Initial Questions about Online Deliberation

Posted on March 3, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

While last semester I looked at gender representation in comic books by analyzing a network of superheroes, this semester I’m taking my research down a different path.

Through my Ph.D. I ultimately hope to develop quantitative methods for describing and measuring the quality of political and civic deliberation.

To that end, this semester, I’ll be looking at data from a popular political blog aimed at providing a space for political conversation. I have scraped this website’s entire corpus of nearly 30,000 posts from 2004 through the present, including posts and comments from 4,435 unique users.

From this, I plan to build a network of interactions – who comments on whose posts? Who recommends whose posts? Are there sub-communities within this larger online community?

Additionally, as I build my skill set in Natural Language Processing, I hope to do some basic text analysis on the content of posts and comments, looking for variation in word choice between communities as well as comparing the content of different types of posts – for example, are there keywords that would predict how many comments a post will get?

No doubt more questions will come up along the way, but as I dive into this data, these are some of the questions I’m thinking about.

Exit, Voice, and Presidential Elections

Posted on February 29, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

In spring 2003, I was living in Japan.

That’s where I was when the Unites States invaded Iraq for “Operation Iraqi Freedom” as it was colorfully named by my government.

Throughout the months I lived abroad, I tried to keep up on the news from home; daily scouring reports from the U.S., the U.K., and Japan. The flavor of news coming out of each country was markedly different – the U.S. blindly patriotic, the U.K. supportingly reserved, Japan politely disapproving.

The details and word variation between articles told remarkably different stories, and I hoped, I suppose, that by reading multiple accounts I could somehow triangulate the truth.

The news coming out of the U.S. was particularly disturbing.

It was as though the whole nation had gone mad.

Other countries reported stories of schools being bombed by U.S. troops; my country was on some tear about Freedom Fries.

This was in the infancy of the blogosphere, so apart from the few people I kept in touch with over AOL Instant Messenger, my only sense for public opinion back home came from the sycophantic mainstream media. A media which has, in fact, somewhat reformed in recent years in response to its catastrophic failure of that time.

And perhaps this is why I’m inclined to sigh whenever someone declares that they will move to Canada, or, perhaps, the moon, should someone they strongly dislike be elected President.

I heard that a lot when President George W. Bush won reelection, and I’m hearing it a lot now.

It’s hardly a solution.

I hardly mean to imply that the Iraq War would have played out differently had I not been abroad; but it seems fairly certain that such warmongering tendencies would only be worse should all progressives decide to leave.

At the very least – I have to say – let’s not leave the nuclear launch codes behind.

In Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Albert O. Hirschman outlines the three ways in which a person might interact with an organization, community, or state. As you may have guessed, the options are: exit, voice, and loyalty.

A person might stay loyal to an organization and support it’s views and actions; a person might exit an organization, leaving its undesirable policies in search of greener pastures; or a person might exercise voice: speaking up and fighting to make the organization the way they’d like it to be.

There are, of course, many instances throughout human history where people have been forced to exit for fear of their lives and wellbeing. One report estimates that there are nearly 60 million refugees in the world today. Theirs was not an exit taken lightly.

But the situation in the United States – while disheartening – is hardly so harsh.

I know most people are joking when they speak of plans to move away, and yet – it is a troubling sign of resignation.

We may not be the unparalleled superpower we might fancy ourselves to be, but we are still a nation which wields the potential for great harm or good.

If elections don’t go the way we like, it shouldn’t be cause to flee, but rather a call to action: our voices would be needed more than ever.

The (Re)Emergence of American Hate

Posted on February 25, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

A certain presidential candidate, known for his racist, sexist, and otherwise outlandish rhetoric has recently won his third primary.

And if it wasn’t disturbing enough that people in KKK robes showed up to support him at the Nevada primary – an action which may or may not have been a poorly executed protest – one of the country’s most notorious white supremacist leaders unofficially endorsed this candidate today saying that anything other than voting for him was ‘treason to your heritage’.

Now, I have a general policy of not giving space to hate groups – which thrive on the attention generated by their shocking acts, but this is getting too serious to ignore.

But, here’s the thing – it’s not the idea that a particularly distasteful candidate might actually become president that I find so alarming. It’s the fact that he genuinely has so much popular support.

Donald Trump is making it acceptable to be a racist again.

Of course, racism has long been alive and well in this country. It never really died the quiet death we hoped it would. Through the activism of 60s and the “colorblindness” of the 90s, we just shoved it into the closet, hoping it would never spill out again.

In 1925, the KKK had “as many as 4 million members,” a number which shrank dramatically following the civil rights movement. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates the group at 4,000-5,000 members today.

Of course, I still think the number of members is about 4-5 thousand more than I’d hope to see in my country – but that membership become even more disturbing when you consider that there are normative social pressures likely to prevent people from expressing their believes.

That is, our country is full of closeted racists.

Racists who aren’t closeted any more.

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that 74% of South Carolina Republican primary voters favor “temporarily barring Muslims who are not citizens from entering the United States.”

Furthermore, a recent poll by Public Policy Polling found that in addition to barring Muslims, “31% [of Trump supporters] would support a ban on homosexuals entering the United States as well, something no more than 17% of anyone else’s voters think is a good idea.”

Again, 0% would be a better figure here.

The New York Times also reports that, “Nearly 20 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters disagreed with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in the Southern states during the Civil War.”

This is profoundly disturbing.

I’d almost prefer to blame this all on Donald Trump. If we can only stop him from winning the Presidency, then all our racial problems will be solved.

But here’s the thing: Trump is the symptom, not the disease.

A significant number – a significant number – of white Americans seem ready to re-don their white robes. Americans who otherwise are not entirely unlike myself.

I find that terrifying, and I’m hardly the most at risk.

It is not enough to wave our hands, to hope that the Republican establishment comes through with blocking a Trump nomination. We have to recognize that there is a growing racist sentiment – or, perhaps, a growing willingness to express that sentiment.

My greatest concern is not that Trump will be elected – it’s that even after he is eventually defeated, this profoundly, openly racist faction of Americans will continue to grow.

Dynamics of Online Social Interactions

Posted on February 24, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

I had the opportunity today to hear from Chenhao Tan, a Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science at Cornell University who is looking at the dynamics of online social interactions.

In particular, Tan has done a great deal of work around predicting retweet rates for Twitter messages. That is, given two tweets by the same author on the same topic, can you predict which one will be retweeted more?

Interestingly, such pairs of tweets naturally occur frequently on Twitter. For one 2014 study, Tan was able to identify 11,000 pairs of author and topic controlled tweets with different retweet rates.

Through a computational model comparing words used as well as a number of custom features, such as the “informativeness” of a given tweet, Tan was able to build model which could correctly identify which tweet was more popular.

He even created a fun tool that allows you to input your own tweet text to compare which is more likely to be retweeted more.

From all this Twitter data, Tan was also able to compare the language of “successful” tweets to the tweets drawn from Twitter as a whole; as well as compare how these tweets fit into a given poster’s tone.

Interestingly, Tan found that the best strategy is to “be like the community, be like yourself.” That is – the most successful tweets were not notably divergent from Twitter norms and tended to be in line with the personal style of the original poster.

Tan interpreted this as a positive finding, indicating that a user doesn’t need to do something special in order to “stand out.” But, such a result to also point to Twitter as an insular community – unable to amplify messages which don’t fit the dominant norm.

And this leads to one of Tan’s broader research questions. Studies like his work around Twitter look at micro-level data; examining words and exploring how individual’s minds are changed. But, as Tan pointed out, the work of studying online communities can also be explored from a broader, macro level: what do healthy, online environments look like and how are they maintained?

There is more work to be done on both of these questions, but Tan’s work an intriguing start.

Mimicking Deliberation

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

In 1950, pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing described an “imitation game” which has since come to be known as the Turing Test. The test is a game played between three agents: two humans and a computer. Human 1 asks a series of questions; human 2 and the computer respond.

The game: human 1 seeks to correctly identify the human respondent while human 2 and the computer both try to be identified as human.

Turing describes this test in order to answer the question: can machines think?

The game, he argues, can empirically replace the posed philosophical question. A computer which could successfully be regularly be identified as human based on its command of language would indeed “think” in all practical meanings of the word.

Turing goes on to address the many philosophical, theological, and mathematical objections to his argument – but that is beyond the scope of what I want to write about today.

Regardless of the test’s indication for sentience, it quickly became a sort of gold standard in natural language processing – could we, in fact, build a computer clever enough to win this game?

Winning the game, of course, requires a detailed and nuanced grasp of language. What orders are properly appropriate for words? What elements of a question ought a respondent repeat? How do you introduce new topics or casually refer to past topics? How do you interact naturally, gracefully engaging with your interlocutor?

Let’s not pretend that I’ve fully mastered such social skills.

In this way, designing a Turing-successful machine can be seen as a mirror of ideal speaking. The winner of the Turing game, human or machine, will ultimately be the player who responds most properly – accepting some a nuanced definition of “proper” which incorporates human imperfection.

This makes me wonder – what would a Turing Test look like specifically in the context of political deliberation? That is, how would you program ideal dialogue?

Of course, the definition of ideal dialogue itself is much contested – should each speaker have an exactly measured amount of time? Should turn-taking be intentionally delineated or occur naturally? Must a group come to consensus and make a collective decision? Must there be an absence of conflict or is disagreement a positive signal that differing views are being justly considered?

These questions are richly considered in the deliberation literature, but it takes on a different aspect somehow in the context of the Turing Test.

Part of what makes deliberative norms so tricky is that people are, indeed, so different. A positive, safe, productive environment for one person may make another feel silenced. There are intersecting layers of power and privilege which are impossible to disambiguate.

But programming a computer to deliberate is different. A machine enters a dialogue naively – it has no history, no sense of power nor experience of oppression. It is the perfect blank slate upon which an idealized dialogue model could be placed.

This question is important because when trying to conceive of ideal dialogue run the risk of making a dangerous misstep. In the days when educated white men were the only ones allowed to participate in political dialogue, ideal dialogue was easier. People may have held different views, but they came to the conversation with generally equal levels of power and with similar experiences.

In trying to broaden the definition of ideal dialogue to incorporate the experiences of others who do not fit that mold, we run the risk of considering this “other” as a problematizing force. If we could just make women more like men; if we could make people of color “act white,” then the challenges of diverse deliberation would disappear.

No one would intentionally articulate this view, of course, but there’s a certain subversive stickiness to it which has a way of creeping in to certain models of dialogue. A quiet, underlying assumption that “white” is the norm and all else must change to accommodate that.

Setting out to program a computer changes all that. It’s a dramatic shift of context which belies all norms.

Frankly, I hardly know what an ideal dialogue machine might look like, but – it seems a question worth considering.

Remembering Scalia

Posted on February 16, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

When I first heard that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had died I thought I must have misread. A Supreme Court justice passing away unexpectedly on the eve of a particularly volatile Presidential election cycle?

That’s the stuff Aaron Sorkin dramas are made of. Not real life.

This election cycle would make a great Aaron Sorkin drama.

After news of his death, it didn’t take long for the political pageantry to start. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell quickly announced that the next president should appoint Justice Scalia’s replacement.

Supreme Court sessions typically run October – June, so delaying an appointment until after the start of 2017 would almost certainly mean not having a ninth Justice confirmed until the end of the next session.

Of course, President Obama was also quick to act, parrying McConnell’s announcement with his own declaration: I plan to fulfill my constitutional responsibilities to nominate a successor in due time.

If this is an Aaron Sorkin drama, perhaps we can get Edward James Olmos on the bench.

But, political posturing aside, the loss of this conservative giant has raised intriguing questions about the rule of law in a polarized nation and collegiality across political lines.

Justice Scalia had a notoriously positive friendship with liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg – so much so that there’s apparently a comic opera about it.

They disagreed ardently, fervently, irrevocably, yet still they found space to genuinely get along.

Ginsburg once explained this friendship, saying, “As annoyed as you might be about his zinging dissent, he’s so utterly charming, so amusing, so sometimes outrageous, you can’t help but say, ‘I’m glad that he’s my friend or he’s my colleague.’ ”

I once has the pleasure of hearing Justice Scalia speak. I utterly disagree with nearly all his opinions, yet I was struck by – what I can only describe as intellectual charisma. He was so bombastic in his beliefs yet well-reasoned in his arguments, it was hard not to pay him some measure of respect.

At the end of his talk, he took questions from the floor. I saw student after student get up with well-prepared questions and commentary ready. Scalia handily took each and every one of them down.

Not through the artful dodging that we’ve grown familiar seeing from politicians, but with clever, sharpened responses and wit. He out-argued them all.

I imagine that arguing with him would be like arguing with Socrates: I myself might be likely to conclude simply stammering, “well, you’re wrong and your stupid,” yet the opportunity to debate might be worthy in itself.

Ginsburg certainly seemed to think so. Possessed, I imagine, with equal skills of argument and rhetoric, Ginsburg once remarked of Scalia:

“My opinion is ever so much better because of his stinging dissent.”

Civic Engagement and Custodianship

Posted on February 10, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

I attended an interesting discussion today with Dan O’Brien, Northeastern Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, who also directs the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI).

BARI has collected numerous datasets related to Boston: 311 calls and 911 calls; event listings and ticket sales from ArtsBoston, property tax assessment records, data on bicycle accidents, and more. You can even access the data online here: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/BARI.

O’Brien discussed a number of projects he was interested in exploring with his work, but I was most struck by his work using data from 311 – Boston’s hotline for requesting city services – as an indicator of civic engagement.

Through the 311 system a person might notify the city of a burnt-out street lamp, a pothole, or any number of other issues.

This creates a dataset which can measure what O’Brien calls custodianship – essentially citizen actions to improve or repair a community good.

This civic indicator has typically been challenging to measure. As O’Brien notes in a 2013 paper,” custodianship entails the co-incidence of an ‘issue’ and someone who moves to address it. Although some such events might be regular, like an individual who sweeps the front walk daily, they will typically be rare.”

However, 311 data are starting to change that, with the added benefit that – at least in Boston – users register to use the system, making it possible to “aggregate cases for each registered user, permitting analyses that examine and compare patterns of custodianship across individuals.”

In his work so far, O’Brien has found that custodianship through the 311 system is “a rare act” – most users only reported 1-2 cases within the 15-month window. Of course, the 311 system only captures some portion of “custodial acts,” so it’s entirely possible that a low frequency of reports does not indicate low custodianship.

(Also possible: Boston is perfect and few requests for improvement are needed.)

Perhaps most interestingly, O’Brien has found that “Most individuals take responsibility for a narrow geographical range surrounding their homes.” This could be a simple indicator that people are more likely to see a problem in an area the frequent, but it could also indicate that people feel more custodianship over their immediate neighborhood.

This work is just the beginning of a really interesting exploration of the relationship between civic engagement, custodianship, and 311 calls, but with cities’ growing interest in collecting resident data, there will certainly be more great work to come.

Honoring Dr. King

Posted on January 19, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

Every year, the great Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is commemorated in communities around the country. Officials gather to emphasize the importance of diversity. People participate in service days to help their fellow man. Quotes from the venerable Dr. King can be found everywhere.

I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

It is all very beautiful, meaningful, and inspirational.

There’s just one problem: it’s all just a little too nice. A little too practiced. A little too…superficial.

Particularly among the white community, Martin Luther King Day is too often a day of self-praise and hollow gestures towards justice. As if we can cram all our care into one day and thoughtlessly continue with microaggressions the next. It’s okay cause I celebrated Dr. King. I proved I am not a racist.

Too often in the white community we fail to truly grapple with the complex legacy of Dr. King and the dark history of racism in this country. We share inspirational quotes about love and brotherhood, while glibly glossing over King’s valid and harsh critiques of white privilege.

Rather than praise the great man that was, Martin Luther King Day should be an opportunity for critique and introspection. An opportunity to truly ask ourselves, which side are we on?

Consider Dr. King’s brilliant Letter from a Birmingham Jail (I especially recommend listening to the audio version here.)

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?”…Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

As King addresses the criticism of his own actions, it’s easy to hear the critiques of today’s activism. It is too untimely. It is too disruptive. Too aggressive.

As we find these same arguments slipping from our mouths, we’d do well to remember this as the popular white response Dr. King received. King goes on:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

To truly honor the legacy of Dr. King, those of us in the white community should reflect on his life not with platitudes about justice, but with a critical eye to our own role in the current struggle for social justice. Despite our good intentions, are we indeed a white moderate, standing on the sidelines of change?

Discomfort and Civility on College Campuses

Posted on January 15, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

There seem to be incongruous concerns growing around many college campuses.

On the one hand, young people are accused of being fragile and coddled, too concerned with creating an artificial, shallow, ‘politically correct’ environment. At the same time, there are increasing calls for civility in response to student complaints.

The dance becoming familiar: something happens, students complain, the university administration calls for civility while the those watching from the outside throw up their hands at the coddled youth of today.

Why can’t they just calm down?

Let’s discuss this civilly.

I call these concerns incongruous because, while sounding like a call for moderation, calling for civility is essentially calling for a maintenance of the status quo. It’s a polite way of saying, you are wrong to be concerned.

Nobody calls for civility when outrage is considered to be well-founded.

As Audre Lourde says in her brilliant 1981 speech The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism: “Mainstream communication wants racism to be accepted as an immutable given in the fabric of your existence, like evening time or the common cold.”

Student protests are a disruption to that fabric. Favoring an absence of controversy, most administrations respond with level-head calls for civility. They hold community dialogues where only those who agree with them show up. The others have already written off the process.

Well-meaning administers say and do all the polite things, baffled by students’ outrage and anger.

Meanwhile, students see inaction and platitudes; calls for civility when any reasonable person would be up in arms. Students are as confounded by administration placidity as administrators are of students’ anger.

As Lourde describes, “I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger.” Our students cannot hide their anger.

Yet, civility and politeness are the prevailing norms in proper society. Perhaps it is only natural to expect proper students to conform to these norms.

There is a study I heard awhile ago – the most homogenous school districts give themselves the highest measures on discussing issues of diversity.

Diversity is easy to discuss when people are mostly the same.

It’s the places where there is true diversity, where people come from a wide variety of backgrounds – it is these places where topics of diversity are most difficult to tackle.

A risk-adverse administrator would be wise to prefer a homogenous community. With, perhaps, a splash of difference to benefit the mainstream and fulfill any principles of diversity.

This is the model that students object to. Students of color aren’t “diversity” intended to educate their white peers. And yet their anger is often dismissed as the sensitive ravings of over-privileged youth.

It is, I think, this aversion to risk, this aversion to discomfort, which is most problematic as we collectively strive towards social justice. Young people are told that they are wrong to demand safe spaces on campus, yet administrators, too, are guilty of seeking the outcome that most suits their needs.

And that just makes students even more angry.

Horse Races and Political Journalism

Posted on January 14, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

The advancement of the calendar year has brought a whole new energy to political campaign coverage. The Iowa Caucus is just over two weeks away, with the New Hampshire primary a week and a half after that.

Political journalism is aflutter with polling data and predictions – Cruz is expected to win the Iowa primary, and the second spot seems locked down as well. But other republicans vying for the nomination have the chance to make waves with a surprise third place finish.

“‘Exceeds expectations’ is the best headline a candidate can hope for coming out of Iowa,” a reporter shared in a recent NPR Political podcast while discussing what he referred to as the “Iowa Tango.”

The dance is not dissimilar on the democratic side – Clinton is expected to win Iowa, but Sanders has been slowly chipping away at her lead. An “exceeds expectations” in Iowa – and certainly a win – could lead to a big bump for the Sanders campaign.

This is all very exciting.

For those of us who are political junkies, presidential horse race coverage can be exhilarating. It’s like a (nerdy) action movie where you never know what’s going to happen next, where you’re on the edge of your seat because there’s no guarantee of a (subjectively) happy ending.

This sort of coverage is engaging for a certain segment of the electorate, but is it good journalism?

In We are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, my former colleague Peter Levine illustrates an alternative model:

An important example was the decision of the Charlotte Observer to dispense with horse race campaign coverage, that is, stories about how the campaigns were trying to win the election. Instead, the Observer convened representative citizens to choose issues for reporters to investigate and to draw questions that the candidates were asked to answer on the pages of the newspaper.

Rather than asking “who will win the election?” this type of political coverage seeks to answer “who should win the election?”

One could argue that this isn’t an appropriate question for a news outlet to ask. If an ostensibly fair and balanced news outlet was actually biased in a particular candidate’s favor, for example, that would indeed go against the democratic process.

Yet we already know that horse race coverage can be prone to bias – resulting in early or inaccurate calls of elections while voting is still taking place.

Similarly, while certainly prone to bias, the question of who should win is not inherently biased. In the example above the Charlotte Observer answered the question not with their own editorial views, but through a combination of citizen voice and candidate response.

This is hardly the only model for political coverage addressing who should win. For example, outlets could put more emphasis on political investigative journalism – scrutinizing candidate policies for likely impact and outcome. There is certainly some of this already, but it is absent from some outlets while others treat such long-form critiques as secondary to the quick news of poll numbers.

Arguably here we have a market issue – perhaps journalists want to provide this sort of thoughtful analysis, but lack the reader interest to pursue it.

Walter Lippmann – a journalist and WWI propagandist – would certainly agree with that assessment. “The Public” as a faceless, unidentified herd, will always be too busy with other things to invest real time and thought into a deep understanding of political issues.

As Lippmann describes in his 1925, The Phantom Public:

For when private man has lived through the romantic age in politics and is no longer moved by the stale echoes of its hot cries, when he is sober and unimpressed…You cannot move him then with good straight talk about service and civic duty, nor by waving a flag in his face, nor by sending a boy scout after him to make him vote.

To the extent that it is popular, horse race coverage succeeds because it is sexy and exciting. There are some people who have the interest and energy to read more provocative thought pieces on politics, but their numbers are not significant enough to affect so-called “public opinion.”

Lippmann does not fault the generic masses for putting their attention towards other things – it is only natural to have more interest and awareness in those topics which effect you more profoundly.

There is an important and subtle distinction here – just because the unnamed masses have no interest in politics does not mean that all people do not have an interest in politics. In one of my favorite Lippmann quotes, he writes that “The public must be put in its place…so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd.”

Lippmann does not mean to argue for a technocratic society in which the voices of the common people are excluded. Rather, he highlights an aggregation problem – individual voices are important, while the collective voice of “the Public” – while easiest to hear – is nonsense.

This is, perhaps, what is most attractive about a model such as that used by the Charlotte Observer. Individual voices shaped the process, but on a scale that didn’t aggregate to meaninglessness.

A similar strategy can be seen in work such as that by the Oregon Citizen’s Initiative Review. A the review regularly gathers “a panel of randomly-selected and demographically-balanced voters…from across the state to fairly evaluate a ballot measure.” Each panel hears professional testimony about the measure and participates in several days of dialogue before produce a statement “highlighting the most important findings about the measure” which is then included in the official voter pamphlet.

This type of approach provides a balance between engaging diverse citizen voices and the infeasiblity of having every single person participate in such a process.

The Charlotte Observer provides one example of how this balance might be found in political journalism, but there have been so few attempts it’s impossible to know what’s best. It’s an area that’s desperate for greater innovation, for finding new ways to cover politics and new ways to think about journalist’s and citizen roles in politics.

Civic Studies

An intellectual community of researchers and practitioners dedicated to building the emerging field of civic studies

Category Archives: Citizens & Civil Society