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.

Is Global Recession Increasing U.S. Engagement?

(Flickr photo by jam343)

Typically and historically the effects of a great recession or significant levels of unemployment have been greater civic disengagement.

There have been interesting studies on this:

• The classic study of the sociological effects of a great recession was in Marienthal by sociologists Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, and Zeisel. They examined the effects of the Great Depression on a tiny Austrian town, 20 m SE of Vienna, in 1931-1932, that captured the psychological costs for individuals exposed to prolonged unemployment, thrown into a vicious cycle of reduced opportunities and reduced aspirations to the point where they didn’t fully pursuing available opportunities.  Many workers were unemployed following the closing of town flax mill that affected nearly every Marienthal family; 2 years after closure in 1931, only one in five families had one or more wage earners with regular work and 75% of families were dependent on unemployment insurance.  Despite increased free time, people joined less, read library books and newspapers less, the public park fell into disrepair, and the once popular theater club was shuttered. The only organizations that benefited were those providing a direct financial benefit to individuals (e.g., the cycling club which offered insurance to members and the Social Democratic cremation society)  The unemployed men in a demonstration of their lower self-esteem and lack of purpose actually slowed down their walking speed and stopped more often.
• Bob Putnam in Bowling Alone (2000) Figure 8 (p. 54) charted the civic patterns over the last 100 years through the aggregate market share of 32 civic pillars (e.g., the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, Rotary, Red Cross, PTAs, etc.). The biggest single rapid decline in the last 100 years was in the Great Depression. A number of groups lost half of their members in 3-4 years in the 1930s.
• A 2008 study by Brand and Burgard using long-term panel data from the high school graduating class of 1957 in the state of Wisconsin showed that spells of unemployment have a permanent effect in depressing civic engagement.  Overview at http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/bowling-alone-because-the-team-55041.aspx .   Jennie Brand and Sarah Burgard.  “Effects of Job Displacement on Social Participation: Findings over the Life Course of a Cohort of Joiners.” Social Forces. (September 2008). The reasons for this long-term impact are not well-known but may also be psychological.
• Cristobal Young, a graduate student rising star in Princeton’s Sociology Dept., has a forthcoming thesis with a chapter on the time effects of unemployment showing that the big increase in the unemployed is time spent alone (up by about 160 minutes a day), controlling for standard socio-demographics. Time spent with family increased by 2.25 hours a day and time spent with friends increased by about 45 minutes, but both were actually lower than the increase in time spent with families and friends on a typical weekend day.  (This may be part psychological and wrapped up in self-confidence or shame, but clearly also partly a coordination issue with the schedules of friends and family members who often work weekdays and also may not want to socialize on weekday nights for that reason.)

The short answer is that we won’t know until a year or two from now when we have reliable large-scale data, but history is chastening on this score.  Obviously in this business, as the mutual funds warn, past performance is not necessarily indicative of future success.

But Annie Gowen of the Washington Post examines some tea leaves in “In Recession, Some See Burst of ‘Neighboring’; Tough Times May Be Helping Build Stronger Communities in D.C. Suburbs” (5/4/09) and asserts hopeful early signs.  She asserts that due to technology, governmental leadership and an active youth generation, this global recession is currently increasing engagement.

My own take is that in all likelihood there is clearly a positive impact of President Obama, who comes from a community organizing background and fully understands the importance of engagement.  He ran a campaign that mobilized scores of new voters into the political process and built up an e-mail list of 13 million supporters who expressed their hunger in staying involved.  He was a participant in our Saguaro Seminar, and early steps of his administration, like renewal and expansion of the national service legislation, and his volunteering on Martin Luther King day and organizing an effort to help others do so clearly provide a conducive backdrop to those with inclinations to serve.  Moreover, Bob Putnam and I have written about the 9-11 Generation, and this will certainly help bolster the country’s civic engagement, aside from the effects of the recession.

It could well be that the economy will be having a negative influence on civic engagement, but that some, and maybe all of this may be countervailed by the Obama effect and the 9-11 Generation.

In any event, the evidence Gowen of the Washington Post musters is fairly anecdotal:

- In Montgomery County (MD), for example, the number of new neighborhood groups has doubled

- “… in hard-hit Manassas (VA), active groups jumped from five to 20 in the past two years.”

-  Keith N. Hampton, an asst. prof. at U. Penn.’s Annenberg School, runs i-neighbors.org, a web site for neighborhood groups with 50,000 members. Hampton says that i-neighbors’ communication  is up 25% this spring over last spring.

Note:  Gowen doesn’t mention this in her article but there is clearly strong evidence (more related to the young generation of Americans) about big increases in interest in national service programs, like Teach for America, City Year, etc.  This is probably a consequence of 2 intersecting factors, the declining job opportunities for graduating seniors at universities, and a 9-11 Generation (those in H.S. or college at the time of the September 11 attack) that has been more interested in volunteering and politics than the generation that came before.

Another journalistic article that also stresses the positive impact of recession on volunteering is “Many who lose a job find a joy: Volunteering” (Atlanta Constitution, by Gracie Bonds Staples, 5/19/09)

Cybershaming to spur engagement in a socially isolated era?

Could ISawYourNanny, nyc.UncivilServants.org and citizen YouTube videos of rats in a Greenwich Village Taco Bell (which then later came to media attention) be a tonic for our civic woes?

What civic woes? As chronicled in Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, Americans over the last generation are increasingly disengaged from their friends as well as government and community organizations. And we’re paying a dear price for this decline in ‘social capital’ beyond some warm and fuzzy sense of the remembrance of community passed. A booming volume of research shows that with weaker social networks come less responsive public institutions, increased crime, worse public health and lower life satisfaction, slower economic growth, and lower educational achievement, to name a few consequences.

In an earlier era where everyone knew their neighbors and were more involved in organizations, information spread more rapidly. The reputation of Greenwich Village’s KFC would have disseminated through bowling leagues and PTAs and Kiwanis clubs once a person saw rats in the customer area. And these social networks of trust and reciprocity thus held civil servants and citizens far more accountable — a nanny loafing on the job would dramatically increase the job that she’d be fired, increasingly making the benefit of an afternoon’s leisure seem scant against a high likelihood that her reputation would become widely known. Making Democracy Work by Robert Putnam showed that in regions of Italy where social networks were vibrant through choral societies or soccer clubs, government performed better and was more responsive.

But what are we to do in a social-capital anemic society? How do we hold idle nannies or corrupt government officials accountable? How do we engage others when these social networks are weak? It appears that the web, through civilian disclosure activists may be making lemonade out of lemons. Maybe this web disclosure is a social adaptation to a changing ecosystem. It also raises questions about when shaming is useful behavior in starting to reassert civic norms, as this biker thinks it is.

When is this shaming and publicizing especially useful in mobilizing activism and when is it not?

- when the issues are visual or arresting (e.g., a Nanny sleeping in park on duty, George Allen saying *macaca*) since interpretation is “clearer” and desire to spread virally to others is higher.

- when context appears not that important (for example, a terrible parking job or this Your Parking S*@ks, a site devoted to terrible parking jobs)

- when issues are not that complex (i.e., it is less clear that web-data on the carbon footprint of various products will be as powerful without persuasive brokers like respected leaders or respected non-profit organizations)

Activism by disclosure hardly represents any sort of panacea but it is a development surely to rise in importance and may offset to a small degree some of the loss from the fact that we are Bowling Alone.

I’d welcome your comments for interesting trends you see in this space.

See also: Don’t Date Him Girl

Platewire (to report bad driving behavior by license plate)

and “Honk if you’re going to report this on the Internet” (Slate, May 2009)

UPDATED: Technology doing little to reduce civic class gap

photo by TabascoKid

At the Harvard Inequality Seminar, Harvard Prof.  Sid Verba and BC Prof. Kay Schlozman presented some of their then-unpublished recent work-in-progress on whether the Internet is helping to reduce the class gaps in civic participation that Verba wrote about in 1959 in Civic Culture and Verba, Schlozman and Henry Brady wrote about in 1995 in Voice and Equality.  [They have now published their findings in "The Internet and Civic Engagement" (Pew Internet and American Life Project, 9/1/09).]

Their primary conclusions were that the Internet is NOT doing much to level political participation from a class perspective but may be doing more to level participation across age groups.  Over the past generation, lower socio-economic groups and younger Americans participate civicly at lower rates than older and higher status Americans.

Although they didn’t know the socio-economic status of the 13 million e-mail addresses that Obama gathered in the 2008 campaign, they surmised, based on their research that it was likely to be disproportionately those of higher SES levels.

They also were able to dissagregate the class gap in civic participation among the lower SES fifth.  They compared rates of *online participation* (participation in one or more of five categories like giving money to political causes, sending e-letter to editor,  signing an e-petition, contacting your representative by e-mail, etc.) among those who “connected” (i.e., they had Internet at home or sent e-mails periodically) against those who weren’t.  The digital divide (much lower rates of being “connected” among the lower SES fifth) explained maybe half of the class gap in political participation, but a clear gap in political participation remained, even in comparing the rates of political participation of connected lower class Americans against upper class Americans.  Verba pointed out that this is probably a function of lower SES groups, either: a) not wanting to participate; or b) not being able to (not having the money or time or skills); or c) not being asked as much by other groups to participate.    The last factor creates a vicious spiral; people target higher SES groups to politically participate since they participate more and it seems rational to focus attention where it will produce the biggest payoff, but this in turn makes lower SES groups participate less and therefore means that other groups avoid them more in the future in targeting.

The one potential bright spot for Verba and Schlozman was social networking groups (Twitter, Facebook and the like).  Participation in these groups was much higher among younger Americans than older Americans.  While social networking sites have the potential to be used for political purposes, they didn’t see evidence that these sites were commonly being used for such purposes, and in fact, their data (drawn from an August 2008 national survey of 2,000 Americans), continued to show a persistent effect of older Americans participating more politically (both on-line and off-line).  But Verba and Schlozman, while acknowledging that more of the “political” uses of applications like Facebook currently seems to be fannish, think that these social networking groups may in the future help to reduce the age-based civic gap if they are used for more expressly political purposes.

One of their interesting findings was a graph that compared levels of class inequality in 1959 (from Civic Culture) to 1995 (from Voice and Equality) to their current findings.  Interestingly, the class gradient has remained fairly constant.  Those in the lowest SES (socio-economic status) fifth participated civicly at rates of 25-35% in all three studies, and those at the top SES fifth participated civicly at rates of 80% in all three studies (spanning 50 years of U.S. history).

Their findings were somewhat controversial among the crowd listening to these comments.  Some felt that they limited participation too much toward traditional forms of participation (writing a letter to the editor, giving money to a political candidate, etc.) and shortchanged new forms of political participation, like writing a blog post or commenting on one, joining a Facebook cause, etc.  [Verba and Schlozman did that so they could compare on-line and off-line participation,  and didn't have an off-line counterpart of blog posting.]  Others felt that they couldn’t make inferences about the consequences of the Internet, since they didn’t know the counterfactual (how much would Americans of various social classes participated offline if the web wasn’t around).

Verba and Schlozman have also not teased out whether the patterns with regard to the Internet for youth are a cohort phenomenon (where this group will stay equally involved as they age) or a lifecycle phenomenon, where it is something about being a 18-25 year-old and this group will become less civicly involved as they age.  When they showed a slide comparing civic engagement by age (in 1959 v. 1995 v. 2008) it shows that there is now a much flatter pattern of civic engagement by age.  Whether that says something about the Internet or the attractiveness of Barack Obama to youth participation is anyone’s guess.  In addition, since the methodology Verba and Schlozman used did not survey cell phones (disproportionately used by young people), it is possible (if the young cellphone users differ from the landline users) that they underestimated youth civic participation through various social media.

Depression has “depressing” social consequence

TV brainwashed - photo by Aaron Escobar

More bad news from the economic depression.

The most recent “Three Screen Report” from the Nielsen Co. tracks TV watching across the three screens of television, computers and cellphones.  The average amount of TV watched a month is a staggering 5 hours a day on average (151 hours a month), up 3.6% from 12 months ago.

As the L.A. Times put it: “Television executives (and space aliens) have the recession and the heightened interest in election coverage to thank for the increase in TV watching. People are staying in and watching the boob tube rather than spending money outside the house….”

And another depressing factoid for those who claim that at least if Americans are watching, they are watching together.  There are now more TVs than people in an average American household, suggesting that more and more Americans are watching alone.

This is bad news because Robert Putnam has chronicled how lethal commercial, entertainment television has been to social capital in Bowling Alone.  Basically, television has more than consumed all the increase in our leisure time since the 1960s, and is the only activity in which doing more of this is associated with doing less of everything else civicly (e.g., joining a group, or volunteering, or socializing with neighbors).  Other activities (e.g., playing an instrument or going to a sporting event) are associated with doing more of other social and civic activities.

And it suggests that David Brooks’ prognosis that the recession may be bad for middle class social capital because it will lead to more cocooning may be true.  Note:  the NY Times is planning a story for next Thursday (3/5) on the social and civic impact of the recession.

Read The Nielsen Co.’s Three Screen Report or Television viewing at all-time high, LA Times story (2/24/09)

Is “Organizing for America” really “Organizing for Obama”?

We’ve posted earlier about the $64,000 question: what will happen to the throngs of political supporters brought into the process by the Obama Campaign?

This has been partially answered.  Obama for America 2.0 [OBA 2.0] as it was loosely called will be called Organizing for America.

The language sounds empowering of his supporters (“you’ve built the largest grassroots movement in history”, “our journey to change America”, “we cannot do it without you”, I wouldn’t have been sworn in without you,  etc.), but a separate press release by Tim Kaine, governor of Virginia and head of the Democratic National Committee, indicates that Organizing for America will work within the DNC.  This organizational structure suggests that it will be more of a force to enact the Obama Administration agenda: in other words a one-way rather than a  two-way street.

He doesn’t answer how it will be staffed and funded, whether it will be a federated, with a chance for participants to rise to state or national leadership positions in OFA through voting, and most importantly doesn’t address whether it will enable individuals to contact each other: criticizing Obama if they feel he is not living out the ideals of the campaign, or organizing around issues different than the Obama Administration is focusing on.

I’ve indicated earlier that I think this extraordinary 13 million person network will have less staying power if the individuals feel they are merely foot soldiers without an ability to change or shape the political priorities.  (And the one other effort to help glean citizens’ priorities for the Obama Administration (Change.org),  seemed to fall victim to the “vote early, vote often” phenomenon, propelling the legalization of marijuana to #1, probably because Ron Paul supporters rallied their troops repeatedly).

The Obama folks also introduce by video Mitch Stewart as the Executive Director of Organizing for America, caucus director of Iowa and the person and the person who ran Virginia for Obama during the general election.

Stay tuned.

A civic inflection point for the U.S.?

Sorry for the length, but this is an important post discussing evidence that we may be turning a corner civicly and starting to get re-engaged.

My colleague Robert Putnam has written about the devastating declines our nation witnessed in social capital in his landmark book Bowling Alone. As Putnam demonstrated and continued research proves, this social capital is vitally important to things like how well our schools and government works, how fast our economies grow, how happy and healthy we are, how safe our communities are. [For more on this read Bowling Alone, section III.]

It is interesting to note, given that backdrop, that we may well prove to be at an inflection point in our nation’s civic connectedness due largely to generational forces and the election of Obama. Obviously predictions are perilous, so it’s far too soon to announce “Mission Accomplished” on civic re-engagement, but here are some reasons to be hopeful.

Forces at work:

My colleague Bob Putnam uses the metaphor of a bathtub. Imagine that our national stock of social capital represents a bathtub. Each year 18 year olds are coming into this adult civic bathtub with their civic habits largely formed and each year we are losing (a mainly elderly) slice of America to the Grim Reaper. The relative difference between the civicness of the new 18 year olds and the folks dying each year represents an automatic civic change, even if no one changes their own civic behaviors.

For a long time, we’ve been losing each year one of the most civic slices of America (what Brokaw calls the Greatest Generation – folks born prior to 1931 – who have been throughout their whole lives way more civic). They gave more, joined more, gave blood more, voted more, trusted more, volunteered more, than the generations that came before and after them. And until the last 10 years, the folks coming into the bathtub were not very civic (they didn’t vote much, they didn’t trust much, they didn’t volunteer that much). Thus there was a cruel generational calculus going on that was persistently making America on average less civic and less connected, even barring any individual-level change with very hot civic water leaving the bathtub each year and being replaced by more lukewarm water.

There are now two important changes transpiring from a generational perspective. First, the Greatest Generation no longer exists in large numbers (percentage-wise). Thus we are entering into the period where a higher percentage of the folks we lose each year to death are the early Boomers, not the Greatest Generation. It is obviously a major loss that we don’t have the Greatest Generation around in the same numbers as a decade ago, but from the perspective of the civic bathtub, the average temperature of the civic water we’re losing each year has gone down.

And at the incoming end, the water entering the bathtub is heating up as well. The good news is that over the past 10 or so years, volunteering among young people has been going up. Some of this (maybe 1/3) is “mandatory” service (required to graduate from middle school or high school) or service to burnish resumes for college. But the motivations don’t matter all that much. Researchers have found that those who volunteer at a young age are likely to do so throughout their whole lives, regardless of why they initially volunteered.

Since Sept. 11, we’ve witnessed an increase in political interest and voting among American youth who were at or near college at the time of 9-11. We’ve written about these changes in “Sept. 11 as Civics Lesson” describing a new “9-11 Generation” forming. Since we don’t know about voting behavior until youth reach age 18, it’s impossible to know whether 9-11 shaped the political behavior of children who were as young as ages 8 or 10 when the Twin Towers fell, but so far the trends are encouraging. For example, interest in politics among college freshmen was down almost monotonically for 35 years from the early 1960s to 2000 and has turned up almost every year since 2001 (in the UCLA American College Freshman Survey)

2. Barack

Enter Barack Obama (force #2). Some in the press have indicated that Obama created this political upsurge. We don’t think the data support this view. Barack Obama is a remarkably impressive man who we had the pleasure of working with on Saguaro, and he is highly charismatic. But Bob Putnam has noted that although Obama was a match in igniting young people, there was an underlying stock of dry kindling among youth (their pent up interest in politics) waiting to be lit.

The Obama Campaign was a masterful strategy of engaging Americans. I mentioned in an earlier post how it was a great combination of high touch and high-tech and Obama’s intention in the campaign was to take community organizing to national level. He trained thousands of local organizers, engaged millions of new Americans in politics, as volunteers, as donors.

Not all of these were young Americans, but a disproportionate number were. For example:

• The biggest increases in primaries and general election appear to be among 18-29 year olds; and
• Moreover, these volunteers and supporters have the high of a success, for many coming on their first engagement experience.

We think the Obama campaign and administration will influence our civic trajectory in at least four ways:

a) The Obama campaign has built up a network of 13million e-mails of supporters. This is a tremendous potential asset in our nation’s civic re-engagement if it gets effectively used in the future, but it is a $64,000 question about how this should and can be done. Should it be done top down or bottom up? Should it become a new non-profit? Should it be part of the Democratic Party? Will it be a one-way street (for the Obama Administration to mobilize foot soldiers) or a two-way street? Will it be independent enough to criticize the Obama Administration? Some are not waiting for the Obama leaders to define its post-election character and taking action into their own hands (such as, MoveOn “Real Voices for Change” post-election house parties, Nashville Community Organizers Meetup group, Nations for Change, GroundUp (CT for Obama), Wisconsin Field Hands). We saw this earlier in the campaign when the network started to mobilize when Obama switched positions to support FISA, which  has led to Get FISA Right.  It is a hopeful sign that Obama has permitted dissension on his Change.gov site about Obama’s choice of evangelical preacher Rick Warren to give the inauguration convocation.

There is a very good summary at TechPresident by Micah Sifrey about the current state of play on this network of activists, or what is called “OFA2” (Obama for America 2). Some sites are even using “crowd sourcing” to try to set agendas for the Barack Administration (set up by the campaign) or this alternative agenda crowdsourcing site.

One trivial example of how this network might be used came recently when Obama’s campaign manager suggested to the e-mail list that if they are concerned about Barack’s girls’ choice of a White House “first dog”, they should get involved with animal shelters. (The e-mail read: “Excited about the much anticipated first dog? Support your local animal shelter to give animals in your area a chance.”) Some criticized this approach as too small-bore, but the general approach might have great merit. Think of something like Net Day applied to multiple issues over the course of a year.

b) Bully pulpit: Barack will have many opportunities as President in ways big and small to show the importance of service and caring for others and this will have an impact. Whether it is signaling that his girls will have to make their beds in the White House, or telling Detroit’s 3 CEOs that they should forego salary, or giving blood, or working on a volunteer project, or telling us how we need to sacrifice to cut back on global warming.

[Postscript: as one trivial example of this, Obama's use of USAService.org and self-example of painting a homeless shelter doubled the number of Americans in service on MLK Day from 500,000 to over a million.]

c) Given Barack’s own background, one can assume that his policies will be more social capital friendly. The government spends well over $2.5 trillion every year, dwarfing the expenditures of non-profits. How those dollars are shaped could have enormous difference in our civic patterns. The potential examples are almost limitless; imagine if more national spending went to:

• Integrating immigrants through social organizations, learning English in groups with immigrants or non-immigrants;
• Anti-crime efforts that focused more on neighborhood networks;
• Public health efforts that focused on getting individuals into social networks and groups;
• Putting more of the educational dollars into promoting civic values in schools, teaching civic skills and knowledge and ensuring that all students engage in service learning in groups with meaningful reflection;
• Increasing opportunities for intensive national service after high school, with a GI-like Bill component that in turn opened up educational opportunities for those who served;
• Using neighborhood networks and knowledge for homeland security; or
• Ensuring that more of the funding for the arts went to foster community engagement or the bridging of disparate social groups.

d) Transparency and civic engagement in the process. The Obama Transition Team has a working group looking at Technology, Innovation and Government Reform. It’s too soon to know what they will suggest and whether they can get Congress to go along. Although he has said he will not sign any bill until Americans have had a chance to comment on it, I’m not sure that is practical or meaningful. And certainly the risk is that unless the public can see a dispassionate distillation of these comments, Obama Administration officials may pick and choose the friendly comments. But for sure, many think that we have inherited a citizen-participation scheme of government that is badly broken (few if any come to government hearings) and it certainly doesn’t use the best of open source technology or the Internet. Imagine if there were lots of channels for citizens to participate, and citizens could choose the paths that represented their best expertise and highest interest. One such example is Peer-to-Patent where citizens can provide their expertise to review whether inventions are patentable based on “prior art”. Citizens could be used to provide greater expertise in local budgeting (as done in Ipatinga, Brazil) or in holding government accountable or in figuring out policy answers to tough questions (as was done in British Columbia in evaluating the right parliamentary voting process through the use of a citizen jury). But in this process of getting citizen participation we must be able to separate, as Clay Shirkey has noted, the franchise from passion or interest. In our voting system, one gets one vote no matter how passionately one cares about an issue. If commenting and voting systems don’t identify or track participants they risk being gamed: in the way that Ataturk became TIME’s leading vote getter for Man of the Century or that  “legalization of marijuana” rose to the top of the list of issues the new Obama Administration should address at Change.Gov. The issue, as Clay points out, is whether a well organized minority can out-maneuver and less well organizers majority.

3. Technology

I don’t think we’ve figured out how best to use technology to foster social capital and civic engagement, although the Obama campaign as I indicated was a masterful combination of high touch and high-tech (using technology to enable people to figure out whom among their friends lived in battleground states and hence whom they should call, using texting to link people to campaign events). For sure, technology will need to play in a key role in the fourth path above: liberating citizens to play a more active role in governance and accountability.

We’re too early on in the life of the Internet in to know what the technology answers to our patterns of civic disconnection will look like or even if they will emerge (although there are some encouraging signs like Meetup or Craigslist or potentially some of the merging of cellphones with locational awareness to activate and strengthen weaker social ties, like with Helio Beacon Buddy or Loopt). For sure lots more tweaking, innovation and experimentation is necessary.

But technology is a useful ace in the hole, even if it doesn’t start driving solutions yet.

Generational forces are tough when you are working against them and a boon when they are working with you: imagine running into a headwind vs. running with the wind at your back.

If the generational changes (referred to earlier) start to stabilize our stock of social capital and even begin moving us in a positive direction, and the Obama administration, both in their spending and in their moral signaling, raise the profile and importance of social connectedness and sacrifice, technology could be the after burner that gives additional thrust to a period of civic re-engagement, both through participation in governance and outside of government.

This won’t happen on its own, but it is a distinct reality with your concerted attention and the attention of thousands others like you.

For an in-depth look at some of civic engagement of the Obama volunteers and how they consciously deepened volunteers engagement, see the National Journal piece “Community Organizer In Chief: The success of the Obama campaign is a sign that civic participation is on the rise again after decades of decline”. [This also describes some of the history of civic organizations over the last 100 years.] Also see Zack Exley, key online organizer of the Howard Dean campaign and a former union organizer, who had this interesting post “The New Organizers: What’s Really Behind Obama’s Ground Game” in the Huffington Post (October 8, 2008)

What Next for the Obama Network? Four Critical Questions

(Will the Obama network become an Administrative megaphone or a 2-way street?) (photo by Irene Roxanne)

Guest Post by Thad Williamson: There can be little question that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign marked a seismic event in the history of American political participation, an event that is incredibly interesting in its own right and that may have long-term repercussions for the future trajectory of civic engagement in America.

Here in Richmond, Virginia, due to the efforts of the Obama campaign, voter rolls swelled by 18% (an increase of over 18,000 voters) between the February primary and Election Day last week. Voter turnout was up roughly 25% across the city compared to 2004, and Obama compiled a voted margin in this strongly Democratic city (about 54,500) nearly twice as high as that mustered by John Kerry (29,000 votes) four years ago.

Any political scientist would consider an event or factor capable of increasing political participation by 20-25% in a single election cycle, holding other factors constant, a very big deal. And so the Obama campaign is!

But perhaps what is most interesting about the Obama campaign is the reminder it provides that human behavior is not pre-determined by regression models, or by past behavior. Prior to this year, few would have believed that turnout in the city’s four predominantly African-American council districts, neighborhoods with historically low voting rates, would be over 40% higher than in 2004. Nor were there any good recent examples in Richmond of sustained, multi-racial organizing involving diverse citizens working side-by-side in horizontal relationships towards a shared goal.

The Obama campaign changed both those facts, and consequently this city is now a different place politically. Indeed, we are living in a rare moment where the future seems open and the possibility of “change” of various kinds seems very real.

How the Obama campaign might affect the long-term civic culture of the United States is a very open question, however. Will the networks and contacts and relationships established during the campaign endure, and what shape will they take?

We can break that overarching question down into four more specific ones.

The first has to do with how the vast civic network established by the Obama campaign might affect his administration’s governance. It has been reported this week that the Obama camp has a list of 11 million email addresses (not to be confused with 11 million distinct people!) , and the transition team is soliciting yet more addresses at its change.gov website.

The obvious use towards which that list might be put is to exert pressure on Congress to pass the Obama Administration’s legislative proposals. Such pressure would be useful not just in persuading the odd recalcitrant Republican senator (and/or Joe Lieberman!) from blocking legislative progress through filibusters, but in ensuring that the Democrats themselves do not lose their nerve and water down proposals threatening to established interests.

No one imagines, for instance, that it will be possible to pass meaningful health care reform without encountering determined resistance from some in the insurance industry as well as from conservatives opposed for philosophical reasons.

Obama will be determined to avoid a repeat of 1993-94 when the Clintons advanced an ambitious reform agenda without having the foot soldiers or public enthusiasm to advocate effectively for the plan. The entire theory of Obama’s campaign has been that grassroots organization will be required not just to win the election but to pass meaningful legislation.

All signs indicate that the new administration intends to aggressively enlist its supporters in the legislative struggles ahead, and thereby inaugurate a new mode of presidential governing.

But this raises a second, more difficult, question: Can those same mobilized networks of supporters be used to hold President Obama accountable? Will the administration allow repeats of this summer, when his own website was the venue for a vocal protest against the candidate’s vote for the FISA granting retroactive  immunity to telecoms? Will generally supportive groups like moveon.org be willing to hold Obama’s feet to the fire should he change positions or strategy? Will Obama supporters move to set up their own groups independent of the campaign/administration’s organizational infrastructure?

Those are difficult but important questions going forward. The challenge is how to assure that the potential for direct communication between the White House and supportive voters becomes not just a one-way but a two-way dialogue. That challenge is complicated by the fact that Obama supporters will surely disagree among themselves regarding when they should be willing to call the president out loud and clear when he goes astray and when they should be willing to accept departures from campaign promises as a matter of pragmatism.

Here we might expect over time a divide (of sorts) to emerge between supporters who are primarily attracted to Barack Obama as an individual leader and are willing to support him and trust his judgment almost unconditionally, and those who see him as a vehicle for advancing values they care about. (That dichotomy is overdrawn of course; I don’t know of any strong progressive supporters of Obama who don’t also admire his personal qualities, at least to some degree.)

A third question is whether and how the networks established by the Obama campaign at the local level might generate new forms of cross-cutting social and civic capital that facilitate progressive action and changes in specific places. The question is particularly pertinent here in Richmond, where there is great need for a mobilized civic network involving African-Americans, Hispanics, and whites from multiple parts of the city.

What happens in Richmond and in similar places will depend on the actions and steps these former Obama volunteers take themselves to keep the network going. I’m pleased to report that the email network of (demographically diverse) campaign volunteers I’m on in Richmond has already had one community picnic , with more events planned going forward; how all this might translate into future politically significant efforts remains to be seen. While it’s not realistic to think that all or even most of the millions of people who showed up to volunteer for Obama in their local community (some of whom, as in Richmond, are inherently transient college students) will want to remain engaged in local networks, it’s very possible that local core groups of permanent residents who are energized by the campaign and have an appetite for more will lead the way in creating new progressive civic groups with real staying power.

The fourth question is how the Obama model of campaigning will affect the Democratic Party as an institution going forward.

Marshall Ganz, who did incredible work in bringing Obama’s community organizing strategy to life, rightly points out that the Democratic Party is hardly a monolithic institution. Indeed, in many localities, it has often been a virtually empty shell (a situation that Howard Dean began to rectify with his 50-state strategy). Nonetheless, it is (as Ganz puts it) a critical “venue” for political contestation; and the Party does have a financial and legal infrastructure which can be used (as the Obama campaign did) in support of an organizing approach to electoral politics.

Obama has, ironically, an opportunity to take top-down steps to re-organize the Democratic Party into an institution that encourages and facilitates bottom-up grassroots campaigns. But he will have to decide how much energy to put into that project, and how to balance investing in future Democratic electoral success with his post-partisan stance. Moreover, it remains to be seen whether the Obama model of inspired grassroots organizers knocking on every last door and making sure every identified supporter has voted can work without a leader as inspirational and attractive as Obama himself.

Indeed, some cautious Democrats may wonder if it’s wise to bank the party’s future hopes on the idea that the civic effort witnessed on Obama’s behalf in 2008 can be duplicated on behalf of another candidate in 2016. Put another way, the question is whether the organizing model of campaign politics since in 2008 should be seen as a one-off event, or something which might perpetuate and build upon itself by force of habit, so that by the time Obama leaves the scene no one will dream of trying to do a national campaign any other way.

My guess is that Obama would prefer for the latter scenario to unfold, but he’ll have to help make it unfold in his de facto role as head of the Democratic Party. Already he has made it possible to at least imagine a Democratic Party that functioned not simply as a vehicle for contesting and winning elections but a tool for organizing communities.

[Very interesting guest post by Thad Williamson. See comment by Tom Sander below]

Job loss linked to lifelong community disengagement

(photo by khalishah)

An interesting study by sociologists Jennie Brand (UCLA) and Sarah Burgard (Univ. of Michigan) found that workers who laid off even once are 35% less likely to be involved in community or social organizations than workers who have never been jobless.

The plus is that this study (the high quality Wisconsin Longitudinal Study) tracks  Wisconsin high school graduates for decades from their graduation in 1957. The caveat is that this group was almost entirely white Americans so it is hard to know whether this applies to a New York or an L.A.

What’s especially troubling is that it doesn’t appear to be a simple explanation of people who are jobless temporarily disengaging from community to find a new job.  The scholars found that those who had been jobless had lower levels of civic engagement decades after they were laid off, and this “civic gap” remained relatively stable.  Author Brand describes them as being on lifetime lower civic trajectory across a range of civic activities, from joining book clubs to participating in the PTA and supporting charities.

Their study tracked six forms of civic engagement: churches; charitable organizations; youth groups or community centers; business or political groups; professional organizations; and social or leisure organizations, such as country clubs or sports teams. The average participation of respondents decreased over this period, consistent with the trends highlighted by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone.  But the 25% of workers in the study laid off between 1975 and 2005 dropped faster (statistically significantly) in all categories other than business or political groups, and professional organizations. The declines were largest on participation in youth groups or community centers.  The only group that seemed somewhat exempt from these effects were those that were involuntarily let go in their later years (after age 53), when they could recharacterize this as ‘early retirement.’

Brand admits she doesn’t know why job displacement has this long-term effect.  She suspects it might be one of three causes: 1) those who are laid off are depressed and often downwardly mobile; 2) there may be embarrassment or shame with job less that causes people not to interact with others; 3) there may be bitterness or a loss of trust in others that comes from the implicit social contract being torn asunder that causes long-term withdrawal.

The study (“Effects of Job Displacement on Social Participation: Findings Over the Life Course of a Cohort of Joiners”) will appear in the September issue of Social Forces.  See earlier research report on this.

Brand’s study grew out of her interest in the rapidly growing practice of companies laying off Americans (see Louis Uchitelle, The Disposable American, 2006) and work by my colleague Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone, 2000, and Better Together, 2004) on social capital and civic engagement.

Given the looming economic recession/depression(?) this obviously doesn’t bode well for longer-term civic engagement.  Although it’s also worth noting that the Long Civic Generation that came of age through the Great Depression and two World Wars has been far more civic and socially engaged their entire lives than the generations that preceded or followed.  We hope that the next Administration can work together with businesses, non-profits, religious leaders, and civic leaders to think about how to spur greater civic engagement in this period of far less economic security and confidence.

Abstract and description of the study available from UCLA.

Tip of the hat to Robert Putnam for alerting me to this study.

For teens, most e-gaming is social

(photo by melissa)

According to the recent Pew Internet Survey, cast aside the image of the loner teenage boy playing video games and then going on a violent rampage.

The Pew Study found that most teen internet gaming is social (65%) and is positive associated with civic engagement.  They also found no evidence of a connection between violence and gaming.

A caveat:  Their study assumes that violent teen gamers accurate report on both their level of video gaming and their levels of violence (either of which are somewhat dubious assumptions, but the latter even more so).  If I were a violent youth, I’m suspicious that even on a random survey I’d accurately report how violent I have been or am likely to be.   And note of course, as statisticians will tell you, that the fact that the same people who game are also the same people who are socially and civicly engaged does not mean that the games lead to civic engagement.  It is quite possible that these same individuals without the gaming would be more socially or civicly engaged, but until we can randomly assign some kids to play video games all day and some to quit video games, we’re unlikely to have any controlled experiment.  Although lending credence to the report, the top video games in popularity reported were Guitar Hero (Wii program where you get credit for playing right notes on guitar), Halo 3, Madden NFL, Solitaire, and Dance Revolution.  Of these, only Halo 3 is expressly violent.

“This report does a lot of myth-busting,” said Amanda Lenhart, the Pew senior researcher who authored the study. “It’s not just about 14-year-old boys sitting alone in the basement blowing things up.”  And the study found that virtually all teens were gaming (99% of teenage boys, 94% of teenage girls and 90% of parents playing with them); this seems to be perhaps the only sphere of life where one doesn’t see large class and race inequalities.  “We don’t see economic inequalities, we don’t see racial differences,” she said. “We see are some slight variations by gender and by age, but that’s about it.”

It’s obviously good news that many youth are with other youth and interacting when they play the games, although it seems odd and counterintuitive that participating in many games (that are frequently violent) wouldn’t trivialize the violence and make it that much easier to disassociate oneself from ‘real life’ acts of violence (and just fantacize that one is playing another game).

The big boost of social gaming and involvement of parents is undoubtedly fueled by the popular Nintendo Wii playstation.

See the Pew Internet and American Life Survey on gaming here (survey was based on telephone interviews of 1,102 teenagers ages 12 to 17 between November 1 and February 5. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.)

See the Christian Science Monitor Article ‘Loner Image Out: for Teens, Video Games Often Social’ (9/18/08)