Democracy's future: CIRCLE

The next presidential election is still a year away, but most of the candidates have been campaigning for almost that long. Do these lengthy, expensive, and noisy campaigns produce a more informed electorate, or do they make citizens feel less engaged than ever? This week, DemocracySpace is looking at several citizen-driven efforts that aim to make our government more responsive, inclusive, and functional. Today's spotlight is on the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, or CIRCLE, which conducts, collects, and funds research on the civic and political participation of young Americans.

Today in Washington, D.C., CIRCLE and the Kettering Foundation released "Millennials Talk Politics: A Study of College Student Political Engagement." According to CIRCLE's website, the report learned that "college students in the United States are hungry for political conversation that is authentic, involves diverse views and is free of manipulation and 'spin.'" The headline on the press release announcing the report is "Dissonant Discourse Turning Off College Students to Formal Politics." Students want information and they want to be involved, but they discard information that's overly partisan and polarizing and "are more likely to appreciate an authentic opportunity for reasonable discourse," says Peter Levine, director of CIRCLE. 

The study involved nearly 400 students gathered in 47 focus groups on a dozen four-year college campuses between October 2006 and July 2007. The report found a shift since 1993, when the last major survey of this kind revealed that Generation X students considered politics irrelevant and saw little purpose in participating. The Millennial Generation - born between 1985 and 2004 - are much more interested in politics, but they'd prefer to pursue it in the community, not in the classroom. "You sit in a classroom and you read your dusty books with your dusty professors about dusty things, and then you don't learn anything about what you can do with it," one Minnesota student said. "Then you go into the community and all of a sudden you're like, wow, this is who I am and this is where my skills can go."

Why are Millennial students more attuned to civic life than their Gen-X predecessors? According to the news release, researchers speculate that the shift was spurred by the past decade's political environment - "closely contested national elections, terrorist attacks, ideological polarization," as well as the Millennials' exposure to service-learning opportunities. "Today's students are proud of their civic activism," the release notes. "However,the confrontational arena that currently defines American politics is distasteful to the majority of those surveyed, with few willing to embrace a party label. Still, they are not tuning out politics altogether."

You can read more about the report and download it here. CIRCLE director Peter Levine writes at his blog about some stark differences in the political attitudes and experiences of students at highly selective colleges in the Northeast and a historically black college in the South. "Individuals of the same age differ dramatically from one another depending on the institutions they attend," he writes. Meanwhile, commenters at a Baltimore Sun blog are weighing in on the report's findings.

Tomorrow: Mobilize.org defines Democracy 2.0 and plans a Party for the Presidency.

Comments

[Julie Fanselow]

This report on youth civic engagement is a good opportunity to say that we'll be talking about that very thing on November 15 at the DemocracySpace water cooler.

Join us right here between 3 and 4 Eastern next Thursday afternoon to share your experiences of organizing youth-focused dialogue and action projects with others who are doing similar work.