Civic Engagement Games on the Internet

Peter Levine points out several online civic engagement games:

• Impact Inc. where you can try your hand at running a non profit
  
• Redistricting the Nation where you can try redistricting different parts of the country
• Do I have a Right? where you run a law firm and must give advice to clients using the Constitution and Bill or Rights
  
• Supreme Decision where you can try to be on the US Supreme Court

I would just add one more

• Publi.us or Fantasy Congress
  

Response to my Obama Education Speech Post

I think the "stay in school" speech can be seen as a form of propaganda--some see schools as mechanisms for recreating inequality across generations and the way the poor/those with least power are taught that school failure and their low socioeconomic status is their own fault, not the fault of public policies and those who hold on to their own privilege so they can pass it on to their own children. Schools can become a way to socially certify and justify people's low s.e.s.--and to get children to participate in their own oppression.

These ideas probably won't be part of the discussion when students are given an opportunity to discuss and critically evaluate the President's message in class.

I'm with you on the way the Post overlooks young people's ability to think for themselves. On the other hand, when it comes to schools, how much can any of us think for ourselves when we were socialized within them 5 days a week for 16+ years to believe in their goodness and necessity.

My professor from college makes a valid point. However, I dont think we should underestimate life experience and the "non-school" arena as parts of our lives that inform the way we think and that shape our values. I can say with near 100% certainty that the curriculum in my public school did not lead me to have the values that I have today. My social studies classes, history classes and civics classes did not indoctrinate me with liberal propaganda. Rather I attribute my values largely to my life experience and family. For this reason, I do think that young people can think for themselves. Students have organized against systematic oppression at public schools, so I would not underestimate their capacity to think and act for themselves.

More on Immigrant Political and Economic Contributions

The U.S. Census Bureau published new data, Voting and Registration in the Election of 2008, which tracks demographic characteristics of the 131 million U.S. citizens who reported that they voted in the 2008 presidential election. The Census Bureau’s new data set shows a significant increase of about 5 million voters from the 2004 presidential election—including 2 million more Latino voters and 600,000 more Asian voters. Relative to the presidential election of 2004, the voting rates for blacks, Asians, and Latinos each increased by about 4 percentage points. The voting rate for non-Latino whites decreased by 1 percentage point.

The growing electoral power of New American Latino voters in particular was especially important in key states in the 2008 election—giving Obama a wider margin of victory than he would have had otherwise. In Indiana, Obama won by roughly 26,000 votes, and received the votes of nearly 24,000 more Latino New Americans than John McCain. Similarly, in North Carolina, Obama won by approximately 14,000 votes, yet received the votes of nearly 26,000 more Latino New Americans than McCain.

Via ImmigrationProf Blog:

The Immigration Policy Center has compiled research which shows that immigrants, Latinos, and Asians not only wield tremendous political power in Michigan, but are also an integral part of Michigan's economy and tax base. As workers, taxpayers, consumers, and entrepreneurs, immigrants and their children are an economic powerhouse--especially the Arab American community. As voters, they are a potent political force. As Michigan's economy begins to recover, immigrants and their children will continue to play a key role in the shaping and growing the economic and political landscape of the Great Lakes State.

Highlights of the research include:

• Immigrants make up more than 6% of Michigan's total population (roughly equal to the total population of Boston, MA) and nearly half of them are naturalized citizens who are eligible to vote.

• New Americans (naturalized U.S. citizens and their U.S.-born children) represent 5.2% of the state's voting population.

• The purchasing power of Michigan's Asians totaled $9.2 billion in 2008 and Latino buying power totaled $8.8 billion

• Asian-owned businesses in the state generated sales and receipts worth more than $5.1 billion annually and Latino-owned businesses generated $3.2 billion in 2002.

• Arab Americans accounted for $7.7 billion in total earnings in the four counties of the Detroit metropolitan area, generating an estimated $544 million in state tax revenue and supporting an estimated 141,541 jobs. There is no denying the contributions immigrants make and the important role they play in Michigan's political and economic future.

Strengthening Civic Participation

Do you have thoughts on how to improve civic participation? Send in your thoughts at the end of this post.

The 'we-ness of politics'

Harry Boyte makes the case that President Obama has backed away from his message of 'we are all in this together to make change.' Obama's campaign was always about change that cane be made by all but now he has since been about him making changes through government:

On Wednesday night, at the news conference marking the first 100 days of his administration, Obama was asked what he intends to do as the chief shareholder of some of the largest U.S. companies. "I've got two wars I've got to run already," he laughed. "I've got more than enough to do."

The change has partly reflected the administration's adjustment to the fierce pressures of the Washington press corps. As Peter Levine noted as early as December 2006, reporters and pundits assumed that Obama's words about citizenship and involvement "were just throat-clearing." Journalists and pundits constantly demand that he explain what he is going to do to solve the problems facing the country.

But the general citizenry outside of government is not composed of innocent bystanders. In our consumer-oriented society, we too easily assume that government's role is to deliver the goods. Dominant models of civic action, as important as they are -- deliberation, community service, advocacy -- fit into the customer paradigm, as ways to make society more responsive and humane. The older concepts at the heart of productive citizenship -- that democracy is the work of us all, that government is "us," not "them" -- have sharply eroded.

Congres Passes the 'Give Act'

Congress passed the GIVE Act, also known as the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which will expand AmeriCorps by 170,000 positions and direct much of the service toward three national priorities: reducing the high school dropout rate, conserving energy, and providing health care to needy people. Here is some analysis.

Here are some articles:
New York Times
Wall Street Journal
Reuters
AP
Chronicle of Higher Education
Chronicle of Philanthropy

A Must See: 'Walk Out'

I recently saw the movie 'Walkout,' which tells the true story of Chicano/a students from five East L.A. high school who organized three days of school Walk Out to protest for improved educational standards. It is a great movie that describes how community organizing should take place.

Based on a true story, student activist and Mexican-American Paula Crisostomo, tired of being treated unequally, decides to take action and stage a walkout at five East Los Angeles high schools in 1968, to protest educational conditions and complain of anti-Mexican educational bias along with some 10,000 students. Paula Crisostomo is not Mexican- American--she is Filipina-American. Written by Norma Schaffer

Women in American Politics

This is a great summary of the numbers of women in American politics.

Obama on the Service

With the GIVE Act passed in the House, and the Serve America Act moving toward a vote in the Senate, it’s a great moment for President Obama wrote a major essay in TIME magazine, “A New Era Of Service.” The President takes a tour of his own history as a community organizer, and the bipartisan history of service that has brought us to the brink of a new era. And he concludes with an explicit call to all Americans:

In the end, I have no illusions about the magnitude of the challenges we face. But I have no doubt that we can meet them if we each do our part. So I urge you to get involved, right now, at this defining moment in history. I’m not going to tell you what your role should be; that’s for you to discover. And I won’t promise that it will always be easy or that you’ll accomplish all your goals all at once.

But as I learned in the shadow of an empty steel plant more than two decades ago, while you can’t necessarily bend history to your will, you can do your part to see that, in the words of Dr. King, it “bends toward justice.” So I hope that you will stand up and do what you can to serve your community, shape our history and enrich both your own life and the lives of others across this country.

Listening Session with Obama’s Open Government Initiative

A meeting was convened by Beth Noveck, the new director of the White House open government initiative. Participants included members from Demos, the Personal Democracy Forum, the Cato Institute, AmericaSpeaks, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, IAP2, the Partnership for Public Service, Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE), the National Civic League, the League of Women Voters and the National Academy of Public Administration all had representatives there.

Beth Novak said:

We’re looking at how we can create a “21st century government.” We’re interested in what we (the administration) can do for civic engagement organizations, and what “we can do for each other.” It’s important to figure out what we can do together, because we have a huge agenda, and not enough time, money or staff. “So you have to help.” The open governance initiative will soon have a public website where you can submit information to us. We’ve started an interagency discussion process already.

We are approaching this challenge from different angles:

1. Policy / legislative agenda
2. Technical issues like identity management (sign-ons on government websites, usability issues)
3. Cultural issues, like getting people comfortable with a participatory agenda, with participation earlier in the decision-making process
4. Implementation issues. Science advisory boards are an example of an older model that has been replicated widely. “What are the new models of participation?” And how can we best achieve them?
5. Accessibility - regarding both online participation as well as offline

In other news, there was money for AmeriCorps in the stimulus package, and the GIVE Act (HR 1388) has made its way through the House. According to Peter Levine, this is the equivalent of the Senate's Kennedy-Hatch Serve America Act. It would dramatically enhance the quality and quantity of service opportunities and would direct federally-funded service toward three major social objectives: carbon reduction, health care, and high school dropout prevention.

Peter Levine thinks other important planks should include:

• National (and also local) discussions of issues that involve recruited citizens who represent the population as a whole.
• Training programs and conferences that help federal civil servants to collaborate day-to-day with community-based groups.
• Changes in key federal policies such as the Federal Advisory Committee Act to encourage and improve events like public hearings.
• Grants programs within the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, and the National Science Foundation that promote citizen work.
• Greater focus on the acquisition of civic skills in the US Department of Education and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (lately known as NCLB).

The Serve America Act

Last night, the president spoke strongly and explicitly in favor of the Kennedy-Hatch Serve America Act, which would increase the number of paid national and community service positions and increase the quality of those positions.



Peter Levine has more to offer about this bill.

Finally Taxation WITH Representation in DC?

D.C has its first chance in a long time to finally be fully represented in the union. The bill is currently working its way through the House and Senate and would likely get 60 Senate votes to defeat a Republican filibuster and would be signed by President Obama. However what could stand in the way are the courts. Slate reports:

Supporters of D.C. voting rights have pushed for years to get this bill through Congress. (D.C. residents already have a delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, who can serve on committees but when it counts can't vote on final bills.) The district's supporters came close in 2007 with a measure that also would have created a new congressional seat for Utah (which was next in line among the states, given congressional reapportionment earlier this decade). Despite this neat attempt at partisan balance (a Democrat for D.C., a Republican for Utah), Republicans filibustered the measure after a threatened veto by President George W. Bush. Things are different this time. President Barack Obama co-sponsored the 2007 version of the bill, and the current one in the Senate is worded identically. There's a chance supporters can muster 60 votes in the Senate to defeat a filibuster.

If that political battle is won, the war will shift to the courts, where it faces uncertain prospects. The constitutional claim against the D.C. Voting Rights Act is that Congress lacks the power to create a new congressional seat for the district. There's a strong textual argument for this position, advanced by George Washington University law profesor Jonathan Turley and others. Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution provides that "[t]he House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several states …" and there's no question that Washington, D.C., is not a state. Congress cannot amend the Constitution through ordinary legislation simply by calling D.C. a "state," and therefore the D.C. act is ostensibly unconstitutional. Supporters like Turley have backed up their arguments with extensive historical analysis based on the Framers' intent in giving the District of Columbia its odd status.

Perhaps surprisingly, some conservative heavy hitters (who tend to favor textualist and originalist interpretations of the Constitution) nonetheless have come out in favor of the constitutionality of the measure. Ken Starr has argued that Article I elsewhere, in what's called the District Clause, authorizes House representation for the district by providing that "[t]he Congress shall have power … to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever" over the District of Columbia. Profesor Viet Dinh, who worked as an assistant attorney general in the Bush administration, has made similar arguments that Congress' power under this Clause is plenary, and he backs it up with his own analysis of the Framers' intent.

The debate also centers on an obscure 1949 Supreme Court case, National Mutual Insurance Co vs. Tidewater Transfer Co. Tidewater considered the constitutionality of a 1940 congressional statute, which provided that federal courts should consider residents of Washington, D.C., as coming from "states" for purposes of "diversity jurisdiction." (That's the legal framework that allows federal courts to hear cases arising under state law when a resident of one state sues the resident of another.) In a fractured decision, the Supreme Court upheld the 1940 law, despite an earlier 1805 Supreme Court ruling holding that D.C. residents could not be considered residents of states for diversity jurisdiction purposes.

Colorado is at the top for political engagement on the web

The Compete Blog (which posts a wealth of interesting data charts mined from monitoring web surfers) posted statistics about proportion of web surfers that visit political websites: Colorado, Connecticut and New Jersey are at the top. Colorado was a battleground state.

(HT: Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science)

Some more on the Youth Vote and Minorities

The exit polls on the web do break down the vote by age and race. Among blacks, Obama won about the same among all age groups. Among Hispanics, Obama did 8% better among the young than the old, and among whites, Obama did 14% better among the young than the old.

There was an interaction between age and race: many more of the young voters were ethnic minorities. Among blacks and Hispanics, there were three times as many under-30's as over-65's. (By comparison, among whites, there were more old voters than young voters.)

So the age effect partly arose from lots of young ethnic minorities coming out to vote.

(HT: Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science)

More on the Youth Vote

CIRCLE reports:

• Youth Turnout Rate Rises to at least 52% with 23 million voters under 30
• 3.4 Million more Young People vote than in 2004
• Young Voters Account for at least 60% of Overall Increase
• 18% of All Voters were Young

Youth Voter Turnout

CIRCLE says:

• About 22-24 Million Young Americans went to the Polls: Up by at Least 2.2 Million from 2004
• Young voters favor Obama over McCain 66% to 32%
• 18% of all voters were young
  

New Era Colorado

I want to call attention to this new group and movement in Colorado that is "dedicated to reinventing politics for our generation through innovative social and political action": New Era Colorado.

"We believe that our country is on the verge of the next progressive era--a new era brought by a new generation. That generation--the Millennial Generation--is the most diverse and progressive in the history of our country and will prove to be the most powerful political force since the baby boomers. The numbers show it: By the year 2015, we will make up one-third of the US electorate."

The Importance of the Youth Vote in 2008

I am glad to finally see some positive attention placed on the youth vote. Excerpts from Rob Grabow's "Voting With Our Pants Down:"

Young voters, 44 million strong, are the country’s second largest voting bloc this year. The relevance of these numerical values and images bears on the fact we are going to turn out in record numbers this year. Nearly 80 percent of young voters are registered to vote.

True, registration doesn’t guarantee turnout. However, a voter who makes it to the polls once is much more likely to visit again. And three times more young voters caucused in Iowa in 2008 during the Democratic primary than in 2004. Young voter turnout in New Hampshire was 271 percent higher than the previous presidential primary. On Super Tuesday, almost three-million young voters made it to the polls, significantly more than any Tuesday past. This baseline is also building on the bar established in 2004, a year that saw a near-record level of young voter participation, almost 50 percent. All of these trends should make your spine tingle, toes curl, and hair stand on end, because it means we’re coming out.

If registration figures and primary turnout don’t convince you that this year will be different for the youth vote, let me lob a question your way. When was the last time you read about young voters camping out overnight and standing in the rain to vote early - yes EARLY - in an election? As it turns out, it hasn’t been that long. Two weeks ago, NPR ran a story about young voters doing just that Ohio. It’s not an isolated occurrence either. Last week, CNN’s Campbell Brown ran a brief segment about young voters in Colorado comprising a potentially critical new voting constituency in that crucial swing state.

But wait! We are civically engaged, though as a collective, we haven’t always equated voting with political or civic expression. Instead, we’ve manifested our civic-mindedness in other ways. For example, over half the deaths thus far in Iraq and Afghanistan are from our demographic. 70 percent of us volunteer on a regular or semi-regular basis. One third has decided that getting a college education is important enough to subsist on Top Ramen and frozen burritos for four years. And most of us are working our butts in the public and private sector. The distance between our current manifestations of civic-mindedness and the voting booth is far shorter than most people think. Because voting is often used as the sole metric by which people gauge political and civic engagement, pundits have overlooked the passion and savvy in us that we exhibit in the rest of our lives. That passion, given good reason, is easily translatable into votes.

If you’ve started to accept the premise that young voters will turn out in record numbers, you might be asking yourself why should I care. Fair enough. The answer is part is this, regardless of political inclination, we all should. Why? In 2004, John Kerry carried only one age-demographic, 18- to 29-year-olds. He did so by almost 13 points. That support alone was enough to keep the election fairly close.

More relevantly, according to a USA Today/MTV/Gallup poll that came out last week, Obama has a 29 point lead among 18- to 29-year-olds. If this poll, and others like it, which yield similar results, hold true, and if young voters turn out in percentages close to 60, which many young voter wonks (including me) are predicting, Obama could net 7 million votes among this age group, more than enough to put him over-the-top in an otherwise close election, especially, because many of the critical swing states have large young voter populations. Democrat or Republican, how young voters think and how we vote will affect your lives in profound ways.

I’d look at the prospective turnout of young voters in two weeks this way. Because we’re facing the most angst-inducing economic clime since the Great Depression, you’re probably wondering where to put your money. Where is the arbitrage potential? I’m no Ali Velshi from CNN, but if I were, my recommendation would be this: take all your money out of the stock market, hop a red eye to Vegas, take a shot of tequila at the airport, flag a taxi to a casino, take another shot of tequila, and put all your bling on this bet — that young voters will turn out at record levels this year. Seems quixotic, I know. But you’ll get good odds, and the preliminary anecdotal and material evidence suggests it’s a good bet.

New Demographic Goal for the Peace Corp

The Peace Corp is targeting a new group of people -not the fresh out of college young crowd,- but a much older group:

Today, about five per cent of the Peace Corps’ 8,079 volunteers are 50 or older, many of them serving as teachers. The number of applications from people in that age group has jumped nearly 40 per cent this year. That’s 9.4 per cent of the total number of applicants, the highest percentage in the 47-year history of the corps.

There’s a few reasons for this - the first being more demand. More and more baby boomers are looking to serve as they retire. Second is the fact that elders are respected and revered in many cultures, so older Americans automatically bring a new set of factors.

Defending Community Organizing

An eloquent defense of community organizing.