REINFORCING FUNCTIONS

 

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A funny thing about the relationship between civics education and political science is that the practitioners of both fields do not give the relationship much thought.  This is doubly true for political scientists, but at least civics teachers, to be certified, need to earn credits in political science.  But despite this apparent indifference, there seem to be two functions that relationship serves.

They take the following form:  political science provides information that civics courses use, and civics courses prepare students to expect objectified information when the topic is politics – an assumption contemporary political science favors.  To find evidence of how these functions are satisfied in civics education, one can look at civics’ textbooks. 

In practical terms, those textbooks tell civics teachers what to teach and an overview of their content is very telling as to how these reinforcing functions are performed.  Generally, the effect of these books and the related instruction are to convey to students a consumerist view of citizenship.  That is, the typical American, as depicted in these books, is a person with a limited concern about what governments are or what they do.  Their topics center on how the various entities within the polity compete to attain favorable governmental services.

That is, the descriptions are akin to describing a customer at some retail store.  This is a far cry from the image one gets from Lincoln’s refrain:  “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”  It, in other words, ignores the partnership view that the Constitution establishes.  Partners do not limit their concerns to what an enterprise can provide them on a given day.

They instead have a longer-term view, and that view holds that the health of the enterprise is extremely important.  They express this concern in their views, pronouncements, and strategies about how they behave within the partnership.  If one holds to the ideal expressed in Lincoln’s statement, then one sees this lack of normative concern in civics instruction as a shortcoming. 

In general, civics textbooks do not, to a meaningful degree, advance a partnership sense of citizenship.  Not only do these books avoid normative issues, but given they are based on the political systems model, they also neglect an essential element of that model, that being the “feedback loop.”  That is, these books neglect looking at how people react to governmental policies.

To explain this element, it falls in line with how organisms react to stimuli.  Early utilization of the political systems model received criticism because it relied too heavily on the behavioralist notion of “reward/punishment” determinants or as the field calls it:  “stimulus-response.”  Simply stated, it tended to see political behavior as merely a calculated process by which a person attempts to maximize rewards and minimize punishments. 

That early criticism summarily pointed out that its approach was a mechanical view of politics.  By emphasizing inputs, conversion, outputs, the use of the model did not sufficiently provide attention to a subject’s feelings, motivations, and the other subjective aspects of a person’s awareness and reaction.

But, by shifting more attention to the feedback element, and the array of emotions that a reaction might include, that would give the model a needed organic sense or view.  As a result, David Easton eventually called for these other factors to be taken into account in political studies.[1]    

But civics textbooks ignore this feedback feature and, therefore, instead of an organic view, these books retain the model’s initial mechanistic view – machines don’t react, they simply follow the physical laws of nature.  This in effect renders these books as giving governance and politics a dehumanized portrayal as they avoid subjective information and, therefore, tend not to account for the controversies that naturally arise in everyday politics. 

The view, instead, limits itself to describing entity X seeking governmental service, Y, by performing Z process.  Missing is the more intriguing story of how the actors, reflecting on a slew of motivations, dispense rewards and punishments by governments and citizens (e.g., favorable policies by government or political donations by citizens) in an ongoing process over time.  As such, there is little in these books on how the participants of the system are either motivated or dissuaded to behave in the various options open to them. 

There are various areas in which this focus on science, described in previous postings, has meaningful effects on how civics textbooks approach their subject matter.  In relation to this just addressed issue, how and why political actors act as they do, the first of these areas has to do with how the very acts of politics are defined. 

Starting with Harold Lasswell’s seemingly flippant definition – politics is determining “who get what, when, how” – this definition promotes that above mentioned consumerist character and it loses, to a meaningful degree, the assumed overall motivation to advance the interests of the common good or the seeking of that “perfect union.”  But it took a couple of decades, starting in the thirties, for Lasswell’s view to take hold in the fifties. 

That eventuality can be marked with the contribution of Easton.  The popularization of the political systems model is attributed to him.  He commented extensively on the implications of this model, but at its base what one carries away is an explicit image of a transactional system. 

Actors are motivated by self-interest and mostly engage in tit-for-tat interactions.  They seek rewards and avoid punishments.  While in actuality, this basic pattern leads to complicated consequences – e.g., mounting advantages by those who have inordinate levels of political assets – the basic process is relatively easy to accept because under a natural rights view it is easy to understand.

And as such, it becomes a convenient framework for civics textbooks.  Here, within their covers, one finds an overall motivational view for politics, a series of descriptions of participants in the resulting competition which characterizes politics, and descriptions of the organizational set-ups in which those participants function. 

Resulting textbooks, in summary, have a recurring format:  there are the basic rules of the political game (early chapters), the input groupings (the second set of chapters), and the conversion structures (primarily the latter chapters).  What is not included are the output/feedback aspects, which are mostly ignored.  At best, a student so instructed turns out to be an informed observer of the nightly news.

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[1] David Easton, “The Current Meanings of ‘Behavioralism,’” in Contemporary Political Analysis, ed. James C. Charlesworth (New York, NY:  The Free Press, 1967), 11-31.