Young Americans dropping out of religion, other American Grace findings by Putnam/Campbell

Saying Grace - Flickr photo by ImCait

Robert D. Putnam (Harvard) and David Campbell (Notre Dame) recently previewed selected themes from their forthcoming book American Grace at the May 2009 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life that draws a select group of the leading journalists on religion in America.

As Michael Gerson, ex-speechwriter to President George Bush and one of the Pew Forum attendees, noted in his opening paragraph in a recent nationally syndicated and well-nuanced op-ed in the Washington Post:

“There is a book that everyone will be talking about — when it appears over a year from now. American Grace: How Religion Is Reshaping Our Civic and Political Lives, being written by…Putnam and… Campbell, is already creating a buzz. Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, is the pre-eminent academic expert on American civic life. Campbell is his rising heir. And the book they haven’t yet finished will make just about everyone constructively uncomfortable.”

Putnam and Campbell’s analysis draws on the Faith Matters data they collected — a national, authoritative large-scale, hour-long survey on religion (beliefs, belonging and behavior),  social and political engagement, and religious and political beliefs.  They followed up in a very rare panel survey, reinterviewing the same respondents 6-9 months later to understand the stability of our religion and religious beliefs and to get traction on the issue of causation.  Their research also entails a dozen to fifteen in-depth case studies of religious denominations and churches of many stripes across all parts of the nation.

American Grace finds evidence of unprecedented polarization along religious and political lines, with politics driving changes in religious attendance rather than the reverse!  But amidst the deepening divides, they find a startlingly high level of support on all sides for religious diversity. Most deeply religious Americans reject the idea of a theocratic society run by Christian ayatollahs, while most secular Americans are quite comfortable with the idea of a society infused with religious and moral values.  In short, they argue, America today represents a historical rarity—a society that is both deeply religious and deeply tolerant.  [For example, Americans believe that Americans of other religions can go to heaven, even Christians of non-Christians.  Moreover, 8 of 10 Americans think there are "basic truths in many religions" and 85% of Americans say that religious diversity is good for the country.]

Here are a few of their interesting findings:

• Young Americans are dropping out of religion at an alarming rate of 5-6 times the historic rate (30-40% have no religion today versus 5-10% a generation ago).  But youth’s religious disaffection is largely due to discomfort with religiosity having been tied to conservative politics.  Putnam and Campbell expect, given the remarkable history of American religious entrepreneurship (from Mormonism to revival meetings to megachurches), that this disaffection from religion is temporary: religious entrepreneurs will rise to offer these young Americans the less politicized religion that they crave.
• Americans today inherit both religion and congregation far less than their parents and grandparents did and there is remarkable religious fluidity, with between 1/3 and 1/2 of all Americans changing religion from the one they were born into.  [The lower bound does not count a denominational shift like that from Methodists to Calvinists as a switch and only counts a change in religion from Judaism to Buddhism or from Baptist to no-religion.]  And there has been remarkably more entrepreneurial sorting of congregations and congregation shopping with congregants finding a religious home within a denomination that maximally meets their wants and needs (sometimes through stricter “churches”, sometimes through looser ones).
• There is a remarkable degree of religious bridging in our social networks: approximately 70% of Americans have at least some extended family of a different religion than they are, and this rises to 75% for closest friends, and 85% of Americans who live among at least some neighbors of a different religion.  The interlinkage of these religious networks helps to constrain any message of intolerance that parishioners get from the pulpit.
• Religious Americans are better citizens than non-religious ones (they give more to secular causes, volunteer more for secular causes, and join more, to mention a few markers of good citizenship). However, it is not their particular theology that predicts good citizenship, but the extent to which they are embedded in a friendship network of religious others (regardless of their religion). [Putnam refers to these religious friends as "powerful, supercharged friends."]  So it is religious social networks, not teachings from the pulpit that are key to them being 3-4 times more generous than the most secular Americans.

The American Grace book is expected to come out in the Fall of 2010.

Michael Gerson’s syndicated Op-Ed “Religion and Our Civic Behavior” is here. (Wash. Post, 5/8/09)

See “Getting to Know You” (Wall Street Journal by Naomi Schaefer Riley, 5/15/09) [which discusses the extent of religious bridging social capital in America, and how having friends of different religions changes ones views toward that religion]

Also, see “Religious People Make Better Citizens” (BeliefNet.org)

Excerpt below from “Religion and Our Civic Behavior” By Michael Gerson:

“[R]eligious affiliation has declined in America since World War II, especially among the young. The change was not gradual or linear. It arrived, according to Putnam, in “one shock and two aftershocks.” The shock came in the 1960s. As conservatives have asserted, the philosophy of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll is an alternative to religious affiliation (though some of the rocking religious would dispute the musical part). Baby boomers were far less religious than their parents at the same age — the probable result, says Putnam, of a “very rapid change in morals and customs.”

“This retreating tide of religion affected nearly every denomination equally — except that it was less severe among evangelicals. While not dramatically increasing their percentage of the American population, evangelicals did increase their percentage among the religious in America. According to Putnam, religious “entrepreneurs” such as Jerry Falwell organized and channeled the conservative religious reaction against the 1960s into the religious right — the first aftershock.

“But this reaction provoked a reaction — the second aftershock. The politicization of religion by the religious right, argues Putnam, caused many young people in the 1990s to turn against religion itself, adopting the attitude: “If this is religion, I’m not interested.” The social views of this younger cohort are not entirely predictable — both the pro-life and the homosexual-rights movement have made gains. But Americans now in their 20s are much more secular than the baby boomers were at the same stage of life. About 30 percent or 35 percent are religiously unaffiliated…. Putnam calls this “a stunning development.” As many liberals suspected, the religious right was not good for religion.

The result of the shock and aftershocks is polarization. The general level of religiosity in America hasn’t changed much over the years. But, as Putnam says, “more people are very religious and many are not at all.” And these beliefs have become “correlated with partisan politics….There are fewer liberals in the pews and fewer unchurched conservatives.”

Republicans no longer the party of community and civic order

David Brooks in his Op-Ed today describes how Republicans have tilted toward freedom and rights at the expense of community.

He notes Republicans’ love of Western culture and uses as a didactic icon director-great John Ford’s 1946 Western, My Darling Clementine, in which…”Henry Fonda plays Wyatt Earp, the marshal who tamed Tombstone. But the movie isn’t really about the gunfight and the lone bravery of a heroic man. It’s about how decent people build a town. Much of the movie is about how the townsfolk put up a church, hire a teacher, enjoy Shakespeare, get a surgeon and work to improve their manners.

“The movie, in other words, is really about religion, education, science, culture, etiquette and rule of law — the pillars of community. In Ford’s movie, as in real life, the story of Western settlement is the story of community-building. Instead of celebrating untrammeled freedom and the lone pioneer, Ford’s movies dwell affectionately on the social customs that Americans cherish — the gatherings at the local barbershop and the church social, the gossip with the cop and the bartender and the hotel clerk.

“Today, if Republicans had learned the right lessons from…John Ford Westerns, they would not be the party of untrammeled freedom and maximum individual choice. They would once again be the party of community and civic order.

“They would begin every day by reminding themselves of the concrete ways people build orderly neighborhoods, and how those neighborhoods bind a nation. They would ask: What threatens Americans’ efforts to build orderly places to raise their kids? The answers would produce an agenda: the disruption caused by a boom and bust economy; the fragility of the American family; the explosion of public and private debt; the wild swings in energy costs; the fraying of the health care system; the segmentation of society and the way the ladders of social mobility seem to be dissolving.”

The last point dovetails well with consensus that emerged from a recent meeting we convened of some of the leading minds from academia, think tanks and philanthropy about “Increasing Opportunity in an Age of Inequality”.

Read the rest of Brooks’ editorial (“The Long Voyage Home“) about how this has cut off Republicans from the civicly-minded youth and cities (where people realize that they need to cooperate), at the peril of the party.

Brooks concludes: “The Republicans know they need to change but seem almost imprisoned by old themes that no longer resonate. The answer is to be found in devotion to community and order, and in the bonds that built the nation.”

It reminds one of just how deeply the vision of “compassionate conservatism” has faded. In the very early days of the GW  Bush Administration it seemed like there was a there there, but by the end had crumbled into  extremely hollow rhetoric.

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)

No gap in black-white turnout in 2008 elections; youth gap narrowing

The Pew Research Center, in partnership with CIRCLE released a report showing that Asians, Hispanics and Blacks voted in record numbers in the 2008 election, partially spurred by the magnetic candidacy of Barack Obama.  America’s three biggest minority groups — blacks, Hispanics and Asians — comprised almost a quarter of all voters for president in 2008. The increases in minority voting were driven by increases both in numbers of voters and the rate of election turnout.

The second table shows especially large increases in the turnout rate among blacks, and especially black women (not charted), although all non-white groups showed increases.  [Black turnout rose from 60% in 2004 to 65% in 2008, virtually indistinguishable from the voting rates of whites at 66%.]

68.8% of eligible black female voters voted in 2008 (an increase of 5.1 percentage points, from 63.7% in 2004), so that black women were the highest voting of any racial-gender pairing.

So the interesting takeaway from all this was that although the voting rate in November (despite all the money spent on the campaign and the telegenic candidacy of Obama) was relatively unchanged, but the composition of the voters definitely did change, with whites continuing to disengage and non-whites becoming more active.

The region of the country that saw the most dramatic increases in black voter turnout rate was in the South.

Obviously the $1,000,000 question is whether these behavioral changes are likely to continue beyond the Obama candidacy.  One piece of good news for those interested in seeing non-white voting rates continue to rise, is the behavior of younger Americans, as youth tend to keep the civic habits they demonstrate in their teens and twenties.  And this was also good news, especially for blacks.

CIRCLE’s analysis revealed that the “youth gap” ( younger Americans voting at lower rates than older Americans) continued to shrink in 2008. [For example, voters 18-29 voted at rates 24 percentage points less than Americans 30 and older in 2000 but this narrowed to a gap of 16 percentage points less in 2008.]  But minorities also saw good news in the turnout of various ethnic groups.  Young black adults’ voting rates (ages 18-29) increased by 17% from 49.5% in 2004 to 58.2% in 2008.  For the first time, the turnout among 18-29 year old blacks was higher than any other racial and ethnic group in 2008.  While white youth voting rates were relatively flat from 2004 to 2008, mixed race youth voting at 55%, almost 10 percentage points higher than in 2004 (perhaps motivated by voting for a mixed-race president).  Latino and Asian turnout rates continued to increase, but they significantly trailed turnout rates of whites, mixed race and black youth voters.  (The only youth group to see a decline in voting rates in 2008 was Native American Non-Hispanics.)

So the increases in youth turnout, if they persist could help change the distortion in our democratic process toward politicians being more responsive to the needs of older voters, and if non-white voters continue to increase their voting turnout rates and white turnout rates continue to decline, this may also start to change the voices heard in the democratic process.

See also: No Racial Gap Seen in ‘08 Turnout (NYT, 5/1/09)

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.

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)

Updated 2008 Voter Turnout, Registration and Youth Turnout Figures

(Ironically Paris Hilton neither voted nor died in 2008)

Voter Turnout:  Despite earlier reports that 2008 election turnout may have exceeded 1964 rates and rivaled 1960, Curtis Gans (an expert at American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate) now estimates that the percentage of eligible citizens in the 2008 presidential election was virtually unchanged from 2004 (126.5-128.5 million Americans, or 60.7-61.7%).  [Read Gans report on voter turnout here.]  Michael McDonald at GMU continues to believe turnout numbers will be higher, but thinks the rate will fall in the band that Gans predicts.  McDonald projects turnout to be 130.4 million Americans or 61.2%, a 1.1% increase over 2004, and the highest since 1968.  [See McDonald's blog post here.] Gans and McDonald differ on the numerator (Americans who voted) and denominator (eligible Americans), and the latter difference focuses on the fact that “voter-eligibility” can be tinkered with state by state, depending on how often the state or localities scrub their voting lists to eliminate people who have died, moved, or are no longer eligible to vote.

Registration:  Curtis Gans estimates that 73.5% of Americans are now registered to vote, breaking the previous record of 72.5% of Americans in 1964.  Estimated registration for the 2008 general election increased by a moderate 2.5 percentage points; Gans believes that registration rates back when women were given the vote in 1920 may have been still higher. [Read Gans registration report.]

Youth Turnout:  CIRCLE projects that a record number of young people (19-29) voted in 2008, in terms of numbers (22.8-23.1 million Americans) and the highest percentage of youth turnout since 1972 (52-53%).   (CIRCLE’s figures are based on exit polling, which can then be compared with what youth report on the Current Population Survey, once it becomes available in the Spring).   [As one would expect, youth turnout and turnout of those over 30 years old was heavier in battleground states.]

As we noted in “Why Republicans Are So Worried“, youth favored Obama by an unprecedented more than 2:1 ratio; as CIRCLE observes “The average age-gap in support for the Democratic candidate from 1976 through 2004 was only 1.8 percentage points, as young voters basically supported the same candidate as older voters in most elections.”

And CIRCLE believes that the increased youth turnout of 18-29 year olds represented 60% of the increase in voting from 2004 to 2008.

To see the whole CIRCLE youth turnout post, click here.

See Pew Research Report on “Young voters in the 2008 election“.

Why Republicans are so worried

Republicans have to be worried about the youth vote for Obama.  Here’s what the map would look like if just 18-29 year olds decided who was president.

(from farm4.static.flickr.com)

And the exit polls had young voters preferring Obama over John McCain by 68 percent to 30 percent, the highest ever since exit polls began reporting Presidential votes in 1976.  This youth vote continues to become more non-white:  it was 74% white in 2000, 68% non-white in 2004 and was only 62% white in 2008. [For a fuller report on youth in the 2008 election see this Pew Research Center report.]

Last time youth was so divided on a president was the election of Ronald Reagan (with youth strongly tipping Republican).  The Reagan landslide ushered in several decades of increasing conservatism.  In 2008, 45% of voters 18-29 identified as Democrats, compared with only 26% who identified as being Republican or 29% as independent. (In 2000, young voters were basically evenly split between Democrats (36%) and Republicans (35%). This is part of the reason why Republican commentators (like William Kristol) are so concerned.

Voters often keep their party affiliations for a long time, so it can make a big deal the political environment and party IDs that they first affiliate as.  It’s like political imprinting, where much as the same way ducks imprint on the first moving object they see and assume it is their mother, teenagers at a key impressionable time of their political career, often seize disproportionately on the politics of the movement.

Finally, the young voters were especially active in the campaign.  While young voters didn’t donate money as much as older groups (to be expected because of their stage in life), Pew’s post-election survey found that 28% of young voters in battleground states had attended a campaign event, far more than among other age groups.

Obama’s historic election

The election of Saguaro’s Barack Obama as 44th, and first African-American president marks itself as a truly historic election.  It makes me immensely proud to be an American.

Some notes on the election:

1) voter turnout:  preliminary turnout projections put the numbers between 134 million (Curtis Gans, American U.) and 136.6 million Americans (Michael McDonald, GMU).  SEE UPDATED NUMBERS HERE. [Some 30 million voted early and some 105 million were believed to have voted on election day.] This would translate into a voter turnout rate of somewhere around 64%, possibly exceeding the all time rate in 1960, or just below this rate.  [Curtis Gans notes on a Metro Connection interview that turnout was very high among Democrats, but actually lower in 2008 among Republicans; Gans notes that some states actually had lower turnout.  Gans notes that one shouldn't compare votes cast to number of registered voters since once can manipulate turnout rates depending on how recently they cleaned the voter lists for people who moved or died.]  (You can see from below chart that after declining until 1996, it has shot up in the last 12 years).  [David King, of the Kennedy School believes that voter turnout, without counting the absentee ballots was 64.9%, matching the 1960 rates and could rise higher.)  One can see this as half-full or half-empty;  it is disconcerting that even in an election with such important consequences for the future of the nation, and with such compelling personalities (Obama and Palin), and with unprecedented sums spent on advertising and GOTV (get out the vote) efforts, still over a 1/3 of all eligible Americans did not vote.  But nonetheless, it is a remarkable turnaround in the last 12 years.  Curtis Gans thinks that the trends of civic disengagement from voting are generally occurring and although he hopes Obama brings in a new era of civic engagement, he thinks we shouldn't infer too much from a couple of close elections in 2000-2008.

(Source: Michael McDonald, GMU)

2) youth vote:  Part of the story in the resurgence is youth voting.  We witnessed  huge increases in primary voting among younger voters 18-29 year olds (in many cases doubling or tripling number of youth votes 4-8 years ago in the primaries).  We have written  about what might be the beginning of a 9-11 Generation among youth, preliminary reports from CIRCLE were that youth 18-29 did not make up an increased percentage of voters in the 2008 general election [since all age groups were increasing their voter turnout, the youth's share stayed constant at about 17%).  SEE UPDATED NUMBERS HERE. But it appears that the youth are continuing to turn out at increasing rates (from 37% in 1996 to 41% in 2000 to 48% in 2004 to 49-54% in 2008). [CIRCLE is still projecting the youth turnout from the 2008 election; we'll fill this in when they come in with a definite number, but it could be the second highest youth turnout ever since 1972 when it was 54.5%.]  David King at the Kennedy School says the data indicates it was the highest turnout for 18 year-olds since 1972. Whether the glass is half full or half empty is a matter of interpretation;  voting rates for youth are still significantly below voting rates for seniors, for example.  And young people voted overwhelmingly for Obama.  [See the NYT's story "Youth Turnout up by 2 Million from 2004"]

3) mobilizing new people into the political process:  2008 was an unprecedented year in terms of the numbers of volunteers and donors to the Obama campaign, and an exquisite combination of “high-tech” and “high-touch” in his campaign (with tens of thousands of door-to-door canvassers coupled with a highly sophisticated use of e-mail, texting, use of cellphone, and websites).  [We've written about that earlier here and here. ] But with the massive increases in the number of registered Americans, preliminary reports were that first-time voters were not noticeably higher than they were in 2004 as a percentage of the voters (even though their absolute numbers increased, since the total number of voters increased).  In the process of his campaign, he spurred 50,000 local events, 1.5 million volunteers on the web, 8,000 web-based affinity groups, and 3.1 million donors who contributed almost $700 million to his campaign. It didn’t hut that Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes helped worked for the Obama campaign. [My colleague David Lazer talks about in "Obama's Machine" [Forbes], how Obama might unleash this network in the future to his advantage.]

4) What will new Obama administration look like?  What will be their priorities?

In some regards, it is too soon to tell.  But there have been some inklings of important strands announced by Barack on the stump, above and beyond his obvious focus on energy independence, ending the war in Iraq and trying to make the economy work again.

- Focus on sacrifice: Alexandra Marks article in Christian Science Monitor discussed this theme which Obama also returned to in his speech last night from Chicago.

Obama in his victory speech: “So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, it’s that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers — in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people.”

- Role of the citizen:  Mentioning Obama’s focus, Michael Sandel noted “…[A] new politics of the common good can’t be only about government and markets. “It must also be about a new patriotism — about what it means to be a citizen.”  (From Thomas Friedman’s column, “Finishing Our Work”, NYT, 11/5/08)

From Obama’s victory speech: “[The campaign victory] was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give five dollars and ten dollars and twenty dollars to this cause. It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy; who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep; from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on the doors of perfect strangers; from the millions of Americans who volunteered, and organized, and proved that more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth….[A]bove all, I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it’s been done in America for two-hundred and twenty-one years — block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand….This victory alone is not the change we seek — it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you.”

- Focus on service:  from Barack’s mention of a bold plan for AmeriCorps expansion as a campaign promise, to his appearing in the ServiceSummit with John McCain and Richard Stengel of TIME, to his invocation of service in his victory speech.  [As Michael Sandel noted, “This is the deepest chord Obama’s campaign evoked. The biggest applause line in his stump speech was the one that said every American will have a chance to go to college provided he or she performs a period of national service — in the military, in the Peace Corps or in the community. Obama’s campaign tapped a dormant civic idealism, a hunger among Americans to serve a cause greater than themselves, a yearning to be citizens again.” (Friedman’s column, “Finishing Our Work”, 11/5/08)]

- Slate magazine’s John Dickerson also had an interesting post on  6 ways that Obama could show he is a new type of leader

And E.J. Dionne (who was a fellow member of Saguaro with Barack) wrote an op-ed today “A New Era for America” talking about how he expects that in the same way as Barack completely recast the campaign process, he will recast politics.

Yes, it is time to hope again….Time to hope that the era of racial backlash and wedge politics is over. Time to imagine that the patriotism of dissenters will no longer be questioned and that the world will no longer be divided between “values voters” and those with no moral compass. Time to expect that an ideological label will no longer be enough to disqualify a politician….Above all, it is time to celebrate the country’s wholehearted embrace of democracy, reflected in the intense engagement of Americans in this campaign and the outpouring to the polls all over the nation…. Obama inherits challenges that could overwhelm any leader and faces constraints that will tax even his exceptional political skills. But the crisis affords him an opportunity granted few presidents to reshape the country’s assumptions, change the terms of debate and transform our politics. The way he campaigned and the way he won suggest that he intends to do just that.

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)