Interesting links on service and social capital

A few interesting links:

1) The first ever national summit on service is being held in NYC.  [I blogged on that earlier.] Last night that featured a Town Hall interview of Judy Woodruff (PBS) and Richard Stengel (TIME) with Barack Obama and John McCain.  Read the Obama-McCain transcript on service here.  (McCain was even asked about our research on diversity and the strains it puts on social capital, although my colleague Robert Putnam, eminent political scientist, was misidentified as a sociologist.)  The snippet was:

STENGEL: Robert Putnam, the sociologist, has written about how in communities that are diverse, there’s actually less social capital, less trust. What can national service do to knit up America? And I’m sorry, we only have one minute left for such a complicated question.

MCCAIN: National service can do a great deal. National service can unite us, just as the military unite us, as we meet people and interface with people from all over the world.

But also let me say, look, the greatest thing that makes America exceptional is we have had wave after wave of people come to this country for the same reason — they want to build a better life, they wanted freedom and they want to be part of America. So I don’t accept that premise that somehow — some of the most patriotic Americans that I’ve ever seen and the hardest working and most ready to serve this country and go in harm’s way are those who just came here.

2) TIME magazine: cover story on national service (“The Candidates Stump For Service”).  TIME also has 21 ideas for serving America, including a mini-essay by me on importance of service in creating a new us (what I originally entitled: ‘Social Alchemy: Walls Into Bridges’.)  You can also see TIME Managing Editor’s cover note about national service and some essays by McCain (“Inspiring Citizens to do More”) and Obama’s “A Call To Service”.

3) An interesting Op-Ed by David Brooks in today’s NYT on the fact that the Republican Party is missing the importance of social interconnections, what social scientists and the Saguaro Seminar calls ’social capital.’  See Brooks’ “The Social Animal” here.

Interesting post about inequalities in online youth civic participation

Engaged Youth features an interesting blog with a relatively recent thoughtful post about potential inequalities in youth online participation. It has links (in the comments) to various papers written on this topic.

You can read my comment on the Engaged Youth site, but there are other interesting comments as well.

National Service has long-term impact on participants

The Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) has been monitoring the long-term impact of participating in AmeriCorps (the nation’s national service program), in conjunction with Abt Associates.

Since 1999, a group of AmeriCorps participants has been compared to a group of individuals who expressed interest in AmeriCorps but didn’t wind up serving.

While some of the impacts faded over time (as one sees in most programs), eight years later, the CNCS study (Changing Lives, Changing America) found that:

• Former AmeriCorps members are more likely to be in public service careers today due to their year of service.
• Minority AmeriCorps members (State and National) who served in 1999-2000 are significantly more likely to choose a career in public service today than similar individuals in the comparison group (44% compared to 26%).
• Former AmeriCorps members from disadvantaged circumstances are more likely to be employed in a public service careers today than similar individuals in the comparison group (46% compared to 26%).
• One year of service in AmeriCorps creates long-term positive impacts on the civic outcomes of AmeriCorps alums eight years later. For instance, AmeriCorps members are more likely than the comparison group to attend public and community meetings today due to their year of service.  AmeriCorps alumni are more confident that they could get a pothole fixed and more confident in their ability to launch projects like after-school youth programs.
• They are more slightly more likely to have volunteered in past 12 months
• AmeriCorps alumni show greater social trust: 85% of alumni believe that others can be trusted vs. only 71% of comparable respondents who didn’t participate in AmeriCorps.
• Members who served in AmeriCorps are more satisfied with their lives eight years later than individuals who did not end up serving in AmeriCorps.
• And satisfaction rates are extraordinarily high: 91% of AmeriCorps participants said their experience was excellence or good; 95% would re-enroll if given the opportunity and 95% would recommend AmeriCorps to a friend or family member.

[Full report "Still Serving: Measuring the Eight Year Impact of Americorps on Alumni" available here.]

National Service has always focused on dual strategies of getting useful work done and transforming the participants and this research speaks powerfully to that second point.

We also think that the timing is propitious. Many young Americans are increasingly interested in volunteering (since the mid-90s) and are now getting increasingly interested in politics and public service. [Bob Putnam and I have written about this '9-11 Generation.'] Moreover, there is a movement afoot to increase the scope of national service, ranging from Barack Obama’s national service platform to Alan Khazei’s forthcoming book *Be The Change*, to Richard Stengel’s TIME cover on national service to a planned summit in September convening by TIME and the National Conference on Citizenship that brings together John McCain and the democratic presidential nominee (which at this point is looking heavily like Barack Obama).

Moreover, we think that broadscale national service may be one of the most effective ways in helping us to gain traction on the short- to medium-term challenges of building a stronger social fabric in the face of more diverse communities.

Mom, won’t you vote for Barack?

It’s been fascinating in the exit polls from the 2008 presidential primaries observing the age gradient for Obama supporters. Children of Boomers support Obama significantly more than their parents and the Boomers in turn are more likely to support Obama than their parents.

Now the Obama campaign is putting this to good use.

The New York Times reported on children persuading their parental Superdelegates to vote for Obama. (See: “Young Obama Backers Twist Parents’ Arms” 4/18/08)

Now comes a wonderful grassroots-developed video of kids pleading for their parents to support Obama.

Children have persuaded us to give up smoking, and recycle. Why shouldn’t their hope inspire us now to vote?

Youth voice in ‘08 largely limited to the well-educated

CIRCLE (at University of Maryland) has a recent study showing that although youth participation is up in the 2008 primaries (which we’ve blogged about before) it is not coming from all swathes of the socioeconomic spectrum.

For example, CIRCLE found that in Super Tuesday, 1 in 4 college-educated voters under age 30 were participating versus 1 in 14 for youth that only had a high school degree or less.

CIRCLE chalks this up to several factors: 1) non-college youth are less likely to be involved in groups and associations and therefore less easily reached by candidates; 2) the quality of civics education that non-college youth have been exposed to is far less than the college youth (affecting both their civic skills and disposition to get involved socially); 3) non-college youth have lower political efficacy (a sense that their vote matters and they can achieve change); and 4) that youth disproportionately hear about candidates and get motivated to get involved politically through their friends and thus there is a compounding of this problem either as non-college youth are more socially isolated and if connected to other friends, unlikely to be connected to others that are encouraging them to vote.Distressingly, this is parallel to some evidence that then-Harvard-undergraduate Rebekah Crooks explored several years ago in her thesis that showed that while volunteering rates had risen among youth since the early 1990s, this was largely coming from the ranks of the “haves”, not the lower-middle class “have nots.” While the CIRCLE study is not a longitudinal study and hence does not address whether this rich-poor civic divide is growing, the gaps are alarmingly large nonetheless.

For more information, see: CIRCLE fact sheet or study; or NPR story (Audie Cornish, “Non-College Kids Outsiders to Rising ‘Youth Vote’ “.

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.

Dramatically Increased youth turnout on Super Tuesday

With the exception of NY, most of the primary states witnessed dramatically more active youth participation in the primaries than in 2000 with many states doubling, tripling or even quintupling their under-30 voter turnout (as a percentage of votes cast).

- In my home state of Massachusetts, the youth vote in the 2008 primary doubled from the 2000 with an estimate that 25% voters under age 30 voted this year, compared with 11% in the 2000 primary.

- In Tennessee the youth vote quintupled from 3% in 2000 to 15% on Super Tuesday.

- In Georgia, 280,000 voters under age 30 voted on Super Tuesday, a tripling in the turnout rate to 21% from the 7% that voted in the 2000 Georgia primary.

- The youth vote tripled in Missouri, and Oklahoma and doubled in Connecticut relative to 2000.

All these states also saw big increases in the NUMBERS of youth voting, but increases in the number of youth voting vs. 2000 are less impressive since the race in 2008 is far more competitive than the primaries in 2000 that led to Al Gore’s nomination, leading more voters to vote, regardless of their age.  But the increase in youth turnout (as a percentage of all votes cast) is much more impressive, since there is no inherent reason to believe that competitive races would boost young adult turnout more than other age demographics.

NY was a noticeable exception where the youth vote remained flat at 12%.

I haven’t seen the data, but Steven Stark, Boston Phoenix blogger and Real Politics contributor, asserted that in Massachusetts, youth voter turnout was up in college towns, but not elsewhere.  If this was true, I’m not sure if the increases in these other states also reflect increases most heavily centered on college towns.

CIRCLE (the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) released a helpful summary report of youth voting here.

That’s the glass half-full picture, but it is important to note that even with these dramatic gains in youth turnout, youth under age 30 are still participating at a fraction (sometimes less than half) of the rate of other adult Americans.  For example,  in OK 14% of youth under 30 voting vs. 33% overall, or 11% of youth under 30 in Arkansas vs. 25% overall turnout or 18% youth turnout in Illinois vs. 32% overall.

So despite youth turning out at higher rates, they are still having far less voice than their share of the population would signify.  It’s as if you imagined this demographic speaking through a megaphone turned the wrong way so whatever they say becomes weaker not stronger.  I hope the youth vote increases can continue so they can eventually have the same clout that they should and their inspiration, passion, vision, environmentalism and tolerance can translate into national leadership that accords with their values.

Note: CIRCLE indicates that these are all based on estimates. “Because there is no actual count of the number of votes cast by young people in the primaries, we can only estimate their level of participation. Our turnout estimates are based on early vote tallies reported by the media, the share of voters who are young calculated by the National Election Pool exit/entrance polls, and an estimate of the eligible voting population obtained from the Census Current Population Survey (CPS). The 2008 voter turnout rate may rise as more votes are tallied. (The early vote tally does not include such votes as absentee ballots and provisional ballots.) As a result, our 2008 turnout rate likely underestimates the level of participation in the 2008 Super Tuesday primaries.”

Put young voters behind the wheel?

A New York Times Op-Ed today (Feb. 6, 2008) called “You’re Sixteen, You’re Beautiful, And You’re a Voter” argues that we should build on the growing momentum of youth interest in politics (up over the last 8 years) by letting younger voters vote.    Author Anya Kamenetz notes how voters under age 29 were the first demographic to settle on the fact that Barack Obama was their man.  She argues that, much like with early driver’s licenses (learning permits), we should lower the voting age to 16 if youth have taken and passed a civics course in high school much like a citizenship test.  She argues that similar rules could lower the age to get credit cards, become legally married, drink alcohol, etc.

Bob Putnam and Thomas Sander have written about the growing interest of youth in politics and how this is something that needs to be stoked.  (See “Sept. 11 As Civics Lesson“, Washington Post).  I’m not ready to sign on to lowering age limits to everything but I agree that voting is something we should allow (for responsible youth) at a younger age and encourage.  We should also couple this with more programs like KidsVotingUSA to give youth practice in exercising this important responsibility before they reach age 16.

You can read Anya Kamenetz’s Op-Ed here.