Where's the evidence?
And are we brave enough to find it?
Editor’s note: Here’s a “what if” for us to chew on: What if we’ve been making sub-optimal decisions on where to invest resources — decisions based on hunches and not research-backed evidence? Could that be hampering the democracy space?
Andrew Seligsohn says yes. Andrew runs Public Agenda, which conducts original research and brings insights from academic research to democracy practitioners. Read on for his perspective.
When right-wing authoritarianism emerged as a serious threat to the sustainability of American democracy nearly a decade ago, it inspired a surge of energy. In his excellent recent piece in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Scott Warren captured well the feeling of many of us who had quietly been toiling away in the pro-democracy shadows for years. At the time, I was leading Campus Compact, a higher education association whose work focuses on civic and democratic education. All of a sudden, organizations that had not existed months before were knocking on our door to ask us about getting access to college students for dialogue initiatives, bridge-building projects, voter engagement, and various other efforts aimed at strengthening democracy.
On the one hand, this blossoming of pro-democracy energy was welcome. At a personal level, I had defined my career based on my deep belief in the necessity of democracy for human flourishing, and the choices I made seemed strange to lots of people. That was no longer true. At a public level, all of us involved in pro-democracy work knew that we needed many more people to care about the health of our democracy to have a chance at success. Here they were.
On the other hand, I started to notice two things about the emerging movement for democratic renewal. First, a lot of the projects and programs finding philanthropic support were based on hunches about what might contribute to strengthening democracy, rather than research-backed evidence.
As is typical in the sector, these efforts were framed around theories of change. “If we engage college students in deliberative dialogue, they will be more open to a variety of ideas as citizens throughout their lives.” “If we change the electoral rules in a specific way, there will be less polarization and more collaboration.” These theories involved hypotheses about causation, but in the vast majority of cases, there was no evidence showing that the hypotheses were true.
That wasn’t necessarily a problem—you have to start somewhere, even if you don’t yet have the evidence you’d like—except for the second thing: No one seemed to be doing very much about the lack of evidence.
Unlike other generational challenges—cancer, climate change—the democracy challenge was not attracting a major stream of research funding. No one was creating the infrastructure to identify key questions, investigate them, and bring results to practitioners in forms useful to them. Some research was (and is) being funded, but the gap between the complexity of the issues and the resources dedicated to understanding them is colossal.
Because I lead an organization seeking to close that gap, I run the risk now of being heard as saying “fund our work.” And, yes, of course, that would be great! But that’s not my (entire) point.
Instead, my point is grounded in good news: We can act now. There is an enormous body of existing research waiting to be translated and made useful to pro-democracy practitioners. There are vast troves of data desperately wishing to be analyzed by skilled researchers. These opportunities and many others can be seized through open calls for proposals drawing innovative approaches from emerging scholars and established researchers alike.
The next phase of democracy work could be powered by high quality evidence that can emerge quite quickly if we get started. Some research will take more time, which is a great argument for getting started now.
Andrew J. Seligsohn, PhD is the president of Public Agenda.
Have thoughts on this piece? You can submit a pitch to Democracy Takes here.
As a pro-democracy organizer married to a civic participation researcher sociologist, yes, a thousand times. One of the things that researchers like Hahrie Han are uncovering is the importance of values-based narrative and emotion in moving people to take collective action, such as the important "public narrative" framework of Marshall Ganz (the architect of the 2008 Obama campaign's successful grassroots strategy.) And yet, good organizing and leadership development are by and large not what gets funded. It's amazing what we have forgotten about campaign strategy since 2008 and 2012. There's an important and underdeveloped step of taking the research that *has* been done -- the things we do know -- and incorporating them into the decision making process of elite funder circles. One confounding aspect of the problem is that funders generally have no accountability -- it's their money and they can spend it however they want. More than a few foundation boards and program officers have this same attitude (even when it is not in fact their money.) I have found these elite cliques are often more concerned with what their boards or peers think of their decisions than whether or not they are effective, and if you look at the power-structures underlying their employment, it's not hard to understand why this is so. Any analysis of why the climate and democracy movements have been so ineffective over the past 40 years should start (and possibly end) with how they have been funded -- by elite large donors and donations, rather than grassroots membership and dues -- and what incentives and power-structures that funding has created, often at the expense of effectiveness. Certainly we have not succeeded at preserving our climate or our democracy, and the cold fact alone of a losing scoreboard should prompt more public analysis and accountability than we have seen to date.