Our judges played the games, and made their decisions. There were several strong contenders in every category. Each of the winners has been invited to this year’s Frontiers of Democracy Conference, where we’ll be showcasing their efforts.

Awareness-raising: Morgan Davie’s “Refuge“

Refuge is a storytelling game for 2 to 4 people. Players become refugees as they struggle to create new lives for themselves in an unfamiliar land. What might it be like to flee your home to a new land? It is a powerful testament to what games with simple rules can do to put us in the shoes of those who have lost almost everything.

Skill-building: Shawn Roske’s Last Item on the Agenda

Last Item is a LARP (a live-action role-playing game) for 4-6 people. The players are staffers at a group home for the developmentally disabled, struggling to discuss the sexuality of the residents. The game design creates a frustrating and difficult matter for deliberation, assigns roles to different players guaranteed to lead to conflict, and then asks these players to create a clear corporate policy the deal with the matter. This game was a contender for awareness-raising, but ultimately the mechanics make it particularly powerful as a tool for building deliberative skills.

Inherently Political: Mike Capron’s “Long-Term Community Organizing, Abridged.”

This is a simulation game for at least 8 people. It creates an abridged format for “one-on-one” meetings to show how such meetings can be used to create affinity groups who can work together to plan events and collective actions. It was a strong contender for “skill-building,” but the judges decided that if you played this game with people you don’t know, you’d probably end up in a political action network. (Maybe our categories are a bit too overlapping.)

The Civic Games Committee (Daniel Levine, Joshua Miller, and Sarah Shugars), with the support of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, are proud to announce the 2017 Civic Games contest, a design competition for analog games that seek to promote the understanding and/or practice of good citizenship!

The contest starts from two fundamental ideas:

• Games can not only provide welcome distraction in dark times, but also help us solve our problems;
• The heart of democracy is not just its institutions, but the convictions, skills, and commitment of its citizens.

For updates, follow our Facebook Page!

What is Civics?

Civics aims to answer questions like: “How can we make democracy work like it should?” or “How can we enhance citizens’ abilities to act as equal co-creators of our shared world?” You are a citizen of a group (regardless of your legal status) if you seriously ask: “What should we do?” (more) Civic activities include deliberation, community organizing, social entrepreneurship, protest, and–in a pinch!–electoral politics.

What is a Civic Game?

A civic game is any game that, in some way, aims to promote or enhance people’s ability to engage with the social and political world around them. Civics can be about working with and within formal structures of government, but it can also be about reforming or opposing injustice, or about being a member of a community in other ways. We welcome games that address any aspect of civics, including:

• Personal: having moral integrity, taking responsibility for one’s actions, reflecting on one’s personal morality

• Communal: openness to dialogue, communal service (e.g., charitable work, helping neighbors), involvement in community organizations (e.g., religious institutions, social clubs)

• Political: engagement with or challenge to formal political structures (e.g., advocacy, protest, running for office, voting, revolution)

There are many ways that a game could address one or more of these themes. For this contest, we’re interested in seeing examples across three categories of games, that we’re calling awareness-raising, skill-building, and inherently political. We plan to pick a winner in each category.

Awareness-Raising

Perhaps the most common type of civic-minded game found among existing games is what we might call awareness-raising games. These are games that educate their players about some important aspect of civic life – they may be historical games that ask player to imagine themselves into a moment political importance, or they may call attention to a contemporary political problem.

There are a lot of very good games out there that fall primarily into the “awareness-raising” category. For example, Moyra Turkington’s Against the Grain asks players to take on the roles of managers and workers in a Baltimore factory producing materials for World War II, on the eve of a wildcat strike protesting the appointment of the factory’s first Black inspector. Playing the game can help players understand the dynamics of race and labor relations in the mid-20th Century US. It may also have aspects of a “skill-building” game, since it encourages players to build empathy for people unlike themselves, or who may seem unlikeable or to hold odious political views.

Skill-Building

A different approach, which we’ll call skill-building, aims to better prepare the players to take political action outside of the game – a game that, for example, simulated canvassing for a political candidate and thereby made players more comfortable actually doing it, would fall into this category. Despite the term “skill,” we understand this category to include games that build dispositions to take political action as well – say, games that build empathy for people experiencing some problem, and make the players more likely to act to alleviate it.

Nomic was designed by Peter Suber to illustrate a conceptual puzzle about legal systems that direct and constrain their own amendment: “Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed.” Nomic has many elements that teach and build the skills of designing and debating social rules. It may also have an awareness-raising component, of course: serious games of Nomic usually begin with democratic voting procedures but often end undemocratic.

The National Coalition for Deliberation and Dialogue maintains a list of participatory practices for which practitioners might need to build their skills based on an earlier “Citizen Science Toolbox” of Process Arts. Feel free to use it for inspiration.

Inherently Political

Finally, some games might be inherently political themselves, where playing the game is an act of civic engagement. A simple example – we’re sure you can come up with a better idea! – would be “gamifying” voting, recycling, or participation in local governance, giving points for those activities that could then be used for some in-game purpose.

Games have been incorporated into real-world political processes such as such as participatory budgeting. Most famously implemented in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, this process in that case allowed ordinary citizens to identify, discuss, and ultimately set budget priorities for $200 million in construction and service projects in the city. Many American cities are also experimenting with participatory budgeting, including New York City, Boston, and San Francisco. In 2011, community leaders in San Jose, CA were invited to an event to play a budget-negotiation game, the results of which were then used by the city government in making actual budget decisions – meaning that, at least in this case, playing the game was an inherently political act with real-world impact.

Submission Guidelines and Rules

• Your game must be an analog game – that is, not a video game. Analog games include role-playing games (both those played at a table and live-action games), card games, and board games. Your game may have electronic components (e.g., an mp3 played as part of the game play, an associated phone app), but the core of its play should be non-electronic. There may be weird corner cases – we’ll try to be generous.
• We will try to be broad-minded about what constitutes a game – however, note below that part of our judging rubric includes playability and fun, so experimental projects may be formally intriguing but will be at a disadvantage in this context. We are looking for games that people will want to play, even independent of their civic content.
• All components of your game must be able to be sent to the judges in electronic format. If there are pieces that need to be printed out to actually play (e.g., print-and-play board game components), that’s fine.
• Your game’s text and any required printable components should not exceed either 5,000 words or ten printed pages (that is, it shouldn’t be more than either – if you have eight pages of printable components, please don’t also send ten pages with 5,000 words of rules text). We very much welcome shorter games (and brevity is often a plus for accessibility, see below).
• Currently, we only have English-language judges; please provide all text in English. We encourage you to provide it in other languages as well, if you can, though judges will refer to the English text.
• Games submitted for this contest cannot have been previously published, or made publicly available in completed form for free, prior to submission. You may draw on previously published materials; compliance with all relevant intellectual property rules is the responsibility of the submitter. Basically: don’t just send us a game you already have lying around, don’t steal stuff.
• You may submit materials that are intended for use with another game, subject to a couple caveats:
  • We are looking for complete experiences that can be used in a relatively self-contained fashion. So, we would accept something like a module intended to be run with the Swords and Wizardry rules. But a set of playbooks for Apocalypse World (The Politico, The Fact-Checker, etc.) is not the sort of thing we’re looking for.
  • Any materials required to use your game may impact its scoring on accessibility (see below). Basically, if you need $200 worth of rulebooks and supplements to play your game, that will count against you.
• Teams may submit games. Your name may only be on a maximum of one solo submission and one team submission.
• Submissions are due by midnight on 15 April 2017. Please send all submissions to civicgames17@gmail.com. Don’t forget to include your name(s) as you’d like them to appear in any mention of your game.

Other Rules

• You retain all rights to your game. However, by submitting your game to the contest, you are agreeing to allow us to:
  • Make any copies of the game necessary for the judging process, in physical or electronic format.
  • Distribute your game in print or electronic format, for free, to participants in the 2017 Frontiers of Democracy conference.
  • Make your game available for free via our website (in electronic format).
  • Instruct people who receive your game from us at the conference or via the website that they are permitted to download it and make copies (physical or electronic) for personal use, educational use, or use in political activism.
  • Include language in any copy of your game we distribute that indicates that it was a submission to the 2017 Civic Games Contest, that the contest was sponsored by the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, and that the game can be copied for personal, educational, or activist use.
  • If you decide that you would like to withdraw these permissions, you must do so before judging begins on 15 April 2017, by notifying us in writing at civicgames17@gmail.com. If you withdraw these permissions, your game will not be considered for any award.
  • Submitting your game to the contest means you are representing yourself as having the right to give us these permissions.
• We reserve the right to decline to make any game available on the website, at our discretion.
• If you are selected as an overall winner or a winner in a special category, you may be offered the opportunity to have your game published in The Good Society (see below). If (and only if) you choose to do so, you will need to transfer copyright to the journal. No winner will be required to publish in the journal if they prefer not to.

How will you pick a winner?

We’re looking for games that work as games as well as as educational or activist experiences – our ideal game is one that people who had no idea it had a civic purpose would still want to play. More specifically, our judges will be assessing games for:

• Fun: Does this game look like it’ll provide an experience of play that people will seek out and appreciate? We recognize that “fun” may not be quite the same as happy-making or enjoyable – a deeply engaging tragic story can be “fun” in the relevant sense.

• Civic Impact: How likely is this game to achieve some civic purpose through its play? Will people who play the game leave more aware of some civic issue or history? Will they acquire new skills? Will they change the world for the better through play of the game?

• Accessibility: Is this game open to a wide range of players? Does it have rules that are easy to teach and learn? Is its social footprint one that people can integrate into their lives? Does it take steps to ensure that physical/mental impairments and limited resources are mitigated as barriers to play? This is an issue that still needs a lot of work, and we’re hoping some innovations may come out of this contest! Accessible Games has some resources and information. You can find some solid ideas for accessibility in video games here, which has some advice relevant for analog games. There’s an interesting discussion of accessibility in board games in these two blog posts as well.

• Inclusivity: Does this game speak either to a broad range of experiences, or to experiences less often addressed in games and/or mainstream discussions of civics? Does the game address issues of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or related divides in interesting and worthwhile ways? If you’ve got a kick-butt game about the operation of a bicameral legislature, that’s great – but we want you to at least consider taking note of the fact that sometimes bicameral legislatures have their operations affected by sit-ins, or that Montesquieu proposed the notion of a bicameral legislature to ensure that nobles would have a voice to check that of the people.

We will select one overall winner for each type of game – awareness-raising, skill-building, and inherently political. We may also decide to award special recognition to games that make a particular contribution in one of our areas of interest or genre-bend in ways we did not predict.

The games will be judged by a panel of six fabulous game designers, game theorists, and scholars of civics:

• Laura Simpson, UX designer and author of “Driving to the Reunion” (part of the #feminism game anthology) and The Companion’s Tale.
• Jessica Hammer, Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University (Human Computer Interaction Institute/Entertainment Technology Center)
• Trygve Throntveit, Dean’s Fellow for Civic Studies at the University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development, Editor of The Good Society, and author of William James and the Quest for an Ethical Republic.
• Alison Staudinger, Assistant Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, co-editor of the forthcoming Gender in Teaching and Learning Political Science and author of a forthcoming book based on her dissertation, Work Under Democracy: Labor, Gender, and Arendtian Citizenship.
• James Mendez Hodes, staff writer on the new edition of 7th Sea, translator of Tha Illiad of MC Homer, and author of the upcoming game AfroFuture.
• Adam Dray, editor of Misspent Youth and carry: a game about war.

What Do I Win?

Mostly, bragging rights and the knowledge that you’ve created something that might make the world a better place. We will announce the winners via the website on 1 June 2017.

In addition, the three overall winners will have their games presented at the Frontiers of Democracy conference in late June 2017. Frontiers is the birthplace of civic-studies and the field’s premier conference. It will be a chance for your game to be known by educators and scholars from around the world. We will work with you to develop a 30-minute demo of your game (if it is not already played in a similarly short time-frame). Thanks to a generous sponsorship by the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, any winners who are able to attend the conference will have their entry fees covered. We will work with winners who cannot attend the conference to set up a video question-and-answer period after the presentation of their game.

In addition, the three winning games, along with any other special category winners that space permits, will be considered for publication in a special section of the journal The Good Society.

Who is the Civic Games Committee?

Really, we’re just a few friends, who share an interest in both tabletop games and deepening democracy, who had an idea and decided to see if it had legs. We hope it does!

• Daniel H. Levine is the School Mediation Coordinator for Baltimore City Community Mediation, and a co-founder of the Jessup Correctional Institution (JCI) Prison Scholars Program. In a previous life, he was an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and a Program Officer in the Education and Training (International) program at the US Institute of Peace. In a future life he is working on a game about the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation (aka “Jane”).
• Joshua A. Miller is the Assistant Director of the Second Chance program at the University of Baltimore, which offers a degree in Community Studies and Civic Engagement to incarcerated men; he is also a founder of the JCI Prison Scholars Program. His heart will be especially warmed by any civic-minded Ars Magica hacks we receive.
• Sarah Shugars is a doctoral student in Network Science at Northeastern University. She received her BA in Physics from Clark University, where she graduated Cum Laude in 2004. She received her MA in Integrated Marketing Communications from  Emerson College in 2009, and participated in Tisch College’s Summer Institute of Civic Studies in 2013. An active member of the Somerville, MA community, Sarah serves as vice president of The Welcome Project board and on the board of the OPENAIR Circus.

I Have Questions!

Please contact us at civicgames17@gmail.com and we’ll do our best.

Special thanks to James Mendez Hodes, Jessica Hammer, Laura Simpson, Jason Morningstar, Graham W, and Nick Wedig for their input on this document. Any remaining errors or infelicities are the sole responsibility of the Committee.

Education is facing a crisis: it is increasingly divorced from efficacious citizenship. This crisis is linked to the widely felt crisis in democracy itself, understood not only as a system of formal governance but as a way of life which sustains and enhances civic agency—the individual and collective capacity for meaningful social action.

To address these related crises—and in recognition of a new institutional home at the University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development—The Good Society invites submissions exploring the purpose, practice, and prospects of education, broadly conceived. What is the purpose of education in societies aspiring to democracy? How has that purpose been conceived and realized historically, across cultures and time? How do current educational practices and policies reflect, achieve, or fail to advance it in various local, national, and global settings? What are the likely consequences, for today and for the future?

These questions are urgent. Take the United States, where public schools and institutions of higher learning were originally conceived to deliver a public good: citizens with skills and opportunity to advance their own wellbeing, the wellbeing of their communities, and the “general welfare” of society. Today many Americans view education as a means to personal wealth and security: a private good, increasingly burdensome for those without wealth to attain. Americans are also dissatisfied with a political system they view as in thrall to economic elites, whose narrow and divergent priorities preclude concerted action in the public interest. Amid such conditions, hundreds of colleges, universities, schools, and communities are working to reclaim or forge new roles as creators and sustainers of a democratic culture.

Such efforts should be known and compared, along with similar efforts in countries worldwide. Thus we invite papers of 6,000 to 8,000 words from scholars and practitioners in any field who are making serious inquiry into the role of education, in and beyond the classroom, in fostering empowered and responsible citizenship and a democratic way of life. Submissions will be considered for publication in The Good Society, an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal and the flagship journal of the Civic Studies field.

Possible topics include: historical alternatives in education; comparative perspectives on education; education in a pluralistic society; education for global citizenship; education beyond the classroom; local and national aspects of education; translating educational theory into practice; innovation in education; and the economics of education. (NB: Future possible issue themes might include civic approaches to combatting corruption; the politics, economics, and diplomacy of public health; the relationship between civic renewal and climate change; etc.)

Please submit papers by September 15 to: http://www.editorialmanager.com/gs/default.aspx

For more information regarding this call, contact Trygve Throntveit, editor, tthrontv@umn.edu

For more information on Civic Studies, visit http://activecitizen.tufts.edu/civic-studies/

We are pleased to announce that The Good Society will be moving to a new home at the University of Minnesota, where it will be housed in the Dean’s Office of the College of Education and Human Development (CEHD). As of the first issue of 2017 the editorship will pass to Dr. Trygve Throntveit, Dean’s Fellow for Civic Studies at CEHD.

The emerging field of civic studies explores the complementary “co-production” roles that citizens and small-scale associations can play in governance institutions. Unfortunately, numerous civic deficits–political polarization, declining social capital, the influence of special interests, lack of public participation, and hyper-adversarial public discourse—prevent the citizenry from playing its complementary role, inhibiting the effectiveness of policy systems. In this issue, we seek to focus on the relationship between civic deficits and effective policy in specific urgent and contested issue domains. We seek work that furthers the understanding of the civic roots of policy issues such as climate change, social inequality, education and health care. Articles might address such questions as: What civic deficits inhibit policy in each area? What concepts are useful in understanding these civic deficits? How do such civic deficits inhibit sound policy-making and/or effective implementation? How might increased or improved citizen participation increase the effectiveness of policy? What kind of practical interventions—participatory planning, deliberative forums, regulatory commenting processes, advisory boards—have made progress in addressing civic deficits and enabling effective policy? By bringing together research across policy domains, we hope to reveal common themes across policy domains to make a stronger case for practical efforts to engage the citizenry in effective policy.

Issues related to the environment are one such policy domain. Electoral institutions of nation-states are fundamentally ill-suited to make decisions that are long-term and global in their implications. Moreover, there is broad disagreement on environmental issues like climate change, watershed management, fossil fuel extraction, nuclear power, and fisheries conservation. Such issues inevitably involve tensions among legitimate and widely shared values, including concerns for the environment, sustainable economic growth, and raising the standard of living. Citizens feel stymied by technical and scientific questions, which fuels both polarization and skepticism; meanwhile many domain experts struggle to communicate their findings effectively in a politicized media environment. This, then, is a classic civic incapacity exacerbated by contemporary institutions where citizens must nonetheless take a central role in evaluating both the evidence and the possible collective and policy responses. In this issue, we invite papers form a variety of disciplinary and political perspectives on topics related specifically to the civic dimension of environmental policy.

Manuscripts will be due August 1st, 2015. They should be submitted here (http://www.editorialmanager.com/gs/) and formatted for blind review.

Possible topics include:

• Citizen-scientists and civic science
• Environmental issues in science communication
• Civic engagement in regulatory rulemaking beyond comment periods
• The prospects and pitfalls of environmental mass movements
• Principle-agent problems (and solutions) in environmental diplomacy
• Civil society’s role in watershed management
• Common-pool resource management strategies
• Empirical evidence from deliberative forums, deliberative polling, and citizens juries on environmental policy preferences
• The political economy of cap and trade, carbon taxes, and carbon offsets
• Participatory emissions budgeting
• Sustainable development
• Steady-state economics

The annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies is an intensive, two-week, interdisciplinary seminar bringing together advanced graduate students, faculty, and practitioners from diverse fields of study. The Good Society covered it in our Winter 2013 issue. The Framing Statement used by the Institute is published in our latest issue.

Organized by Peter Levine, Tisch College, and Karol Sołtan, University of Maryland, the Summer Institute features guest seminars by distinguished colleagues from various institutions and engages participants in challenging discussions such as:

• What kinds of citizens (if any) do good regimes need?
• What should such citizens know, believe, and do?
• What practices and institutional structures promote the right kinds of citizenship?
• What ought to be the relationships among empirical evidence, ethics, and strategy?

To apply: please email your resume, an electronic copy of your graduate transcript (if applicable), and a cover email about your interests to Peter Levine at Peter.Levine@Tufts.edu. For best consideration, apply no later than March 15, 2015.

It is customary for a new editor to say a little about himself and how he plans to tackle the goals of the journal. But in the spirit of co-creation, I’d like to start this issue by extending special gratitude to the longest-running member of the editorial staff: Habib Gharib. Gharib has worked on the journal since 2001, and his attention to both grammar and content is impeccable. He has at various times been listed on our masthead as “Assistant Editor” and “Assistant Managing Editor,” but whatever the title he has edited patiently and with great skill. We are grateful for his services.

Steve Elkin has often said something like what he wrote in his last book: that political science needs to be either reinvented or reworked so that “efforts at explanation and evaluation are tied to the question of good political regimes and how they may be secured and maintained.”[i] This reworking has been the business of The Good Society since Elkin founded the Committee on the Political Economy of the Good Society with Soltan and Gar Alperovitiz and started printing a newsletter in 1991.

Since that time, the journal has had a certain thematic unity: the articles we have published have focused on matters of institutional design, democratic deliberation, the history of political theory, and, perhaps obviously, political economy. But the real unity of the journal has been methodological, an intensive focus on this holistic and normative approach to political science. In his first “PEGS and Wholes” editorial in 1995, Elkin challenged the new faddish attention to deliberation, asking: “if deliberation is such a good thing what does it take to get it?” That is a theme we take up again in this issue and to which we plan to return in future. Always The Good Society has had the dual aim to analyze specific institutions and understand them in relation to regimes: to understand that the structure of the economy, the organization of the state, and the role of the citizen are not independent but interlinked questions. Elkin titled his editorials “PEGS and Wholes” to refer to this linkage, framing analysis of the institutions within the good (or good enough) regime.

I intend to preserve that stereoscopic focus, with some expansions. The discipline of political science still seems to have its attention focused elsewhere, or what’s worse, research questions are divided up in such a way that the question of the good political regime is rarely asked in its totality. Yet it is not hard to find fellow-travelers: many scholars find themselves straddling disciplinary lines in the way Elkin imagined, and we will continue to be a home for their work.  In our coverage of the good regime, economy and government authority have predominated, and citizenship has often played a minor role. Yet there is good reason to believe that insofar as a regimes’ institutions fall short of those required for a good enough regime, only the regimes’ citizens, acting together, can restore it.

The Good Society has assembled plenty of evidence about which institutions citizens should seek to reform, and even some theories as to how they should go about achieving those reforms. But more than before I hope to find good work to publish in The Good Society on the education, organization, deliberation, and effective action of citizens (defined both as legal members and as informal co-creators of the institutions and regimes they inhabit.)

I believe that one of the primary obstacles to effective citizen action is the size of the problems and the mechanisms available to address them: neither small-scale deliberative and participatory activism nor mass-scale mobilization and protest are any longer effective to address the kinds of problems that plague us. We therefore welcome new work on challenges to citizen efficacy, especially challenges and opportunities presented by the administrative state, whether it be in environmental governance, financial sector rule-making, or urban land use.

We will also spend a bit more time focusing on bad regimes and the badness in our own. This issue features a book review on a new biography of Adolph Eichmann that purports to challenge Hannah Arendt’s 1963 portrait of the man in Eichmann in Jerusalem. As Roger Berkowitz reports, it mostly confirms her thesis that Eichmann was anti-Semitic and cruel, but ultimately thoughtless. Hannah Arendt said of political theory that it takes up the challenge “to think what we are doing.” Eichmann, she claimed, did not think what he was doing and so while he was guilty of enthusiastic support for genocide, this guilt was a byproduct of his thoughtlessness and failure of imagination. The corollary for Arendt was that when our own thoughtlessness fails to be genocidal it is more a matter of (moral and institutional) luck than skill or character, so “thinking what we are doing” is a general obligation.

While we may not have been unthinkingly complicit in genocide, we have inhabited a regime that incarcerates far too many of its citizens, too many of whom are black and brown and poor. We have inhabited a regime that has become dependent on a class of migrant laborers who are denied the formal rights and protections of citizenship. And we have inhabited a regime whose consumption patterns appear to be inconsistent with sustaining a good (or even good enough) climate. There is little doubt that even the good enough society is an aim to be secured rather than a status quo to be maintained, and there are many more examples like these in the political economy and institutional design of our own regimes.

Thus while we continue to value the kind of political theory that aims to think the present moment, to understand how we have found ourselves in this place, we hope to expand “what are we doing?” to include the question of civic studies: “what shall we do together?” This opens up strategic considerations and alternative aims in a way that was always nascent in the effort to secure and maintain good political regimes. But it also frames future research around the limits and opportunities for citizens to reconstruct the regime’s constitution directly. I want to put contributors on the lookout for spaces and examples of collaboration among active citizens that reach beyond the limited scale of local citizenship.

Some Procedural Changes of Note

Two Departures from the Symposium Model: Historically, The Good Society has solicited and published thematically-linked symposia. The beauty of this model is the depth of inquiry that scholars can produce when they are engaged together from the start in attacking a single theme from multiple perspectives. As much as possible, we plan to preserve this model; but we also plan to expand on it. Starting this issue, we will begin announcing our themes in advance and soliciting papers broadly. We will also begin publishing standalone papers and book reviews, as well as symposia from prior issues.

Calls for Papers: Over the next year we’ll be publishing symposia on a diverse set of themes: formal political theory, militaries and democracy, and deliberation in non-democratic regimes. We invite contributions to these symposia, especially from young scholars. We promise to give prompt peer reviews (within the limits of our reviewers’ generosity and competence.) The quickest way to access these calls for papers is through our new website (goodsocietyjournal.org) and our Facebook page (The Good Society.)

A General Call for Standalone Papers: Starting this year, we will be experimenting with the publication of standalone papers. One way to think about these papers is as responses to prior symposia: if you missed the publication deadline for our symposium on “Mass Incarceration and Democratic Theory,” for instance, we would still like a chance to publish your response essay or your article on similar themes. Another way to think about this standing call for papers is through the lens of our enduring preoccupations: in this issue, you will find the first publication of a document we call “The Framing Statement,” written by a group of scholars as they began planning the Summer Institute for Civic Studies that now meets annually at Tufts. You may also consider it a general call for papers, symposia, reviews, and practical reflections.

Triannual Publication: The Good Society has sometimes been published biannually and sometimes triannually. Starting in 2016, it will be published triannually again, thanks to our new partnership with the Kettering Foundation.

Endnotes, In-Text Citation, and Abstracts: We’ve traditionally eschewed the clutter of in-text citation, along with that harbinger of indexing and impact factors, the abstract. But no longer. We now welcome in-text citations and require abstracts.

PEGS and The Good Society: Since 1995, the proper title of the journal has been “The Good Society: Journal of the Committee on the Political Economy of the Good Society.” That’s quite a mouthful! So in private we call the journal “The Good Society,” a name we share with a German denim clothing brand and books by Walter Lippmann, Robert Bellah (and his coauthors), and John Kenneth Galbraith. PEGS generally refers to the Committee and its work: the edited volumes, our panels at the APSA and other conferences, etc.

Biases, Heuristics, and Democracy

This issue features a symposium on “Biases, Heuristics and Democracy.” The current cross-pollination between cognitive psychology, experimental philosophy, and political science has been a very fruitful one for researchers, but we worry that it has overemphasized the basic skepticism in political theory about the competence of democratic polities. So we commissioned these papers to take up the newest version of Plato’s challenge that the demos is not wise enough to rule.

Perhaps the best and most appealing expression of this view comes from Cass Sunstein, who has gathered the research on democratic deliberation and epistemic considerations for public policy in such a way as to make a preference for democratic decision-making look unpalatable.[ii] Yet as Michael Wagner and his co-authors show, citizens need to use their cultural identities as a part of their reflection and deliberation, and these identities can both help and hamper comprehension. Heuristics, then, are not simply biased short-cuts, but lenses through which we see and frame the world: there is no non-heuristic cognition. In the spirit of operationalizing the problem, John Gastil offers concrete suggestions from his research on the Oregon Citizens Initiative Review for institutional changes that can increase voter information without succumbing to bias. With a theorist’s perspective, Hélène Landemore adds insights from her own recent book to this defense, arguing that the existence of biases actually militates in favor of inclusion and broad-based decision-making rather than exclusion. And Jamie Kelly takes issue with Sunstein’s libertarian paternalism, not from the perspective of libertarian concerns for autonomy, but rather from the perspective of the common welfare.

[i] Stephen L. Elkin, Reconstructing the Commercial Republic: Constitutional Design after Madison (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2006), 3.

[ii] Cass R. Sunstein, Republic. Com 2.0 (Princeton University Press, 2009); Cass R. Sunstein, “The Law of Group Polarization,” Journal of Political Philosophy 10, no. 2 (2002): 175–95; Cass R. Sunstein, “Moral Heuristics,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28, no. 4 (2005): 531–41; Cass R. Sunstein, Why Nudge?: The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).

The new issue (vol. 23, no. 1) is devoted to a single symposium on the intersection of mass incarceration and democracy. It’s available on Project MUSE for institutional subscribers, and on JSTOR, where all the articles will be open access for the next two months!

Albert Dzur introduces the issue in “Penal Democracy.” Many of the authors responded to his account of the mistake in believing we incarcerate large numbers of people because democratic polities have chosen more punitive laws in Punishment, Participatory Democracy, and the Jury.

Bernard Harcourt discusses Foucault, Tocqueville, and the political temporality of prisons in “The Invisibility of Prisons in Democratic Theory.”

Rebecca Thorpe articulates the atrocious economic geography of white rural prison sites and black urban prisoners in “Urban Divestment, Rural Decline and the Politics of Mass Incarceration.”

Richard Dagger asks if there’s a just explanation for excessive incarceration (spoiler alert: there isn’t) in “Playing Fair with Imprisonment.”

Christopher Bennett analyzes the problem of expertise-driven incarceration and calls for common ownership of the procedures of incarceration in “What is the Core Normative Argument for Greater Democracy in Criminal Justice?”

Lynne Copson defends utopian thinking against the supposed pressures of penal pragmatism in “Penal Populism and Mass Incarceration: The Promise of Utopian Thinking.”

David Green criticizes politician’s efforts to combine tough-on-crime rhetoric with ameliorative policies in “Penal Populism and the Folly of ‘Doing Good by Stealth.'”

Liz Turner criticizes the foundation of “penal populism” in the construction of non-deliberative public opinion in demographic polling in “Penal Populism, Deliberative Methods, and the Production of ‘Public Opinion on Crime and Punishment.”

Elizabeth Anderson summarizes the current state of affairs for large classes of people from whom the state has withdrawn the protection and benefit of law, which is the problem of extrajudicial punishments and status crimes in “Outlaws.”

Ian Loader and Richard Sparks summarize the findings of these papers and offer a useful way forward in “Beyond Mass Incarceration?”