How Do You Inspire New Civic Leaders? A Field Experiment on Mentoring

• In Event: Participation in Politics

Abstract

Leaders are vital in civic and political life. The success of social movements, civic associations, and community organizations depends upon people who voluntarily choose to take responsibility for projects outside their comfort zone. What motivates people to lead new initiatives? Previous work from a variety of disciplines highlights the value of one-on-one mentoring, and provides numerous case studies describing how it can work and why it’s important. Yet we lack causal evidence. Here I report the results of research designed to estimate the impact of mentoring on the likelihood that people become leaders. The design includes both ethnography and a field experiment. First, I leverage my own participant observation along with research on the psychology of relationship-building to design a mentoring intervention. Then I collaborate with an NGO to test the impact of that intervention as part of a larger training program across four countries in 2018. What results is a nuanced picture of some of the key techniques of mentoring along with one estimate of their impact.

Author

• Adam Seth Levine, Cornell University