Monthly Archives: October 2014

should people trust the government?

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Since the 1950s, pollsters have been asking Americans whether they “trust the government in Washington to do the right thing most of the time?” The proportion who say yes has plummeted. Here I show that trend along with data on horizontal trust (i.e., citizens trusting and working with one another).

I worry about the trust-in-government decline for three reasons. First, the government can be a valuable tool for public purposes, and when it’s deeply distrusted, voters won’t allow it to be used. In other words, distrust will prevent ambitious government. But–second–distrust will not necessarily curb or limit government. When the state is widely distrusted, interests still use it for private gain and don’t have to worry about a mass public that has higher expectations. So a distrusted government can be intrusive and expensive without doing much good. And, third, the trend line of distrust may–in part–reflect declining trustworthiness. Alexander Hamilton proposed as a “general rule” that people’s “confidence in and obedience to a government will commonly be proportioned to the goodness or badness of its administration.”

But I bring all of this up because I recently read Matthew G. Specter’s Habermas: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge, 2010) and kept track of Habermas’ thoughts on the importance of mistrust in government. For instance, in 1985, he wrote, “The legitimacy of rechtsstaatlichen [rule-of-law] institutions rests in the end on the non-institutionalizable mistrust of the citizens.” Separately, he argued that the legitimate state depends on a “non-institutionalized mistrust of itself,” which roughly translates into checks and balances. Habermas is an influence on theorists like Jean Cohen, who has written:

It makes little sense to use the category of generalized trust to describe one’s attitude toward law or government. One can only trust people, because only people can fulfill obligations. But institutions (legal and other) can provide functional equivalents for interpersonal trust in impersonal settings involving interactions with strangers, because they, as it were, institutionalize action-orienting norms and the expectation that these will be honored.*

If you asked Habermas whether he had confidence in the German state, he would probably say yes (at least “some confidence”–depending on the policies of the ruling coalition), but if you asked him whether he trusted it, he would say no. For him, trust in the state is a great evil that underlay German statism, from Frederick the Great to Hitler. Habermas is primarily concerned with preventing totalitarianism, something that he can personally remember.

Yet the aggregate survey results would be very similar if one replaced the word “trust” with “confidence,” because most people don’t make that subtle distinction. So, from a Habermasian perspective, what level of trust/confidence should we consider optimal? Too high means we have turned into state-worshipers, and totalitarianism is a threat. But too low means we no longer believe that we can use the state as our tool, and the national deliberation will suffer as a result. We could slide into some kind of dictatorship here, but since the American left is generally concerned with civil liberties and the right has a powerful strain of libertarianism, I think our more serious threat is the abandonment of government rather than too much of it.

In any case, this whole debate often focuses on the proportion of people who do not trust the government. But the desirable answer to this question is probably a subtle one, lying somewhere between trust and mistrust. We don’t want the proportion of people who trust the government implicitly to rise; we want everyone to give it partial trust (and to hold themselves responsible for improving government when it fails). I am not actually sure that the median American is so far from the optimal position if you take their ambivalence into account.

*Jean L. Cohen, “American Civil Society Talk,” in Robert K. Fullinwider, ed., Civil Society, Democracy, and Civic Renewal, p. 66. See also where do you turn if you mistrust the government and the people? and If You Want Citizens to Trust Government, Empower Them to Govern

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Sign up for the Morven Park Field Trip at NCDD 2014

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We are excited to share an invitation from Abby Pfisterer, a member of our conference planning team, to join her for another great field trip during NCDD 2014 to Morven Park! Find out more below and read more about our field trips by clicking here or sign up here.

Join us during NCDD 2014 for a field trip to Morven Park on Saturday evening and explore a hidden gem in DC’s metro area! Located in Leesburg, Morven Park is a 200 year old historic mansion that has been a home of political leaders from the days of the early republic through the beginning of the 20th century. It’s the perfect setting to relax after a busy (and invigorating!) second day at the conference – plus there will be local wines to try.

I’ve been a part of Morven Park’s educational team for several years, and what I love is that it’s more than just a place for interesting history and wide open spaces. The story and the site are the base for the exciting and forward looking programs we get to create and share with our community.

One of my favorite initiatives here is our Center for Civic Impact, which teaches K-12 youth how to be active and thoughtful citizens. But there is also a small farm (home to the presidentially pardoned Thanksgiving turkeys), equestrian center, athletic complex, and three museums. To me, it is a place to come together to explore spaces and ideas.

We’d love to share this site and story with those of you traveling from outside the DC region and locals too. We have a mansion tour lined up that looks at the civic activism of the last owner – a former governor of Virginia, and then a chance to enjoy the view with wine, food, and good discussion. The topic – from rural to urban, and where dialogue fits in – is based on the history you’ll hear on the tour as well as the fact the Morven Park sits squarely on a dividing line between town and country. I have a feeling many of you will have similar stories to share!

The cost is $25 to cover transportation and food. We’ll head out at 4:30pm and take buses for the 25 minute drive to Morven Park. It will be a lot of fun – so sign up today!

Thanks! – Abby

Internal Dissonance

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Modern man loves to torment himself.

As Nietzsche argues in On the Genealogy of Morals:
It was that desire for self-torture in the savage who suppresses his cruelty because he was forced to contain himself (incarcerated as he was ‘in the state,’ as part of his taming process), who invented bad conscious so as to hurt himself, after the more natural outlet for this desire had been blocked…

While claims of the universality of this state might be difficult to prove, it certainly seems reasonable to imagine that it is not entirely uncommon for a modern person to occasionally feel guilt at some of their baser instincts.

And guilt certainly has a way of turning into self-torture, as anyone who has ever called themselves a terrible person can attest.

But how are we to solve this internal dissonance?

Is it truly sensible to inflict such pain and torment upon ourselves for acts or thoughts which are entirely natural?

Nietzsche calls this crushing guilt, “the most dreadful disease that has yet afflicted men.”

This suggests we should perhaps release ourselves from the “incarceration” of the state. We should refuse to be tamed by man or man’s God and pursue whatever acts we choose. There is nothing to feel guilty about. No punishment we should inflict upon ourselves. No bad conscious which should hold us back.

Well. That might sound good to some people – freedom and individuality being utmost concerns – but that doesn’t sound so good to me.

Perhaps I should not punish myself to the point of desperation for every passing thought I regret. But I should feel guilty for the mistakes I make. I should regret those misdeeds and aim to do better in the future.

So, no, I am not comfortable saying that man should no longer torment himself for perceived sins. Indeed, I would argue the opposite – I am in favor of self-flagellation.

Because, here’s the thing – in my experience, it is those who worry about being a terrible person who are the least terrible people.

Perhaps it is hard, perhaps it is torture, but the moment you stop questioning your own morality is the moment you have become immoral. If you are not concerned that you’re a terrible person, you probably are.

But this dissonance does not have to be torture. Nietzsche sees this pain as the mad hope of a modern man driven to unreason in the name of reason. As a desperate grope towards an unachievable and nonexistent salvation.

There is a middle ground here. The choices aren’t simply to abandon all moral pretense or face a life of despair.

Dissonance…for some reason is generally frowned upon. Perhaps it is too complicated, perhaps is too hard, I don’t know.

But I find myself at home there.

Yes, I’m a terrible person, and yes, I’m not a terrible person. Both those states exist at once. They aren’t mutually exclusive. And their coexistence isn’t something to fear. It doesn’t have to be a state of despair and self-torment.

Both those states exist at once, in a beautiful, elegant, balance in the universe.

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the youth vote in the news

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Below is some recent news coverage of CIRCLE’s research on the youth vote in 2016. Most of this reporting uses data and visualization tools that we have collected in one place, our “Election Center.”

I don’t think the signs are good for national youth turnout in November, but one of the reasons we never see reasonable turnout in midterm years is that most places don’t have competitive elections. For instance, 16 states don’t have a Senate race at all this year, and virtually all House contests are foreordained. We have identified some key states where the youth vote will matter–and youth turnout may also be reasonable in those places:

*added later in the evening.

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Submit Nominations for the 2015 Brown Democracy Medal

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We want to encourage NCDD members to consider submitting nominations for this year’s Laurence and Lynn Brown Democracy Medal. The award is offered every year by Penn State’s McCourtney Institute for Democracy, and we know many of our members would be a great fit for the award. Learn more in the announcement below and submit your nominations before Dec. 10th.

Seeking Nominations for the 2015 Penn State Democracy Medal

Each year, the Pennsylvania State University McCourtney Institute for Democracy gives a medal and $5,000 award for exceptional innovations that advance the design and practice of democracy. The medal celebrates and helps to publicize the best work being done by individuals or organizations to advance democracy in the United States or around the globe.

The Institute gives medals in even-numbered years to recognize practical innovations, such as new institutions, laws, technologies, or movements that advance democracy. In odd-numbered years, the awards celebrate advances in democratic theory that provide richer philosophical or empirical conceptions of democracy. The Participatory Budgeting Project won the first medal in 2014 for the best innovation in the practice of democracy (see details at democracyinstitute.la.psu.edu).

Nominations will be accepted through December 10, 2014, and the awardee will be announced in the spring of 2015. The winning individual (or representative of a winning organization) will give a talk at Penn State in the fall of 2015, when they also receive their medal and $5,000 award.

Between the spring announcement of the winner and the on-campus event in the fall, the Institute provides the recipient with professional editorial assistance toward completing a short (20-25 page) essay describing the innovation for a general audience. Cornell University Press will publish the essay, which will be available to the general public at a very low price in electronic and print formats to aid the diffusion of the winning innovation.

Award Review Process for Innovations in Democratic Theory

This year’s Brown Medal competition will recognize an exceptional advance in democratic theory, broadly construed. Submissions can include conceptual advances, moral philosophical insights, rhetorical, interpretive or historical theories, empirical or causal models, and/or innovations in the design of democratic processes. Innovating ideas, models, and designs have been instrumental in advancing democracy on both large and small social scales, both in recent years and over the centuries of democratic practice. Examples include new methods of voting and representation, new notions of civil and human rights, theories of political communication, polarization, social capital, and social movements, models of democratization and its impediments, and deliberative and participatory re-conceptualizations of democracy.

Nominations will be accepted through December 10, 2014, and the awardee will be announced in the spring of 2015. Recipients may be scholars, civic reformers, non-governmental organizations, or any other individual or entity responsible for the theoretical innovation. The winner (or the representative of the winning organization) will give a talk at Penn State in the fall of 2015, when we will also present their medal and $5,000 award. Between the spring announcement of the winner and the on-campus event in the fall, the Institute will provide the recipient with professional editorial assistance toward completing a short (20-25 page) essay describing the innovation for a general audience. In the fall, Cornell University Press will publish the essay, which will be available to the general public at a very low price in electronic and print formats to aid the diffusion of the winning innovation.

All nomination letters must be emailed by December 10, 2014 to democracyinst@psu.edu to guarantee full review. Initial nomination letters are simply a one-to-two page letter that describes the innovation, its author(s), and the accessible location of its fullest expression (e.g., in a scholarly article, magazine essay, or on the Internet). Both self-nominations and nominations of others’ innovations are welcomed. In either case, email, phone, and postal contact information for the nominee must be included.

By January, 2015, a panel composed of Penn State faculty and independent reviewers will screen those initial nominations and select a subset of nominees who will be notified that they have advanced to a second round. By the end of February, those in the second round will be invited to provide further documentation, which includes the following: biographical sketch of the individual or organization nominated (max. 2 pages); two letters of support from persons familiar with their theoretical innovation, particularly those who work independently from the nominee; a basic description of the innovation and its efficacy, with a maximum length of 30 pages of printed materials and/or 30 minutes of audio/video materials; and a one-page description of who would come to Penn State to receive award and who would draft the essay describing the innovation. The review panel will then scrutinize the more detailed applications and select an awardee by the end of April.

Review Criteria

The theoretical innovation selected will score highest on these features:

  1. Novelty. The innovation is precisely that—a genuinely new way of thinking about democracy. It will likely build on or draw on past ideas and practices, but its novelty must be obvious.
  2. Systemic change. The theory, concept, or design should be able to change systematically how we think about and practice democracy. Conceptual insights should be of the highest clarity and quality, and empirical models should be rigorous and grounded in evidence. The practical significance of the innovation should be systematic, in that it can alter the larger functioning of a democratic system over a long time frame.
  3. Potential for Diffusion. The innovation should have general applicability across many different scales and cultural contexts. In other words, it should be relevant to people who aspire to democracy in many parts of the world and/or in many different social or political settings.
  4. Democratic Quality. The spirit of this innovation must be nonpartisan and advance the most essential qualities of democracy, such as broad social inclusion, deliberativeness, political equality, and effective self-governance. Nominees themselves may be partisan but their innovation should have nonpartisan or trans-partisan value.
  5. Recency. The award is intended to recognize recent theoretical accomplishments, which have occurred during the previous five years. The roots of an innovation could run deeper, especially as an idea or theory is developed and tested over time, but within the past five years, there must have been significant advances in its refinement or expression.

When choosing among otherwise equally qualified submissions, the review panel will also consider two practical questions. Who would give the lecture on campus and meet with the PSU community? Who would write the essay about the innovation? Neither needs to be the nominee, nor the nominator.

Individuals or organizations who have worked closely with the Institute’s director (Dr. John Gastil) or associate director (Dr. Mark Major) in the past five years are not eligible. For the first five years of the award (i.e., until 2019), Penn State alums or employees are also ineligible.

Questions and Further Information

Any questions or requests for more information should be sent to democracyinst@psu.edu.

The Pennsylvania State University McCourtney Institute for Democracy (democracyinstitute.la.psu.edu) promotes rigorous scholarship and practical innovations to advance the democratic process in the United States and abroad. The Institute pursues this mission in partnership with the Center for Democratic Deliberation (CDD) and the Center for American Political Responsiveness (CAPR). The CDD studies and advances public deliberation, whereas CAPR attends to the relationship between the public’s priorities and the actions of elected bodies.

Whereas each center focuses on the questions most salient to its mission, the Institute tends to larger issues and connections between those questions. The Institute examines the interplay of deliberative, electoral, and institutional dynamics. It recognizes that effective deliberation among citizens has the potential to reshape both the character of public opinion and the dynamics of electoral politics, particularly in states and local communities. Likewise, political agendas and institutional processes can shape the ways people frame and discuss issues. The main activities of the institute include giving a major annual award for democratic innovation, bringing speakers to campus, sponsoring faculty roundtables and workshops, and financially supporting student research.

When a Mountain is No Longer a Mountain

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Many years ago I ran across the koan:

Before you study Zen, a mountain is a mountain
When you study Zen, a mountain is no longer a mountain
Once you master Zen, a mountain is a mountain

While my memory has no doubt mangled the wording, the sentiment has long since stuck with me. Like many koans it makes sense, but it doesn’t make sense. It needs no explanation, yet could never be explained.

And perhaps my gaikokujin sensibilities distort the saying’s true meaning, but I would interpret that particular koan as something like this -

If life makes sense, you are not thinking hard enough. If you are looking to truly understand the world, you never will. All that’s left is to embrace that you know nothing, and to find the knowledge in that.

I’ve never had a the privilege to formally study Zen, but I read much of it’s works in this spirit. Koans are intentionally nonsensical.

As I child I would assure myself that somehow they did make sense, that I could see their deeper meaning. But that is indeed a simplistic, childlike view. Koans make no sense and you can only understand them by embracing that they make no sense.

And that may seem a futile exercise, but life is a futile exercise. And life makes no sense until you embrace the that it makes no sense.

In the West we call this the absurd – another apt description of existence. As Camus describes:

At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of [man's] gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this “nausea,” as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd.

In the West we have fought against the absurd. We have called it nausea and godlessness and feared the immorality and unreason that would tumble down upon us if we admitted the existence of the absurd.

Those writers and thinkers who have embraced this approach are often seen as dark figures who stare into the abyss and scorn all that is Good.

And perhaps they are.

But a mountain is no longer a mountain, and it is only by embracing that, by embracing the absurd, that a mountain can become a mountain again.

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Free 3-Part Webinar on Talking about Difficult Public Issues

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We want to share the following announcement from the American Library Association Center for Civic Life, and the David Mathews Center for Civic Life about a great 3-part webinar on discussing public issues that starts next week. We found the announcement over at the NIF blog, and hope you will read it below or view it here.

Does your community have a problem that looks like this?

Join us to learn how you can help overcome deadlock and lead change in your community.

Session 1: “Beyond Deadlock: A Better Way to Talk about Difficult Issues”

Tuesday, October 14, 4 – 5 p.m. EDT / 3 – 4 p.m. CDT / 1 – 2 p.m. PDT

  • Learn to help people work together to talk about public issues and make choices.
  • Uncover the deeper concerns of our communities.
  • Register for Session 1 at http://bit.ly/namingframing1

Session 2: “Tools for Naming and Framing Public Issues”

Wednesday, December 3, 4 – 5 p.m. EDT / 3 – 4 p.m. CDT / 1 – 2 p.m. PDT

  • Learn the steps and processes for leading a “naming and framing” effort.
  • Apply tools that help people weigh options for moving forward together
  • Register for Session 1 at http://bit.ly/namingframing2

Session 3: Check-in (date TBD)

  • Share experiences with fellow participants in a follow-up webinar or conference call.
  • Registration is free, but space is limited. Participation in all three sessions is encouraged.

Questions? Contact Nancy Kranich, nancy.kranich@rutgers.edu.

Civic Science — Renewing the link between science and democracy

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Science is not value neutral. It depends on democratic values of cooperation, free inquiry, and a commonwealth of knowledge. Before World War II, a broad group of "scientific democrats" including John Dewey and thousands of other scientists, described in Andrew Jarrett's recent book, Science, Democracy, and the American University, helped to lead the movement for deepening democracy in America.

It is crucial to renew the explicit ties between democracy and science, declared Gerald Taylor, one of the nation's leading community organizers, on October 2, to a diverse audience at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia. Otherwise science can become a tool of oppression in extreme cases. The Nazis, after all, conducted first class scientific experiments - on human beings. So did the U.S. government, in the infamous Tuskegee experiment. Between 1932 and 1972 the U.S. Public Health Service intentionally infected a group of rural African American men with syphilis, who thought they were receiving free health care, to study the disease's untreated progression.

Taylor spoke at a workshop on civic science at the National Science Foundation, October 2-3. The meeting brought together a diverse group of scientists, community organizers, political theorists, social scientists, humanities scholars, graduate students, leaders in cooperative extension, humanity centers and science museum directors, federal administrators, program directors from the National Science Foundation, the United States Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Health, and others. For two days the group discussed the relevance of science to the complex problems of our time and the future of democracy.

As workshop organizers gathered on Saturday morning, October 4, to review the meeting, a news story from the American Academy for the Advancement of Science underscored the interests of scientists themselves in strengthening the link between science and democracy. "Battle Between NSF and House Science Committee Escalates." The story details an unprecedented review of files by the House committee investigators. "The visits from the staffers, who work for the U.S. House of Representatives committee that oversees NSF, were an unprecedented--and some say bizarre--intrusion into the much admired process that NSF has used for more than 60 years to award research grants."

The workshop was supported by an NSF grant, with additional support from the University of Iowa, Augsburg College, Imagining America, and Syracuse Universities. I was part of the organizing team, along with Taylor, John Spencer, Sherburne Abbott, Nick Jordan, Gwen Ottinger, and Scott Peters.

Collective challenges emphasized in the framing White Paper include climate change, education, health and agriculture. They also include polarization; widespread feelings of powerlessness; declining trust in public institutions; and forces which threaten free inquiry and access to public knowledge - generating a crisis of democracy itself around the world. Democracy's advance can no longer be taken for granted. The initiative includes a new website, http://civic-science.org/ .

Civic science is an approach to scientific inquiry which revitalizes the democratic purposes and practices of science. Civic science aims to make substantial progress on science-related controversies through bringing civic skills into science, and it aims to build participatory democracy in science and society. In civic science, scientific knowledge is a vital public resource "on tap not on top" in public problem solving. Peter Levine, a prominent political philosopher at Tufts University, argued in his blog that such civic science grows from the intersection of democracy, science, and civic life.

The premise of civic science is that scientists active in public problem solving need ground-level skills and habits of relational public work and strategic thinking if scientific discoveries are to live constructively in the world. Janie Hipp, who directs an indigenous food initiative among Indian tribes based at the University of Arkansas, pointed out that such skills are also needed everywhere.

John Spencer, founding director of the Delta Center at the University of Iowa, described breakthroughs in scientific research on early childhood development and learning, especially the concept of "executive function" which allows children to adapt to new and changing situations. For such science to be integrated into a national movement with sufficient public will to transform early education will mean scientists learning democratic skills such as understanding local contexts and collaborating with a wide range of interests and stakeholders.

Cathann Kress, Vice President for Extension and Outreach at Iowa State, described how Iowa cooperative extension - the large system of campus and county-based educators in Iowa and around the country - is seeking to revitalize the original concepts and practices of extension as democratic capacity building and deeply relational work engaging citizens. She and other leaders are moving Extension away from the "expert knows best," information transfer approach dominant in recent years.

Xolela Mangcu, a leading public intellectual in South Africa in the Black Consciousness Tradition who has detailed "technocratic creep" in South African society -- the spread of purportedly neutral, expert-knows-best approaches that disempower lay citizens- observed that western interventions on medical problems such as HIV AIDS can make matters worse if they ignore local community cultures and capacities.

Tai Mendenhall of the University of Minnesota's Citizen Professional Center described a case study called Family Education Diabetes Series (FEDS) initiative, which answers Mangcu's challenge. FEDS, a supplement to standard care on diabetes for members of the American Indian community in the Twin Cities, was created through collaborative work between health scientists and the Indian community over ten years. It has been based on relationships and mutual respect and trust, and the program's design, educational foci and format, visibility, implementation, and ongoing modifications have all been undertaken democratically. Well-documented health benefits have been found to come from the community-owned and community driven nature of the initiative.

Civic science is democratizing science, as Fred Kronz, director of Science and Technology Studies at NSF put it on a policy panel. The panel also included Ann Bartuska, Deputy Undersecretary for Research, Education and Economics at USDA and Paul Markham of the Gates Foundation. Bartuska described examples of civic science associated with USDA. Markham agreed with Mangcu that there is pressing need for foundations to bring in an empowering civic agency approach, around the world.

As the House raid on the NSF showed, many controversies - from evolution and climate science to educational reform and higher education's role in job creation - are based on caricatures of scientists. And as I described in a recent blog on "Disruption," the promotion film for the People's Climate March, scientists and their partners need to deepen their democratic skills and strategic approaches if they are to win support from the broad middle of America for their issues. The People's Climate March itself, much more inclusive in message than the film, suggests the possibilities.

Many scientists today are in a defensive or protest stance, finding it difficult to gain cross-partisan, broad support.

Civic science -- democratizing science -- holds potential to be a game changer.

Harry Boyte is editor of the forthcoming Democracy's Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities (Vanderbilt University Press), which includes several essays related to civic science.