Did Federal Service-Learning Policy Influence Community Social Capital?

• In Event: Democratic Education? How Schooling Shapes Civic Engagement and Social Capital

Abstract

This paper makes three contributions to the study of public policy, higher education, and civic engagement:
1. It examines the effects of federal service-learning policies, measuring the relationship between engaged institutions and the levels of social capital in their host communities, offering empirical estimates of the higher education civic engagement movement’s effect on communities;
2. The study uses fixed effects methods to examine panel data spanning two decades and exploits an exogenous break in this time series associated with the defunding of the policy;
3. This study’s implications for policy feedback theory add to our understanding of the interpretive effects of how policies promote civic engagement, while also explaining potential reasons this policy was defunded during the populist tea party movement.
The rise of Trump Republicanism has its roots in the populist Tea Party Movement (Morris and Gervais, 2018). In 2011, using the Simpson-Bowles Commission as justification for austerity and budget cuts, the 112th Congress reduced funding to numerous government agencies. One program eliminated by these cuts was a small domestic grant program for service-learning programs: The Corporation for National and Community Service’s Learn and Serve America program.
Using fixed effects regression, I proxy the grantees of this policy with the membership in the Campus Compact, institutions committed to public and community service, consistent with scholarship on service-learning and civic engagement in higher education (Hartley, 2011; Hollander & Hartley, 2000; Heffernan, 2001; Morton & Troppe, 1996). For the social capital outcome, I use an index generated from principal components of the density of voluntary associations, the non-profits per capita, and the voter turnout rates (Rupasingha, Goetz & Freshwater, 2006). The unit of analysis is the community, measured at the geographic commuting zone to enable analyses in both urban and rural areas of the United States while also capturing any potential spillover effects at lower levels of aggregation (Tolbert & Sizer, 1996; Baum-Snow & Ferreira, 2015).
I hypothesize that the communities with higher densities of Campus Compact institutions per capita during the Learn and Serve America funding regime would have better social capital outcomes resulting from service-learning and civic engagement activities funded by the policy and the results bear out that finding. I also hypothesize that the defunding of the policy would represent a structural break in the time series and mute the effects on social capital, also confirmed by the results of this study. I also demonstrate that these effects are different from effects attributable to other institutions of higher education in these communities. The findings are robust to models with theoretically relevant covariates of social capital and models predicting the individual components of the index find the similar patterns.
Mettler and SoRelle (2014) state “[policy feedback theory] brings political considerations to bear on policy analysis, assessing how policies affect crucial aspects of governance, such as whether they promote civic engagement or deter it” (p. 152). The findings for the funding regime are interpretive effects related to policy feedback. The original stated purposes of the policy were “to enhance students’ academic learning, their sense of social responsibility, and their civic skills through service-learning” (Gray et al., 1999, p. 7). Previous research on policy feedback points to the role of the state in promoting civic engagement and this study’s findings are consistent with that literature (Mettler, 2002, 2005; Mettler & Soss, 2004).
Policy feedback theory also suggests that the power of groups has important implications for the preservation of policies (Mettler and SoRelle, 2014). While policy eliminations are rare events, policy feedback suggests that under the threat of elimination, groups coalesce around the preservation of benefits from the policy. The findings of this study demonstrate significant but relatively small contributions during the funding regime to community social capital, suggesting that the benefits of the policy were diffuse. Therefore, the resource effects of the policy were not large enough to motivate the preservation of the policy. Other research has shown that college students rarely advocate for their own interests (Mettler, 2014), and other beneficiaries from service-learning (such as non-profits) may not have anticipated how the policy change would affect them. Furthermore, the original policy design may have also limited the ability of the Campus Compact and its members to influence decision-makers in preserving the funding: grantees were expressly prohibited from participating in partisan activities (Hartley, 2011). This pattern has implications for how policies are designed and the role of policy design in constraining civic engagement as well as promoting it.

Author

• Thomas Alexander Dahan, Rutgers University–Camden