Is a British Obama possible?

Obama ’08 (photo by beebo wallace)

Harvard and Manchester through the SCHMi collaboration released their findings about whether a British Obama is possible.  Broadly we found that substantial generational patterns of increased tolerance in both Britain and the U.S., whether related to attitudes towards a black boss or intermarriage or towards black politicians (in the US).  Robert Putnam (Harvard Professor and visiting professor at Univ. of Manchester) noted that: “Change is taking a similar form on both sides of the Atlantic: exactly as in the US, the generation of Britons uncomfortable with non-whites in positions of power or intimacy is gradually dying off, and being replaced by its more tolerant offspring….It is fair to add, however, that the smaller minority population in the UK, as well as the much shallower pool of black politicians and the more centralised political recruitment paths, still tends to work against black representation in Britain.”

There is an interesting article on these findings by Allegra Stratton “Britain ready for black prime minister” in today’s Guardian and in-depth piece called “Mixed Blessing” and an editorial “Geography of Race” by co-author of the forthcoming book Age of Obama, Tom Clark.

In addition, the BBC aired several pieces on the story (“Black prime minister likely to take decades” and Robert Putnam interview with the BBC).

One can find the underlying scholarly papers (on which the report draws) and a sample chapter of the book Age of Obama here.

Press release on this topic available here.

Background:

Social Change: a Harvard-Manchester Initiative (SCHMi) is a collaboration of Harvard University and the University of Manchester that seeks to understand the complex consequences of big societal changes, like the Industrial Revolution or the civil rights revolution, which require careful inter-disciplinary research to identify ways to maximize social benefits and minimize social costs. Much as the sharp declines in life expectancy in the train of the Industrial Revolution in the later 1800s spawned empirical research that uncovered the importance of clean water and sanitation and ultimately reversed the adverse health effects, so too SCHMi aims to spur careful research on large-scale social issues today and thus to foster social progress. Transatlantic comparison and transatlantic learning have long been pivotal to such efforts.

One objective of the SCHMi collaboration is to produce roughly annually a book or report for the informed public, comparing and contrasting the US and UK experiences on some major social issue. The first project, nearing now completion, is on diversity/immigration. We anticipate future reports on religion and public life, and on inequality. The fourth and final topic has not yet been determined, but will likely be either the social consequences of technology or the changing workplace.

Diversity is a critically important subject. In the opening decade of the 21st century immigration and racial diversity are high on both countries’ agendas, for both are undergoing rapid demographic change. But their starting points and trajectories are different, and the policy debates, while intertwined transatlantically, are also different. The Age of Obama (to come out in Fall 2009) compares the social, economic, demographic, and political consequences of immigration and racial diversity in the US and the UK. The work is unusually timely because many are now wondering whether there could be a British Obama.

The Age of Obama is written by Tom Clark, an experienced writer for The Guardian, and builds on substantive contributions from Professors Waters (Harvard), Fieldhouse (Manchester), Peach (Manchester-Oxford), Yaojun Li (Manchester), Daniel Hopkins (post-doc, Harvard Govt. Dept.), and Rob Ford (post-doc, Manchester sociology) with overall project direction being provided by Robert Putnam.

• The underlying chapters are:1. Comparing Immigrant Integration in the US and the UK (based on research by Mary Waters)2. Ethnic and Racial Segregation in the US and Britain (based on research by Ceri Peach)3. Immigration and neighborhood diversity in the U.K. and the U.S.  Does diversity damage social capital? (based on research by Ed Fieldhouse and David Cutts)4. Socio-economic integration of immigrants in the US and UK (based on research by Yaojun Li)5. How levels of neighborhood immigration influence attitudes towards immigration in the U.S and the U.K and generational changes in the US and UK in attitudes toward race (based on research by Dan Hopkins and Rob Ford).

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.