On one hand, the US experiences far too much crime. Our homicide rate is almost five times that of Britain, almost three times that of Canada, and 17 times that of Japan.
On the other hand, crime rates have tended to fall in the USA since 1992, and today many people assess crime as much more pervasive than it is. Many voters seem to have the idea that urban communities were safe earlier in their own lifetimes but are now very dangerous, even though crime rates were distinctly higher in the late 20th century, and most urbanites are doing fine today. This belief motivates reactionary and authoritarian policies.
An obvious explanation for the mismatch between public opinion and trends is … the media. If it bleeds, it leads. Some major news sources evidently want to fuel hostility to migrants, people of color, and cities by relentlessly presenting crime. And politicians, such as the current president, amplify the media’s attention to crime.
In 2016, the Cooperative Election Study (now housed at Tisch College!) fielded an extensive battery of questions about crime. As one might expect, whether respondents viewed crime as a very important issue was related to which kinds of news they watched. The percentage who rated crime very high was 52% among local news viewers, 49% among national TV news viewers, 49% among readers of print news (which usually means a local newspaper), 34% among readers of an online news source, and 45% among those who followed no news at all. These differences are not very large but would probably expand if we compared specific outlets, such as Fox News versus the online New York Times.
However, it is always worth trying to put media effects in context. No one has to watch Fox News or the local TV news; that is a choice. Media effects probably connect to other factors, such as demographics and values, in a complex system that has no single “root” cause.
I am not an expert on this topic, but I wanted to get a rough handle on it, so I ran a regression using the 2016 CES data. This method purports to predict how highly people will rate crime as an issue based on a set of variables taken together.
For example, I included both whether a person was a victim of crime in the last four years and their education level. We know that people with less education are more likely to be victimized, but a regression disaggregates such relationships so that you can see how much education matters regardless of whether people are victimized by crime, and vice-versa.
The results are shown above and can be explored a bit more here. The units are standardized Betas, a measure of how much each factor matters compared to the others. All the results are statistically significant at p <.05. I had included two variables in the model that I omitted from the graph because they were not significant (social media use and approval of the local police department).
Most of the patterns are intuitive. People are more likely to view crime as a major issue if they are white, Republican, male, less educated, and willing to admit that they fear people of other races. Watching the TV news is related to greater concern about crime, even when considering the other factors separately. And reading a newspaper is related to less concern. Younger people, parents, and richer people are more concerned.
The whole model is not very predictive, explaining only 16% of the variance. That is interesting in itself, suggesting that these factors–including TV viewership, race, and partisanship–do not really explain what is going on. Perhaps more depends on which specific channels and social media accounts people watch–but that would have to be shown.
(The labels on the graph suggest that these are binary variables, e.g., either watching TV or not watching it at all. But the questions were multiple-choice scales, so the labels are really my shorthand.)
Many Americans are working to defend democracy, but we need even more. People with diverse agendas and various diagnoses of our current problems must take action right now. There are several legitimate theories of our crisis. We need people to address whatever aspects resonate most with them, coming from their diverse backgrounds and viewpoints.
I think these (below) are our most important tasks. And I believe that if many people do them, our disagreements about diagnoses and strategies will not matter very much, because a stronger civil society will preserve democracy:
One-to-one interviews: Fanning out in a community and asking people what they care about, looking for individuals who have various kinds of leadership potential and networks, and bringing them together in meetings. Use a guide like this one.
Local news: Collecting information that would otherwise go unreported because of the collapse of local journalism, and sharing it. Local news is highly relevant to national events, because everything from budget cuts to ICE raids plays out in locations.
Caring for affected people: Raising money, serving food, driving people where they need to go, taking care of their children and pets, helping them find work.
Advocacy in local institutions: We need concerned citizens to meet with their school superintendent to ask how undocumented children are being protected, their local college president to ask about free speech, and their local TV station to ask about biased news coverage. Some of this advocacy can be friendly and low-key. Sometimes, local leaders just need our quiet support. But some issues may have to escalate to public conflict.
Registering and turning out voters: It is fine to do this in a partisan way: party activism is an important aspect of democracy. It is also possible to register and motivate voters in a genuinely nonpartisan way to expand the electorate and protect everyone’s right to vote as they wish.
Recruiting and supporting candidates: This is important at all levels, from school boards to 2028 presidential candidates.
Nonviolent resistance: Civil disobedience is a spectrum, from easy and safe actions to very courageous ones. The method of banging on pots in big cities has spread globally in the last decade and has now reached Washington, DC. It is an example of a relatively safe action. Standing in the way of armed government agents is much more dangerous. Effective nonviolent movements offer and celebrate a wide range of actions.
I did not list protests on this table. They can be valuable, but I want to suggest that they are more means than ends. For example, a march can be a powerful way of publicizing that there is a resistance and collecting the contact-information of people who might do the other tasks. I often think that the most important people at a rally are not the speakers on the podium but the folks at the back of the crowd with clipboards.
These are not tasks for individuals to do alone. None of us can accomplish much by ourselves; we can’t even think wisely unless we discuss what to do with others. Therefore, the tasks listed above require organizations, and there is an equally important agenda for building and sustaining groups:
Recruitment: Individuals must be invited into organizations and made to feel welcome, notwithstanding their previous experience and views, and encouraged to commit to the group. (This is where protests belong on the checklist.)
Logistics: A group can’t get anything done unless someone finds a space, buys the pizzas, arranges childcare, and does all the other scutwork. Some of this requires skill and experience; all of it requires effort. By the way, the people who contribute in this way must be recognized and thanked.
Decision-making: Groups must make decisions efficiently, yet without ignoring dissenters who have genuine disagreements. Effective groups treat meeting time as a scarce resource and use it economically. They know what they are doing at any given moment during a meeting. (Are we venting? Brainstorming? Advising someone? Choosing between two courses of action?) I recommend distinguishing between contested values and merely practical questions and reserving discussion time for the value-conflicts that need resolution. I would delegate practical issues to volunteers to decide. It is also crucial to record all decisions so that it’s clear what the group has committed to do.
Leadership-development: Groups need leaders. Even the most non-hierarchical groups actually have leaders, although those people may not have titles or official powers. Leaders should be recognized and thanked. They should have opportunities to grow. They should also be held accountable and, if necessary, removed.
Raising and holding money: The typical anti-Trump resistance group raises money, but not for itself. Members pass the hat (metaphorically), and their funds go to political candidates or name-brand national nonprofits. This is unsustainable. In the first month of the first Trump Administration, 350,000 people donated to the ACLU, disproportionately funding one organization that had one strategy. Then the money tapered off. Groups need their own bank accounts and budgets, reserving some funds for their own continuous fundraising.
Hiring: We need more people whose jobs involve organizing for democracy, and we need pathways for those who want to do this work. Organizers can be young, part-time, and (frankly) underpaid, but they need salaries.
Scaling up: Once there are three resistance groups in a given county, there should be an umbrella group for the county. This should not just be forum where like-minded people share news; it should make decisions. That implies a leadership structure at the county level–and then upward from there.
Coalition work: There should be many flavors of organizations, and they should coordinate. I completely respect the big emerging networks, such as Indivisible and #50501, but they need company, and not everyone will want to join any given network. Groups have various identities and agendas. To work in coalition is not only to express mutual support or to agree on general principles. (In fact, it’s fine if different groups disagree on principles.) A coalition can coordinate concrete actions at key moments. That requires empowering selected representatives from the various member organizations to meet and make decisions.
My friend Trygve Throntveit and I sent the following email yesterday to a list of 508 people who have been involved with Civic Studies institutes in the USA, Germany, or Ukraine over the years. It offers some news from the field. If the email missed you even though you have participated in Civic Studies, it’s because of my imperfect list-management, and I apologize; but please let me know.
Dear Colleagues,
We are writing as the co-chairs of the Civic Studies Related Group within the American Political Science Association (APSA). This group is a cluster of activity for Civic Studies. Under a previous name, it launched The Good Society journal, it organizes annual panels at the APSA national conference, and it has its own list of 50+ members (who are included on this email).
We also realize that the APSA group is less relevant to our colleagues in Civic Studies who are not political scientists or not based in the USA. Here we will offer a selection of news and opportunities for the Civic Studies field, defined broadly.
§ The Alliance for Civics in the Academy: Inaugurated in Spring 2024 at a meeting sponsored by Stanford University and the Hoover Institution, the Alliance for Civics in the Academy is a nonpartisan network of instructors in higher education involved in teaching courses and developing academic programs aimed at civic education. Peter serves on the Executive Committee, and Civic Studies has been frequently discussed at ACA events. See: https://www.hoover.org/research-teams/alliance-civics-academy.
§ The possibility of a Civic Studies Association: Harry Boyte, Marie Ström, and Trygve Throntveit have written a post entitled “A New Approach to Politics and Professions: The What and Why of ‘Civic Studies,’” which ends by asking, “How should proponents (like ourselves) develop and expand Civic Studies as a field in these times?” Please contact Tryg if you are interested in helping to form a Civic Studies Association or a broader association for “citizen professionals and other likeminded Americans to promote a civic political alternative to today’s dysfunctional politics.”
Summer Institutes of Civic Studies in 2025
§ Chad Hoggan and Tanja Hoggan-Kloubert (Summer Institute 2015) led the European Institute of Civic Studies and Learning for Democracy in Augsburg, Germany in June
§ Peter offered a short course on Civic Studies at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) in Ukraine in June and discussed the experience in “Teaching Civics in Kyiv” on the Kettering Foundation blog.
Teaching Civic Studies in Kyiv, June 2025
And, looking forward to 2026 …
§ Tanja Hoggan-Kloubert and Chad Hoggan are co-chairing the International Transformative Learning Conference on Oct. 21-23, 2026, with a pre-conference symposium on Civic Studies on Oct. 20, at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. Peter will provide a keynote address.
Civic Studies Journals
The Good Society journal
The Good Society is the journal of Civic Studies. The latest issue (vol. 33, no. 1) is half of a special issue on “Dialogue, Deliberation, and Community in Civic Life,” guest-edited by David J. Roof and Sarah M. Surak (JMU Summer Institute ‘23). The second half of the special issue is being edited now.
Introduction
Cultivating the Commons in Uncertain Times: Dialogue, Deliberation, and Community in Higher Education and Our Democracy. –David J. Roof and Sarah M. Surak
Articles
§ Higher Education and the Commonwealth. Harry C. Boyte
§ Validity and Reliability of the Civic-Minded Graduate Scale in a Place-Based Experiential Learning Context: Integrating Ethical and Self-Construal Theory. -Danka Maric, Grant A. Fore, Brandon H. Sorge, Francesca A. Williamson, and Julia L. Angstmann
§ Beyond Red v. Blue: A Four-Part Model for Cultivating Moral Vision in Higher Education. – Brandon Neal Edwards
§ Teaching Teachers With, For, and Through Dialogue: Demonstrating Democratic and Ambitious Social Studies Teaching Through an Education Foundations Course. William Waychunas
§ Integrating Lessons about Community into the PreK–12 Curriculum. Katharine Kravetz (Summer Institute ‘09)
New Political Science
Sarah Surak is also a co-editor of New Political Science(the journal of APSA’s Critical Political Science section, newly transitioned to Duke University Press). She says that they are open to publishing and have published Civics Studies-related pieces that align with the journal’s mission.
Many appearances of Jürgen Habermas at a Tufts Summer Institute of Civic Studies
An open position
Tufts University is seeking an assistant professor of political science in the subfield of political theory. Teaching topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to, civic studies, the pursuit of justice, citizen behavior under conditions of injustice, the intellectual foundations of liberal democracy, and political rhetoric.
Recent publications and talks or podcasts related to Civic Studies
§ Vachararutai (Jan) Boontinand and Joshua Forstenzer (both Summer Institute 2016) and Fufy Demissie, eds, The Pedagogy of the Community of Philosophical Enquiry as Citizenship Education: Global Perspectives on Talking Democracy into Action (Routledge 2024), also including a co-authored contribution by Jonathan Garlick (Summer Institute 2016).
§ Joshua Forstenzer’s paper, “Do the Unexpected! Democracy as a Way of Life and Real Politics, Or Why Deweyan Democrats Should Be Pluralists About Tactics and Strategies” won the Educational Theory/John Dewey Society 2024 Outstanding Paper Award.
§ Chad Hoggan and Tetyana Hoggan-Kloubert, Learning for Democracy: A Framework for Adult Civic Learning (Palgrave Macmillan, in press)
§ “Professional Study of Civics,”a Great Battlefield podcast in which Nathaniel G. Pearlman interviewed Peter Levine
§ Prof. Sachi Ninomiya-Lim, Rikkyo University (Japan) used Civic Studies concepts in a keynote address on “The modern value of ‘pollution studies’ from the perspective of environmental education.”
§ Shigeo Kodama (President, Professor, Shiraume Gakuen University) and Tryg Throntveit delivered papers on aspects of Civic Studies at the International Political Science Association in Seoul in July
The Ball State project entitled Cultivating Civic Character for the Common Good (C4G) was funded by the Educating Character Initiative at Wake Forest. A major aspect of this project will be faculty development and student activities connected to the Civic Studies Minor and Third Way Civics.
David Roof developed a new course at Ball State titled Citizenship, Community, and Leadership (HONR 390) based in large part on Civic Studies and Learning for Democracy and using Third Way Civics. methodology. He will be teaching two related courses in the Netherlands this summer/
Huston-Tillotson University
The Politics Lab at the James L. Farmer House at Huston-Tillotson University leads the Texas HBCU Democracy Schools Alliance, now in its fifth year. The Alliance serves as a statewide platform for designing civic architecture rooted in Black institutional leadership. By integrating institutional design and broad-based cultural and community organizing into a unified practice, the Lab builds Democracy Schools and creates civic infrastructure, lasting institutions, networks, and capacities that sustain democratic life.
This fall, the Alliance will convene alongside a public forum series on the future of higher education. These events extend a method that links legislative outcomes, campus leadership, and scholarly production in a single strategic frame.
Tufts University
Tufts’ Civic Studies Major was launched in 2019. About 50 majors and minors are declared at any time. The requirements include an “Introduction to Civic Studies” course that is regularly taught by Peter Levine and Brian Schaffner, who is the Newhouse Professor of Civic Studies; it enrolls 50 students. There is also a required internship and a capstone course on communicating civic ideas, along with a menu of courses that meet requirements for normative reasoning, the empirical study of social action, and civic skills, such as dialogue and deliberation, conflict-mediation and peacemaking, community-based research, communication and media-making, public art, community organizing, evaluating nonprofits, or financing social enterprises.
All incarcerated or formerly incarcerated students in the Tufts prison program are Civic Studies majors.
University of Sheffield (UK)
Joshua Forstenzer regularly teaches an advanced undergraduate course and an MA course that is largely inspired by the Summer Institute of Civic Studies. It is called: “How to Change the World From Here: Utopian Vistas, Reformism, and Democratic Action”. It involves reading philosophical texts related to political technology (or the question of political means) from different historical eras, and students engage in a personally-selected service learning practice throughout the semester and reflect on it. It is very popular with students, regularly reaching full capacity, and receiving very strong student evaluations.
Forstenzer also leads an ‘Impact Case Study‘ at Sheffield, which involves engaging in research-informed practice-based activities with non-academic partners (mostly collaborating with European non-profits) on the question of flourishing in challenging educational contexts, with a special focus on climate crisis education.
Individuals’ News
§ Tahima Yesmin Shova (European Institute 2023) defended her doctoral dissertation in Philosophy at University of Sheffield, advised by Joshua Forestenzer (2016), with Peter serving on her committee
§ Yuriy Petrushenko, who has attended the Institute of Civic Studies more than once and serves as President of the Eastern European Network for Citizenship Education, was appointed director of the Fund of the President of Ukraine to Support Education, Science and Sports.
“Class Notes”
Among the first cohort of Civic Studies alumni (2019): Paula McAvoy is a Professor of Education at NC State; Whitney Barth is Executive Director of the Emory University Center for the Study of Law and Religion and professor of law; Michelle Bellino is professor of education at the University of Michigan; Meenakshi Chhabra is Vice Provost for Mental Health & Wellbeing at Lesley University; James Croft is University Chaplain at University of Sussex; Connie K. Chung is a researcher and consultant on youth engagement; Andrea Finlay is a Research Health Scientist for the US Dept. of Veterans Affairs; Elizebeth Gish is the Senior Program Officer for Democracy and Education at the Kettering Foundation; Katharine Kravetz is emerita at American University and has an article in the current Good Society; Meredith Mira founded and leads Choice Points Coaching; Vedant Nanackchand teaches printmaking and human rights/democracy at the University of Johannesburg; Sung-Wook Paik is Professor of Political Science at York College; Anna Rosefsky Saavedra co-directs the University of Southern California’s Center for Applied Research in Education; Tim Shaffer is the inaugural Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Chair of Civil Discourse and director of the SNF Ithaca Initiative at University of Delaware; Laura Wray-Lake is a Professor of Social Welfare at UCLA; and Nick Zavediuk teaches at High Point University
We welcome additional news for future (occasional) emails!
