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Guest Post:New Report Evaluates the Use of Google Hangouts and Other Formats for Public Deliberation

Peter Levine

November 25, 2013

(This is the seventh in a series of blog posts by CIRCLE, which evaluated several initiatives funded by the Democracy Fund to inform and engage voters during the 2012 election. These posts discuss issues of general interest that emerged from specific evaluations.)

During the 2012 campaign season, AmericaSpeaks and Face the Facts USA worked together to involve citizens in online discussions of important issues facing our country. An evaluation by John Gastil, David Brinker, and Robert Richards of Penn State’s Department of Communication Arts and Sciences finds that people learned a lot about the issue from videos or text explanations. Participants absorbed somewhat less factual information from deliberations but gained more commitment to civil dialogue. When they chose to share what they had learned or experienced, they opted to put comments on websites to share more complex thoughts but used Facebook and Twitter to disseminate simpler points. Conservatives were less satisfied with these particular deliberations.

A participant from one of the Google Hangout discussions who was interviewed by the evaluators reflected on his experience with the dialogue:

“I was really surprised by this experience. I didn’t … expect to get much (or anything) from it. But I actually enjoyed it a lot, and I think it was useful. And I think this sort of experience, with a skilled moderator, could actually be incredibly beneficial for our democracy. There are so many forces acting to the detriment of American democracy, and I can’t really think of ANY forces helping preserve the quality of our democracy. …. I think there’s a lot of potential here, to counteract the pernicious effects of cable news and special interest campaign financing.”

The evaluators also organized face-to-face deliberations for college students on the same issue (the national debt/economy) and randomly varied the style of facilitation. Some facilitators were trained to “focus on rigorous analysis of the facts,” others on “democratic social relationships among the participants,” and a third group was asked to balance the two styles. Preliminary evidence suggests that all three styles were generally successful, but a balanced approach was best for raising the participants’ knowledge of the issue, which, in turn, led them to value the conversation more. Facilitators should focus on keeping a conversation on topic and identifying tradeoffs.

These and other findings are summarized in a report by Gastil, Brinker, and Richards. (The methodology is described below)

All in all, we hope these results prove useful to others who wish to take deliberation to scale using online approaches and face to face discussions and look forward to sharing them widely. Please do be in touch if you are aware of other work in this area and want to share.

————————————Methodology

The research team recruited an online sample of adults and randomly assigned them to:

discuss issues in small groups using Google Hangout’s web-chat function. These discussions were structured and facilitated.
listen to a live broadcast video about a policy issue; thanks to Spreecast’s technology, they could submit questions to the moderator and chat online with other participants.
read text or watch videos that explained policy issues, or
receive no information about the issues at all but just take a survey.

The evaluators compared the participants’ grasp of the issue and attitudes about citizenship and discussion. They also recruited college students for face-to-face discussions and randomly varied the facilitation style. The evaluation was funded by the Democracy Fund through a subcontract to CIRCLE at Tufts University.

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Guest Post: The State Open Campaign System: Technology for Cleaner, Fairer Campaigns

John Kaehny

October 25, 2013

New York has struggled to emerge from a long history of political scandals. In recent years, a number of the state’s most powerful elected officials have left office after indictments or convictions, as have numerous state legislators. The public’s unhappiness over the pervasive influence of money in state politics has led to a loud call for new legislation that would reform campaign finance and ethics laws. But the state legislature has resisted. Despite this inaction in Albany, we are optimistic that there are ways forward that do not require difficult legislation or political upheaval. For instance, New York — and other states — can use inexpensive technology to help make our campaign finance system cleaner, fairer and more transparent.

Our informal group of civic-minded technologists and transparency and campaign experts has created a blueprint for an affordable, state-of-the-art campaign finance reporting system called the State Open Campaign System. It’s like a super-charged TurboTax for campaign finance: a website based tool that would be made available by the Board of Election — for free — to every state political campaign to use for bookkeeping, reporting and donor tracking. All online, no paper. Our design builds on the New York City Campaign Finance Board’s web based CSMART, which moved all New York City campaign reporting online this year. Our team assembled earlier this year in the midst of a big push for a small donor matching program like New York City’s 6-1 public match, and lower caps on contributions. Experts on campaign finance agree that any public funded campaign matching program must be accompanied by rigorous reporting, oversight, and tough enforcement. They also agree that transparency and tough reporting are an integral part of any kind of clean campaign finance system.

We designed the State Open Campaign System — “SOCS” — after in-depth discussions with government regulators, campaign treasurers, experts from academia and watchdog groups, and major technology firms.* We had three goals for the web based system. First, we wanted to design a system that allows campaigns to comply with very tough reporting and auditing regimes as easily as possible. Second, we wanted to sharply reduce the cost to regulators of conducting audits and detecting abuse. Third, we sought to use modern data sharing techniques, like API’s, to open up campaign finance data to the public, and to watchdogs in and out of government, and to make it as useful as possible. SOCS incorporates best practices for campaign finance and ethics reporting: 1. A fully paperless system which uses a website for all records and transactions. 2. Smart web-forms, with automatic suggestions/corrections, producing fewer errors. 3. Instant address and donor ID validation procedures that use voter and data files. 4. Unique ID numbers for all donors. 5. Open data using widely available API’s and bulk downloads in open file formats.

To make SOCS as useful as possible, we went through every step of reporting and auditing campaign donations and expenditures. We designed a “work flow” that uses smart forms, and widely available business software, to help campaigns comply with complicated rules, in a way that is as simple and intuitive as possible. We strove to keep our system as inexpensive as possible by using modules of open source code. We estimate that completely implementing SOCS, and buying new database hardware and software would cost New York about eighteen cents a voter, or two million dollars. Since New York’s totally archaic campaign finance technology is on the verge of collapse, and has to be replaced in any event, the additional cost of building a system like SOCS is very low.

Our hope is that New York will build the State Open Campaign System as part of replacing its aged technology and reforming its campaign system. If it does, we would like to see SOCS offered as an open source tool for other states. We have a promising discussion underway with the NYC Campaign Finance Board about open sourcing its CSMART code sometime in early 2014, and we will continue to work with the Democracy Fund and our many other partners to get the Open Campaign System up and running. Please feel free to contact us at info@campaignworkinggroup.org John Kaehny is executive director of Reinvent Albany, and a co-founder of the Open Campaign Working Group.

*Summaries of some of these interviews are online at opencampaignsystem.org

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Guest Post: Engaging News Project Results

Talia Stroud

September 18, 2013

It has been an exciting debut year for the Engaging News Project. The aim of the project is to research democratically-beneficial and commercially-viable tools and strategies for engaging online news audiences. Below, we detail four take-aways from our work. Use a “Respect” Button in Comment Sections. “Like” is a common button on news websites. You can “like” news organizations, articles, and others’ thoughts in comment sections. The use of the word “like,” however, may exacerbate partisan reactions to news and comments. The word asks people to think in terms of agreeing or disagreeing, approving or disapproving. But not all words inspire the same reaction. Indeed, several organizations have incorporated other buttons onto their sites. The Tampa Bay Times has “Important,” Civic Commons “Informative,” and Huffington Post “Bored,” to name but a few. We tested a new word: “Respect.” Perhaps asking people to “Respect” others’ comments will lead to different behaviors in a comment section compared to “Like,” or another frequently used word, “Recommend.” The results were encouraging. From a democratic angle, “Respect” led people to click on more comments expressing different political viewpoints. From a business angle, “Respect” resulted in more clicks overall, particularly for some topics. We encourage news organizations to consider using this new button. Use Fact-Based Interactive Slider Quizzes. Online polls are regular features on news sites. They solicit site visitors’ opinions on everything from proposed legislation to how a sports team will fare during an upcoming season. Truth be told, however, the poll results are of limited value. They offer no insight on the sentiments of a broader public. They should not be used to form an opinion or to inform policy. The main purpose of these features is to keep people on a news page longer. We hoped that we could find a way to increase the democratic value of these interactive tools. Instead of polls that ask people to report their opinions, we tested quizzes that ask people about a fact and then provide reliable information. For example, a question could be posed about what percentage of the federal budget is spent on Social Security. Quiz questions also could ask people to predict public opinion about a topic, giving results based on reliably-gathered public opinion data. We tested two types of polls: a multiple-choice poll and a slider poll. Consider the Democracy Fund’s work with the “Oregon Citizens Initiative Review (CIR).” As Peter Levine explained in his earlier blog post, the project involves sending Oregonians pamphlets created by a representative group of 24 citizens that explain ballot measures. Here are examples of the two types of polls:

We first conducted a laboratory test on polls like these. We learned that people spend more time with slider polls and that these interactive tools improve learning compared to just telling people a fact (e.g. “nearly half of Oregon voters were aware of the CIR’s explanations.”). Next, we partnered with a news organization that let us include polls on their site. The code randomized whether people saw a multiple-choice or slider poll. Results showed that including more than one poll, and at least one slider poll, can increase the amount of time people spend on a webpage. Get Involved in the Comment Section. In visiting with news staff across the country as part of this project, we were struck by the tremendous variability in comment section practices. Some news organizations actively cultivate a vibrant online community. Others essentially ignore the section, writing it off as a wasteland that is included on a site because having people argue, the theory goes, could increase their time on site. Calls by political leaders from President Obama to Texas Governor Perry to improve the civility of public discourse inspired us to examine strategies for combatting incivility in comment sections. We worked with a local television station to randomize what took place following 70 different political posts to their active Facebook page. For some posts, the station’s popular political reporter interacted with commenters. For other posts, the station interacted with commenters. And for yet other posts, no one interacted with commenters. Results showed that having a political reporter interact with commenters can improve civility in the comment section. Use Caution in Labeling Hyperlinks. Our final project analyzed how hyperlinks are labeled on news sites. Right now, they are commonly labeled as “Top Stories” or as “Most Popular Stories.” We wondered whether other phrases, developed based on research in psychology, communication, and political science, could affect people’s on-site behavior. For example, we analyzed whether including the phrase “Follow the issues that worry you.” would influence people’s on-site behavior and attitudes about politics. We conducted a lab experiment where we compared how people behaved on a news site that was identical in all ways except one: a single phrase included on the site. Results were decidedly mixed. All of the six different phrases that we evaluated had effects, but none of them had uniformly positive business and democratic outcomes. For example, the phrase “Follow the issues that worry you” resulted in some respondents displaying less polarized political views, but it had no discernible business effect. As a result of our study, we can’t recommend any of the phrases that we tested. But we can report with confidence that news organization should tread cautiously in adding new phrases to their sites. A single phrase can affect people’s attitudes and behaviors. For the Engaging News Project these results are the beginning of the project’s work to help newsrooms. Many new tools and strategies remain to be discovered and evaluated and we look forward to continuing our work in the coming years. If you’re interested in getting involved, you can follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, Sign up for our newsletter, and Email us with any suggestions you might have!

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Fostering a Culture of Problem Solving in Washington

Joe Goldman

August 14, 2013

“Compromise” is a dirty word in today’s political environment. To admit to making a compromising implies weakness and a lack of principle. In their new book, “The Spirit of Compromise,” Amy Gutman and Dennis Thompson recall a 2010 interview of Speaker John Boehner on CBS’s 60 Minutes:

JOHN BOENER: We have to govern. That’s what we were elected to do.

LESLIE STAHL: But governing means compromising.

BOEHNER: It means working together.

STAHL: It also means compromising. …

BOEHNER: When you say the word “compromise” … a lot of Americans look up and go, “Uh-oh, they’re going to sell me out…”

STAHL: Why won’t you say – you’re afraid of the word.

BOEHNER: I reject the word.

By design, our political system does not function without compromise. While partisans on both sides may hold out for the day in which they control super majorities who can make decisions at will, the reality is that these circumstances are rare and temporary. Failure to accept the need for compromise privileges the status quo and robs our political system of the capacity to solve problems. Compromise need not entail a violation of core values, but it does often require giving up some battles and letting the other side win something. To political leaders who are stuck in a permanent campaign, the idea of losing anything is unacceptable, which takes any compromise off the table. Gutmann and Thompson write that improving mutual respect and trust among political leaders can help shift this mindset and make compromise possible. They write:

“Because in politics motives are usually suspect and bargaining leverage often uncertain, capitulating to opponents is an ever-present fear. Mutual respect is an indispensable antidote. Without it, the parties to a compromise have little reason to believe that they are getting as much as they can reasonably expect, and they cannot assure their supporters that they are not selling out. Political leaders who combine being principled partisans with cultivating close relationships with their partisan opponents bring both the intrinsic and the instrumental values of mutual respect to the table when the time for compromise is ripe.”

Mutual respect cannot solve everything that is plaguing our politics – it may only be a small part of the solution. Real political incentives – votes, money, promotions – often stand in the way and can overpower any good will that exists between people. But some modicum of trust and respect is often a pre-condition to solving problems and can make a real difference. With this in mind, I’m happy to share that the Democracy Fund has added a new member of our portfolio aimed at encouraging bipartisan problem solving – the No Labels Foundation. As you may know, the No Labels Foundation is the educational arm of No Labels – a group of Democrats, Republicans, and independents dedicated to a new politics of problem solving in America. They join the Bipartisan Policy Center, the National Institute for Civil Discourse, and the Faith & Politics Institute in our portfolio of organizations working to ensure that our government has the capacity to rise to the challenges facing our nation. Over the past year, 82 Members of Congress have joined a Problem Solvers Coalition organized by No Labels to encourage greater communication and collaboration among political leaders from both parties. The No Labels Foundation has organized educational events in order to foster greater trust among these political leaders, their staff members, and other key stakeholders in Washington. By building relationships across the aisle within the policy making community, the No Labels Foundation believes it can foster an environment of trust among policy makers and their staff members. Their approach to building personal relationships between political leaders from opposing parties and focusing attention on common interests is well aligned with our aim at the Democracy Fund. I’ve personally attended several events convened by the organization to foster dialogue among policy makers. What has stood out more than anything else is how rare these opportunities seem to be where leader can get to know colleagues from the other side and identify space for genuine common ground. My sense is that there is a real hunger for these opportunities, especially among newer members. The Democracy Fund will continue to explore how structural changes – like redistricting reform and changes to Congressional procedures – can further shift incentives in our political system. But we are enthusiastic about the work that grantees like the No Labels Foundation are doing to contribute to a more productive governance process.

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Guest Post: Creating Community Solutions, part of the National Dialogue on Mental Health

Carolyn Lukensmeyer

August 9, 2013

On June 3rd 2013, President Barack Obama hosted a National Conference on Mental Health at the White House as part of the Administration’s efforts to launch a national conversation to increase understanding and awareness about mental health. At the event, President Obama directed Secretary Kathleen Sebelius of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Secretary Arne Duncan of the U.S. Department of Education to launch a National Dialogue on Mental Health.

An important component of the national dialogue is Creating Community Solutions, which is a series of events around the country that will allow people to engage in dialogue and action on mental health issues. The effort is being led by the National Institute for Civil Discourse and several other deliberative democracy groups. The National Institute for Civil Discourse has joined in this initiative because we believe mental health is one of the most pressing issues facing our country, yet is one of the most difficult issues for Americans to talk about. We hope to engage thousands of Americans in a range of setting: small-group discussions, large forums, online conversations and large-scale events. The dialogues are supported by an array of local officials, nonprofit organizations, professional associations, foundations, and health care providers. In over 50 communities, planning has begun for the community conversations on mental health. The community conversations page at www.mentalhealth.gov describes the basic parameters of these events and the online map at www.creatingcommunitysolutions.org shows the full range of places and organizations involved. Two large-scale events of several hundred people each have already been convened this summer in Sacramento, CA and Albuquerque, NM. In Sacramento, local and state officials and community leaders were extremely supportive, including Mayor Kevin Johnson who attended the event along with members of his staff. Congresswoman Doris Matsui attended and talked about the State of Mental Health Matters. Sacramento aggressively used social media to recruit young people and it paid off. Thirty percent of the 350 people in the room were between the ages of 19-24. Local television and print media provided good coverage, including a segment on the local NBC affiliate KCRA. A diverse group of three hundred people attended the forum in Albuquerque. Former U.S. Senator Pete Domenici addressed the crowd, along with Mayor Richard Barry who joined people in the discussions and committed to act on some of the suggestions that emerged from the day. Albuquerque also received local television and print media coverage of the event, including a segment on KRQE. Now that the events are completed, each city will have a Community Action page under the Outcomes section on our website, www.creatingcommunitysolutions.org. Information about next steps, the outcomes of the event, relevant documents and media articles will be housed there. Both cities have robust action planning committees composed of local organizations and leaders committed to incorporating the strategies expressed by the participants into Community Action Plans that will guide their cities’ responses to mental health going forward. Some of those strategies included: strengthening existing resources, improving preventive services and continuity of care, teaching mental health services in schools, and communicating information about mental health services to young people using more extensive social media. Dr. Carolyn Lukensmeyer is the Executive Director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse.

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Guest Post: The Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review

Peter Levine

July 10, 2013

(This is the sixth in a series of blog posts by CIRCLE, which evaluated several initiatives funded by the Democracy Fund to inform and engage voters during the 2012 election. These posts discuss issues of general interest that emerged from specific evaluations.) CIRCLE evaluated seven initiatives funded by the Democracy Fund during the 2012 election. These interventions were not comparable; they had diverse purposes and operated in various contexts and scales. We certainly do not have a favorite among them. But we do recommend that policymakers pay attention to one of the projects because it can be adopted by law—with positive effects. In 2011, the Oregon legislature instituted a process called the Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR). This reform unifies two apparently contrasting forms of democracy, the popular initiative and the deliberative forum.

*Presentation of Key findings from Measure 85, 2012 CIR, Healthy Democracy Fund*

With a referendum, the public can circumvent entrenched interests and hold politicians accountable. A referendum honors the democratic principle of one person/one vote.

Oregon was one of the first states to institute referenda, initiatives, and recall elections. Perhaps the most famous advocate of these populist reforms was William Simon U’Ren, known nationally as “Referendum U’Ren,” who formed the Oregon Direct Legislation League in 1897. As a result of early initiatives, Oregon was the first state to elect its US Senators directly (1908), the first to hold a presidential primary election (1910), and one of the first to allow women to vote (1912).

These were achievements. But a referendum does not require people to learn, think, or discuss. As the number of referenda rises, the odds fall that voters will be thoughtful and well-informed about each ballot measure. Deliberation is a form of democracy that encourages people to be well-informed and thoughtful. Juries and New England town meetings are deliberative bodies that have deep roots in the United States, but governments can also create innovative deliberative forums today. For instance, several cities have asked AmericaSPEAKS to convene large numbers of representative citizens to discuss an issue—such as the city plan of New Orleans or the budget of Washington, DC—and give official input on the final decisions.

Referenda can easily reach large scale and offer every citizen an equal vote, but they may not reflect thoughtful opinion and may in fact present information in a format that is too complex or filled with jargon to be easily understood even by well-informed voters. They can even be manipulated by the authors of ballot measures or by groups that spend money on campaigns. Deliberation addresses those two problems, but deliberations tend to be small and would cost a great deal (in both money and participants’ time) to make widespread.

The Citizens Initiative Review process combines the best of both ideas. The text of an initiative is given to a randomly selected, representative body of 24 citizens who study it, hear testimony on both sides of the issue, and collaboratively write an explanatory statement. They spend five days on this work. Their explanation does not endorse or reject the initiative but gives deliberated and informed arguments for and against it. A copy is mailed to all households in Oregon as part of the state’s Voters Pamphlet.

*CIR: How it Works, Healthy Democracy Fund*

Penn State Professor John Gastil found that nearly half of Oregon voters were aware of the CIR’s explanations in fall 2012. He also conducted a randomized experiment, surveying a sample of Oregonians who were given the explanations and a control group who were not. His experiment showed that the text produced by the CIR influenced people’s views of the ballot measure and increased their understanding of it. If many people knew about the explanation, and the explanation changed people’s opinions in an experiment, then the CIR probably changed many people’s opinions across the state. CIRCLE conducted an analysis of media coverage of the CIR process in December of 2012. With the bulk of coverage appearing in Oregon-based media outlets, it generally focused on the CIR process—describing it and communicating its validity and trustworthiness. Healthy Democracy, the organization that managed the CIR, created strong and consistent messages that guided this public conversation, which at times expanded into advocacy for the CIR or appeals to strengthen democracy through such processes. The media also used the CIR as a way to talk about deliberative dialogue in a concrete form. For the non-Oregon media especially, it offered a way to think about the possibilities for such processes in other locales. Advocating deliberative processes and igniting the public imagination about new forms of engagement were clearly strong narrative threads in the public discourse caused by CIR media coverage. CIRCLE is also in the final stages of interviewing political leaders from other states who have observed the CIR in Oregon or are engaged in other educational activities about the CIR. We are asking them what would influence their decision to adopt the reform. We will report our results here.

The previous entries in the series can be accessed below:

1 – Educating Voters in a Time of Political Polarization 2 – Supporting a Beleaguered New Industry 3 – How to Reach a Large Scale with High-Quality Messages 4 – Tell it Straight? The Advantages and Dangers of Parody 5 – Educating the Public When People Don’t Trust Each Other

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Guest Post: Educating the Public When People Don’t Trust Each Other

Peter Levine

June 27, 2013

(This is the fifth in a series of blog posts by CIRCLE, which evaluated several initiatives funded by the Democracy Fund to inform and engage voters during the 2012 election. These posts discuss issues of general interest that emerged from specific evaluations.) Although low trust for Congress is widely known, it may be just as significant that “a dwindling majority (57%) [of Americans] say they have a good deal of confidence in the wisdom of the American people when it comes to making political decisions” (Pew Research Center, 2007). That trend is consistent with a long and steady decline in generalized social trust, or trust in fellow citizens.

If most people trust their fellow citizens but not the government, they are open to populist forms of political reform, such as referenda, recall, and transparency laws. If most people trust the government but not the people, they may want to consolidate power in the hands of political leaders. But if they trust neither, any reform agenda has a difficult path, and restoring trust in fellow citizens emerges as an important precondition of reform. When we asked a representative sample to make open-ended comments about today’s political advertising, many respondents blamed voters for deceptive rhetoric, often describing their fellow Americans in scathing terms. They said, for example: * “Most people are sheep, the politicians know this and use propaganda to further [their] own ends. But not all of us are sheep, I try not to play into [their] bullshit.” * “Allowing sheeple [people who act like sheep] to vote reduces elections to pure pandering.” * “Deceptive advertising is reprehensible and ugly, and its popularity today reflects the American public’s inability or unwillingness to think critically and objectively.” * “Most American people believe everything they see on TV and do not take the initiative to research what they are hearing to ensure its validity. This results in the wrong people being elected to offices- people who make our situation a lot worse instead of improving it.” * “It’s a sad state of affairs that the political advertising used today is effective because of a largely ignorant electorate.” * “The general public doesnt know the difference between propaganda and rhetoric and I find most people too lazy to to research topics that they dont understand or dont know what a law is, they just blindly trust the person to be telling the truth.” * “The political ads are of low quality because their target audience is of low quality ….” * “There will always be deception in Politics. How else are you going to get a mass amount of ignorant and uneducated people to follow you?” We coded only 7 percent of all the open-ended responses as critiques of the American people, so we cannot conclude that this was a majority opinion. On the other hand, our question was very broad—about political advertising in general—and it is notable that 42 people took the opportunity to denounce their fellow citizens. Similarly, in evaluating Face the Facts USA, John Gastil and Dave Brinker asked representative Americans to watch videos of online conversations, and asked “After watching [the video], do you feel that you would be more able to participate in a political conversation?” Most responses were favorable, but some expressed critical views of the people featured in the videos: * “NO, it made me quite upset and I lost a little faith in humanity listening to all the right wingers” * “I don’t think this will help any political discussions because as was evident in observing some of the chat, liberals and democrats are incapable of remaining calm and decent 100% of the time and right wingers are incapable 90% of the time. Check that fact!! People are dug into their positions and there is a war coming, it’s just a matter of when, not if.” In conjunction with survey data about declining social trust, these responses indicate a challenging situation. However, as part of the same Face the Facts initiative, AmericaSPEAKS also convened citizens to deliberate in Google Hangouts. Compared to a control group—and compared to people who simply received one-way informative materials—citizens who were randomly chosen to deliberate were more likely to express faith in their fellow citizens as deliberators. Their attitude was measured by their agreement with these statements: * “The first step in solving our common problems is to discuss them together.” * “Even people who strongly disagree can make sound decisions if they sit down and talk.” * “Everyday people from different parties can have civil, respectful conversations about politics.” So it would appear that actually engaging other people in discussion makes people more favorable to deliberation. Most citizens do not have such experiences. Expanding the scale and prevalence of discussion would have benefits for nonpartisan political reform. The previous entries in the series can be accessed below: 1 – Education voters in a Time of Political Polarization 2 – Supporting a Beleaguered News Industry 3 – How to Reach a Large Scale with High-Quality Messages 4 – Tell it Straight? The Advantages and Dangers of Parody

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Guest Post: Tell it Straight? The Advantages and Dangers of Parody

Peter Levine

June 24, 2013

(This is the fourth in a series of blog posts by CIRCLE, which evaluated several initiatives funded by the Democracy Fund to inform and engage voters during the 2012 election. These posts discuss issues of general interest that emerged from specific evaluations. Join CIRCLE for an ongoing discussion of the posts using the hashtag #ChangeTheDialogue, as well as a live chat on Tuesday, June 25th at 2pm ET/1pm CT/11am PT.)

Parody is powerful. Scholarly papers by Young Mie Kim and John Vishak, Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, Amy Becker, Michael Xenos, Xiaoxia Cao, and others have found that late-night comedy influences viewers’ political belief and attitudes. Presumably, parody works by motivating viewers to pay attention (when they might tune out less amusing material) and by provoking strong emotions, such as disdain for the person being parodied. In turn, those basic emotional framings strongly affect how people collect and interpret factual information. A parody can also spread “virally” if people enjoy it and choose to share it. The popularity of shows like the Colbert Report demonstrates the appeal of satire.

The challenge is that some people do not get the joke. For example, Flackcheck produced a parody video entitled “Could Lincoln be Elected Today?” that purported to be a television ad from the 1864 election. Its purpose was to teach viewers to shun deceptive advertising from real, modern campaigns.

Other experiments seem to suggest that these parodies were just as effective as more traditional fact check articles found at places like Factcheck.org.

However, we found that substantial numbers of people did not understand the parodic purpose of this video. Two-thirds (67.4%) of all respondents thought that it was reminiscent of real campaign ads shown today. That was the intention of the parody, and two-thirds “got” it-but the remaining one third did not.

Three quarters (76.2%) thought that the Lincoln video was deceptive in that it would have been unfair to compare President Lincoln to Benedict Arnold, as the video did. Again, that means that most of the respondents understood and agreed with the premise of the video. But about one quarter did not.

A few thought that Lincoln is overrated; they were pleased that the video would reduce his popularity, which they took to be its intent. About two percent of the respondents saw a partisan purpose to the video, e.g., “Well done video. An obviously very pro Obama video,” or “This video was obviously made by left wing nuts.”

Some other responses:

“It was disrespectful to our 16th President. Negative ads should be banned from all government elections”

“I think it was stupid and who ever used it, or if it was used, should never hold an office in this country and the public should have been outraged.”

“Anyone who believed this video was and is a traitor to the USA.”

Overall, we can conclude that most people understood the video, but there was substantial “leakage” in the form of people who missed its parodic intent, thought that it was fair to compare Lincoln to Benedict Arnold, were furious at it, or otherwise drew the wrong message from it.

Anyone working to educate the public about politics in a nonpartisan way faces a choice. Very straightforward messages may come across as boring or preachy and may not be viewed willingly, let alone shared. Funny messages spread further, but a significant proportion of the recipients miss the point—and they may be the very people who would most benefit from a deeper insight into politics and public affairs.

The previous entries in the series can be accessed below:

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Of Post-Election Audits and Plaudits

Adam Ambrogi

June 21, 2013

Provisional ballots allow the parties a chance to continue the Election Day fight well into November and December—they’re ballots that can only be counted later in the election process, after the identity or qualifications of a voter have been confirmed. It’s clear that in many elections—especially local elections, the race can come down to provisional ballots—so they’re important. That said, their frequent use—or overuse—can slow down the process, result in longer lines, and result in incomplete preliminary count outcomes. A recent audit by Philadelphia City Controller’s office sheds some light on how provisional ballots are being used and where problems can arise from their improper use. The audit was prompted by the fact that provisional ballots cast in Philadelphia in 2012 more than doubled from the last similarly situated election in 2008. Little had changed with the City’s election procedures and population, so officials wanted to understand what was going on.

According to the audit report, there were multiple causes for the high number of provisional ballots issued:

Pollworker error. The Controller estimates that 4,899 voters cast provisional ballots due to pollworker error. These were voters who were registered in the right precinct and were properly listed in the poll books. According to the Report: “Poll workers should have located the names in the books, which would have permitted these voters to cast their ballots using a voting machine, rather than casting a provisional ballot. This error should be the easiest to fix—and to the extent that jurisdictions have the ability to move to electronic poll books, the enhanced search capability should mostly eliminate this problem. Better training or review protocols might also have made a difference.

Problems in printing the ‘supplemental poll books.’ About 4,827 voters were forced to cast provisional ballots because their names were not printed in the poll books or supplemental poll books. This is the perhaps the most challenging of the problem to fix on election day, since there’s no knowable proof at the polling place that the voter is properly registered.The key finding from the audit is that the flood of last minute registrations caused a number of legitimate voter registrations to be bumped from the PA Department of State’s approved poll book. These voters should have been included in supplemental poll books, but were not. Unfortunately, the audit could not determine who was to blame for these errors because the auditors could not recreate the problem. Apparently, the City and state did not save the parameters that were used for making the books. For the purposes of audits and identifying errors, maintaining the parameters used would seem to be a necessary step in election integrity. Since this particular problem may be more challenging to fix at the poll location, it’s important to provide accountability for the system by making the parameters available, and retain those parameters for a reasonable time after the election to attempt to determine flaws in the system.

Registered voters at the wrong polling place. The third reason for provisional ballots being issued was that about nine thousand voters tried to vote at an incorrect polling location. These were properly registered voters who, due to misinformation, or other error, went to the wrong polling place. It is unclear whether Philadelphia properly notified those voters of their correct polling place.

There were some smaller problems identified by the audit that also pose unique election administration problems:

Teenage wasteland. Many groups, including Fair Vote have promoted pre-registration, which allows individuals under 18 to pre-register—who will automatically be qualified when they turn 18. It seems to be a useful policy development—so all potential voters can get registered in high school. However, that benefit was limited when the City failed to run a critical “Update Underage Voters Utility” program prior to printing its poll books.

It’s all in the family. In other cases, provisional ballot were voided improperly. For example, in one case, a pollworker voided a provisional ballot because he or she believed that the voter had already voted on a machine. On closer inspection, the auditors realized that the provisional ballot was actually cast by the daughter, and “personnel from the City Commissioners Office wrongly identified the voter’s signature in the poll book. Had they checked the dates of birth, they would have realized the signature was that of the voter’s mother, who had voted on a machine.” Obviously, it’s more than possible that a family would vote in the same polling place—this is an error that should be caught in the canvass period for provisional ballots.

In short, while a formal review of an election process can take a significant amount of time (and be a touch arduous), the results and recommendation for the reform are incredibly useful in planning future elections in the locality, and for reforming local pollworker training and requirements. There has been a push for serious post-election audits of voting systems in the last few years, and that seems to be a positive step. What this thoughtful, well-organized examination from the Philadelphia Controller’s office indicates is that officials should not stop at the voting systems themselves. Regular, independent reviews of the provisional ballot and the regular ballot systems can lead to positive lessons learned, and a chance to correct errors prior to the next election. It seems that the independence of this review is also important—no one loves an external critique, but governments and businesses of all sizes are subject to periodic, external audits—it’s time to consider that elections follow suit. It strikes me that using the Philadelphia model might be a good start.

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Guest Post: How to Reach a Large Scale with High-Quality Messages

Peter Levine

June 19, 2013

(This is the third in a series of blog posts by CIRCLE, which evaluated several initiatives funded by the Democracy Fund to inform and engage voters during the 2012 election. These posts discuss issues of general interest that emerged from specific evaluations.) Since 2012, the Democracy Fund has invested in projects and experiments intended to inform and engage voters. Several of these efforts sought to change the way citizens respond to divisive and deceptive rhetoric. To succeed, an organization would have to (1) create an experience that altered people’s skills, attitudes, and/or habits, and (2) reach a mass audience. In this post we focus on the second issue: scale. Since adults cannot be compelled to undergo civic education, and about 241 million Americans were eligible to vote in 2012, engaging citizens in sufficient numbers to improve a national election is challenging. Democracy Fund grantees used at least four different strategies to reach mass audiences with nonpartisan education.

First, the Healthy Democracy Fund’s Citizens Initiative Reviews convened representative groups of citizens to deliberate about pending state ballot initiatives in Oregon. The citizens’ panels wrote summaries of these ballot initiatives that the state then mailed to all voters as part of the Oregon voter guide. Although only 48 people were directly involved in the deliberations, the results of their discussions reached hundreds of thousands of Oregon voters. Penn State Professor John Gastil found that nearly half of Oregon voters were aware of the statements that these deliberators had written and that a significant portion of the voting public found the statements to be useful. In an experiment that Gastil conducted, citizens who read the statements shifted their views substantially and showed evidence of learning. So, in this case, a small-scale exercise in deliberative democracy led to mass public education. Second, Flackcheck.org produced videos ridiculing deceptive campaign ads. The videos were free, online, and meant to be funny. A major reason to use parody and humor was to increase the odds that viewers would voluntarily share the videos with their friends and relatives. We asked a representative sample of Americans what would generally encourage them to share a political video, and 39% said that they would be more likely to share it if it was funny. The only attribute that attracted more support was the importance of the topic. We also asked respondents to watch one of three Flackcheck parody videos, and 37% thought the one they saw was funny, although 20% did not. In the end, the Flackcheck parody videos attracted some 800,000 views. That is a relatively large number, although a small proportion of the electorate. On a subcontract from CIRCLE, Marc Smith is analyzing the dissemination network created by the sharing of Flackcheck videos online. Below are shown the people and organizations that follow Flackcheck’s Twitter account and their mutual connections. It is a substantial online community.

Third, AmericaSpeaks recruited individuals to deliberate online as part of Face the Facts USA. AmericaSpeaks is best known for large, face-to-face deliberative events called 21st Century Town meetings. Although they convene thousands of people, often in conference centers, their scale is small compared to the national population. The Face the Facts project provided an opportunity for AmericaSpeaks to recruit participants to low-cost and scalable Google Hangout discussions. That is a model that could be replicated as an alternative or a complement to more expensive, face-to-face discussions. Finally, several projects involved influencing professional journalists or media outlets as an indirect means of educating the public. These projects took advantage of the fact that millions of Americans still receive information and commentary from news media sources. The Democracy Fund grantees strove to improve the quality of their coverage and thereby reach a substantial portion of the voting public. The Columbia Journalism Review’s “Swing States Project” attempted to improve the quality of local media coverage by commissioning local media critics to critique the coverage . We interviewed political journalists in the targeted states. Among respondents who were aware of the project, 59% responded that it had influenced them. Thirty-six percent indicated that it had a moderate influence or influenced them “very much.” Although we cannot estimate how this influence on journalists affected voters’ understanding of the issues, the findings suggest that a fair number of journalists whose work is being read and watched by voters in swing states were taking steps to improve their coverage.

The Center for Public Integrity’s “Consider the Source” provided in-depth reporting on campaign finance issues that newspapers, broadcasters, and other news sources could use. CIRCLE interviewed 13 prominent experts who report on money and politics. Nearly half of these interviewees felt that CPI resources had influenced the conversation among media professionals, and that consequently the media now offers more comprehensive stories about money in politics. Although only 200,000 people read the CPI stories at the CPI website, the organization’s media tracking service estimated that the stories reached a potential circulation of 48 million people through pick up by other media organizations. Although CIRCLE’s evaluations did not yield recipes for changing mass behavior, the following conclusions are consistent with our findings:

Distributing recommendations from a credible public deliberation can have significant influence on the public, if the deliberation is reflected in an official vehicle, such as a state voter guide
Providing resources to the media can be an effective means of reaching scale, if the source is viewed as fair and providing them with relevant and valued content
It’s hard to get to scale by trying to become a destination site.

The previous entries in the series can be accessed below: 1 – Educating Voters in a time of Political Polarization 2 – Supporting a Beleaguered New Industry