It makes sense to introduce game theory by playing some games. Many online and in-person games are available for that purpose. A useful list of reviews is here. I could not, however, find games that would play well in a large virtual course, especially without a significant registration fee. So I made some up, and they seemed to work well in a class of 62 students yesterday. I am making them available here.

The games simulate:

1. A pandemic at a university. (How much does each student comply with social distancing?)
2. Carbon policy. (How much does each country reduce its emissions?)
3. Carbon policy with negotiations; and
4. An iterated commons game involving fishing.

Instructions are provided in the first sheet. In brief, an instructor should …

1. Show students each sheet of the spreadsheet in turn.
2. Read or briefly explain the scenario at the top. Do not answer questions about what the students’ objectives should be or what defines winning. Let them just play.
3. Field a survey–using Zoom or another platform–with the choices that are presented in each scenario. E.g., The response options for the first scenario (the college pandemic) should be 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4.
4. Enter the data from the survey in the grey cells of the sheet (e.g., cells B14-B18 in the college pandemic scenario). The other cells are all locked.

(In the second climate game, students should talk in breakout groups before they take the survey individually. In the fishing game, there are three rounds.)

5. Discuss the results shown in the rest of each table once the data are entered.

Here are some questions for discussion:

• A game has parameters–for example, the number of players, the choices they can make, and whether players can talk. What other parameters can you think of that go into a game? How do you know whether the parameters are right for the situation?
• What assumptions do we make by using a game to model/represent/explain the real world?
• What kinds of situations–if any–can game theory help to explain? (You might think of other examples or general categories of situations that games seem useful for.)
• What kinds of questions can game theory probably not answer?
• When introducing his idea of the “Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin talks about the “solemnity of the relentless working of things,” “the inevitableness of destiny,” and “the futility of escape.” Did we see evidence today that disaster is inevitable when people try to coordinate their behavior? If not, is there anything valuable in Hardin’s idea?

You’re likely to get some intriguing specific results. For instance, when my students played the carbon-policy game, the global results were pretty good. (They’re a bunch of environmentalists.) I then put them in small groups to simulate negotiations before surveying them again. After their discussions, the global impact on carbon worsened. It appears that some of the groups became small conspiracies against the common good. Specifically, some students persuaded each other that they could get away with emitting more carbon.

To test whether this result generalizes, you would have to repeat it with controls. Maybe the result worsened just because it was the second try. In any case, it is fun to discuss the concrete results, form hypotheses, and connect the games to the real world.

See also: why learn game theory? (a lesson plan that includes a game) and these posts about game theory.

This is newly published: Peter Levine, “Theorizing Democracy in a Pandemic,” Democratic Theory, vol. 2, issue 2 (Winter 2020), pp. 134-142 https://doi.org/10.3167/dt.2020.070216. Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic raises questions about the future of democracy and civil society. Some recent predictions seem to use the suffering to score points in ongoing political arguments. As a better example of how to describe the future during a crisis, I cite the prophetic voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. King does not merely predict: he calls for action, joins the action, and makes himself responsible for its success or failure. With these cautions about prediction in mind, I venture two that may guide immediate responses. First, communities may erect or strengthen unjustifiable barriers to outsiders, because boundaries enhance collective action. Second, although the pandemic may not directly change civic behavior, an economic recession will bankrupt some organizations through which people engage.

The whole special issue on Democracy in the Time of COVID-19 looks interesting and is currently available for free.

The Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University is offering a virtual event on October 2, 2020 – 9:00 AM – 12:30 PM. It celebrates the 30th anniversary of Elinor (Lin) Ostrom’s Governing the Commons. I’m on the panel about environmental justice and policing studies, and there are other panels about social-ecological systems thinking and practice; polycentric governance; and the “‘new commons’ (health, data and knowledge, urban).” It’s free but registration is required.

See also insights on police reform from Elinor Ostrom and social choice theory; new chapter on Elinor Ostrom and Civic Studies; and many previous posts on this blog.

Check out the National Constitution Center’s biographies of the Founding Fathers! https://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational-resources/founding-fathers

It’s Founders Month here in Florida! According to the Florida Department of Education,

Section (s.) 683.1455, Florida Statutes (F.S.), designates the month of September as American Founders‘ Month and s. 1003.421, F.S., recognizes the last full week of classes in September in public schools as Celebrate Freedom Week.

So what does this mean for our schools and kids and teachers? Basically, it’s time to do some learning about the men and women who have helped shape this state and this country. Here on our Florida Citizens blog, we’ll be doing at least two posts a week with a brief overview of a particular Founder, Framer, thinker, or shaper of this state or this nation and how they made an impact.

Are you familiar with Deborah Sampson? If not, you should be, for we might consider her a Founding Mother, and certainly perhaps the first woman in US history to get a military pension.

She was born the poor daughter of a poor though preeminent family, a great granddaughter of founding Pilgrims Myles Standish and William Bradford. She was indentured at age 10, completing her service at 18 and then working as a self-educated teacher in Massachusetts. But in the heat of war, as the Revolution raged, she felt she had to do something more. She wanted to fight. But she was a woman, and that was impossible. Or was it?

She disguised herself as a man, and served as a light infantry scout, led men in battle, was wounded more than once (and taking care of the wounds herself, less her true sex be exposed) and served proudly as a soldier in Revolutionary Army. But then she fell ill and lost consciousness, and was then honorably discharged from the army. She married, had children, and traveled the new country telling her story.

“Four years after Sampson’s death at age 66, her husband petitioned Congress for pay as the spouse of a soldier. Although the couple was not married at the time of her service, in 1837 the committee concluded that the history of the Revolution “furnished no other similar example of female heroism, fidelity and courage.” He was awarded the money, though he died before receiving it.”

You can learn more about Deborah Sampson by visiting Mount Vernon’s excellent overview of her life and service! 

You can get a copy of the slide on Deborah Sampson here: Sampson AFM

If you’re participating in the American Political Science Association’s virtual annual meeting this year, there’s a Roundtable on Facilitating Civic Engagement Research
(Sep 9 – 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm EDT) with Richard Davis, Mary Currin-Percival, Eitan Hersh, Diana Owen, Stella Rouse, and me.

“Civic engagement research” can mean research about civic engagement, which is my main job. Such research can be empirical, asking what causes various people to engage (or not) in various ways, and what their engagement accomplishes. Or it can be normative, asking what makes engagement good or bad, a right or a duty.

I am also interested in research that is done in a civically engaged way. Amy Cabrera Rasmussen, Valeria Sinclair Chapman, and I direct the APSA’s Institute for Civically Engaged Research as an annual seminar for political scientists who want to learn to work in an engaged way.

One conclusion I take away from ICER so far is that there’s a robust debate about what defines civically engaged research.

One kind of definition is methodological. On this view, you are doing civically engaged research if you form a research partnership with a group or network of people outside academia and frame your questions, collect and analyze your data, and disseminate the results together with the partner. This definition is content-neutral and not necessarily connected to any particular ideal or agenda. Perhaps entering a partnership simply helps you to generate certain kinds of knowledge and insight.

A different definition is about solidarity. The civically engaged researcher conducts research as a way of being part of some group, or a strong ally of it. The group in question might be demographic, but not necessarily. Sometimes, for example, researchers express solidarity and membership in the geographical community where they work. This definition can be methodologically neutral–you’d be a civically engaged researcher if you do your research as a Chicagoan, regardless of whether you use ethnography or multivariate regression or any other method.

A third definition suggests efforts to make research influential–to connect research directly to public conversations, policy analysis and advocacy, or trainings and program evaluations. This definition encompasses efforts that begin inside academia, whether or not they involve partners. One of many such examples would be the Center for Inclusive Democracy, on whose advisory board I sit. They produce research studies, policy briefs, a tool for citing polling locations, datasets and maps, and public presentations. Tisch College’s new Center for State Policy Analysis also fits this model, or Tufts’ Equity Research Group.

CIRCLE, which I directed for seven years, has bridged these definitions to some degree. CIRCLE has formed many specific research partnerships with grassroots groups. Its original board consisted of scholars and practitioners who represented a nascent theory/practice community for youth civic engagement. Some of them identified as “youth,” which means they belong to CIRCLE’s population of interest. CIRCLE has always employed at least one key staff person whose main responsibility is to develop and tend partnerships. At the same time, CIRCLE began in academia, with political scientists as its first two directors; and some of its work has been relatively detached empirical social science meant to affect the world.

See also: civically engaged research in political science #APSA2019; engaged political science; scholarship on engaged scholarship; and Apply for the Second Annual APSA Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER) at Tufts University’s Tisch College, June 15-18, 2020

Check out the National Constitution Center’s biographies of the Founding Fathers! https://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational-resources/founding-fathers

It’s Founders Month here in Florida! According to the Florida Department of Education,

Section (s.) 683.1455, Florida Statutes (F.S.), designates the month of September as American Founders‘ Month and s. 1003.421, F.S., recognizes the last full week of classes in September in public schools as Celebrate Freedom Week.

So what does this mean for our schools and kids and teachers? Basically, it’s time to do some learning about the men and women who have helped shape this state and this country. Here on our Florida Citizens blog, we’ll be doing posts with a brief overview of a particular Founder, Framer, thinker, or shaper of this state or this nation and how they made an impact. This includes folks you may never have heard of, and folks beyond those great Framers and Founders we find in our books.

Today, we look at Thomas Jefferson. Out of all of the Founders’, it may be Thomas Jefferson that most schoolchildren are most familiar with. They know him, of course, as the author of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration, of course, is considered on of the clearest rebukes of tyranny ever written, and it remains to this day a symbol of the pursuit of liberty the world over.

Like many of his peers, however, Jefferson was a man of massive contradictions. An advocate for liberty who owned a great many slaves, a slaveowner who recognized the evils of slavery (‘the rock upon which the Union would split’) but never freed his own slaves (unlike his colleague and friend George Washington, who freed his own upon his death), an opponent of an activist and strong central government who nevertheless used his power to purchase vast swathes of land from the French (despite his doubts about whether the Constitution gave him that power), and a believer in the importance of civility and comity in politics and life who was involved in one of the most brutal presidential campaigns in American history.

Thomas Jefferson was indeed many things, some good, some bad, but all important to the legacy of freedom and the Founders of this country. As one of his successors as president, John F. Kennedy, once said while hosting a dinner for Nobel Prize winners,

I want to tell you how welcome you are to the White House. I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.
Someone once said that Thomas Jefferson was a gentleman of 32 who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, and dance the minuet.

Log in and learn more about Thomas Jefferson from this excellent lesson provided by our friends at iCivics! 

You can grab the PowerPoint featured at the top of this post here: Thomas Jefferson AFM