Voices of Citizenship

INTRODUCTION

In the spring of 2002 the Strauss Institute for Civic Participation Sponsored a symposium entitled Voices of Citizenship. The Symposium, presented in conjunction with a graduate seminar of the same name taught by Professor Roderick Hart, invited five innovative scholars from around the country to share their research and their perspectives on contemporary citizenship in giving public lectures and attending seminar classes.  This series was notable because it represented an opportunity for graduate students from several disciplines to be exposed to research that sought to answer rich questions about related issues based on a variety of methods and first assumptions.

SPEAKERS

Katherine Cramer Walsh; The University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dr. Walsh presented the first talk of our series. Her talk, entitled, "Having Lunch, Talking Politics: Field Work with Ordinary Citizens." Professor Walsh was inspired by Robert Lane's work, including Political Ideology and Political Life, which were based on in-depth interviews with working people in New Haven Connecticut. Her talk described her efforts to discover how ordinary people talked about politics in everyday contexts.  She described a participant observation she did at a local coffee shop in Ann Arbor while a doctoral student at the University of Michigan. Over time, she became an honorary member of "The Old-timers," a contingent of retired locals who would meet every morning for coffee, conversation and camaraderie. She found that they only rarely had distinct conversations about politics, but that brief interchanges about political topics were often woven into their everyday conversations.

Dr. John Gastil; The University of Washington
Dr. John Gastil also looked at the dynamics of citizen deliberations about politics. His talk, "Citizen Deliberation and the Vitality of Democratic Life," touched on a study that linked jury service with increased voting, as well on experimental studies intended to define the features of good deliberation. His discussion with students in the seminar centered on the proper time and place for deliberation and on how we might institutionalize deliberations that might create a more informed electorate.

Dr. David Barker from the University of Pittsburgh
Dr. Barker focused on the mediated deliberation of talk radio and its impact on listeners' attitudes in his presentation, entitled "Talk Radio: Who Listens, Why and With What Effect?" Barker described the techniques used by talk show host Rush Limbaugh to manipulate the arguments among his callers. He also described some of the effects of prolonged listening to Limbaugh's show on people's confidence about talking about politics.

Dr. Stephanie Greco Larson; Dickinson College
Dr. Larson was interested in a similar phenomenon, namely "People-on-the-Street in the Nightly News: Continuities and Change." Through a content analysis of the 3 major networks she was able to articulate the contours of an experiment by NBC in 1996 during which they allowed average citizens to present relatively detailed portraits of their political opinions. She was also able to contrast NBC's coverage in 1996 with the misleading way that the networks generally present public opinion through polling.

Dr. Lisbeth Lipari, from Denison University
Dr. Lipari, who spoke about the way that polling is used to construct public opinion, further addressed Stephanie Larson's concerns. By analyzing the way that polls are designed and administered, Lipari unpacked the political consequences of the symbolic manipulation of polls. A case study of the use of polls in the welfare reform debate provided a thought-provoking example of how the wording of question can channel responses into a limited number of categories and can influence the course of a policy debate.

RESULTS

The Voices of Citizenship lecture series successfully brought together students and faculty from departments around the University's campus, and seminar students were given the opportunity engage with visiting scholars in a environment not commonly made available. The multi disciplinary design of the class allowed for a sharing of methods and perspectives that is invaluable to graduate study and enriching to all members of the community.