UPDATING CIVIC ENGAGEMENT, PART II
[Note: This posting, the previous two postings, and at least the one to follow are a restatement of what has been addressed previously in this blog. Some of the sentences to come have been provided before but the concern is that other information has been discovered and an update seems appropriate. The blog has not changed the overall message – that civics education is seriously deficient – but some of the evidence needs updating.]
The previous posting focuses on defining and describing political activities as being a central element of civic engagement which in turn, it is argued here, should be a main concern of civics education. This posting will address two other elements, political voice and electoral activities.
As for these two elements, the first includes those actions citizens can take to advocate a public policy option – signing petitions, communicating with government officials, writing letters to editors and other media outlets, boycotting, etc. – and the latter, electoral activities, includes voting and other election related behaviors that, in turn, have social implications. The general thrust in civics education should be to advance those behaviors that one can link to communal duties and obligations.
The question here is: what does recent research indicate how often and how well do Americans are perform these behaviors? To provide some context, Mary Hylton makes a connection in her reportage. That is, that a citizenry that engages in these types of activities add to their communities’ resources and further can be associated with economic resilience.[1]
This was demonstrated in those years following the onset of the financial crisis of 2008. Communities that had among their citizenry higher levels of civic engagement were able to recover more readily. While this is a correlational finding, one cannot help but think that either directly or indirectly there is a mutual reinforcing dynamic between civic engagement and economic health.
People who actively behave in sufficient numbers to advance their community add a vibrance that can only help stimulate that community to do what is necessary to spur economic energy. And, further strengthening this connection, one can detect this relationship at a communal level but also at the individual level.
Jonathan Greenblatt reports in a White House paper:
Volunteering also helps people develop skills and confidence. A recent report by the National Conference on Citizenship found the “participation in civil society (such as volunteerism) can develop habits that make individuals enjoyable and strengthen the networks that help them find jobs.”[2]
In a study, Malte Klar and Tim Kasser found that political activism is positively associated with measures of good feelings (hedonic), a sense of being happy, healthy, and prosperous (eudaimonic), and social well-being.[3] And college students, according to an Association of American Colleges and Universities publication, who are civically engaged, register greater levels of satisfaction with their educational experience, enjoy higher grade point averages, and are more apt to gain their degrees than those who are not so engaged.[4]
And what can one say about the levels of community responsibility and civic belongingness – i.e., political engagement from a social perspective – exhibited by Americans? According to Putnam, Americans have “a shriveled sense of we.”[5] Despite many school systems introducing “volunteerism” as a graduation requirement, a program with little thought-out function, overall participation by Americans has fallen drastically during the last fifty years.
Peter Levine and Eric Liu report, “The proportions of Americans who say that they have attended community meetings, worked with neighbors to address problems, and belonged to organizations have fallen between 1975 and 2005.”[6] This conclusion is backed by a slew of research over the past several decades.[7]
That research basically provides evidence supportive of the conclusion that political participation is seriously low and that for those who do participate, they are more apt to engage in what Charles Euchner identifies as extraordinary politics,[8] a topic that will be highlighted in the next posting.
But recent studies have further connected volunteerism with either physical health or psychological health. There seems to be a correlational relationship between this civic behavior and cardiovascular disease factors: “[Researchers] found older adult volunteers (65 and older) had lower risk of hypertension than older non-volunteers, but not for middle-aged volunteers (51-64 years old).”[9] This study goes on to report other relationships, but the purpose here is not to give a rundown of these findings.
The purpose is to give the reader a sense of areas of research that investigate the effects of civic behaviors have on a person’s physical health. Another study worth noting is by Frank J. Infurna, Morris A. Okun, and Kevin J. Grimm that notes a relationship between volunteering and the avoidance of cognitive impairment, a psychological condition.
Consistent civic engagement in old age [over 70 years of age] is associated with lower risk of cognitive impairment and provides impetus for interventions to protect against the onset of cognitive impairment. Given the increasing number of baby boomers entering old age, the findings support the public health benefits of volunteering and the potential role of geriatricians, who can promote volunteering by incorporating “prescriptions to volunteer” into their patient care.[10]
Again, a positive effect attributable or, at least, associated with proactive civic behavior is noted.
This posting will abruptly end here. The next posting will begin with a description of extraordinary politics and pose questions: is this sort of politics necessary in the pursuit of desired public policy? Also, how federal – how much does it promote a federated citizenship – is extraordinary politics?
[1] Mary E. Hylton, “The Role of Civic Literacy and Social Empathy on Rates of Civic Engagement among University Students,” Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 2018, vol. 22, 1, 87-106.
[2] Jonathan Greenblatt, “The Benefit of Civic Engagement for Tomorrow’s Leaders,” White House (of Barack Obama), April 17, 2012, accessed May 10, 2018, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2012/04/17/benefits-civic-engagement-tomorrows-leaders .
[3] See Malte Klar and Tim Kasser, “Some Benefits of Being an Activist: Measuring Activism and Its Role in Psychological Well-Being,” (abstract), accessed May 10, 2018, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2009.00724.x .
[4] The National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement, “A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future” (Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2012), accessed May 7, 2018, http://www.aacu.org/civiclearning/crucible .
[5] Robert D. Putnam, “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis” (Keynote presented at the Campus Compact 30th Anniversary Meeting, Boston, MA, 2016, March 21).
[6] Peter Levine and Eric Liu, “America’s Civic Renewal Movement: A View from Organizational Leaders (Medford, MA: Tufts Report, Tufts University, 2015), 3.
[7] “Political Polarization in the American Public,” Pew Research Center, June 12, 2014, accessed on February 17, 2017, http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/, AND Herbert McCloskey, “Political Participation,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2008, accessed December 27, 2017, http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Political_Participation.aspx , AND “The Civic Mission of Schools,” National Conference of State Legislatures, 2015, accessed on February 24, 2017, http://www.ncsl.org/legislators-staff/legislators/trust-for-representative-democracy/the-civic-mission-of-schools-executive-summary.aspx , AND Paul Burnstein, American Public Opinion, Advocacy, and Policy in Congress: What the Public Wants and What It Gets (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014), AND Arron Smith, Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry Brady, “The Current State of Civic Engagement in America,” Pew Research Center, September 1, 2009, accessed on December 6, 2017, http://www.pewinternet.org/2009/09/01/the-current-state-of-civic-engagement-in-america/, AND Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2000), AND “What Democracy Means to Ninth-Graders: U.S. Results from the International IEA Civic Education Study,” National Center for Education Statistics (U. S. Department of Education, Washington, D. C., 2001).
[8] Charles C. Euchner, Extraordinary Politics: How Protest and Dissent Are Changing American Democracy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996).
[9] Jeffrey A. Burr, Sae Hwang Han, and Jane L. Tavares, “Volunteering and Cardiovascular Disease Risk: Does Helping Others Get ‘Under the Skin?’” The Gerontologist, April 15, 2015, accessed April 15, 2019, 937-947, 944, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/43c7/f901d13837320cbce6c8254bbcaad7070659.pdf . A summary of the results are as follows: “formal volunteering is beneficial for middle-aged adults, and to a lesser degree, older adults. Further research is required to determine what factors may mediate the volunteer–CVD risk relationships.” Page 937.
[10] Frank J. Infurna, Morris A. Okun, and Kevin J. Grimm, “Volunteering Is Associated with Risk of Cognitive Impairment,” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (Wiley Online Library), 64 (11), November 2016, accessed April 15, 2019, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jgs.14398 .