teaching Civic Studies in Kyiv

Posted on June 20, 2025 by Peter

This reflection is originally published on From Many, We the Charles F. Kettering Foundation blog series that highlights the insights of thought leaders dedicated to the idea of inclusive democracy.

I went to Kyiv, Ukraine, June 2–7, 2025, to offer a short course on Civic Studies at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE).

I wanted to do something useful in Ukraine. Ukrainians earned their democracy by accomplishing massive nonviolent popular revolutions in 2004–2005 and 2013–2014. Their republic stands as a rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has tried to destroy it for more than a decade. In addition to wanting to express solidarity, I also wanted to learn from them and to understand more about civil society in the context of war.

On the Ground in Kyiv

As I traveled toward Kyiv, the tempo of the conflict was increasing. First, the Russians intensified strikes on civilian targets. Then Ukrainian special forces achieved a remarkable attack on Russian strategic bombers, which form part of the Russian nuclear triad. President Putin swore to retaliate—a threat that President Trump repeated without any criticism. Some retaliation then unfolded while I was in Kyiv, although Putin may still be looking for ways to do far worse. The Thursday of my visit was the second-most intense night of strikes on Ukrainian civilians in the war to that date.

I was safe, in part because my hotel had a massive, three-story underground garage. From the bottom level, with heavy summertime HVAC running, I couldn’t even hear the strikes on our district, Solom?yan?sky, or the Ukrainian air defenses. I then left Kyiv after the planned five days, which is a blink of an eye compared to the experience of living with this war for three years so far. Most Ukrainians seem resigned to an indefinite future of the same.

Air raid alerts sound several times every day. Mostly, an alert does not result in an actual attack. The Russians send up a MiG (military aircraft) to cause an air alert and disrupt everyone’s day. We are all familiar with disruptions, but it is different to face a hostile state that is trying to maximize inconvenience for years on end. The Russians choose the times and methods of their attacks for that purpose. My class had to relocate to a bomb shelter while we were doing our introductions on the first day and when the participants were offering their final reflections at the very end. Of course, this was a coincidence (Putin did not know or care about my course), but the point is that anything one tries to accomplish is subject to disruption.

Often, the raids are real. The Russians deploy swarms of Iranian shahed drones that buzz around the city, threatening civilian targets. I am told that they sound like Vespa scooters. Most Ukrainians do not have deep basements under their homes—some say they have no shelter at all. So, they listen to the drones’ buzz and the Ukrainian air defenses.

At a certain point, the shaheds crash into apartment buildings, power infrastructure, schools, or any targets that the Russians choose. Meanwhile, MiGs are launching cruise missiles from hundreds of miles away. The popular Telegram channels (with automatic English translation) are used by civilians to report drones or missiles flying overhead. “Chernihiv, heading south!” “The cruise missile is turning west!”

Ukrainian civilians face constant choices: Go to the subway station or wait this one out? Try to move to an apartment on a lower floor? Try to emigrate? And many have relatives on the frontlines.

They report handling stress in various ways. One confident young man told me that he had thought he was fine until his first night on a trip to Poland, when there was a thunderstorm and he found himself trembling and weeping. His guard was finally down. A clinical psychology professor told me that PTSD is a misnomer, because the trauma is not “post.”

I wanted to understand whether such a violent context would require changes in the course material that I usually present.

The Course

With colleagues in the United States and overseas, I have developed a syllabus for an introductory course in Civic Studies and have offered it many times before in several countries. Indeed, I had helped to lead a version in Ukraine in 2015.

I hoped that the course would be useful for Ukrainians who are active in their own civil society—or who want to act—and who struggle with specific challenges, such as the disruptions of war, endemic corruption, and the difficulty of holding robust public debates in full view of a foreign enemy. I was interested in whether Ukrainian civic leaders had changed their thinking since the full-scale invasion of 2022.

Although my course was open to undergraduates, the participants turned out to be professionals who work for Ukrainian nonprofit organizations, plus some entrepreneurs. At least three participants had free time for studying civics because they had recently lost jobs that had been funded by USAID.

In essence, the course addresses three questions that arise for anyone who wants to preserve or improve society.

First are questions of collective action: What kinds of rules and norms help groups to coordinate individuals’ action so that they can accomplish goals together?
Second are questions of dialogue and deliberation: How should people discuss disagreements about values and make wise decisions together?
And third are questions of exclusion. When institutions (or even whole populations) refuse to collaborate or deliberate with us, how can we compel them to engage constructively without using violence? This last topic turns our attention toward nonviolent social movements.

Our curriculum represents a respectful challenge to definitions of “civic education” that emphasize the national government and its constitution. In Civic Studies, we treat any sovereign republic as one venue among many for deliberation and collective action, and we see citizens as people who may choose to belong to many overlapping groups at various scales.

For the most part, my course unfolded as usual. Near the end, at least two participants wanted me to say how different I had found them from the other people I had taught in other countries. My honest answer was that they were not too different. Active participants in civil society everywhere seem to have generally similar concerns and perspectives.

Perhaps this group was a bit less adversarial than the participants in my previous courses. In the last segment, I always give students instructions for organizing an advocacy effort, and I play the “target” of their advocacy. This group asked me to role-play the chair of the board of KSE. They then chose to present me with a rather good idea for a new program. I do not know whether their gentleness toward a hypothetical authority-figure was representative of Ukrainian civil society, but I found it unusual.

In general, my experience in Kyiv reinforced my confidence in the Civic Studies curriculum, but it did challenge me in some valuable ways.

For one thing, the curriculum presumes that the public sphere should be free and vibrant, full of debate about conflicting values. On the surface, Ukraine is not having a very robust, public debate about existential questions, such as whether it would be worth a vast sacrifice to try to regain occupied territories or whether Vladimir Zelensky is the best available leader.

One explanation is that the answers are clear; the government enjoys a broad consensus. Another explanation is that people are voluntarily keeping diverse opinions to themselves because debating and disagreeing feel wrong; it undermines solidarity. Particularly while the government negotiates with a foreign enemy, it may seem wiser to leave such matters to leaders and not to publicly discuss what Ukrainians would be willing to concede. (After all, the Russians could watch the debate.) Finally, to some extent, the Zelensky government may discourage dissent, not through censorship and violence but by dominating the Parliament and media.

I did not press the class to tell me what they thought about the quality of their national debate because the question did not feel sufficiently respectful in the moment. I am still pondering the appropriate role of debate when a nation is under attack.

Another assumption of the Civic Studies curriculum is the value of nonviolent civil resistance, something that Ukrainians experienced in 2004–2005 and 2013–2014. I can testify that it is difficult to talk about nonviolence in wartime. When I emerged from the shelter on Friday morning, I was not exactly in the mood for reconciliation with Russians.

That said, participants seemed open to my point that their relationships to their own fellow citizens and to Ukrainian institutions must almost always be nonviolent, and therefore it is important to learn nonviolent methods for social change.

Finally, I noticed that concepts of patriotism and honor were more prominent in my own mind than usual. Patriotism is often a central value in civic education curricula that are required around the world, including in the US. In contrast, the ideal of patriotism is less prominent in Civic Studies because the nation-state itself is not our focus. In fact, patriotism can rationalize unjust favoritism for people who hold legal citizenship while excluding others.

Nevertheless, I believe that American patriotism was my most basic motivation for going to Ukraine (along with curiosity about what Ukrainians would tell me). I consider our government’s current betrayal of Ukraine to be a stain on our honor. I feel dishonored because I love my country. If I lacked patriotism, then this shame would not attach to me. It was a privilege and a source of satisfaction to be able to tell Ukrainians that many Americans stand by them.

Peter Levine, a Kettering Foundation board member, is the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship and Public Service in Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life and the director of Tufts’ Civic Studies Program. He most recent book is What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life.

from Ukraine (1)

Posted on June 2, 2025 by Peter

I am aboard a train from Warsaw to Kyiv, well into Ukrainian territory now. I hope to write something of substance about my week in this country, but my main reflections should wait until I have listened and learned and found the right voice.

I don’t want to pretend to any real knowledge based on a few days in a large country where I cannot even fluently decode the alphabet, let alone study the range of opinion. (I have been here three times before, but always as a brief and superficial observer, which will be the case again this week.)

And I want to find a voice than it not about me, because more than 35 million people live here all the time. Everyone else on this train holds a Ukrainian passport; I saw the whole stack in the arms of the border guard. The people who spend months and years in a war deserve attention, not the guy with the dark-blue passport who can leave when he wants.

I have come in solidarity. That is not a big thing to do; it is a small thing. But it is not nothing, and it seems important right now not to do nothing. Solidarity, plus a desire to learn from activists here, explains my visit.

For the moment, I will just share that a rail journey from Warsaw via Chelm to Kyiv seems haunted. It’s a journey from the site of the Warsaw ghetto, via a town where 60 Jews out of 15,000 survived, to the site of Babi Yar. Our path cuts through the Pale of Settlement, albeit perhaps south of its middle and south of the part of Belarus from which my paternal ancestors escaped in the early 1900s. Trains have rolled back and forth in this region with cargoes of people for mass murder and with soldiers to kill and be killed. (We are currently stopped in Kovel, whose large Jewish community was wiped out, for the most part on the single day of June 28, 1941).

The train that I am riding must have already served the Soviet Union, and the vast majority of the passengers today are women and small children—presumably because most Ukrainian men are not allowed to exit. As we move past farms and through birch-sprinkled woods, the past seems very close.

Where have lower-educated voters moved right? (a look at 102 countries over 35 years)

Posted on November 30, 2024 by Peter

I believe that left parties should draw their votes from lower on the socio-economic hierarchy, so that they can compete by offering more governmental support. Right parties should draw their votes from the upper end, so that they can compete by promising economic growth. This debate and competition is healthy.

In contrast, when left parties draw from the top of the social order, they tend to offer performative or symbolic policies, while the right promises low-SES voters some version of ethnonationalism. This debate is unhealthy because it blocks more effective and fair social policies, and it sets the right on a path whose terminus can be fascism.

Education is a marker of social class. We saw a social class inversion in the US 2024 election, with Harris getting 56% of college graduates and Trump getting 56% of non-college-educated adults.

Nowadays, we are used to assuming that Republicans have an advantage in the Electoral College because they are dominant in the states with the lowest percentages of college gradates, while Democrats win easily in the most educated states. But the opposite should be true.

I am fully aware that race is involved in the USA. Recently, less-educated white voters have formed the Republican base, whereas voters of color have preferred Democrats, regardless of their social class. However, in 2024, we saw a significant shift of low-education voters of color toward Trump.

Besides, race plays different roles in various countries, but many countries display a trend of lower-educated people preferring the right and moving in that direction .

The World Values Survey has periodically surveyed populations in 102 countries since 1989, for a total sample of almost half a million individuals in the dataset that I used for this post. The WVS asks most respondents to place themselves on a left-right spectrum, and the global mean is somewhat to the right of the middle. It also asks people their education level. For the entire sample, the correlation between these two variables is slightly negative and statistically significant (-.047**). In about two-thirds of sampled countries, the correlation is negative. This pattern is upside-down, suggesting the people with more education tilt mildly to the left around the world.

However, considering the heterogeneity of the countries and years in this sample (from Switzerland in 1989 to India in 2023), it is important to break things down.

The graph with this post shows the correlations for wealthy countries with democratic elections: the EU countries, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. A positive score indicates that people lower on the educational spectrum are more likely to vote left. The trend is slightly downward, meaning that the highest-educated have moved a bit left (and the lowest have moved right).

Among the countries that have recently demonstrated a class reversal (with the lower classes voting right) are Australia, Canada, Greece, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, the UK and the USA. Czechia and Slovakia are the main exceptions. In Japan and South Korea, less educated people have consistently favored the right to a small degree.

By contrast, for a sample of Latin American and Caribbean countries, the trend has generally been toward what I consider the desirable pattern, with lower-educated people increasingly voting left. The mean for all voters in this region is distinctly left of center.

In a cluster of countries that were part of the Warsaw Pact and are not now members of the EU, the trend is flat. Interestingly, in these countries, the mean voter is on the right.

Finally, the WVS surveys in some countries from the Global South–from Bangladesh to Zimbabwe-but these countries do not seem representative of the whole hemisphere. For what it’s worth, the trend for this sample is just slightly upward, and the results vary a great deal among countries.

I am still in the “deliverism” camp, believing that left parties have not delivered sufficient tangible benefits to less advantaged voters since the 1990s. (One explanation could be their dependence on affluent voters, who do not really want them to do much.) Achieving more tangible change could turn things right-side-up again.

However, it should give us pause that the Biden Administration actually spent trillions of dollars in ways that will benefit working-class Americans, yet Trump won and drew an increasing proportion of lower-educated voters of color. The “deliverist” thesis now depends on the premise that Biden-Harris had too little time and suffered from post-COVID inflation.

Meanwhile, if your premise is that US working-class voters moved right due to (increasing?) racism and sexism, you need an explanation of similar trends in many countries, including some without substantial ethnic minorities.

The post Where have lower-educated voters moved right? (a look at 102 countries over 35 years) appeared first on Peter Levine.

class inversion in France

Posted on July 18, 2024 by Peter

After the 2022 French election, I wrote:

The left should represent the lower-income half of the population; the right should represent the top half. When that happens, the left will generally advocate government spending and regulation. Such policies may or may not be wise, but they can be changed if they fail and prove unpopular. Meanwhile, the right will advocate less government, which (again) may or may not be desirable but will not destroy the constitutional order. After all, limited government is a self-limiting political objective.

When the class-distribution turns upside down, the left will no longer advocate impressive social reforms, because its base will be privileged. And the right will no longer favor limited government, because tax cuts don’t help the poor much. The right will instead embrace government activism in the interests of traditional national, racial or religious hierarchies. The left will frustrate change, while the right–now eager to use the government for its objectives–will become genuinely dangerous.

I wrote this as a US citizen, concerned that the Democratic Party relies on upper-income liberals while the GOP is increasingly based in the working class. But the pattern is seen internationally, which should influence how we seek to explain it.

At that time, I noted that the French electorate had turned upside-down. The right-wing far surpassed the center and the left among voters from the lowest occupational class, while the top stratum of the society favored the center or the left.

The same pattern was not clear in Britain’s recent election, where Labour performed about as well across the social spectrum (although the Tories did best among workers). However, the inversion did repeat in last week’s French election, as shown in the graphic with this post.

The data come from IPSOS. The occupational categories, in declining order of prestige, are: “cadre,” “profession intermédiaire,” “employé,” and “ouvrier.” (See more here.) The parties, in order from left to right, are the leftist New Popular Front, Macron’s “Ensemble,” the Gaullist Republicans, and the rightwing National Rally.

The inversion is most clearly illustrated by a comparison between Ensemble and the National Rally. Macron drew from the top; the right-wing party, from the bottom. But the supposedly left-wing New Popular Front performed worst among workers (ouvriers), and was the top choice of the managerial class (cadres).

IPSOS also asked about self-described class, educational attainment, and economic circumstances. The patterns are the same as shown in my graphic, but I thought that occupation would be the most reliable measure. (Reports of class identity and economic circumstances can be affected by people’s political views, rather than the reverse; but IPSOS derives its occupational categories from people’s actual jobs.)

In the USA, race is certainly relevant. The working-class Americans who have shifted right are mostly (but not exclusively) white. This may also be the case in other countries, but it is important not to assume that race and racism explain the class inversion without looking more closely at the data from the country. Unfortunately, per French law, voters cannot be asked about their race/ethnicity. However, in the IPSOS poll, just 16 percent of Catholics, versus 34 percent of members of other religions, voted for the left, and the “other” category may pick up a fair proportion of immigrants. This may suggest that some French citizens who identify as white and Catholic are voting for the right on cultural/national grounds, but that explanation is not clear from these data.

The post class inversion in France appeared first on Peter Levine.

UK election results by social class

Posted on July 5, 2024 by Peter

One of my obsessions is the social-class inversion that has been visible in several countries in the 21st century, in which parties of the left draw their strongest support from highly educated, “professional” voters and those on the right appeal best to the working class. Under those circumstances, left parties will block bold economic initiatives (which would cost their voters), and right parties may offer ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism, since libertarian economic policies have little relevance to workers. This is potentially a road to fascism.

The full exit polls from yesterday's UK election do not seem to be available yet (I assume they are still embargoed for the media companies that subscribe to Ipsos' service), so I have used Ipsos' final pre-election survey as a rough substitute. The interactive graphic above lets you see each party's support by social class.

The image above this post simplifies matters by grouping the Tories and Reform as "all right," and Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and the Scottish and Welsh nationalists as "all left."

You can see evidence here of a class inversion, but it is not as dramatic as in some 21st century elections. The Reform and Green parties illustrate the pattern best, drawing their support (respectively) from the bottom and the top of the social class structure. The Conservatives perform best at the bottom, but only by a bit. In all, the right does considerably better among semi-skilled and unskilled workers than among managers and professionals, but Labour holds its own across all categories, blurring the pattern.

I would argue that Labour must pursue policies that benefit the lowest social class category, not only for social justice but also to reverse the class inversion that threatens democracy itself.

The post UK election results by social class appeared first on Peter Levine.

setbacks for authoritarianism?

Posted on June 6, 2024 by Peter

It’s easy to imagine authoritarianism as a ratchet: a device that can be tightened but not loosened again.

An authoritarian leader and/or party wins an election, perhaps with a substantial base of authentic supporters. Instead of blatantly overturning the constitution in a “self-coup,” the government uses a whole range of available tools to discourage opposition and secure continued power. These tools include changing the electoral system (perhaps subtly), taking over the state media, raising the cost of private media, altering curricula and removing hostile educators, selectively investigating and prosecuting opponents, heavily surveilling private communications, channeling economic benefits to supporters and potential supporters, forming close partnerships with local oligarchs, shifting power from the legislature to the executive, governing by decree and executive action, packing the civil service and judiciary with friendly appointees, encouraging opponents to emigrate while selectively refusing entry visas to journalists and activists, banning overseas NGOs and funders, encouraging the police and security forces to use visible violence, and using rhetoric that links authoritarian means to popular ends, such as prosperity or religious or ethnic domination.

Authoritarians have so many tools and opportunities that it’s easy to predict a one-way path.

Nevertheless, the following parties and/or leaders who meet at least some of the previous description have suffered setbacks or outright losses: Trump in the USA (2020), Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro (2022), the Law and Justice Party in Poland (2023), Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan and the AKP (2024), and India’s Narendra Modi and the BJP (2024). I would add South Africa’s ANC (2024), although I would anticipate disagreement about that case.

It appears that “backsliding” is not a rigid and predictable process, any more than “transition to democracy” was (Cianetti & Hanley 2021). Looking at data from many countries, Brownlee & Miao find that a one-way journey toward fascism really was a pattern in the 1920s and 1930s, but at other times, there has a lot of movement in both directions, with a slight predominance of shifts away from authoritarianism (Brownlee & Miao 2022). Regimes that combine some elements of democracy, such as genuine elections, with authoritarian practices appear to be unstable, almost always teetering to one side or the other in time (Carothers 2018)

I think that civil societies are more resistant than we might fear. To put it more forcefully, it’s not so easy to boss people around.

An authoritarian party always takes over at the expense of rival political movements and would-be leaders, who have strong incentives to push back at an opportune time.

Authoritarian governments and their opponents continually innovate. Every tool of control sooner or later produces a technique for subversion. (Unfortunately, the opposite is also true: each form of resistance meets a new form of control.) One reason for waves of authoritarianism or democratization is that one side may temporarily lead in this competition, but then the other side catches up.

It is also difficult for any administration to remain popular for long. Unanticipated events–such as the current global bout of inflation–will turn people against a leader even if he doesn’t deserve the blame. Once a leader is unpopular, there are rewards to opposing him. It is risky to permit elections, even if they are subtly manipulated, but it is also hard to avoid them.

By the same token, defeating a would-be authoritarian doesn’t end the struggle, as illustrated by the USA today.

The post setbacks for authoritarianism? appeared first on Peter Levine.

Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

Posted on January 11, 2024 by Peter

Lea Ypi is a political theorist who has written a prize-winning memoir entitled Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History (Norton, 2021). You don’t have to be interested in political theory, philosophy–or any academic discipline–to enjoy and benefit from this book. It is an engrossing story about coming of age during an extraordinary time and in an unusual household composed of vivid characters. For the most part, the vantage point is that of a child or adolescent. The plot is compelling, and I don’t want to give that away. I was genuinely surprised by some of the twists.

It is, however, no secret that Ypi is now an influential leftwing public intellectual who was born in the extremely communist state of Albania and experienced the collapse of that regime when she was a young teenager. One might ask whether she is highly critical of capitalism today because of her formative experiences during a disastrous “transition” to a market economy. Likewise, one might ask whether other people have been anti-communist because they experienced Stalin, or Albania’s Enver Hoxha.

I think Ypi’s answer would be: Yes. Our “biographies” (a fraught word under the Albanian communist system) do shape what we think. Jailing or shooting potential critics was evil, but the Party was not foolish to distrust people whose formative experiences would lean them to anti-Communism. Our circumstances shape us.

The next question might be whether knowing that someone holds a view because of personal experiences invalidates that view. For example, should we discount Ypi’s current politics because she was influenced by extreme circumstances at a formative moment?

Here, her answer would be: No. Our fate is to live at specific times in history. The best we can do is to critically assess the world that we find and work with others to improve it. This is “politics,” in the best sense of that word. It is also “freedom.” To be free is to bring your individual experiences into a consequential public debate with other people who are different from you. That is dangerous or even impossible under a dictatorship, but it is also difficult in contexts like the contemporary European Union, where there is “no politics left, only policy” (p. 227).

If Ypi holds a general political/economic theory, it’s not in her memoir. In fact, she says that she was planning to write a “philosophical book about the overlapping ideas of freedom in the liberal and Socialist traditions” (which sounds like an attempted synthesis), but “when I started writing, ideas turned into people–the people who made me who I am.” She adds: “They loved and fought each other; they had different conceptions of themselves, and of their obligations. They were, as Marx writes, the product of social relations for which they were not responsible, but they still tried to rise above them” (p. 263).

This passage is about as abstract as this book gets. Otherwise, it is about specific people, including the narrator. But the whole memoir conveys the idea that freedom is “trying to rise above” current injustices while treating other human beings as responsible individuals with perspectives of their own.

The epigraph is a quotation from Rosa Luxemburg: “Human beings do not make history of their own free will. But they make history nevertheless.” Ypi vividly and empathetically depicts people who are not free–and who cannot see the truth objectively or independently–but who still strive to make the world better. That is her definition of freedom.

Henry Milner, Participant/Observer: An Unconventional Life in Politics and Academia

Posted on September 4, 2023 by Peter

On Labor Day, I very much enjoyed reading the memoir of my friend Henry Milner, entitled Participant/Observer.

Born in a refugee camp in Germany in 1946 to Polish-Jewish survivors, Henry grew up as a Baby Boomer in Montreal. As he navigated the turbulent waters of his time and place as both a political scientist and an activist, he became an Anglophone Quebecois nationalist, an expert proponent of Scandinavian social democracy, a liberal on social issues, and sometimes a critic of the Quebecois public sector unions to which he belonged. He has played significant roles that have put him in the “rooms where it happened,” notably as one of the most senior Anglophones in the leadership of the Parti Quebecois (PQ) during its heyday and as one of the key diplomats for that party in international social democratic circles.

I know and admire people–possibly readers of this blog post–who have deep commitments on all sides of these issues. Some would be more prone to take the unions’ side or less enthusiastic about the Swedish welfare state or more critical of Quebecois nationalism or less favorable to Anglophone involvement in that movement. I’m not qualified to defend Henry’s positions, but I think that any reader should appreciate his memoir as the story of a thoughtful and public-spirited person who has tried to exercise good judgment on difficult questions and has contributed effort as well as opinions. For instance, he sometimes made the English translations of politically sensitive PQ documents.

Milner raises general questions that are worth consideration. For example:

1/ Must organized labor clash with social democratic parties when labor represents a small minority of the workforce and is strongest in the public sector? (This is the situation in the USA now, as well as in Canada.) Milner argues that Scandinavian unions can advocate growth and modernization–shifting workers to new and different jobs–because they represent most of the population. In contrast, unions that represent small segments of the public become protective of the status quo and compete with disadvantaged people.

2/ Do participants in politics know things that political scientists cannot know? Is the reverse also true? In general, how should we think about the relationship between science and experience?

(I count five professions that claim expertise about politics: reporters, civil servants, lobbyists, political scientists, and politicians themselves. Do they all have valid insights? Can the methods of political science capture all the others’ perspectives if scholars study participants’ beliefs well?)

3/ How can democracies provide robust voluntary adult education for democracy without allowing it to degenerate into propaganda? I encountered Milner years ago as an expert on Scandinavian adult civic education and have only grown more supportive of that cause over time. We can’t rely on civic education for children and college students alone, since most citizens have long ago outgrown those phases. At times, Americans have adopted Scandinavian exports like Folks Schools and Study Circles. Americans contributed (with others, including Germans) to building a robust system of adult education in post-War West Germany (Levine 2023). Nevertheless, today we lack an impressive policy for adult civic education in the USA, and it’s hard to see how we could create one in the face of intense partisan polarization.

Overall, Milner’s trajectory has been from a socialist who was always deeply democratic to a democrat who seeks social equity, and from there to a proponent of civic education and electoral reform as bulwarks of democracy.

Source: P. Levine, “The Democratic Mission of Higher Education: A Review Essay.” Political Science Quarterly (2023). See also an overview of civic education in the USA and Germany; what does it mean that 130 million adult Americans lack literacy?; the Nordic model; etc.

decentralization and civic capacity in Ukraine

Posted on August 31, 2023 by Peter

Ukrainian friends have been telling me for a decade about the value of decentralization in their country. Some have even argued that it helped prepare Ukraine for an effective and motivated military defense.

A new paper by Arends, Brik, Herrmann and Roesel (2023) offers relevant quantitative evidence. The authors explain that, in “2014, the Parliament of Ukraine amended the budget code to entitle villages and cities which amalgamated voluntarily into larger local governments, so-called ‘territorial hromadas’ …. Hromadas therewith become independent from local branches of the national administration. The newly created local governments also qualified for a 60 percent share of the personal income tax collected within their jurisdiction.”

In 2015, the hromadas gained power over schools, libraries, hospitals and health centers, local roads, and fire and emergency services. In 2018, they were also given “ownership of formerly state-owned land within their jurisdiction.”

The process was popular and widespread. By 2020, “more than 10,000 Ukrainian villages, settlements and cities were amalgamated into 1470 new hromadas now enjoying considerable autonomy over local affairs.”

Arends et al show that areas with and without hromadas started with similar levels of trust in local and national government, but the ones that created hromadas saw substantial increases in trust for local (but not national) government. This empirical evidence is strongly suggestive that the reform caused trust to rise.

Here are a few reflections based on theory and studies from other countries.

First, I don’t read the paper as a general argument for decentralization, per se. Independent Ukraine had inherited a highly centralized system from the Soviet Union, and it was wise to moderate that by strengthening the local layer. The study does not imply that more power should necessarily be devolved to localities if they are already strong.

More important, I suspect, was the way the reform was designed. Contiguous communities were permitted to assemble themselves voluntarily into hromadas. This was a bottom-up process, requiring substantial agreement at the local level. One advantage was avoiding corruption: politicians and bureaucrats could not extract benefits by deciding which new local units to create or by conferring autonomy on favored local leaders. Another advantage was civic experience. Quite a few local stakeholders had to come together to negotiate and present each plan for a new hromada. They would later be able to use their network-ties, deliberative experience, and confidence for other purposes.

Second, trust in government is not intrinsically desirable. People should distrust bad governments. Some have argued that “trust” is not quite the right word for an attitude toward the state, which should rather inspire “confidence” if it functions well.

But we have survey data on trust, and the authors make good use of it to support a valuable empirical case. Still, the really interesting question is whether governance improved as a result of the reform. For example, did corruption fall? Trustful opinions may indicate improvement, because citizens are well placed to assess government, but I think the accuracy of their opinions deserves further attention.

At the same time, trust in government is often found to be a component of the construct labeled “social capital.” And social capital is a resource that communities can use to address problems–including corruption. But although trust in government is empirically a component of social capital (meaning that it correlates with the other components), it doesn’t suffice. It would be interesting to know whether Ukrainians in hromadas also developed other aspects of social capital, such as habits of participating in discussions and meetings and helping each other voluntarily.

Reference: Helge Arends, Tymofii Brik, Benedikt Herrmann, Felix Roesel,
Decentralization and trust in government: Quasi-experimental evidence from Ukraine,
Journal of Comparative Economics, 2023. See also: two approaches to social capital: Bourdieu vs. the American literature; social movements depend on social capital (but you can make your own); civilian resistance in Ukraine, revisited.

the Iran crisis and literature on nonviolent uprisings

Posted on October 11, 2022 by Peter

I wish I could follow the uprisings in Iran more closely and insightfully, but my background knowledge is limited and news coverage in English is scanty. I must admit that the regime’s victory over mass nonviolent protests in 2011-2012 made me pessimistic, especially since that turned out to be the first in a series of victories by repressive regimes. The global success rate for nonviolent social movements has fallen from near 70% in the 1990s to under 30% in the past decade, probably because authoritarian governments have improved their tactics.

That said, pessimism can be self-fulfilling. Turning trend-lines into predictions squelches agency and hope. Successful revolutionaries are not determinists. Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940, “The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action.” One never knows when masses of people will find inspiration in selected moments from the past and disrupt the patterns of recent history.

The literature on social movements and popular uprisings may offer some insights. That literature suggests that we should focus on certain recent developments in Iran.

The protests appear widespread, highly decentralized, and attractive to a diverse range of Iranians, including students, merchants, oil workers, and ethnic minority groups. In the literature, both the size and the pluralism of protests are related to their odds of success. (The “s” and “p” in my SPUD framework stand for those two factors.)

The movement appears capable of coordinating across a large country even though Iran has shut down the Internet and the protesters do not follow a few charismatic (and hence vulnerable) national leaders.

There are preliminary reports of some soldiers and police joining protests. Although “security force defection” has not occurred yet at substantial scale in Iran, it is a recognized phenomenon in popular uprisings. Chenoweth and Stephan (2011) found that nonviolent movements have been 46 times more likely to succeed when some members of the security forces defect. Anisin (2020) identifies “the size of the oppositional campaign (100,000+ participants)” as a common precondition of security force defection. One recent example was in neighboring Armenia in 2018.

There are also some preliminary reports of possible fissures within the regime, with (for instance) a “Hardline Chief Justice Call[ing] For ‘Dialogue With People’.” The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is said to be “gravely ill,” and his office may represent a power vacuum.

I believe that whether to use violence is a matter of judgment that depends on the circumstances, yet movements generally benefit by imposing restraints on their own behavior. Unrestrained tactics tend to escalate in ways that can damage or split a movement. Refraining from physical violence against human targets–or refusing to use live ammunition–can be bright lines that prevent such escalation. So far, the Iranian protesters seem to be using nonviolence as a self-imposed restraint.

By the way, a movement can be nonviolent despite scattered exceptions. Indeed, a mass movement that is predominantly nonviolent can benefit from the pressure imposed by parallel military movements. In the current case in Iran, several armed insurgencies are underway that may prove synergistic with the civilian protests.

Women play a disproportionate role in the Iranian protest movement. Women have certain strategic assets for social movements. For one thing, their activism can present “an apolitical appearance” that allows them to “engage in more political forms of resistance” without seeming to threaten the state’s monopoly on violence, as my colleague Anjuli Fahlberg notes in her study of Rio (Fahlberg 2018).

So far, we are seeing a familiar cycle: violent state repression instigates broader and more intense popular protest, which create dilemmas for the security forces and may initiate a downward spiral for the regime. That was the pattern in Paris in 1789 and also in Tehran in 1979, when every time the Shah’s regime killed protesters, the vast funeral processions turned into new expressions of popular will. Of course, it was also the pattern in Syria in 2011, with an ultimately tragic outcome.

Overall, I would be looking–and hoping–for scale and diversity, security force defections, self-imposed limitations, and acts of repression that stimulate even broader resistance. Success is far from inevitable but remains possible.

Citations: W. Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), trans. by Harry Zohn, xv; Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011; Alexei Anisin (2020) Unravelling the complex nature of security force defection, Global Change, Peace & Security, 32:2, 135-155; Fahlberg, A. N. (2018). Rethinking Favela Governance: Nonviolent Politics in Rio de Janeiro’s Gang Territories. Politics & Society, 46(4), 95–110. See also: people power in Iran (2009); why autocrats are winning (right now); Why Civil Resistance Works; the case for (and against) nonviolence; pay attention to movements, not just activists and events; etc.

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