Essays
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Civic Engagement - Levine, Peter
Civic engagement is usually measured as a set of concrete activities, from voting to protesting, that individuals undertake in order to sustain or improve their communities. Higher rates of civic engagement generally correlate with desirable social outcomes. Education and socioeconomic status predict whether individuals participate, but programs that recruit and organize disadvantaged people are effective at boosting their civic engagement. Although it is valuable to know the causes and consequences of these behaviors, the ideal of civic engagement is intrinsically normative, connected to basic debates about what constitutes a good society and a meaningful human life. In the future, civic engagement research should not only be an empirical investigation into concrete behaviors but also a reorientation of research throughout the liberal arts to serve civic ends. That will require more fruitful combinations of empirical, normative, and strategic thinking. -
The Politically Motivated Reasoning Paradigm, Part 1: What Politically Motivated Reasoning Is and How to Measure It - Kahan, Dan M.
Recent research identifies politically motivated reasoning as the source of persistent public conflict over policy‐relevant facts. This essay, the first in a two‐part set, presents a basic conceptual model—the Politically Motivated Reasoning Paradigm—and an experimental setup—the PMRP design—geared to distinguishing the influence of PMRP from a truth‐seeking Bayesian process of information processing and from recurring biases understood to be inimical to the same. It also discusses alternative schemes for operationalizing “motivating” group predispositions and the characteristics of valid study samples for examining this phenomenon. -
The Politically Motivated Reasoning Paradigm, Part 2: Unanswered Questions - Kahan, Dan M.
This is the second in a pair of essays on politically motivated reasoning. The first presented a conceptual model of this dynamic: the “Politically Motivated Reasoning Paradigm” (PMRP). This essay uses PMRP to highlight a set of unsettled issues, including the rationality of politically motivated reasoning; the association of it with ideological conservatism; the power of monetary incentives to neutralize it; and the interaction of it with expert judgment.