Civil Engagements

Series of nonprofit-supported televised forums allows voters to trade views without trading barbs

Politicians and pollsters may have long ago decided that the presidential race in Connecticut was over, but try telling that to residents who squared off in New Haven this month in a nationally televised discussion on the war in Iraq and the national economy. Even in places where the outcome seems a foregone conclusion, Americans have plenty they want to say about the policies of the presidential candidates.

A retired schoolteacher, defending President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, told participants that after the 2001 terrorist attacks, “I don’t think traditional policy exists anymore. We have to do whatever is necessary to protect the citizens of the United States.”

A local child advocate shook his head and countered: “If I perceive you’re going to hit me, I can go ahead and hit you first? As a veteran, I really don’t believe we can go around the world striking at people because they appear to have weapons of mass destruction and we should hit them first. That’s wrong.”

Engaging Voters

The exchange was part of a new effort to engage ordinary Americans in issues of national politics and governance by MacNeil/Lehrer Productions and 19 community foundations, universities, and other groups.

The project, By the People, this month brought together about 100 residents in each of 17 cities — from San Diego to New Haven, and from Lincoln, Neb., to Baton Rouge — for moderated, televised discussions on key national issues. The first meetings, which ran on PBS stations around the country, were held in January, while the second round aired last week.

With the political parties ignoring residents in some states and hitting voters in others with a barrage of conflicting messages, charities involved in the project say it is important to provide opportunities for balanced, open discussions, so that average citizens will feel some connection to national politics and feel there is a reason to vote and debate the issues.

“We’ve gotten to the point now where opportunities for constructive dialogue are limited,” says Michael Brown, director of community projects at the Seattle Community Foundation. “It’s usually the loudest person who prevails, or people are talking over each other. Finding that safe space where people can really exchange different views, and figure out where there’s common ground to lead to something better, that’s what we want to create. That’s what we should have.”

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation provided $3.5-million for the project and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund provided $185,000.

Organizers say the televised forums and corresponding polls of participants that were conducted before and after the events demonstrate that the electorate may not be as hopelessly polarized as many political commentators have suggested. While discussions during the events sometimes grew heated, they remained civil.

And many participants expressed a willingness to change their positions after having been given a chance to understand and discuss the issues. For example, a majority of participants in the January forums ranked “establishing democracy” as the most important thing for the United States to do in Iraq. But after studying the issue, they changed their minds: It was more critical to establish a stable government, whether or not it was a democracy, the majority said.

Polls taken after the October session suggest that this kind of discussion can help people decide whom to vote for, even when the discussion doesn’t focus on the candidates. Fifteen percent of participants were undecided about which presidential candidate to support before the sessions, but only 7 percent said they were undecided afterward.

Even so, some observers question the ability of projects like By the People to have any broad or sustained impact. Lewis M. Feldstein, president of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, who is co-author of a book on effective civic-engagement projects, says his foundation decided not to participate in the PBS project.

“Lots of people run programs like this here in New Hampshire,” he says. “Every four years there’s been a whole host of town meetings and voter-deliberation projects. But just exposing people to it doesn’t seem to cause people to keep it going. Six months later, people are back about their lives.”

‘Deliberative’ Democracy

Despite its limits, other community foundations believe the project provided a worthy experiment for helping Americans in cities around the country feel they have a stake in national politics.

“This is engaging people in the process of deliberative democracy, helping to create an electorate that has more reason to go to the polls, and knows more when they do,” says William W. Ginsberg, president of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, which helped organize the event there. “In an environment where so many resources go into the political parties’ presenting their sides, it’s all the more important to have processes designed to be fair, balanced, and deliberative.”

Some By the People participants — such as Levora Hawkins, a retired social worker in Rochester, N.Y. — say the discussions have made them more interested in getting involved in local advocacy efforts.

Ms. Hawkins currently is taking part in a television program, Voice of the Voter, in which voters talk about local current events, on Rochester’s PBS station, WXXI. And she may join a similar panel organized by Rochester’s newspaper. After years of believing politicians would not listen to people like her, “it has inspired me,” she says. “They hear me now.”

Jennifer Leonard, president of the Rochester Area Community Foundation, said the opportunity to appear on national television helped her organization attract a broad and diverse group of area residents. Forum participants were selected after being contacted by a polling firm that made calls to randomly selected numbers. Those ultimately chosen had to represent the demographics and political views of the geographic region.

“The people who were involved were a cross-sample of the community,” says Ms. Leonard. “And the fact that some of this was televised is an incentive, we hope, to others to pursue the issues behind the news and recognize we all have an obligation to be informed and vote. We hope this will ultimately stem the decline in voting. But more than that, we’d like there to be more discussion of public issues.”

Changing Views

Approximately 1.4 million people watched the January broadcast, according to MacNeil/Lehrer; figures for last week’s broadcast are not yet available.

Many organizers of the events believe the opinion polls taken of participants before and after the forums provide the best evidence that the process can be effective in moving people away from long-held positions. Cynthia Farrar, a political-science lecturer at Yale University who has helped the New Haven Community Foundation create similar local events, says, “It’s not just about people interacting with other folks, but feeling their voice is being heard.” That makes them more willing to revise their opinions in light of new information, she adds.

Mr. Ginsberg, of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, says that his organization has served as a kind of poster child for the process, known as deliberative polling, and its role in engaging local citizens. For the past three years, the community foundation has sponsored gatherings to discuss pressing local affairs, such as prison overcrowding.

After holding the local forums, which were broadcast by New Haven’s public television station, the community foundation organized follow-up town hall meetings with residents and local politicians. It put information from its meetings on its Web site, and organized online discussion groups. The community foundation also conducted opinion polls of forum participants to measure any shifts in views over time. The combined effort cost the community foundation about $50,000, according to Mr. Ginsberg.

At the start of the effort, most people who attended the sessions supported building more prisons. But after meeting to discuss the issue, a majority of participants said it made more sense to look at ways to reduce recidivism and create alternatives to the traditional prison.

Using its findings, the community foundation helped lobby local legislators to increase spending on research on other options, and this year the state approved $1-million to experiment with alternatives to prison.

Such forums “strengthen the community foundation’s hand as an advocate,” says Mr. Ginsberg. “It’s one thing to say we believe this. It’s another to say a randomly selected group of citizens believe this.”

Spreading the Message

Robert Putnam, a Harvard professor and author of Bowling Alone, a study of civic engagement in America, says he hopes nonprofit groups will continue to seek out ways to engage the people in their cities and neighborhoods. “The people who vote and go to church and belong to a civic association are the same people who volunteer and give to charity,” he says.

Despite a brief surge of interest after the terrorist attacks, civic engagement remains at historically low levels, he says. Voting levels have fallen by 25 percent over the past four decades, and other types of political participation have fallen by 50 percent.

“As the pool of civically engaged people dries up, charities are going to have to fish a lot harder” for money and volunteers, he says.

Mr. Putnam says projects like By the People can be useful, but only if they reach enough people. “Will it spill beyond the people in the room and get people off the couch and into their communities?” he questions. “If all that happens is that 300 people have a talk fest and another 3,000 people watch it, that’s not going to have an effect.”