Campbell, David E. (2006). Why we vote: How schools and communities shape our civic life. Reviewed by John T. Stroup, University of Virginia

Campbell, David E. (2006). Why we vote: How schools and communities shape our civic life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pp. 288         ISBN 0-691-12525-1 Reviewed by John T. Stroup University of Virginia July 16, 2007 David Campbell, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, begins his examination of civic education and voting behavior with the compelling story of Traci Hodgson, who on September 26, 1989, was the only person in her precinct to cast a vote for Boston’s City Council. What makes Traci’s story fascinating is not that she voted alone. We might expect a passionate lone voter. No, by her own account she was not “very familiar with the candidates running” (p. 1). Nevertheless, she just thought it was “important to vote. If you have the right, you ought to exercise it- whether your going to make a difference or not” (p. 1). Why We Vote is an attempt to find out why Traci voted, while others in her immediate community did not. To answer this question, Campbell suggests that citizens are motivated to vote for two very simple reasons: self-interest or obligation. He argues that the ideological, rather than socio-economic, characteristics of the community in which one grew up and the community in which one currently resides can explain the prevalence of one of these two motivations. Campbell succeeds in explaining how communities develop norms that increase voter participation. However, he does not detail the development of politically-oriented preferences that accompany the duty to show up at the polls. Scholars and educators interested in citizenship education, electoral politics, and community building will all learn much from this well researched book. Campbell takes painstaking measures to define fuzzy concepts such as civic engagement and social capital and methodically explores the civic and political motivations to vote. Campbell employs an array of large-scale longitudinal datasets to investigate how schools and communities shape civic behaviors. Most importantly, he tells a convincing story about the importance for developing the civic duty to participate in elections. Campbell juxtaposes two fundamental images of “public engagement” (p. 5). In one image, human beings are ambitious, selfish creatures looking to maximize their own narrow interests. In the other, human beings exhibit selfless, collaborative community building born out of the obligation to do one’s civic duty. In short, Campbell asks whether human beings are motivated by individualism or solidarity. In other words, is James Madison’s view that democracy is a “clash of interests” more accurate than Alexis de Tocqueville’s view that “it is the duty as well as the interest of men to be useful to their fellows” (p. 2)? Although this is an old discussion, Campbell offers a fresh take on the individual interest verses solidarity of the community debate by marshalling an exceptional array of new evidence. Campbell finds that across multiple data sets voting rates increase in a u-shaped pattern as the political heterogeneity of a community increases (p. 67). That is, politically homogeneous communities and highly partisan communities, defined either by Presidential voting or political ideology, exhibit similarly high levels of voter turnout. Corresponding with the Tocquevillian and Madisonian images of public engagement, Campbell argues that in politically homogenous communities voting is as “civically motivated,” while in politically heterogeneous communities voting is “politically motivated” (p. 49). Distinguishing between these two forms of public engagement is one of Campbell’s most important accomplishments, and one that service learning and civic educators and researchers would do well to consider. From here, Campbell makes three simple causal claims to explain how someone like Traci might vote and vote alone. Regarding individual public engagement, what you do now depends on where you are now; what you did then depends on where you were then; and, what you do now depends on what you did then (p. 5). The third statement represents a conventional belief tightly held by educators. Teachers passionately believe that they have a direct influence on student behaviors later in life. Novice teachers are indoctrinated with this conventional wisdom. New teachers are often informally told, “You just have to be content to know that your efforts won’t come to fruition until they’re much older.” Campbell adds new data to this deeply held belief. Specifically, when it comes to voting, what teachers and students do in schools does make a difference in the adult civic behaviors of those students. These causal claims, however, only lay the foundation for Campbell’s central argument that what you do now depends on where you were then. In other words, “the civic norms within one’s adolescent social environment have an effect on civic participation well beyond adolescence” (p. 5). According to this logic, the Boston City Council was lucky that Traci didn’t grow up in their precinct. Obviously, there are not strong normative pressures in this community to get out and exercise one’s constitutional right to vote...at least not for City Council elections. As Campbell tells us, Traci grew up in a place, Little River, Kansas, (population 693) where people regularly turned out to vote. In one recent election, Campbell notes that more than two-thirds of the citizenry visited the voting booth. The difference between the two communities, Campbell hypothesizes, is that in Little River peer relations, school activities, and social networks all reinforce the belief that individuals are obligated to show up at the polling booth. Campbell’s lays out his book along these causal statements. The first four chapters of Why We Vote are dedicated to “bringing duty back in” (p. 92). In these four chapters, Campbell goes to great lengths to explain how civic motivations to vote are developed in politically homogeneous communities. Members of these communities come to consensus about voting norms because they form lasting social networks that facilitate discussions with like-minded people. People who live in politically heterogeneous communities, however, lack those social networks and, thus, the discussions are absent. Campbell echoes a long line of social capital scholars including James Coleman (1990), Francis Fukuyama (1999), and Robert Putnam (2000), who have marked the decline of homogenous social networks as the primary reason for low voter turnout. Campbell applies this logic to youth behavior. His fifth chapter explores and disentangles how schools, peers, and parents influence adolescent public engagement. In this chapter on youth political socialization, or how one “learns what is socially desirable” regarding public engagement, Campbell shows that students in politically homogeneous communities are more likely to volunteer in community building activities such as volunteer community service, report more tightly disciplined home and school environments, and believe that their opinions are more likely to be listened to (p. 99). Campbell notes, however, that “politically homogeneous communities have other social consequences that many people might find troubling” (p. 119). Students in these less ideologically diverse communities report lower levels of confidence in their capacity to make social changes through politics and government and are less willing to grant civil liberties to people with differing opinions. These results should give Campbell reason to pause and explore what kind of political socialization is desirable. Although he hints that the good society is one in which there is a strong sense of civic duty to vote, he does not specifically engage the values or the knowledge assumed by this civic motivation. Campbell helps us see how community contexts organize and institutionalize civic norms, but he doesn’t help educators learn which civic norms are of value to a society. For that, citizenship educators must examine difficult philosophical questions about the nature of the persons to be educated, the character of social life for which they are being prepared, and the nature of knowledge, culture, and other media through which education occurs. These questions important questions are beyond the scope of Why We Vote. In chapter six, Campbell ambitiously wants to make predictions about future voting behaviors. Specifically, he wants to show that youth activities affect later forms of public engagement. In order to do so, Campbell focuses on the positive correlation between volunteering in high school and voting after high school. Using data from the Monitoring the Future (Johnston et al., 2001) study, Campbell presents a significant correlation between volunteering in high school and voting. These estimates are more robust than the correlations between parental education levels, which also correlate positively with adult voting, and TV viewing in high school, which correlate negatively with adult voting. More importantly, volunteering, which Campbell marked in previous chapters as a decidedly civic-oriented form of public engagement, shows positive but not significant correlations with politically-orientations like working on a campaign or voicing one’s opinion through letter writing and boycotting. These results soften Campbell’s previous hard sell that people are motivated by either a Tocquevillian sense of duty or a Madisonian partisan preference. That is, engaging in community service activities as a young person seems to influence the development of both motivations. Until this point, Campbell has attempted to show why the curvilinear relationship between voting and political heterogeneity exists. However, chapter six and seven focus only on the development of civic motivations for voting. Campbell does not attempt to explain how politically-oriented youth activities such as boycotting, letter writing, and community organizing may impact the development of political motivations to vote. Further, by limiting his examination to voting, Campbell neglects other forms of desirable public engagement like deliberating in “cross-cutting social networks” (Mutz, 2002a; Mutz, 2002b), tolerating opposing opinions, and believing in the democratic system. Campbell offers some compelling evidence questioning the desirability of ideologically exclusive communities. According to Campbell’s data, students in homogenous communities are more willing to impose speech limits and limit the availability of contentious books (p. 124). This supports other available research on the effects of homogeneous communities. Other scholars have shown that high levels of discussion in homogenous communities does not mean that fair deliberation for all affected community members will necessarily occur (Gutmann & Thompson, 1996). Others have shown that exclusive social networks may exclude possible solutions to social problems when those solutions are out of step with community values (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004). Finally, one must ask whether homogenous social networks facilitate the sharpening of one’s own point of view or provide greater awareness of opposing points of view (Mutz, 2002a; Mutz, 2002b). In his penultimate chapter, and the most important to educators, education researchers, and policy makers interested in civic education, Campbell makes the case for Traci’s lone vote. When it comes to voting, the community norms in one’s childhood influences adult voting behavior. One stumbling block that Campbell overcomes is the lack of consensus about a clear definition of community. In some cases, it’s a neighborhood, while in others it’s an internet chat room. As every educator knows, schools clearly are important communities, and Campbell shows that “strong civic norms in an adolescent’s high school lead to a greater likelihood of voting well over a decade following high school” (p. 8). But how does the climate of one’s school affect the development of civic motivations to vote? Further, how can one tease out the relative importance of school climate compared to other factors? In general, political socialization is believed to occur in schools through formal in-class curriculum (civics, social studies, government courses), through extra-curricular activities (especially school government, political clubs, and community service), and through the “hidden curriculum” that includes school climate (Jackson, 1968). Regarding formal in-class instruction, the available research is mixed regarding the impact of civic or government courses on future public engagement (Niemi & Junn, 1998; Greene, 2000; Galston, 2001; Kahne, Chi, & Middaugh, 2005; Hart, Donnelly, Younnis & Atkins, 2007). Thus, scholars looking to find out how school impacts adult voting would do well to look at other factors. Campbell does just that by using data from the Youth-Parent Socialization Study (Jennings, Markus, & Niemi, 1991). Specifically, he shows that the “prevalence of a norm encouraging voting” estimates adult voting as reasonably as individual educational attainment, parent’s activism in campaigns, and marriage, all of which have consistently shown strong correlations (p. 169). In other words, Campbell argues that when young people are taught to think voting is important that they are very likely to vote in the future. Further, school climate exhibits a “sleeper effect” on future voting. In statistical terms, “a sleeper effect manifests itself with a coefficient for civic climate that does not start out as a positive and statistically significant predictor of voter turnout, but becomes one over time” (p. 172). In developmental terms, lessons learned at one point in life may manifest themselves only after a period of time has elapsed. As the conventional wisdom goes, teaching and learning in schools can impact later behaviors--good news for those telling novice teachers to be patient for results. In conclusion, Why We Vote pushes educators to think carefully about the impact of school norms. Further, educators would do well to remember that political ideology is one factor, among many, that influences what those norms might be and how young people are socialized towards them. Using evidence from a variety of longitudinal surveys, Campbell shows that voting is determined as much by what one did in school and what one’s school was like as where one lives now. To this end, Campbell helps us imagine the community and the school where Traci grew up and how it may have influenced her sense of duty to vote. At first glance, this image is reassuring to those who believe that creating more homogenous communities, especially more homogenous schools, is the remedy for paltry voter turnout. Campbell marks this as precisely the wrong interpretation because the constructs by which we find ourselves in common with another person or group are in constant flux. He notes the national solidarity that came and went following September 11, 2001 and our subsequent invasion of Iraq as evidence. Further, homogeneous school communities may have undesirable influences as well. As a former teacher, I’m more skeptical about “the spontaneous way that teachers stress tolerance” than Campbell (p. 199). Every teacher knows that schools must walk delicately between tolerance and order. Teachers and schools are tolerant of some behaviors but not others. Finding the right balance that encourages dissenting and even rebellious student voices while maintaining an orderly environment for learning is the difficult task that simply separating people into ideological camps will not solve. This brings up Campbell’s most important contribution. Why We Vote reminds educators and policy makers to take civic education much more seriously. More to the point, educators and policy makers should earnestly encourage school norms that support the development of informed civic duty while respecting self-interested preferences. This work highlights a central paradox of civic education, but the answer to how we might nurture a sense of shared fate and individuality in our young people remains for further discussion. References Coleman, J.S. (1990). Foundations of social theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fukuyama, F. (1999). The great disruption: Human nature and the reconstitution of social order. New York: Free Press. Galston, W.A. (2001) Political knowledge, political engagement, and civic education. Annual Review of Political Science, 4, 217-234. Greene, J.P. (2000). Civic values in public and private schools. In Paul E. Peterson & Bryan Hassel (Eds), Learning from School Choice. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Gutmann, A. & D. Thompson (1996). Democracy and disagreement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hart, D., T. M. Donnelly, J. Youniss, & R. Atkins (2007). High school community service as a predictor of adult voting and volunteering. American Educational Research Journal, 44(1), 197-219. Jackson, P. (1968). Life in Classrooms. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Jennings, M.K., G. Markus, and R.G. Niemi (1991). Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Study, 1965-1982: Wave III Codebook. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. Johnston, L.D., P.M. O’Malley, & J.G. Bachman (2001). Monitoring the Future: National Survey Results on Drug Use, 1975-2000. Bethesda, MD: University of Michigan, Institute for Social Research, and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Kahne, J., B. Chi, & E. Middaugh (2005). Democratic education: The untapped potential of high school government courses. (Under Review Canadian Journal of Education). Available at http://www.mills.edu/academics/faculty/educ/jkahne/crf_civic_ed_social_capital.pdf Mutz, D.C. (2002b). The Consequences of cross-cutting social networks for political participation. American Journal of Political Science, 46(4), 838-855. Mutz, D.C. (2002a). Cross-cutting social networks: Testing democratic theory in practice. American Political Science Review, 96(1), 111-126. Niemi, R.G. & J. Junn (1998). Civic education: What makes students learn? New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Touchstone/ Simon and Schuster. Westheimer, J. & J. Kahne (2004). What kind of citizen? The politics of educating for a democracy. American Educational Research Journal, 41(2), 237-269. About the Reviewer John T. Stroup is a doctoral student at the University of Virginia, Curry School of Education in the Department of Educational Leadership, Foundations, and Policy. He is also a Research Fellow at the Federal Executive Institute. He is interested in civic education and service learning in K-12 schools.