A Crucial Element of Democracy

This is a blog by Robert Gutierrez ...
While often taken for granted, civics education plays a crucial role in a democracy like ours. This Blog is dedicated to enticing its readers into taking an active role in the formulation of the civics curriculum found in their local schools. In order to do this, the Blog is offering a newer way to look at civics education, a newer construct - liberated federalism or federation theory. Daniel Elazar defines federalism as "the mode of political organization that unites separate polities within an overarching political system by distributing power among general and constituent governments in a manner designed to protect the existence and authority of both." It depends on its citizens acting in certain ways which Elazar calls federalism's processes. Federation theory, as applied to civics curriculum, has a set of aims. They are:
*Teach a view of government as a supra federated institution of society in which collective interests of the commonwealth are protected and advanced.
*Teach the philosophical basis of government's role as guardian of the grand partnership of citizens at both levels of individuals and associations of political and social intercourse.
*Convey the need of government to engender levels of support promoting a general sense of obligation and duty toward agreed upon goals and processes aimed at advancing the common betterment.
*Establish and justify a political morality which includes a process to assess whether that morality meets the needs of changing times while holding true to federalist values.
*Emphasize the integrity of the individual both in terms of liberty and equity in which each citizen is a member of a compacted arrangement and whose role is legally, politically, and socially congruent with the spirit of the Bill of Rights.
*Find a balance between a respect for national expertise and an encouragement of local, unsophisticated participation in policy decision-making and implementation.
Your input, as to the content of this Blog, is encouraged through this Blog directly or the Blog's email address: gravitascivics@gmail.com .
NOTE: This blog has led to the publication of a book. The title of that book is TOWARD A FEDERATED NATION: IMPLEMENTING NATIONAL CIVICS STANDARDS and it is available through Amazon in both ebook and paperback versions.

Friday, April 15, 2016

WITH LIMITED TIME, A DEPENDENCY

As a civics teacher presents his/her daily lessons, that teacher should keep in mind that in those seats in front of him/her are filled with future adults who will be engaged in a multitude of ways to make a living and that most of their future day-to-day concerns will not be about what their governmental officials will be doing.  They will be concerned with family finance, other family matters, jobs, what’s up with their friends, what’s going on at church, and how their favorite sports team is faring.  What a civics teacher should be about is trying to increase the concern that students have about the privileges and responsibilities attached to their role as citizens.  My attempts in this blog have been to encourage a theoretical slant to that view, one that holds on to a belief and an emotional commitment; that is, I would want that student to begin viewing his/her citizenship as an agreement, an agreement to be a partner with his/her fellow citizens in this project we call the United States of America.  This includes the view of the additional commitment of being a partner within his/her respective state (which in my case is the state of Florida). 

And as a partner, he or she is concerned generally about what is going on, what advances that partnership, and what adds to or detracts from the health of that partnership.  While all this is important, the average citizen can be reasonably pardoned if he/she cannot or will not engage in hours and hours of research related to those issues.  With all that goes on in daily lives, the amount of effort toward becoming knowledgeable and opinionated over these concerns – some being quite complex – will be limited.  How much time, on a daily basis, is it reasonable to expect the average citizen to expend on these civic concerns?  An hour or so?  That’s the time it takes to watch a round of the local news – which is mostly worthless in terms of these concerns – and the national news on TV.  We would hope the average citizen subscribes to the local paper and is able to spend some time at least skimming it for meaningful stories; you know, the ones that don’t cover the latest murder or “kitten up a tree” type of story.  There is an adage today that people don’t read the newspaper anymore, but instead “play” it with all the puzzles and games they print.  But there is always the percentage in the populous that has a heightened interest. 

They view and read more than just the minimum I just described – there is also that portion who views and reads a lot less.  But for those who go beyond the minimum but less than the amount political wonks put in, the function of the pundit is important.  These interested citizens go a bit beyond the hourly newscasts and skimming the paper; they watch news related networks like Fox News and MSNBC.  On those networks, there is a continuous stream of pundits.
And in turn, these citizens who watch and read more than the minimum and less than the “wonk” level, are important.  These citizens are important in that they still speak mostly in the language of the less informed but, being more informed, they can and do become influential among the general population.  People listen to them, if not the pundits, and how they decide to vote or think about an issue can have an augmented effect.  If you know little or nothing about a subject but feel compelled to act in relation to that subject, you might seek advice from someone you think knows more about it than you do.  At the same time, you will seek that advice from someone you can understand and whom you feel is not too different from where you stand in relation to that subject.  There is a literature associated with these phenomena.[1] 

So, if these citizens are influential and they, in turn, are influenced by pundits, how can we view these pundits?  Perhaps one way is to see them as forecasters.  We have weather forecasters and now we have political forecasters.  Their presentations follow a format; either they directly or by innuendo express what will happen if so and so is allowed to happen.  Their stock and trade is to convince viewers how prescient they are in warning the audience what will happen if the political universe is foolish enough not to follow their advice.  They might direct their comments about how good or bad a course of action is or will be, but the ultimate message is a warning.  For a better America, one should heed their opinion.  Of course, this general function can be extended also to columnists in the papers.  If you want to know about any bias on the part of these pundits, either from the network they are on or the paper that runs their column, one can guess quite accurately what side of the political divide they are on – there are exceptions and they are few in number.  What I want to focus on here is on how good a pundit is in forecasting and what some of the factors affecting this level of proficiency are. 

Philip Tetlock[2] provides an analysis of these aspects.  His overall judgment about how good these “political analysts” are in predicting is that they are not so good.  He grades them as poor at predicting beyond a year; they tend to think they know a great deal about what will happen in the future, a lot more than they actually do know.  It turns out that predictions termed as having eighty or ninety percent accuracy, in actuality are in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 percent.  By the way, I still feel that that rate is not bad.  But, he goes on, that when confronted with less than anticipated accuracy, these pundits do not “learn” from their mistakes and hold on to original claims or derived conclusions.  This means, Tetlock holds, that pundits are predicting only a bit better than chance; they are overconfident and do not benefit from their mistakes.  So right off the top, what the media should be about is benchmarking these predictions and if this were done, the thinking is that either these pundits’ modesty would increase or they would become better at their jobs.

But you might ask why, if the rate of accuracy is so low, does anyone listen to these people?  Well, this question is based on a faulty assumption.  It is based on the notion that people listen to become informed, to become educated.  No, this is not the reason.  People listen to pundits to have their already formed prejudices reinforced; they listen to those who already agree with them on the conclusions – what they believe to be true or good or bad – and can provide the arguments and selected facts that bolster those opinions.  Add to this the pundit’s trick to couch predictions in iffy language – such as, “there could be” statements – and the combination is enough of a hedge to allow the system to sustain itself.  But as we look into this form of political communication, we find even more layers to it.  For example, we find that both pundits and listeners are highly reluctant to question, much less change, their basic assumptions.  They might be willing to dabble with the truth or wisdom of those beliefs on the fringes of their belief structures, but the central tenets are untouchable.  They rationalize when confronted with direct hits on those beliefs.  For example, they might emphasize even greater harm if their advocated position is proven to be misguided, as in we’d better not tempt an even worse outcome by going down a particular road (we’d better not negotiate with Iran because it will use its leverage to bolster terrorists).  This is done when their warnings do not have anything to do with the issue at hand (currently preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons).

In the next posting, I want to pick up on Tetlock’s treatment of this question over forecasting and look at what a teacher can emphasize when instructing students on the role and function of pundits.  Such instruction, for example, can point out a benchmark system that students could utilize and then analyze a set of political pundits from various positions on the political spectrum over an amount of time (sounds like a great term paper project).  But this area has been understudied by the general media although there have been some attempts to judge the factual veracity of what pundits and politicians say in the media.  But since pundits play an important role for our citizenry, civics classrooms need to shine more light on what is going on with these “experts.”



[1] See for example Lloren, A. and Wuest, R.  (2016).  Are opinion leaders better represented?  Social Science Research Network, retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2733045 .

[2] Tetlock, P.  (2013).  How to win at forecasting.  In J. Brockman (Ed.), Thinking:  The new science of decision-making, problem-solving, and prediction (pp. 18-38).  New York, NY:  Harper Perennial.

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