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.

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

HEY, WE WOULD LIKE YOU TO …

Let’s apply a positivist twist to a federalist claim.  That is, let us take one of federation theory’s tenets, derive a hypothesis from it, and see if in reality – the real world – the hypothesis is true.  Well, I am going to hedge a bit.  My experiment will not be well controlled, but the general gist of an experiment will be present.  And, it’s not my experiment; it’s Hahric Han’s.[1]  Actually, Han’s work is not an experiment at all; it’s a qualitative study in which she conducted extensive observations and interviews within an array of formal organizations, generally professional and environmental ones.  Her specific interest was to compare the relative success in eliciting activism among these organizations’ members.  She wanted to see the ability of these organizations to get members to participate in the different organizational processes that constitute the activities of the organization, such as working phone banks or soliciting membership.

Han began by dividing general strategies of these organizations into two types.  These types were transactional mobilizing and transformational organizing.  Generally, each type views soliciting activism fundamentally different in that transactional mobilizing counts on actively identifying latent talent among the membership and approaching the members so identified to take on organizational roles – a targeted approach – and transformational organizing casts a wide net, encouraging as many members to take on roles and then spending time and resources to develop the talents of those members once they are “on the job.”  The first is more exclusive in its approach and the latter is more inclusive.  The first relies on fewer resources of time and effort while the second has relatively high upfront costs.  The hypothesis would be, following the claims of federation theory, that the second approach would, in the long run, accrue higher returns for the organization than the first.  You would have more active members, members who, in fulfilling organizational roles, perform their roles in line with organizational expectations, and an overall more vibrant organization better able to fulfill its aims and goals.  What did Han discover?

While transactional mobilizing was better in matching roles to pre-held desires of members, transformational organizers were about transforming member desires and, through the personal interaction entailed in the “training,” developed more social interaction among the membership.  Transformational organizing was characterized by many person-to-person exchanges in the form of training sessions and meetings.  This was distinguishable from the transactional mobilizing approach that left engaged members more alone in doing their jobs.  By and large, these transactional settings were in organizations more prone to having less engaged memberships, while the transformational organizing ones experienced higher engaged memberships.  Higher engagement meant higher cognitive, emotional, interdependency styled work, but did not do away with autonomous efforts strategically pursued (how federal can this get?).  A result for the organizations that adopted the transformational organizing strategy was an organization more prone to enjoy many positive qualities such as a membership sharing more leadership skills and an atmosphere more conducive to engage in collective action.  Federation theory passed this “experiment.”

How generalizable are these results?  Well, as is often the case, more work needs to be done.  This study was limited to fairly professional organizations composed of middle to upper middle income subjects.  In terms of other demographic limitations, the observations and interviews were mostly of a white sample.  And of course, if further study were to conduct a truly experimental design, then many more controls would have to be in place.  Perhaps such a study would be impractical to conduct and the more qualitative protocol employed by Han would be the way to go with a more inclusive set of organizations.  But the path of research opened by Han is worth pursuing and it would be useful to see if the insights derived, assuming they mirror this initial study, further bolster the claims of federation theory.



[1] Han, H.  (2014).  How organizations develop activists:  Civic associations and leadership in the 21st century.  New York, NY:  Oxford University Press.  Information reported in this posting derived from a book review by Melissa R. Michelson found in Political Science Quarterly, fall, 2015, issue.

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