Designing a New Study of Democratic Engagement in the United States

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

Support for key elements of constitutional democracy appears to be diminishing, both in the U.S. and abroad, constituting a threat to democracy and the acceptance of differences. A better understanding of democratic engagement—defined as attitudes toward and participation in civic and political life—could help citizens, policymakers, and civil society respond to this threat. There is a need for a diagnostic tool to understand the ebbs and flows of democratic engagement, and the factors that contribute to, or detract from, such engagement. Such a tool would invigorate the interdisciplinary study of democratic engagement, thus informing public policy and practice to enhance the health of American democracy. Currently, the study of democratic engagement is hindered by the lack of a focused, large-scale, systematic, and longitudinal source of individual-level data. This roundtable explores what a new diagnostic tool could look like to address these limitations.

Existing, or “legacy” data sources are ill-equipped to speak to the breadth of factors that impact democratic engagement. They often include measures designed decades ago, which do not reflect the full range of Americans’ democratic engagement today, especially via digital platforms, and center on forms of engagement that are most common among privileged groups in society. Most data sources are not designed to account for the impact of state or community level contextual variables on democratic engagement, and they do not have the sample size to allow municipal level analysis. Existing large panel data sets do not generally survey individuals below the age of 18, and the few panel data sets that do focus on adolescence generally do not follow youth into adulthood, limiting assessment of experiences in school and community contexts on either current or future political engagement. There is no study specifically designed to understand democratic engagement and the attitudes that support it both during election and non-election years over time.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, which will issue its final report in June 2020, will recommend a major new study of democratic engagement. The hope is that such a study would be widely used by both scholars and practitioners, opening up new understanding of how, when, and why people engage in democratic life. The Commission will suggest, by way of analogy, that the study of democratic engagement needs its version of the human genome project—a collaborative source of data designed to answer big questions.

This roundtable will bring together members of the Commission to explore what data a new study should provide and what pressing questions we could answer with that data. What characteristics should the study have with respect to the sample and set of indicators? What data is needed to better understand democratic engagement online? What civic metrics for social media could help us understand how various platforms fulfill civic purposes? How can the data from the study be made accessible to scholars and the broader public? What questions can the data help us answer about the health of American democracy?



About the Participants:
Lisa Garcia Bedolla
Marie Griffith
Hahrie Han
Joseph Kahne
David Karpf
Ethan Zuckerman

Sub Unit

• Theme Panel

Chair

• David A. Karpf George Washington University

Presenters

• Hahrie C. Han Johns Hopkins University

• Lisa Garcia Bedolla University of California, Berkeley

• Joseph Kahne University of California, Riverside

• Marie Griffith Washington University in St. Louis

• Ethan Zuckerman Center for Civic Media, MIT

• David E. Campbell University of Notre Dame