Guest Blog: The College Student as Engaged Citizen

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One of the pleasures of working at the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship is that we are housed in the environs of the Lou Frey Institute of Politics and Government. Because the LFI is a part of the broader University of Central Florida community, it is available to students as a work-study opportunity. Happily, this means that we are blessed with young college students who are wonderfully engaged in civic life. It is important to note, however, that the mission statement of the Lou Frey Institute includes “Promoting the development of enlightened, responsible, and actively engaged citizens”. This does not mean creating a generation of liberals or conservatives, Republicans or Democrats, Libertarians or Greens. It means citizens. So we welcome students from all perspectives, and we encourage them to pursue their civic passions.
One of these students, Brittany Turner, is an active member of the Libertarian-leaning organization Young Americans for Liberty, and she had the opportunity to serve as an intern at the Institute for Humane Studies. As a civic educator, I am thrilled by the idea of young people living the life of an engaged citizen, and I thank Brittany for her efforts to make a difference. Today’s post describes her experience working in the heart of our nation’s capital.

This past summer, I had the pleasure and honor of participating in an internship program in Washington DC. The program I interned through was the Koch Internship Program (KIP), which is run by the Charles Koch Institute. The KIP program is a educational program where attendees receive hands on professional development training and education on Classical Liberal knowledge and skills, while building a valuable professional network and an understanding of the non-profit career path. My actual internship was at the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS). The Institute for Humane Studies supports the achievement of a freer society by discovering and facilitating the development of talented students, scholars, and other intellectuals who share an interest in liberty and in advancing the principles and practice of freedom. At IHS, I interned in the Events Management department where I took on many big projects throughout the summer. For example, I was involved in the creation of the readers IHS sends out to their fall and spring seminar participants.

One of the best things about interning in Washington DC was the atmosphere. So many important events are going on every single minute of the day in DC: policy decisions are being made, citizens are trying to influence their congress-person to have a particular stance on a specific issue, the Supreme Court is deciding liberty-affecting cases, and so much more. Another great characteristic of the DC atmosphere is how professional it is. This is the best environment for a young professional that seeks to be engaged in civic life. I felt involved and engaged as a young professional and as a citizen. It made me want to strive for better. When everyone else around you is achieving great things and demonstrating their passion for civic engagement and politics, it is contagious. It’s an ongoing joke in DC that if you can schedule your day right, you can rely on feeding yourself (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) by attending networking events (because so many go on everyday of the week).

Participating in a internship program and interning was definitely one of the best decisions I have ever made. I learned a lot about working in events at a non-profit, polished my professional development skills, learned so much more about Classical Liberal philosophy, and made the best group of friends anyone can ask for. Interning in Washington DC was a dream not many achieve and is something I recommend, especially if you are looking for ways to be involved and make a difference that go beyond simply voting. Truthfully, you don’t even have to go to DC to volunteer as a citizen! Check out your local campaigns and nonprofits and see if there are opportunities for civic engagement and practice. It doesn’t matter what your politics are; it only matters that you act as a citizen should and be involved! My experience in DC taught me this and so much more.

Thanks, Brittany, for the post, and for your desire to step up and engage as both a college student and a citizen!


Guest Blog: The College Student as Engaged Citizen

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One of the pleasures of working at the Florida Joint Center for Citizenship is that we are housed in the environs of the Lou Frey Institute of Politics and Government. Because the LFI is a part of the broader University of Central Florida community, it is available to students as a work-study opportunity. Happily, this means that we are blessed with young college students who are wonderfully engaged in civic life. It is important to note, however, that the mission statement of the Lou Frey Institute includes “Promoting the development of enlightened, responsible, and actively engaged citizens”. This does not mean creating a generation of liberals or conservatives, Republicans or Democrats, Libertarians or Greens. It means citizens. So we welcome students from all perspectives, and we encourage them to pursue their civic passions.
One of these students, Brittany Turner, is an active member of the Libertarian-leaning organization Young Americans for Liberty, and she had the opportunity to serve as an intern at the Institute for Humane Studies. As a civic educator, I am thrilled by the idea of young people living the life of an engaged citizen, and I thank Brittany for her efforts to make a difference. Today’s post describes her experience working in the heart of our nation’s capital.

This past summer, I had the pleasure and honor of participating in an internship program in Washington DC. The program I interned through was the Koch Internship Program (KIP), which is run by the Charles Koch Institute. The KIP program is a educational program where attendees receive hands on professional development training and education on Classical Liberal knowledge and skills, while building a valuable professional network and an understanding of the non-profit career path. My actual internship was at the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS). The Institute for Humane Studies supports the achievement of a freer society by discovering and facilitating the development of talented students, scholars, and other intellectuals who share an interest in liberty and in advancing the principles and practice of freedom. At IHS, I interned in the Events Management department where I took on many big projects throughout the summer. For example, I was involved in the creation of the readers IHS sends out to their fall and spring seminar participants.

One of the best things about interning in Washington DC was the atmosphere. So many important events are going on every single minute of the day in DC: policy decisions are being made, citizens are trying to influence their congress-person to have a particular stance on a specific issue, the Supreme Court is deciding liberty-affecting cases, and so much more. Another great characteristic of the DC atmosphere is how professional it is. This is the best environment for a young professional that seeks to be engaged in civic life. I felt involved and engaged as a young professional and as a citizen. It made me want to strive for better. When everyone else around you is achieving great things and demonstrating their passion for civic engagement and politics, it is contagious. It’s an ongoing joke in DC that if you can schedule your day right, you can rely on feeding yourself (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) by attending networking events (because so many go on everyday of the week).

Participating in a internship program and interning was definitely one of the best decisions I have ever made. I learned a lot about working in events at a non-profit, polished my professional development skills, learned so much more about Classical Liberal philosophy, and made the best group of friends anyone can ask for. Interning in Washington DC was a dream not many achieve and is something I recommend, especially if you are looking for ways to be involved and make a difference that go beyond simply voting. Truthfully, you don’t even have to go to DC to volunteer as a citizen! Check out your local campaigns and nonprofits and see if there are opportunities for civic engagement and practice. It doesn’t matter what your politics are; it only matters that you act as a citizen should and be involved! My experience in DC taught me this and so much more.

Thanks, Brittany, for the post, and for your desire to step up and engage as both a college student and a citizen!


Networks and the Rise of the Medici

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So, here’s a fun thing. In 1993 John Padget and Cristopher Ansell explored the social network of the great Medici family. with specific attention to the rise of Cosimo de Medici in 15th century Florence.

The paper, published in the America Journal of Sociology, is intended as a historical case study in a theoretical contradiction of state building: that founders cannot be both judge and boss. That is, a regime’s legitimacy hinges on “the conviction that judges and rules are not motivated by self-interest. Yet, a founder doesn’t want to give up control of their “organized creation.”

Cosimo’s leadership led to three centuries of Medici rule in Florence, begging the question – how did that happen?

Drawing on the “thorough and impressive work” of many historians of Florence, Padget and Ansell carefully reconstructed a network of elite families in Florence. Their data set included 215 elite families – where “family” is more akin to clan than household, and their network accounted four nine different types of connections including kinship as well as political, economic, and personal ties.

After disproving may common arguments for the Medici’s rise to power – it turns out they were just as wealthy as the “oligarchs” they displaced – Padget and Ansell turn to the network for possible explanations.

Their finding are remarkable. Looking at the political turmoil of the day, Padget and Ansell make a bold claim: “Rather than parties being generated by social groups, we argue, both parties and social groups were induced conjointly by underlying networks.”

Their analysis of the network provides some interesting insights into that claim:

The Medici party was an extraordinarily centralized, and simple, “star” or “spoke” network system, with very few relations among Medici followers: the party consisted almost entirely of direct tied to the Medici family. One important consequence for central control was that Medici partisans were connected to other Medici partisans almost solely through the Medici themselves. In addition, Medici partisans were connected to the rest of the oligarchic elite only through the intermediation of the Medici family. Medici partisans in general possessed remarkably few intraelite network ties compared to oligarchs, they were structurally impoverished. In such an impoverished network context, it is easy to understand how a solo dependence on a powerful family would loom very large indeed. 

Meanwhile, the rival oligarch party was densely interconnect. But rather than leading to cohesive collective action, this caused conflict. “The oligarchs were composed of too many status equals, each with plausible network claims to leadership.” they explain.

These network structures had deep consequences for politics and power. Ultimately, along with the capable leadership of Cosimo, it was this structure which allowed for the Medici rise.

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New Research on Making Policy through Crowdsourcing

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For those interested in democratizing more of the policymaking process, check out this recent post below from NCDD organizational member Davenport Institute and their Gov 2.0 Watch blog that highlights recent research into policy crowdsourcing. You can read the post below or find the original here.

DavenportInst-logo

Research: Policy Crowdsourcing

For anyone really interested in diving deep into the question of crowdsourcing for public policy, various techniques and available research regarding their relative benefits, challenges, and effectiveness, a recent paper by John Prpic of the Lulea University of Technology (Sweden), Araz Taeihagh of the Singapore Management University, and James Melton of the Michigan University, College of Business Administration may be right up your alley.

From the abstract:

What is the state of the research on crowdsourcing for policymaking? This article begins to answer this question by collecting, categorizing, and situating an extensive body of the extant research investigating policy crowdsourcing, within a new framework built on fundamental typologies from each field. We first define seven universal characteristics of the three general crowdsourcing techniques (virtual labor markets, tournament crowdsourcing, open collaboration), to examine the relative tradeoffs of each modality. We then compare these three types of crowdsourcing to the different stages of the policy cycle, in order to situate the literature spanning both domains. We finally discuss research trends in crowdsourcing for public policy and highlight the research gaps and overlaps in the literature.

You can download the paper here.

You can find the original version of this Gov 2.0 Watch blog post at http://gov20watch.pepperdine.edu/2015/08/research-policy-crowdsourcing.

Southern Secessionist Defends MS Flag – MPB Intvw

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Southern secessionist

You need to watch this. William Flowers, a man from Georgia, came to a demonstration in Jackson, MS, as a leader in the effort to defend the Mississippi flag, which features an emblem of the Confederate Battle Flag. He leads the self-described southern nationalist group, League of the South.

This interview is not simply someone with a video camera. This is Mississippi Public Broadcasting interviewing a spokesman for the organized protest.

Claytoonz cartoon.

Cartoon posted with permission, copyright Clayton Jones. Claytoonz.com

The man speaks of the cultural attack on southern heritage as a genocide. That is the language and strategy of the Ku Klux Klan. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I returned home from Germany this August to find a message on my answering machine from a Presidential candidate arguing for a fight against the genocide of the white race. This man refers to genocide of southerners, which is novel, at least to my experience.

The argument reminds me of a powerful cartoon by Clay Jones, on right, featuring an African American man carrying a shot child, grieving silently, next to a wailing southern white man carrying his Confederate Battle Flag, in a shape resembling the child on left.

When asked about secession, Flowers openly advocates for it. He is explicitly a secessionist, who then says that he’d prefer a political solution. That sounds like a threat to me.

If you ever needed a demonstration that the Confederate Battle Flag is divisive, this fellow made it crystal clear. He refers to heritage, then dismisses any relation to slavery. He’s unhinged. We have this stuff scanned and online now. Mississippi’s first statement explaining its causes for secession says that slavery was its fundamental cause.

If you’ve visited my site before, you know where I stand on this. If you haven’t check out:

But seriously, watch this first:

If you can’t see this video in your RSS reader or email, then click here.

It’s 7.5 minutes long, but you can get the most important stuff within the first 3 minutes.

If you haven’t already, visit and “like” my Facebook author page and connect with me on Twitter (@EricTWeber).

how a university “covers” the world

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(Philadelphia) Here are the baker’s dozen Tufts faculty who are Tisch College Fellows for 2015-16. Their work involves active citizenship as a topic of study, a research method, or a mode of teaching. I work with a group like this every year; about 100 alumni of the program are still on the Tufts faculty.

Listening to the 2015-16 Fellows introduce their projects last week, I realized that the faculty of a research university resembles a global open-source intelligence service or a nonprofit news-gathering organization to rival a major newspaper. One of our fellows both studies and supports Muslim women leaders in the West African region where Boko Haram makes headlines by suppressing education for women. Another fellow spent this summer conducting detailed ethnographic research in Ferguson, MO. A third is inside the homes of elderly Somerville residents who have mobility problems.

These scholars investigate topics that may also appear on the cable news or the front page of The New York Times. Their methods are more systematic and deeper than those of reporters, although their products also tend to be less timely and (with some exceptions) less accessible. I don’t consider scholarship better than excellent reporting; we need both. But we also need ways to make more public the kinds of knowledge collected or created by scholars. The Conversation is one fascinating and promising effort to marry “academic rigor” with “journalist flair” by employing professional journalistic editors to solicit and edit articles by scholars. That begins to tap the tremendous potential of the academy for public knowledge.

See also Civic Engagement and Community Information: Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication

Deliberation in Practice

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While there are many rich debates around the theory of deliberation, I turn today to it’s practice. How are real-world deliberation structured and how do those implementations relate to the competing theories of deliberation?

The National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) offers a great starting point for examining these questions. A network of more than 2,200 deliberative practioners, NCDD “serves as a gathering place, a resource center, a news source, and a facilitative leader for this vital community of practice.”

NCDD actively embraces a pluralistic approach to deliberation, arguing, “no method works in all situations.” The context-dependent nature of deliberation is implicit throughout the practical literature – as each approach typically introduces itself with a short explanation of where it can be of use.

To help communities “decide which types of approaches are the best fit for your circumstances,” NCDD publishes a useful Engagement Streams Framework, which breaks deliberative techniques into four categories:

Exploration: Encourage people and groups to learn more about themselves, their community, or an issue, and possibly discover innovative solutions

Conflict Transformation: Resolve conflicts, to foster personal healing and growth, and to improve relations among groups

Decision Making: Influence public decisions and public policy and improve public knowledge

Collaborative Action: Empower people and groups to solve complicated problems and take responsibility for the solution

NCDD then takes 22 of the most popular deliberative processes and assigns each to one or more of these categories. I have visualized their chart as a network, showing how different deliberative approaches connect to the four categories NCDD identified.

NetworkOfDeliberation

While perhaps not too much can be inferred from this sample of deliberative practices, it is interesting to note that half of the “Decision Making” practices are focused solely on that stream, while “Collaborative Action” processes are always connected to another stream as well. In this model, “Decision Making” and “Exploration” are the most common approaches, with 12 and 11 practices respectively. Additionally, NCDD’s list captures at least one way to combine any two of their identified streams.

It is worth spending some time briefly describing a model distinctive to the three streams that have dedicated approaches – Decision Making, Exploration, and Conflict Transformation.

National Issues Forum – Decision Making
While a National Issues Forum (NIF) is not a formal decision making body, their facilitated deliberations aim to help groups weigh different options. “We are here to move toward a public decision or CHOICE on a difficult issue through CHOICE WORK,” they explain.

They take this approach of choice work quite literally – each of their dozens of issue guides present a topic along with three possible approaches. Participants are asked to reflect on their own experience of the issue and deliberate about the pros and cons of each outlined approach.

This focus on “choice work” may be somewhat misleading, though. NIF is careful to indicate that successful deliberation does not have to end in agreement or action. “Sometimes, forum participants find the use of the word ‘choice’ confusing” they write. “Some assume that they are being asked to choose one of the approaches. And, of course, they are not.”

The NIF definition of deliberation similarly rejects consensus as a mandatory outcome. “It’s not about reaching agreement or seeing eye-to-eye. It’s about looking at the costs and consequences of possible solutions to daunting problems, and finding out what we, as a people, will or will not accept as a solution.”

Finally, while NIF facilitators are encouraged to begin their session with ground rules, their issue guides don’t provide any suggested ground rules to start from. This seems to be an intentional choice embedded in their philosophy: “The responsibility for doing the work of deliberation belongs to the group,” they write.

NIF expects most forums will last around 2 hours, though they leave room for communities to organize multi-session discussions. Typically, a session will have a hundred or more participants, and NIF encourages communities to determine for themselves the mix of small group versus plenary discussion.

World Café – Exploration
World Café gatherings may be large, but their conversations are intimate. While the total number of attendees can venture into the hundreds, hosts are instructed to seat no more than five people together. Conversations take place in at least three rounds of twenty minutes each.

After each round, one person is encouraged to stay as “table host” to the next round “while the others serve as travelers or ‘ambassadors of meaning.’ The travelers carry key ideas, themes and questions into their new conversations, while the table host welcomes the new set of travelers.

World Café hosts are encouraged to develop their own questions, which can be the same or different for each round of inquiry. “Good questions need not imply immediate action steps or problem solving. They should invite inquiry and discovery vs. advocacy and advantage,” they write.

A light and flexible model, World Cafés can be easily implemented in a range of situations to create “a living network of collaborative dialogue around questions that matter in service to real work.”

The model is subtly action-oriented. Hardly so in comparison to other deliberation models, World Cafés are built around the core idea that there are problems in our communities and only we have the power to address them.

As they describe in their host guide: “The World Café is built on the assumption that people already have within them the wisdom and creativity to confront even the most difficult challenges; that the answers we need are available to us; and that we are Wiser Together than we are alone.”

While some might charge the World Café with being “just talk,” the World Café would retort: “The power of conversation is so invisible and natural that we usually overlook it.”

Public Conversations Project – Conflict Transformation
The Public Conversations Project is a leader in Reflective Structured Dialogue, a technique “designed to help people have the conversation they want to have about some of the most difficult topics.”

Their work is focused on dialogue, “a conversation that is animated by a search for mutual understanding…distinct from conversations focused directly on problem solving.” The Public Conversations Project has led these dialogues in some of the most deeply divided communities, providing spaces for participants to get to authentically know each other without trying to sway each other’s view on an issue.

Dialogues are heavily structured, outlining time for silent reflection, equal time for each person to speak, and a noticeable pause between each person’s response. After every participant responds to the question posed by the facilitator there is an equal time for “questions of genuine interest” which can be posed by any participant to any other participant. These questions seek to “encourage constructive inquiry and exploration that enhances clarity and mutual understanding.”

This highly structured model “empowers participants to share experiences and explore questions that both clarify their own perspectives and help them become more comfortable around, and curious about, those with whom they are in conflict,” and “helps participants engage in constructive, often groundbreaking conversations that can restore trust and lay the foundation for collaborative action.”

Dialogues are typically small group discussions that happen over multiple two-hour session. A community may have multiple dialogues happening at once, but there is typically not a plenary portion of the exchange.

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Arendt’s Considered View on Evil and its Banality

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“It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical’, that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is ‘thought-defying,’ as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its ‘banality.’ Only the good has depth and can be radical.” (Letter to Gershom Scholem July 24, 1963)

the Citizens United decision and the inadequate sociology of the US Constitution

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It is a myth prevalent among liberals that the Supreme Court defined corporations as persons in Citizens United. Instead, the court observed that corporations are associations, cited previous rulings that associations have freedom of speech and that freedom of speech includes spending money on elections, and concluded that corporations may spend money on elections. I disagree with the decision and I blame a neoliberal (pro-corporate, anti-regulatory) ideology for it … in part. But Citizens United also reflects the limitations of the Constitution itself. At best, we can say that the Constitution offers scant protection against such rulings and the ideology that they reflect.

Written in the eighteenth century, the Constitution envisions certain political institutions: parliamentary bodies, courts, a president, an Army and a Navy, militias, a mint, ambassadors, ministers, and departments. The First Amendment adds a few more entities: religions, the press, peaceable assemblies of citizens, and–by implication–petitioners who press their claims before the government. The authors also knew about certain political institutions and actors that they associated with European corruption and hoped to avoid  in the new republic: parties, spies, and lobbyists (although that word was not yet coined).

The authors could not envision other essential components of a modern political system, such as limited liability corporations and corporations (in general) that don’t have specific charters, administrative and rulemaking agencies, unions, trade associations, schools and colleges, and security agencies. Since the Constitution is silent on all these organizations, courts have no way to distinguish among them.

For instance, the 2.6 million mostly unionized career civil servants who work in federal agencies get treated as employees of the president, as “inferior officers,” whose appointment may be vested by Congress “in the President alone.” In fact, they enjoy a great deal of autonomy and permanence and are busy making laws in the form of administrative decisions and rules, even though the Constitution assigns “all legislative powers” to the Congress. They should have their own article of the Constitution, defining and limiting their powers as if they were a fourth branch of government.

Likewise, security agencies are permanent paramilitary organizations with the power to spy and to kill, but they are not the Army or Navy of which the president is the Commander-in-Chief in times of war–alone. So should they answer to the president, the Congress, or (as we fear is actually the case) only to themselves? Courts treat them as arms of the president even though presidents may fear them.

Finally, the Constitution makes no distinction among types of association (a word that doesn’t even appear in the text). An association can be a bunch of people who peacefully assemble, a membership group with an elected president, or a company that trades on the NASDAQ. In the 1700s, corporations were perhaps the easiest associations to regulate because each one came into existence through a discretionary decision by the legislature, giving it a charter that strictly delimited its purposes and powers. Today, corporations are exceptionally hard to regulate because they are traded globally and they have the power to withdraw the investments on which prosperity depends.

It is now a virtual consensus that the constitutional freedoms of speech and assembly depend upon associations. A classic case is NAACP v Alabama. Almost everyone would say that the NAACP has constitutional rights as a body, or else its members would not be able to speak, assemble, or petition the government. But note that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is, in fact, a corporation–incorporated on May 25, 1911 under the laws of the State of New York, with W.E.B. DuBois as the first signatory on its Articles of Incorporation. If it has free speech rights, why don’t the NCAA and Nokia?

I can offer reasons why for-profit corporations should not, in fact, have the same rights of speech and petition that not-for-profit membership organizations enjoy, even though both kinds of organizations are incorporated. My reasons would arise from a political sociology that specifies the functions, advantages, and dangers of various kinds of organization that exist in the 21st century. The problem is that our written Constitution has a political sociology appropriate for 1789. Our judges and justices could still decide more wisely than they did in Citizens United. But the Constitution offers no guidance or protection if they are unwilling to make the necessary distinctions.

See also:  liberals, conservatives, and love of the Constitution; constitutional piety and the Supreme Court reflects the “degeneracy of the times”.