Does activism make you happy?

Flickr photo by Matthew Bradley

I’m quoted in the Boston Globe’s Ideas Section in “The Upside of ‘down with’” (Drake Bennett, 10/11/09).

The article reports on a forthcoming study “Some Benefits of Being an Activist” by Tim Kasser and Malte Klar that activism is associated with happiness (2009, Political Psychology 30(5) ).

The Globe article neglected to quote me that there are lots of reason to support activism — it may increase people’s confidence in making a difference, it may improve governmental quality and leaders’ accountability, it may spark extra-governmental change or reveal the immorality of laws (as seen in the Civil Rights Era).

That said, I am skeptical, as the Globe article noted that it is activism per se that is causing happiness, based on our forthcoming religious research.  Religious Americans are more happy, but it has nothing to do with their theology, or what they hear from the pulpit, or a sense of calling.  It is explained by being in a morally-infused social network.  Praying alone or attending a church where you hear the sermons (but don’t make friends) makes you no happier.  Similarly if one looks at research by Alan Krueger and others, it is social activities that bring happiness.

So while I’m not sure that bowlers are doing as much for government accountability as protesters, my guess would be that they are equally happy.

Sarkozy’s blue-chip Commission recommends measuring social capital

French President Nicholas Sarkozy, convinced that GDP was not properly measuring French citizens’ well-being, appointed a 25-member blue-chip commission (chaired by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and largely composed of the world’s best economists, including 4 other Nobel Laureates) to advise him on whether GDP adequate mesured well-being and, if not, what else to measure. [The findings are supported by Gallup World poll surveys.]

The Commission has reported back, and strongly recommended, among other things, measuring social capital (social connections, political voice, etc.).

Their descriptions of: 1) what is social capital; 2) why is social capital important, especially to subjective well-being (or happiness); and 3) how to measure social capital are among the best things written on this subject.

On what is social capital, they say the following (pp. 182-183):

Like political voice and the rule of law, social connections and the attendant norms of trust and trustworthiness are important for people’s QoL. These social connections are sometimes subsumed under the heading of “social capital”. Definitions of social capital (as were other forms of “capital” at an equivalent stage in their conceptual development) have been much debated, but there is now convergence towards a “lean and mean” definition: social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness. Since it is impractical to measure social networks at large geographic levels, researchers generally rely on proxies for these networks (e.g. number of close friends, political participation, membership in voluntary associations, religious involvement, doing favours, etc.). The core insight of the concept of social capital is that, like tools (physical capital) and training (human capital), social connections have value for QoL.

Social connections have value, first, to the people who are in the networks. For example, labour markets are permeated by networks, so that most people are as likely to get their jobs through whom they know as through what they know. Similarly, social connections bring benefits for health: as a risk factor for premature death, social isolation rivals smoking (Berkman and Glass, 2000). Evidence also suggests that social connections are powerful predictors of (and probably causes of) subjective well-being. Finally, the same personal activity can have different impacts on subjective well-being, depending on whether it is conducted alone or with others.

All these are “internal” effects of social networks, since they represent ways in which
social networks benefit people in those networks. Social connections, however, also have “externalities”, i.e. implications for bystanders. The literature on “social capital” has brought out clearly a number of examples of positive externalities. For example, neighbourhood networks can deter crime (Sampson 2003), and this effect also benefits residents who sit at home in front of their TV. The performance of democratic government and even the pace of economic growth may also depend on the quality of social connections within a jurisdiction.  Finally, several (mainly US) studies suggest that both child welfare (infant mortality, teen pregnancy, low birth-weight babies, teen drug use, etc.) and school performance (drop-out rates, test scores) are robustly predicted by measures of community social capital. However, the “externalities” stemming from networks can also be negative. A strong sense of belonging to one group can strengthen a sense of a unique personal identity in terms of the group to which he or she belongs (Sen, 2006). This may generate fissures in national communities, and breed a climate of violence and confrontation. More generally, a longstanding tradition in economics has stressed the potential for groups to generate benefits for insiders that weigh heavily on the opportunities and QoL of outsiders. In other words, groups can foster bonds among participants but also erect walls with respect to outsiders and members of other groups. To account for these multiple effects, research distinguishes between two types of social capital, “bonding” and “bridging”, but practical implementation of this distinction in empirical research remains a challenge.

In short, a rich literature from several disciplines shows that social connections benefit people in the networks, with effects on non-participants that depend on both the nature of the group and the effects being considered. In some cases, like health, studies have demonstrated that social connections can have positive effects at both the “individual” and “aggregate” level: people with more friends live longer in part because of the biochemical effects of social isolation, and in part because public health systems are more effective in areas of higher social capital. Many of these “causal” claims are yet to be tested with an experimental or quasi-experimental design, but even on this score progress is slowly being made. A high priority for research in this field is more work on causal linkages using natural or randomized experiments.

On why social capital is important to subjective well-being, they note:

Much evidence at both the aggregate and individual level suggests that social connections are among the most robust predictors of subjective measures of life satisfaction. Social connections have a strong independent effect on subjective well-being, net of income.  Moreover, the available evidence also suggests that the externalities of social capital on wellbeing are typically positive, not negative (Helliwell, 2001; Powdthavee, 2008). In other words, increasing my social capital increases both my own and my neighbours’ subjective well-being, and thus represents a coherent strategy for improving QoL for the country as a whole.

The analysis of the effects of social connections on subjective well-being is in its infancy. Much of it does not account for unmeasured individual characteristics, and most of it relies on cross-sectional data. That said, recent analyses have strengthened the case that the link between at least some forms of social connections and subjective well-being is causal. Krueger, Kahneman et al. (2008)  report that, when controlling for individual fixed effects (such as personality traits), most pleasurable activities involve socializing — religious activities, eating/drinking, sports, and receiving friends. Similarly, in a recent large-scale US panel survey on religious attendance and subjective well-being, Lim and Putnam (2008) found that religious attendance at time1 (or time2) predicted subjective well-being at time2, controlling for levels of subjective well-being at time1, as well as many other covariates; the essential mechanism involved in this relation is neither theological nor psychological, but rather the strong effect of “friends at church” on well-being. Fowler and Christakis (2008) also report evidence suggesting that subjective well-being can spread in a beneficially “contagious” way from one person to another. For no other class of variables (including strictly economic variables) is the evidence for causal effects on subjective well-being probably as strong as it is for social connections.

And on measurement, the report notes:

As research on social connections is relatively new, national statistics are still rudimentary. Most researchers have relied on unofficial sources. One proxy of social connections often used is the number of associations in civil society or church to which each person belongs. However, the fragility of such measures is, by now, well recognized. A formal organization with a name and address may not correspond to any actual individual members, much less to social networks among those members. Moreover, the role of associations differs from country to country. Because of these reasons, measures of organizational density are generally not good measures of social connections, despite their frequent use for that purpose.

A related approach measures the activities assumed to be the result of social connections, such as altruistic behaviour. Thus, some research has used blood donations, membership in voluntary organizations or charitable giving as proxies. Other studies have relied on some aggregate measures of individual behaviour like voting turnout, based on the argument that, even though balloting is a private activity, participation in voting is higher in countries with a dense network of political parties or civic organizations, and that in all countries members of
these organizations have a higher probability of voting. Other studies have used proxy measures of social connections based on information on family ties, such as marriage rates, though social changes throughout the world have made these an imperfect measure of enduring interpersonal ties.

Ultimately, however, all these indicators are inadequate proxies of social connections, and reliable indicators can only be constructed through survey data. Only personal reports allow measuring the many and evolving forms of social connectedness. In recent years a number of statistical offices (in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, and most recently, the United States) have begun to gather and report survey-based measures of various forms of social connections. As an example of these endeavours, Appendix 2.2 presents the list of the questions included (since early 2008) in an annual Supplement to the
November US Current Population Survey, which has traditionally probed respondents about voting in national elections.56 These questions have been selected after extensive vetting by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics for reliability, intelligibility, and inoffensiveness; they cover several manifestations of civic and political engagement, as well as other forms of social connections (such as number of friends, or frequency of contacts and
favours done for neighbours).

Measuring social connections, however, goes beyond measuring these particular aspects. Also needed are suitably tested questions assessing people’s experience in a range of other domains. Some of the most important domains that could be explored through dedicated surveys include the following:
• Social trust. Despite only moderate test-retest reliability, the canonical social trust question has been asked thousands of times in many countries: its behaviour is well understood, and it allows many comparisons across time and space.59 Moreover, at the aggregate level (e.g. states/nations), responses are highly stable over time (even when individual-level stability is low), suggesting that this question measures a very predictive characteristic of communities. Data on social trust are also significant determinants of subjective well-being. Compared to this canonical question, questions about “lost wallets” are potentially more reliable, since they are more specific and quasi-behavioural. Opportunities for comparison across time and space are, however, scant, and we still lack studies of its variability across time for the same person.
• Social isolation. Lack of contacts with other people in normal daily living is both a symptom and a cause of social distress, and it can lead to a downward spiral affecting morale and reducing social and economic opportunities. Social isolation can be measured through questions asking people about the frequency of their contacts with others or about how often they spend their time socializing with family members, friends and work colleagues or with other people in sports, religious and cultural associations. Social connections are also a function of living arrangements (i.e. living alone) and employment status (e.g. having a job). Research has highlighted strong associations between the degree of social isolation of each person and measures of their well-being, self-assurance, ability and power of action, and activity (Ringen, 2008)
• Informal support. Questions about the availability of social support in case of need have been used in many countries. The Gallup World Poll includes a yes/no question about friends or relatives “you can count on”; answers to this question are highly predictive of subjective well-being but have little discriminatory power (about 90% of respondents answer this question affirmatively). This suggests that alternative formulations or more nuanced responses may be needed (e.g., “if yes, how many?”, or specifying the type of help expected in various specific contingencies).
• Workplace engagement. For many people in many countries, a large fraction of all their social connections are with workmates, either in the workplace or outside of it. Helliwell and Huang (2005) found that trust in workmates is a robust predictor of life satisfaction. Questions about trust in workmates have been tested in some countries (e.g. North America).
• Religious engagement. While there is general agreement that religion is an important form of social connections, the introduction of specific survey questions (even when extensively vetted) raises issues of political sensitivity. Identifying suitable formulations of these questions is important as, in most countries, religious engagement is a robust predictor of subjective well-being and (in many countries outside Europe) it is a large fraction of all social networks.
• Bridging social capital (i.e. friendships across lines of race, religion, class, etc.) is the most important under-measured form of social connections for many outcomes. The informal advisory committee to the US Current Population Survey recommended that a suitable measure of bridging social capital could take the form of follow-on probes of the form, “Of these close friends, how many are… (White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, Catholic, Jewish, college-educated, etc.)”. This bridging question is least susceptible to response bias and political correctness.

The Economist reports on the commission in Measuring What Matters:

” Man does not live by GDP alone. A new report urges statisticians to capture what people do live by…HOW well off are Americans? Frenchmen? Indians? Ghanaians? An economist’s simplest answer is the gross domestic product, or GDP, per person of each country. To help you compare the figures, he will convert them into dollars, either at market exchange rates or (better) at purchasing-power-parity rates, which allow for the cheapness of, say, haircuts and taxi rides in poorer parts of the world.

“To be sure, this will give you a fair guide to material standards of living: the Americans and the French, on average, are much richer than Indians and Ghanaians. But you may suspect, and the economist should know, that this is not the whole truth. America’s GDP per head is higher than France’s, but the French spend less time at work, so are they really worse off? An Indian may be desperately poor and yet say he is happy; an American may be well fed yet fed up. GDP was designed to measure only the value of goods and services produced in a country, and it does not even do that precisely. How well off people feel also depends on things GDP does not capture, such as their health or whether they have a job. Environmentalists have long complained that GDP treats the despoliation of the planet as a plus (via the resulting economic output) rather than a minus (forests destroyed).”

See earlier Social Capital blog post on “Advances in Social Capital Measurement“.

See full 292 page “Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress” here.

See Economist’s article, “Measuring What Matters” (9/17/09)

Intelligence and social capital

Flickr photo by aylaujp

Jason Richwine had a recent post on The American blog (“A Smart Solution to the Diversity Dilemma“) suggesting that the answer to the short-term tensions Robert Putnam has observed, between diversity and immigration and levels of civic engagement, has a solution: admit smarter immigrants.

First, a clarification…Jason Richwine is incorrect in asserting that Robert Putnam was unclear about whether to share these findings.  We shared an early take on this finding immediately after we conducted the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey.

I disagree with Jason’’s conclusion;  since education is generally a stronger predictor of levels of civic engagement than raw intelligence, we could still admit less educated immigrants who got educated over time in the U.S.  and have the immigrants still be highly civicly engaged.  Moreover, the lower civic engagement that Robert Putnam discussed in “E Pluribus Unum” was not a compositional effect (a consequence of having more immigrants who were less educated), but a consequence of the diversity within communities, so admitting more educated immigrants wouldn’t have offset that effect.  Nonetheless, his blog post did surface some interesting papers that I hadn’t seen before.  Richwine asserts: “Various survey data indicate that IQ is an important and independent predictor of voting, membership in various social organizations, daily newspaper reading, and tolerance of free speech rights.”

The backup for his assertion comes from:

1)  Seth Hauser, “Education, Ability, and Civic Engagement in the Contemporary United States” Social Science Research 29, 556–582 (2000).  Hauser found a modest independent affect of ability on voting and social participation, controlling for levels of education in GSS and Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey data: He found no such finding in ANES (American National Election Studies) data but this data has much weaker and less objective data on intelligence. Hauser concluded that in general the bivariate impact of ability on civic engagement comes from ability proxying for levels of education ultimately achieved.  He also found that education was a stronger predictor of levels of civic engagement than ability.  For “ability”,  GSS had a measure of vocabulary; and WLS used Henmon–Nelson Test of Mental Ability.

2) Stephen Miller, ” Intelligence, Irrationality, and Civic Returns: Can Education Improve Democracy?” (Econ Dept., George Mason Univ.).  Miller also used GSS data and also found that both education and intellectual ability in GSS predict voting, daily newspaper reading and tolerance of free speech.  Ability did not have any independent effect on group membership and only had an effect through levels of education achieved.

Had the effect of intelligence on social capital been much stronger than education (even controlling for education), it would suggest that there is less that one can do to alter one’s baseline level of civic engagement, and head us to more Calvinist notions of predestined civic engagement.  But since education is the bigger driver in Hauser’s findings, it suggests that we are keepers of our civic fate: although we may begin with differential likelihoods of getting engaged, these can be more than offset through additional education (which both provides us with useful skills for getting engaged — like organizing others, running a meeting, writing persuasive materials, making a speech etc. — and will make others more likely to ask us to get civicly engaged).

Various developments in social capital

Water Giggles by McBeth -- Flickr photo

Sorry I’ve been offline for a bit.

Here is a this-and-that post regarding various developments in social capital.

• The Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) has a wonderful new revamped site on Volunteering in America.  They also headlined findings from the Current Population Survey data in 2008 on volunteering and civic engagement showing volunteering remaining steady in 2008 and “[t]he number of people who worked with their neighbors to fix a community problem rose by 31 percent, from 15.2 million in 2007 to 19.9 million in 2008″, a remarkable increase in a year, which CNCS attributes to the Obama Administration’s United We Serve initiative and Serve.gov website.
• The National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) is releasing a new report “Civic Health and Hard Times” on September 9, 2009 at their annual conference on the “Opportunity Cost of Civic Engagement“.  Stay tuned for the findings.  We have some active research in this area on the impact of individual and aggregate economic hardship on levels of civic engagement which we have not published yet; a description of some of the literature in this area can be found in this earlier post.
• Various sites have blogged (here or here) or described an interesting conference in late July at Tufts (The Obama Administration’s Civic Agenda After Six Months), organized by Peter Levine at Tufts, and bringing together some scholars on civic engagement (including my HKS colleagues Archon Fung and Marshall Ganz) with folks from the Obama Administration (like Allen Solomont from CNCS) trying to set an agenda for the Obama Administration.
• Also in early August was the Strengthening Our Nation’s Democracy II conference in DC (organized by Demos. AmericaSpeaks and Everyday Democracy).  See descriptions of the content here.
• And BTW, my colleague Robert Putnam was quoted in a Forbes article entitled “Loneliness Can Kill You” about the research of University of Chicago neuroscientist and physiologist, John T. Cacioppo.

Social and Civic Mobilizing in Iran

Iranian Protests: Flickr photo by John McNab

I commend Thomas Friedman’s Op-Ed today, “The Virtual Mosque”, where he wonders whether Facebook can play the same role for Iranian moderates that the mosque played for more extremist Iranians in mobilizing voters.

Social capital (or social connections) have always played a strong role in politics worldwide.  Experiments in the U.S. show that that face-to-face mobilization is far more effective than phone mobilization, and churches have always played a strong role in political mobilization (especially in black churches, as American Grace, the new book by Robert Putnam and David Campbell will show [among many other interesting findings]).

These facts, in addition to the fact that the Iranian police state has guns (as Friedman points out) and is trying hard, and perhaps effectively to block and filter the internet, make me more skeptical of whether Facebook or Twitter can be as effective a tool in mobilizing Iranian moderates as the F2F connections at the mosque.  But for sure these e-connections are way more useful than not being able to mobilize social networks.   [And mark this as another example of how what appeared to be trivial technologies can be used as pro-democratic forces in repressive countries.] If you’re curious for a live and compelling updating of situation in Iran, see Andrew Sullivan’s blog. Note: the U.S. State Department even asked Twitter to defer maintenance for fear that this might adversely impact the protests!

Moreover, various news pieces have pointed out that the Guardian Council, which previously had maintained their infallability now looks a lot more fallable (after Khamanei initially immediately certified the results and now claims that there should be at least a partial recount).  That’s a hard genie to put back in the bottle.    It’s reminiscent of a conversation with a mother-friend of mine.  When her kids misbehaved, she was constantly counting to five and telling her sons, “you better do it by the time I count to 5, or you’ll be subjected to the wrath of Mom.”  I asked her what happened if her sons didn’t do something by 5 and realized that the consequences weren’t as dangerous as they feared.  She smiled sheepishly and noted, “I’m hoping we don’t get to that point…”  If people believe that the Guardian Council has no clothes, Iranian politics could change dramatically.

See Thomas Friedman’s “The Virtual Mosque” (NYT, 6/17/09)

See also the very interesting “Twitter on the Barricades: Six Lessons Learned” (NYT, 6/21/09, Noam Cohen)

High turnover of close friends

(Flickr photo by psoup216)

A interesting Dutch study by Gerald Mollenhorst found that just over half of close friends turn over every 7 years. And only 30% of friends were discussion partners and practical helpers some seven years later.

Whether this applies to American friends is up for grabs, although one aspect of the Dutch study clearly doesn’t transfer across the Ocean.  Mollenhorst found that the size of close friendship networks remained constant over the last 7 years despite the volatility in the composition of these networks.  In the U.S., the best careful study of close friends-see below-  found that close friendship networks have collapsed between 1985 and 2004, although there has been no careful work on this subject of trends since 2000.  [To be clear, in the U.S., unlike in the Netherlands, the study was not longitudinal;  in other words, researchers were not tracking the same individuals over these 16 years, but nevertheless average close friendship networks were collapsing over this period.]

Mollenhorst was also interested in how the social context (whether you met someone through school, work, neighborhood, etc.) affected friendships.  He found, surprisingly, that the social context did not affect how similar friends, partners and  acquaintances were to each other.  In this sense, it was a somewhat deterministic view of the importance of social context on our friendship networks.

The survey interviewed 1007 people ages 18-65 and then reinterviewed 604 of these individuals 7 years later.

The relevant U.S. study on the collapse of our close friendships is as follows:  Two prominent sociologists, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Miller McPherson, and former critics of Bowling Alone found confirming evidence of social isolation in the General Social Survey data. From 1985-2004, the percentage of Americans lacking anyone to discuss important matters with has nearly tripled. Almost half the U.S. population now has either no one or only one confidante with whom to discuss important matters. See June 23, 2006 stories in Boston Globe, Washington Post, and an essay in TIME magazine by Robert D. Putnam.

For article on the Mollenhorst Dutch study, see “Half of Your Friends Lost In Seven Years” (Science Daily)

Gerald Mollenhorst, Utrecht University page.

Umbrella Project: “Where Friends are Made: Context, Contact and Consequences (Beate Volker)

Diversity impedes redistribution

(Flickr photo by Maistora)

It has long been noted that in more diverse countries, it is harder to sustain wealth redistributive efforts, and public support for such programs wanes.  It has always been hard to disentangle culture from national wealth and diversity in understanding what causes this. 

A recent paper by HKS colleagues Erzo Luttmer and Monica Singhal (using European Social Survey data) gains traction on this issue by looking at immigrants to developed countries and finds that immigrants bring with them their attitudes about redistribution.  So immigrants, controlling for their wealth, education, etc., and their receiving country’s attitudes towards redistribution are more likely to support redistribution if they country that they come from supports redistribution. 

As the Economist summarized this:

Even after controlling for income, education and other relevant economic and social factors such as work history and age, views about redistribution in an immigrant’s home country are a strong predictor of his own opinions. Indeed, this measure of “cultural background” explains as much as income levels, and three-fifths as much as income and education combined. These results hold even for immigrants who moved 20 years before they were surveyed; they cannot be attributed to people not having had time to adjust their views.

 

And the results can not be explained by self-selection — which immigrants choose to migrate as these impacts would favor immigrants moving to countries that are more similar to the immigrants’ own views about redistribution.

Luttmer and Singhal found that these differences fade over time: the culture of immigrants has only about 2/3 of the effect on second generation immigrants as foreign-born immigrants.

The findings are consistent with some research done by John Helliwell about immigrants and their levels of social capital (social and civic engagement).
Helliwell describes the fact that trust levels are lower among Canadian immigrants than non-immigrants and that these differences persist even controlling for factors like education, income, time in community, etc. Tom Rice and Jan Feldman have noted the importance of immigrants’ home country trust in setting their trust levels when they emigrate. ["Civic Culture and Democracy From Europe to America" (1997).] Using this framework, Helliwell finds that these trust differentials disappear in Canada when one controls for average trust levels in the home country of the immigrants. Helliwell also asserts that contrary to the “footprint of imported trust” which lasts for many generations in the U.S., there is starting to be evidence in Canada that this it may disappear within one generation. Helliwell thus asks whether there are generalizable lessons about the win-win benefits to integrative governmental attitudes toward immigration in promoting better inter-racial attitudes and higher trust.

These findings are also broadly consistent with work done by Daniel Elazar on political culture in American states (in American Federalism: A View From the States), where he found, remarkably, that differences in “moral political culture”, especially in the upper midwest, were explained by broad migratory patterns of immigrants decades earlier from highly civic and trusting Scandinavian countries.

See “In the Blood: Attitudes towards redistribution have a strong cultural component” (Economist, June 4, 2009)

And Culture, Context, and the Taste for Redistribution by Erzo Luttmer and Monica Singhal, May 2009

Trust declining in all institutions other than the military

(Source Oregonian)

Preliminary results are in from the 2008 General Social Survey (GSS), the gold standard for social science research, which asks about trust in the following institutions: the military, the scientific community, medicine, the Supreme Court, education, organized religion, banks/financial institutions,  major companies, organized labor, the Executive Branch,  Congress, television, and the press.

Since 1976, trust in all these institutions (other than the military) has declined, many of them markedly. And since 2000, trust is down for all except the military and education.  Note: the polling was done prior to the financial crisis, which presumably has lowered trust in banks/financial institutions further, but nonetheless, trust in banks and financial institutions was cut by more than half from 1976 to 2008.

Trust in government which was around 75% in 1960 has plummeted, with the Executive Branch and Congress only having the trust of roughly one in 8 or 10 Americans, and the Supreme Court a bit more trusted (with roughly 1 in 3 Americans trusting it).

OFA: Harnessing Obama’s grassroots network in Massachusetts

A couple of weeks ago (on May 16), Organizing for America [OFA], the grassroots network that was called Obama for America, had an organizing meeting in Massachusetts that drew over 400 attendees.  [I've written earlier about the challenge and promise of OFA, the 13 million person network from the campaign, that is unprecedented and the question of whether they will be field troops for the Obama agenda or enabled to have their own input into policy.]

Marshall Ganz provided a historical context for OFA.  He noted that social change in our history is not a constant, it is episodic: “”Change is slow except when it’s fast. We’re in a fast movement now so let’s not lose it.”  This is the first time, Ganz noted, that a social movement gave birth during a political campaign.  Successful social movements have to act national but be locally rooted, and to translate national action into local change. Ganz believes that more civic capital has been created through this campaign than ever created through our nation’s history; we have to be creative about using this civic capital.  We need to make sure that it is not a one-way arrangement.

The theme of OFA members wanting input on policy came up at the OFA-MA event, both in questioning of Mitch Stewart (national director of OFA) and in informal discussions throughout the day. Mitch Stewart noted that OFA’s prime agenda was “to support the President’s agenda.”  During Q&A a woman  shouted out “We want input in that agenda!” to large applause.  Stewart tried to siphon the OFA interest in policy by encouraging people to express their input on  whitehouse.gov or by communicating with their members of Congress.  He noted that he was not a policy expert and OFA was not a policy organization.  But it is clear that the audience wasn’t comfortable with that resolution.

A number of speakers highlighted a theme that I have discussed earlier about the importance of marrying technology with “social capital” to have optimal effect. Ethan Winn (software developer) summarized it as  “organizing practices apply online” and commented that once you build the trust through F2F encounters, you can give people responsibilities.)  Marshall Ganz, Harvard lecturer, former community organizer and train-the-trainer for the Obama grassroots effort, in response to a question about how to reach low-income people through technology, replied: “It’s important to distinguish between carpenters and tools. The best tools in the world don’t build a house. The campaign made the tools and equipped people to use the tools. The Dean campaign was successful in using technology to fund raise but the Meetups were not successful — no one knew what to do. The Obama campaign did that part well. People were hungry for tools to work with one another successfully. The technology AND the leadership together were what made the campaign successful. Also, the use of YouTube to enable people to tell their stories was extraordinary. That tool has just begun to realize its potential.”  And Sarah Compton (field organizer in MA for Obama) observed:  “I hope that technology never replaces face-to-face contact. When canvassing to NH, we tried to have a carpool in every town. Those carpools were also meetings and got people engaged. A proof that that was more successful in some ways than technology, the national campaign sent out a blast email about Drive for Change, but we got thousands more people to canvass through word of mouth.”

Here is a thoughtful post on the OFA-MA meeting by “Bottom Up Change”.

Here is video of “Grassroots Organizing: Harnessing the Obama Movement” [panel featuring Sarah Compton, Marshall Ganz, Juan Leyton (director of Neighbor to Neighbor), Ethan Winn and Alan Khazei (BeTheChangeInc.org and co-founder of City Year)

OFA-MA has many other resources from the recent meeting including a live-blogging account of the day.

Building civil society on a foundation of sand

(Flickr Photo by ArmyMil)

Donald Eberly’s new book “Liberate and Leave” has a thoughtful insider’s account of the challenges that the Bush Administration faced in trying to rebuild civil society in Iraq in the first two years following the ouster of Saddam Hussein.  Don was positioned in the Ministry of Youth and Sport (in the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, or later the Coalition Provisional Authority).  One would think that Ministry of Youth and Sport would be an apolitical spot, but this was a department that had been ruled with an iron grip by Saddam’s brother Uday Hussein before the Hussein regime was toppled.  Eberly writes:

“Ralph Waldo Emerson said that every institution is the lengthened shadow of a man. Uday Hussein’s grotesque shadow had lengthened across the nation and even lingered across the very job I was given.  I felt like I caught sight of his very shadow slinking away out the back door as I walked in the front.  I remain haunted by much of what I saw (personally as well as through eyewitnesses and official reports).”  [Eberly recounts later in the  book much of the terror perpetrated by Uday.]

The book gives one an account of life on the ground in Iraq during “Phase IV” that was about winning the “hearts and minds of Iraqis” through humanitarian assistance, reconstruction, and civil administration until the Iraqis could assume responsibility.  Eberly notes that the media tagged this effort a failure, but says that few note how extraordinarily difficult this phase was . One colleague analogized it to  “assembling a vehicle while driving.” There was so little to build on, and although the mantra was a light touch, Colin Powell, talking about Iraqi organizations, noted  “you break it, you own it”  (i.e., are responsible for fixing it). Eberly doesn’t discuss how little central planning went into this Phase initially among central war planners in the US, but he does highlight the key divisions and distrust between the State Department and the Department of Defense in the rebuilding of civil society.

Flickr photo of Boots of Iraqi casualties-by SoundFromWayOut

Eberly’s efforts focused partially on reorganizing the Iraqi Olympic sports teams, from a place of torture for enemies of Uday, into a legitimate and well-respected enterprise.  (It had the support of Paul Bremer who “was himself an accomplished athlete.”)  They had to spend months holding new elections for the Olympic Committee since the old one had been a front and “tangled with corruption and abuse.”

Eberly highlights a central challenge: “We could use our power to eliminate people, but we could not use that same power to dictate who would replace them…We claimed the right to remove past sports officials, even though, under the IOC, sports are supposed to be independent of government.  However, we could not simply and arbitrarily put new people in place.”  How could they insure that new crooks did not get themselves re-elected?

They “assembled and circulated a list of respected Iraqis” to oversee this process, to give it a sense of legitimacy.  Eberly notes that the “entire episode proved to be a remarkable early experiment in democracy for Iraq.”    The book details the challenges to get even one woman on the committee, the challenges regarding the ethnic balance on the committee, and the threats to the legitimacy of the enterprise thrown up by Kurds.

It makes you realize just how much we take for granted in civic engagement efforts in the U.S. (from infrastructure to build upon, to citizen initative, to some sense of social and governmental trust, to the rule of law).  Eberly notes, for example, just how important the effort was to get US donors to contribute 80,000 soccer balls as an effort to build trust of the US-led civic redevelopers.

See also this earlier post on efforts to rebuild civil society in Iraq (“Human Networks in Iraq Trump Technology” and “Tough to Centrally Manufacture Social Capital“).