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 Kay Schlozman presented some of their then-unpublished recent work-in-progress on whether the Internet is helping to reduce the class gaps in civic participation that Verba wrote about in 1959 in Civic Culture and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.

The impact of deliberation on participation and trust: evidence from CaliforniaSpeaks

AmericaSpeaks organized a multi-site day of participatory meetings across the state of California in August, 2007 on health care, called CaliforniaSpeaks. Like the ad slogan, *Not your father’s Oldsmobile*, this is not your father’s public hearing. AmericaSpeaks wired the different sites together and wired small tables into a central software system that let individuals converse in small groups but also be cognizant of what all the other small tables were discussing both in their site and others. More specifically, “some 3500 Californians convened in eight sites across California: San Diego, Riverside, Los Angeles, San Luis Obispo, Fresno, Oakland, Sacramento, and Eureka. The eight sites were linked to one another through voice and data connections so that, in a sense, the event was one very large meeting.”

Taeku Lee, an outsider and associate professor at Berkeley, was invited to observe the event and examine its impact. He concluded that:

• As a group, participants’ substantive discussions about health care priorities and reform proposals reflected a high degree of sophistication and closely matched the two reform proposals that were
  ultimately submitted to the state legislature.
• Participants’ opinions on health care reform itself, however, changed very little as a consequence of the deliberative event, or five months after the event.
• Participants’ views about politics itself changed more significantly – specifically, their trust in government and their political efficacy increased appreciably.
• Participants’ level of political engagement – at least on the issue of health care reform – rises markedly as a consequence of the deliberative event.

To see Taeku’s whole post, click here. It was especially interesting to see Taeku’s 3rd and 4th bullet points. One wonders whether there is a multiplier effect on these changes. Does the increased trust, for example, in government extend only to those participating in these events, which while large in terms of public meetings is tiny compared to the state of California? Or conversely, as they discuss this with family, friends, colleagues, does the impact of the increased trust extend out to others? Similarly, does their increased sense of efficacy enable them to persuade others to get involved?

Note: they have an interesting control group, people who said they were going to come but then didn’t show up. However, as one should note, there may be differences between these two groups beyond their exposure to the CaliforniaSpeaks event. It might be that the the no-showers are less trusting or efficacious people in general, or more likely to lack commitment. It could be something about these people that both caused them not to show up at the meeting and to show less trust and efficacy than the people who did attend the CaliforniaSpeaks meeting.

If Clinton’s mudslinging wins out, longer-term civic disengagement will follow

My colleague Bob Putnam and I have written about the new cohorts that Barack Obama is so effectively bringing into politics (see Putnam op-ed and my blog posts here and here).  We agree that the upsurge in youth civic participation is a dramatic and important new civic “bud”, but one that needs to be nurtured to grow and become more permanent.

Andrew Sullivan enters the chorus with his piece for the Atlantic entitled “The Clinton Rules”, predicting that if Clinton’s old-school negative, mudslinging campaign beats out Barack’s politics of hope of engagement, a whole cohort of Americans being drawn back into the political process by Barack is likely to run for the exits and not look back.

You can read Andrew Sullivan’s piece here.

Super Tuesday “Mini-me” results as NH Redux

There were clearly shades of New Hampshire in the election results last night of Texas and Ohio. In NH, Texas, and Ohio, Barack closed large double digit leads of Hillary that had existed for weeks or months, but in all three cases, Barack came up short of Hillary in the final count. And due to the better spin control operations of Hillary’s campaign than Barack’s, they were able to spin this as a win for Hillary. In film-making, it makes all the difference when you begin rolling the camera and Hillary’s campaign successfully convinced the press that the film should start with her in a neck-and-neck race with Barack in Texas and Ohio that she successfully defended, rather than focusing on the fact that over the last week, hundreds of thousands of voters in Texas and Ohio abandoned her campaign for Barack’s.

Barack was clearly hurt by some last minute gaffes like the private statements of a senior economic adviser to the Obama campaign (Austan Goolsbee) which were later shared in a memo to Canada’s ambassador to the U.S. that they shouldn’t take seriously Barack’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric on the campaign trail in Ohio, and the fact that the Obama campaign was then less than forthcoming with the facts after this memo from the economic adviser was disclosed. Exit polls showed that late-deciding voters tilted toward Hillary, perhaps because of this or her negative campaigning on Barack.  [There is even one recent allegation by a DailyKos blogger that Hillary's campaign darkened the hue of Obama in their Texas advertising to make him look more black, analogous to what TIME magazine did on its cover to make O.J. Simpson look more black.  If true, it's a new low in the Clinton campaign scare tactics that seem to be dropping in ethical standards as they get more desperate.  How long until another Willie Horton ad?]

On Youth Turnout: it’s worth noting that both Texas and Ohio evinced the continued surge in youth turnout (under age 30) that we have witnessed in other primaries. Youth turnout in Texas nearly tripled, going from 6% in 2000 to 17% in 2008; and youth under 30 in 2008 made up 15% of all votes cast as compared with 9% in 2000. In Ohio, youth under 30 made up 15% of voter turnout, up from 11% in 2000; turnout of youth under age 30 rose from 15% in 2000 to 25% in 2008. See my earlier post here and last night’s youth turnout here (Texas) and here (Ohio). This increased youth turnout is also of a piece with my colleague Robert Putnam’s recent Op-Ed on superdelegates and a 9-11 Generation.

Putnam Op-Ed on superdelegates and youth civic engagement

A persuasive Op-Ed by my colleague Robert D. Putnam appeared in Sunday’s Boston Globe entitled, “The Rebirth of American Civic Life.”

Putnam highlights the amazing political birth of a “9-11 Generation” since September 11th, reversing a 35 year decline in political engagement of young adults. He sees this pent-up interest in politics as dry kindling that Barack Obama ignited through the content of his message, his age, and his extraordinary ability to connect. Youth turnout has soared in primaries across the country (as I’ve chronicled earlier) and youth activists are at the heart of his organizers.

Putnam notes that the democrat superdelegates, if they overturn the will of the democratic majority and vote for Hillary Clinton, threaten to squelch this incipient youth political movement and teach them that politics are for suckers, since the meaningful results are all negotiated in back rooms. This would not only cost the democratic party in the long-term, but could extinguish one of the most encouraging civic developments of the past several decades.

You can read the full article here.

Tell people voter turnout will be high and it will increase

Todd Rogers, Ph.D. student at Harvard, is working on an interesting dissertation on the importance of messages in voter turnout.  They randomly assigned voters in California (before the 2006 primary election) and New Jersey (before the 2005 general election) to receive a message that either emphasized low voter turnout (LTO) or high voter turnout (HTO) and saw what influence it had on whether voters actually voted.

 They found that the HTO message actually produced higher turnout among those who heard the message and the LTO message reduced voter turnout.  This is contrary to the *rational choice* model that would assume that voters who expected lower turnout would vote more, since they would perceive that their vote should matter more (as a percentage of all votes cast).

Interestingly, they found that the LTO vs. HTO message did not much affect the frequent voters who were likely to vote regardless of the message, but the HTO message was more likely to mobilize the infrequent voters.   (It should be noted that the message — heard one time by those in the experiement – while it did change the intention to vote statistically significantly, did not produce an enormous effect — the HTO message roughly made voters 3% more likely to turnout and the LTO message surpessed voter intention by a smiliar amount.)

The researchers weren’t constrained by having to deliver truthful messages, but Todd pointed out to me that in any given year, for example with increasing population, you could emphasize high turnout messages such as “more people voted in the last election than ever before”, even if the percentage voting had decreased,  and make it more likely that one would achieve the high turnout result desired.

The paper is consistent with a whole body of “social norms” research (summarized in the Rogers paper) that shows that people are more likely to conform to what they believe are social norms: for example, drinking less in college when low rates of alcohol abuse are publicized, stealing petrified wood more from forests when told that others do, reusing towels more in hotel rooms when told that others reuse towels at high rates, etc.

Note:  The Rogers and Gerber paper unfortunately could only focus on “intention to vote” as a dependent outcome varaible, not actual vote turnout, so they will need to do further work to make sure that the follow-through on “intention to vote” is actually high on these more marginalized voters.

One wonders whether this applies to other forms of civic participation. Presumably it is helpful only in a tipping point sort of behavior where a fairly large number of people do this already and thus others can be encouraged to do likewise, and presumably the benefit would be greatest when there is the greatest discrepancy between people’s guesses about how often a civic action occurs and how often it really does. If some behavior is relatively infrequent (say going to a political rally in the last year), one runs the risk that disclosing how frequent this is could have the adverse affect (at the margin persuading those who do the behavior currently to quit). But some manipulation of the norms could be used, to for example, emphasize how many millions of people went to rallies in the last year rather than focusing on the fact that it was only, say, 15% of the population.

This research will be forthcoming in “Descriptive Social Norms and Voter Turnout: The Importance of Accentuating the Positive” (The Journal of Politics, forthcoming) with Alan Gerber (of Yale Univ.).  Earlier version of this paper available here.

Devolution of power to localities in Britain

Hazel Blears, Minister for the Department of Communities and Local Government in the U.K. Gordon Brown government,  has proposed re-structuring local councils so that citizens in 10 neighborhoods will have greater say over the use of cash.

The pilot programs will give residents the ability to decide on budgets from $400,000-$46,000,00.  Voters can choose on priorities ranging from “recruiting more police to providing play areas, parks and green spaces, or improving road safety.” They can prioritize “new play areas and leisure facilities, curbing anti-social behaviour or traffic calming measures.”

Blears hopes that every neighbourhood will dictate the use of a “community kitty” of up to $40 million within the next five years.

The idea comes from Porto Alegre in southern Brazil, which has pioneered “participative democracy“.  Some studies that show how this can foster greater participation and civic infrastructure in Brazil can be found in Archon Fung’s Deepening Democracy and here.

In general, increasing devolution does increase political participation, but more localized communities are also typically more racially and ethnically segregated than the surrounding communities, so there have to be cross-cutting networks and political projects that require groups to meet, forge compromises and alliances and friendships across these more segregated communities. 

Schools of choice boost civic values

In a meta-analysis of 21 quantitative studies, Patrick J. Wolf (Univ. of Arkansas) found that schools of choice (private and public) better inculcate students in 7 civic values  necessary for democratic citizenship: political tolerance, voluntarism, political knowledge, political participation, social capital, civic skills, and patriotism.  Study called “Civics Exam: Schools of Choice Boost Civic Values” in EducationNext journal (Summer 2007). Among the more rigorous studies analyzed, 23 of 59 findings (52%) show school choice or private schooling as having statistically significant positive effects on civic values. [Ten findings show a neutral effect and only one finding showed a negative effect of school choice on civic values.]

All these studies control for selection bias in addition to differences in student backgrounds in the various schools. Most of the studies  compared students in private schools with those in public schools, but the effects were found in Catholic and non-Catholic private schools.

Wolf concluded that “These results suggest that the expansion of school choice is more likely to enhance than diminish the civic values of our next generation of citizens.”