Using Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel, the Tufts University Research Group on Equity in Health, Wealth, and Civic Engagement surveyed representative samples of Americans in 2020 and 2021. Among many other questions, we asked whether authorities should be able to mandate vaccination. Most respondents said no both times. Support declined from 42.6% to 34.5% from 2020-2021. Biden supporters were more favorable than non-voters, who were more favorable than Trump supporters. However, both Biden and Trump voters moved against mandatory vaccinations. Possibly, Trump supporters have become less likely to favor vaccination mandates now that the federal government is led by a Democrat, but that wouldn’t explain the decline among Biden supporters.
I report these results without a strong value-judgment. I think I would support mandates (with appropriate exemptions), but that's just an opinion. I don't have expertise or fixed views.
Some caveats: In 2020, we asked about vaccinations in general. In 2021, we asked about the COVID-19 vaccines. In 2020, we asked whether people would vote in the next November election--and if so, for whom. In 2021, we asked whether and how they did vote in the prior election. Too few people admitted they didn't vote; our turnout estimate is inflated by over-reporting.
We are in the second day of the American Political Science Association’s Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER), hosted by Tisch College but held online this summer. Twenty excellent engaged political scientists are the participants, and they are interacting with the directors and visitors.
One issue for discussion is the relationship between methodology and civically engaged research. Is engaged research a method? Does it favor one or more methods over others? Or is it methodologically neutral?
I won’t try to characterize the other ICER participants’ views, except to note that they hold diverse and thoughtful opinions on questions like this. For myself, I’d want to resist a tendency (outside of ICER) to equate engaged research with qualitative methods.
I have a biographical reason not to endorse this distinction. My own background is in philosophy, and I succeeded Bill Galston (a political theorist) as the second director of CIRCLE until 2015. CIRCLE is well-known for quantitative research: its own surveys plus analysis of federal data and voting records. Yet CIRCLE has always employed full-time experienced professionals whose main focus is building partnerships and capacity in its partner organizations. I see CIRCLE as a deeply civically engaged research center, in the sense that Amy Cabrera Rasmussen, Robert Lieberman, Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, Rogers Smith, and I propose in a forthcoming article in PS:
Civically
How people govern themselves. Engaged research teams are self-governing collaborative groups (composed of community organizations, government actors, social movements and others); their research strengthens self-governance for others.
engaged
Collaborative, in partnership, with benefits and substantive roles for both political scientists and non-academics in the same projects.
research
Any organized, rigorous production of knowledge, including empirical, interpretive, historical, conceptual, normative, and other forms of inquiry.
political science
A pluralist discipline with a central focus on questions of power, politics, and governance.
Given my background, I’ve always found it natural that engaged research can involve any method, from big-data analytics to randomized field experiments to philosophical inquiry. I would acknowledge a debt to the atmosphere at the University of Maryland in the 1990s, when people like Galston, Steve Elkin, Gar Alperovitz, Linda Williams, and others comfortably combined political theory with empirical research and civic engagement. I also found inspiring models in Elinor Ostrom and Jane Mansbridge.
Meanwhile, I observe that community partners of various kinds are drawn to the full range of methods. Some groups are very comfortable with robust and explicit debates about normative issues. They may connect more easily to the methods of philosophy, political theory, and theology than to qualitative social science. Other groups have big datasets and are already quite good at crunching numbers but would like to collaborate with people situated within universities. Some run interventions and are quite happy to randomize treatment and control groups. Certainly, some are not comfortable with any of those methods, but that doesn’t mean that interviews and focus groups will suit them best.
If anything, engaged research seems an invitation to mix methods and to develop methodological pluralism. Positivism may be an obstacle to engaged research, but “positivism” doesn’t mean quantitative research methods or the application of statistics. Positivism in the problematic sense is a philosophy that sharply distinguishes facts from values, scientists from subjects, and knowledge from power. Qualitative researches can be naive positivists, while number-crunchers can hold nuanced and productive ideas about epistemology.
I’ve had deep connections to the UK since childhood and have always been committed to the idea of Britain in Europe. I believe that the UK has been much better off as a part of the EU, while the EU could benefit from particular British perspectives and institutions. For those reasons, Brexit saddened me.
However, I also believe in polycentricity. As a descriptive theory of the world, it says that there are (almost) always many centers of power, and they need not stack up neatly, with smaller, weaker units inside bigger and stronger ones. Jurisdictions and roles usually overlap and interrelate in complex ways.
As a reform agenda, polycentricity says that things work better when power is divided into many parts that partially overlap. Over-centralization is generally unwise.
“Europe” is already polycentric in this sense. Here is one person‘s diagram of important treaties among European nations. The treaty groups overlap in a classic polycentric way.
This diagram is useful but far from complete. In addition to treaty arrangements, one could add other partnerships among nations, cities, companies, labor unions, universities, parties, professional groups, and more. Also, the image presents each nation as a unit, when many EU member states are federal or otherwise decentralized.
The picture is a little dated; the Union Jack will have to move outside of several circles where it appears above. However, the UK will not move outside of the polycentric network of Europe. Like it or not, Britain is “in.”
To British people who favor European integration, I would say: Brexit was bad. But you are still in Europe. The path forward is to encourage as much participation as possible in a wide range of cooperative ventures, whether among nations or among other kinds of entities. These cooperative activities should extend across Europe but not always be limited to the European continent.
To people who aspire to a federal Europe, I would say: Federalism, as implemented in republics like the USA, Germany, and Brazil, is one approach to combining centralization with decentralization. It assumes a Westphalian sovereign state that has ultimate power and attracts the deepest allegiance from all its citizens, with a neat tessellation of smaller and weaker units inside it that resemble each other and have similar relationships to the whole. This is by no means the only approach to making something large out of many smaller components. In the European context, federalism may have outrun its mandate and potential, at least for now. So everyone who wants to see Europe integrate should be willing to experiment with other overlapping associations.
To Euroskeptic Britons, I would say: You’re in Europe. You always have been, at least since prehistoric French people helped build Stonehenge. Sovereignty is an oversimplification, since power is always polycentric. By overestimating the importance of the national level of government, you have reaped a bunch of unnecessary problems and foreclosed some beautiful solutions, such as a borderless Ireland within the EU. Nevertheless, you and your children and your children’s children must belong to numerous networks and partnerships that cross the Channel. You should be working on making these partnerships work.
On the Tufts Equity Research website is a user-friendly tool that allows anyone to explore data from our May 2021 national survey. The tool requires no specialized background or vocabulary to use. You can just select pairs of variables and see the results.
For instance, I looked at the proportion of Americans who report that other people act afraid of them because of their identity. The graphic shows the result for the whole population. The rate has doubled since last year, and I suspect that’s because we have feared each other during this year of pandemic and political conflict.
One can also look at differences by demographic category. For instance, 33% of Black Americans–versus 15% of whites–believe that they are feared because of their identity.
You can explore hundreds of other combinations on the site.
A few months ago, I published Levine, P. (2020). Theorizing Democracy in a Pandemic, Democratic Theory, 7(2), 134-142, with the following abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic raises questions about the future of democracy and civil society. Some recent predictions seem to use the suffering to score points in ongoing political arguments. As a better example of how to describe the future during a crisis, I cite the prophetic voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. King does not merely predict: he calls for action, joins the action, and makes himself responsible for its success or failure. With these cautions about prediction in mind, I venture two that may guide immediate responses. First, communities may erect or strengthen unjustifiable barriers to outsiders, because boundaries enhance collective action. Second, although the pandemic may not directly change civic behavior, an economic recession will bankrupt some organizations through which people engage.
I’m pasting the official announcement below; and here is a link to a longer article. As a member of the search committee, I share this news with enthusiasm and excitement, and I second the sentiments about Alan Solomont, who has built the college into the force it is today.
Dear members of the Tufts community,
We are delighted to announce the appointment of Dayna Cunningham as the Pierre and Pamela Omidyar Dean of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life. She will assume the deanship on July 1.
With decades of leadership experience in not-for-profit organizations and higher education, Dayna has devoted her career to promoting civic participation, building robust community partnerships, and advocating for underrepresented communities.
Dayna comes to Tufts from MIT, where she was the founder and executive director of the Community Innovators Lab (CoLab), a center for urban planning and development that engages students and community groups to build large-scale collaborations that strengthen civic infrastructure in marginalized communities. One example of CoLab’s work is a partnership with the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative on infrastructure projects that build an ecosystem for economic democracy for people of color. Another example is CoLab’s Inclusive Regional Development program, which works with communities and practitioners to support innovative models for equitable development and well-being in Latin American countries.
Prior to founding CoLab, Dayna was the program director of the ELIAS Project at MIT, which was a collaboration between businesses, NGOs, and government to create initiatives that supported economic, social, and environmental sustainability.
Before her career in higher education, Dayna spent several years as a civil rights attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, litigating voting rights cases in Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, and other Southern states. She also worked in philanthropy as an associate director at the Rockefeller Foundation, where she integrated racial equity into resource spending and designed an annual grants program addressing civil rights and policy issues in the U.S.
Dayna earned an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management, a JD from New York University School of Law, and an undergraduate degree from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges.
Dayna’s experience and accomplishments are complemented by her longstanding commitment to active citizenship and community impact—values that are foundational to Tisch College. We are confident that Dayna will make invaluable contributions both in her leadership of Tisch College and as a member of the university administration.
We are grateful to Alan Solomont, A70, A08P, for eight years of outstanding service as the dean of Tisch College. A beloved member of the Tufts community who has had a profound impact on the university, he will be retiring at the end of June. We would also like to acknowledge the diligence and thoughtful recommendations of the search advisory committee, led by School of Arts and Sciences Dean Jim Glaser.
Please join us in welcoming Dayna Cunningham to her role as the Omidyar Dean of Tisch College.
Last spring, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation) jumped into action to support community-based organizations that would help young people to address the crisis of the pandemic. Their Civic Spring Project funded Groundwork Elizabeth (NJ); The Institute of Engagement (Houston, TX); Kinston Teens, Inc (NC); the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence (KY); Youthprise (MN), and the Newark (NJ) Youth One Stop and Career Center. Along with funds, these organizations received in-kind support and were included in a professional learning community.
Now CIRCLE has published a detailed evaluation. (I did not play any role in it, although at an earlier stage, I was one of many colleagues who had advised on the design of the project and then helped to select the grantees.)
Almost all the youth in these projects said they learned the kind of content that they would learn in a civics class, which demonstrates that hands-on, out-of-school projects can teach the facts and skills that we also value in an academic context.
Sixty-one percent felt that they had made their communities better places to live. For instance, “the Kentucky Student Voice Team members extensively documented the experiences of Kentucky students during the pandemic and used those findings to inform policymakers. … Minnesota Young Champions recruited young Minnesotans to engage in advocacy work to extend unemployment benefits to young people.”
CIRCLE also presents nuanced findings about the conversations that included youth and adults or that convened people from various programs and roles. They report some challenges: power dynamics, lack of clarity about roles, and some issues with communication. For instance, “The same behaviors regarding [the Community of Practice] were interpreted differently–the CoP planners intended for flexibility and responsiveness, but CoP participants perceived this as unclear purpose and lack of intentionality in the planning, schedule, design, and implementation of the CoP. Different stakeholders held different goals and they were communicated at different times and through different fora.”
Collaboration is hard, especially when people come from different walks of life; and we’re not very good at it these days. (See my recent Medium post.) A classic problem is permitting flexibility while also giving clear direction. We get better at these tasks with practice and reflection, which is exactly what this project offered.
Most applied ethicists are skeptical that we can resolve significant problems by applying ambitious moral philosophies or theories of justice.
I report this skepticism anecdotally, but it comes from 15 years working in an applied ethics center and my peripheral involvement with educational ethics, media ethics, political campaign ethics, and related fields. People who teach ethics in college sometimes require students to apply the big moral theories to practical problems. (“What would Kant say about blockchain?” “What does utilitarianism imply about health reform?”) But these assignments are meant to convey the theories, not to resolve the problems. Professional ethicists rarely write their own “What would Kant say about …?” papers.
Why not? I think the following explanations are plausible. Some are mutually compatible, but they push in different directions:
Stalemate: There are several academically respectable moral theories: utilitarianism, deontology, virtue-ethics, and maybe others. Some individuals are drawn to one theory over the rest, but that is a matter of intuition or sheer preference. Arguments have not resolved the disputes among them. To invoke one theory in relation to a concrete ethical problem just neglects the other theories. Invoking more than one often yields a dilemma.
Pluralism (in Isaiah Berlin’s sense): Maybe the truth about the human world is that it involves many different kinds of good thing: various negative and positive rights, welfare outcomes, equity and other relations among people, procedural fairness, etc. These good things conflict, and one must choose among them. Each moral theory tends to illuminate and justify one kind of a good, yet practical wisdom is about balancing them.
Particularism: The appropriate focus for moral assessment is not an abstraction, such as freedom, but a concrete particular, like the school in my neighborhood. In a parallel way, the most important focus for aesthetic evaluation is a whole painting, not all the instances of yellow ochre that appear in different paintings. You can believe that yellow ochre is a nice color, but that doesn’t tell you much about whether or why Vermeer’s “View of Delft” is beautiful, even though that painting does incorporate some yellow ochre. Likewise, you can’t tell much about a given situation in which there is some freedom just from knowing that freedom is generally good. If the appropriate focus of ethical evaluation is a concrete, particular, whole thing, then theorizing about abstractions doesn’t help much. (See Schwind on Jonathan Dancy, p. 36 or Blackburn, “Securing the Nots,” p. 97.)
Complexity: Ethical problems often involve many people who have divergent interests, beliefs, rights, goals, etc., and who continuously affect each other. Their choices and responses are unpredictable. Given the resulting complexity, it is usually hard to model the situation empirically–regardless of whether one is more interested in consequences, rights, procedures, comparisons among people, or all of the above. Once you’ve modeled the situation reasonably well and you think you know what would happen if A did B to C, then a Pareto-optimal choice may become clear. For instance, reducing imprisonment in the USA would (I think) enhance individual rights, equity, utility, non-domination, rule of law, and practically every other value I can think of. However, agreement about Pareto-optimal choices is fairly rare, and the most common reason is persistent debate about the empirics. Moral theory really doesn’t help much.
Narrowness of philosophy: To “apply moral philosophy” often means to apply Kantianism, utilitarianism, 20th-century virtue ethics, social contract theory, or perhaps one or two other idea systems. (Maybe some Levinas; maybe some Marx.) These systems have great value, but also limitations. They usually focus either on individual choices at given moment (Is it OK to lie?), or else on what Rawls called the “basic structure of society,” but not on the overall shape of a single human life, practices for enhancing virtues, deeply ingrained forms of oppression, institutions other than governments, or group processes other than lawmaking. Some of these matters are better explored in Hellenistic and classical Indian and Chinese philosophy or in applied social science fields; some have never received adequate attention. It’s not that abstract theory is irrelevant to concrete choices, but that the most widely respected philosophical theories are too narrow.
I think that large concepts or themes can help us think about what to do. Among the useful concepts for practical reason are the major concerns of modern Anglophone philosophy, such as rights and forms of equity. These concepts or themes do arise in concrete cases. But many other concepts are also useful. Depending on the circumstances, you might get as much value out of Albert Hirschman’s scheme of exit, voice, and loyalty as from Rawls’ account of justice, even though Hirschman’s theory is not explicitly normative. And examples, narratives, and concrete proposals also provide insights.
A reporter supposedly asked Earl Long, “Governor, should you use ethics in politics?” Long said, “Hell yes, use anything you can get your hands on!” I am inclined to agree with the governor–use whatever ideas help you to reason about what to do.
In turn, studying and discussing concrete problems can generate questions and insights that enrich abstract philosophy and social theory. If we must call pure philosophy the “top,” and practical reasoning the “bottom,” then influence should flow from bottom-up as well as from top-down.
America’s constitutional democracy depends on us — the people — to organize ourselves in groups of all sizes and for many purposes. Voluntary associations address community problems, they make it possible to limit the scope of government, and they empower people to express their diverse beliefs and passions.Freedom of association is both a constitutional right and a pillar of American society.
Unfortunately, human beings do not automatically know how to associate well. Challenges arise that lack obvious solutions. How can we resolve disagreements so that disappointed participants don’t quit or just drift away? What is the best response when some members shirk their fair share of the work? What is an effective way to prevent leaders from dominating a group or even stealing its assets? How should an association communicate its purpose and values to busy outsiders?
The Science of Association
Answers to these questions (and many others) constitute what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the science of association.” Visiting the United States in 1831, he credited the success of our young republic to the people’s skill at this “mother science of a democracy.” He observed that Americans had perfected this “science” better than any other nation and had used it for the most purposes.
The traditional way to learn how to associate was to join functioning groups and watch how they worked. In The Upswing (2020), Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett show that associational life grew and strengthened from about 1890 until about 1960 as Americans developed the science of association to unprecedented levels.
But then rates of membership shrank just as steeply. Today, most citizens do not feel they associate much at all. Just over one in four Americans report that they belong to even one group that has responsible leaders and in which they can actively participate. (Of these groups, religious congregations are the most common; online groups are also fairly frequent.)
When functioning groups are scarce and fragile, we cannot count on them to teach a younger generation to participate. However, schools can play a role in reversing this decline. [Read more here about what schools can do.]
