating-civic-education","category-civic-theory","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33776"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33806,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33776\/revisions\/33806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}