News Tribune
November 16, 2010
BY BOB WATSON
Every once in awhile we’re told about how healthy — or unhealthy — we are as a society, based on the latest statistics for cancer, diabetes, heart disease or other health issue. Also on a regular basis, we’re told how well — or poorly — we’re doing economically. But what is the state of our “civic health?” How good is our “civic engagement?” A new report — “Missouri Civic Health Assessment 2010,” issued right before the elections — says that, in most cases, Missourians are more active, including voting more regularly, than national averages.
“The reason that we’ve produced this first-ever report was to give a benchmark, or some idea, of where the state of Missouri is at along the lines of its civic health,” said Michael Stout, Ph.D., an assistant professor and provost fellow for Teaching and Learning in Missouri State University’s Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology. “We’ve got all kinds of indicators to tell us something about the economy.
“We’ve got all kinds of indicators, in terms of bills passed and their effectiveness, for how our political institutions — the public sector — is working.”
But until recently, he said, nothing has attempted to quantify how people are involved in their communities.
The 28-page report can be found online as a PDF file, at http://ncoc.net/mochi2010.
The Missouri report was compiled at the request of, and with the support of, the congressionally chartered National Conference on Citizenship, which “launched a landmark initiative to create a national index measuring the state of America’s civic health” in 2006.
Bob Quinn, a former state representative who now heads the Missouri Association for Social Welfare, looked at the report this week and called it “a worthy and necessary effort. So many of those things are so hard to get a good, quantitative measure of. …. To quantify that and be able to compare it across communities and across the country, that’s a really difficult thing to do.”
He said the report “gives a pretty good picture of where Missouri is, sort of in the middle.”
The report suggests that society functions like a three-legged stool, with business (private sector) and government (public sector) forming two of the three legs — and what the report calls “a civil society” as the third leg.
“Civil society consists of all the households, religious groups, voluntary associations, philanthropic organizations, and clubs that make up a community,” the report explains in its introductory section. “It is where we live.”
The report seeks to define a civil society through three sub-sections: “Social capital,” access to news and information, and “civic engagement.”
It defines civic engagement as “a broad concept that refers to people’s overall level of participation in community affairs and political processes. We use volunteering with an organization, working with neighbors to fix a community problem, and attending one or more public meetings to measure involvement in community affairs.
“Individuals’ level of political participation was gauged by whether or not they are registered to vote, voted in the 2008 presidential election, and took part in one or more nonelectoral activities.”
The report describes those non-electoral activities as “bought or boycotted a product or service because of the producer’s political stance, showed support for a party or candidate, contacted public officials to express an opinion, attended a meeting where political issues were discussed, or took part in a march, rally, protest or demonstration.”
And the report defines “social capital” as: “The connections among people and the norms of trust and reciprocity that arise from those relationships.
“We measure personal connectedness and group membership as indicators of social capital.
“Four activities measured people’s personal connectedness: How frequently they eat dinner with household members, talk with family and friends via the Internet, visit with their neighbors, and exchange favors with neighbors.”
Participation in groups was measured by the percentage of people who are members of one or more organizations, and by the proportion of individuals who are leaders, either as officers or committee members.
Stout noted the report is clear that “one of the big strengths that we have here in Missouri is that we have what we call a ‘Blue Collar base’ for civic engagement, which is stronger in Missouri than in most other states. … We have a more diverse civic leadership in terms of socio-economic diversity and the types of jobs that people are doing.”
Quinn agreed, suggesting that organized labor’s strong presence may help generate that statistic.
“Not that people who aren’t in unions don’t participate,” he explained, “but I’m just saying that unions provide an additional mechanism, an additional social fabric, that helps people become involved in their community who might not, otherwise.”
Both Quinn and Stout said the loss of manufacturing jobs in the state could damage that “blue collar” leadership in the future.
Stout said most of the numbers used in the new report came from a variety of statistics compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, in the 2007-09 version of its annual “Current Population Survey.”
However, he said, that also limited some of the available information.
For example, involvement with religious groups is one of the ways a “civil society” is defined, but Stout acknowledged the new report doesn’t quantify it because the census data doesn’t track it.
“I think that is something that, particularly in Missouri, we would like to expand a little bit further the next time we do this,” he said. “Our religious attachments and the groups that we belong to through our religion and religious organizations — and the friends that we make in our congregations — do play a large role in how we think about and define community and get involved in community.”
Stout said the Missouri survey was paid for with funds from Missouri State University’s Office of the President, Office of the Provost and its College of Humanities and Public Affairs.
He said the report was written without any political bias or pre-conceived ideas of its findings.
“The numbers are what the numbers are,” he said. “What communities should be looking for when they look through this report is — and what they should try to take away from this is — the idea that the structure of networks in a community matters.
“And the more open those networks are, the more diverse they are — and diversity can be defined in different ways, in different communities — the more likely it is that you’re going to be able to increase the civic capacity of your community (and) organize around problems that are specific to that community, or … to what’s happening in the state or in the country.”