Mdp-research

Research agenda -- Midwest Democracy Project

The Midwest Democracy Project is not proposed as an episodic effort to augment traditional election coverage in two U.S. Plains states. Rather, it is intended as an experiment that will provide rich data for social-science research on what influences political and civic participation in our rapidly evolving media ecosystem, especially among youth and younger voters. A byproduct of this experiment will be coverage of broad use to the public, however.

Key questions about participation

Before/after research studies of the 2008 elections by the five-university partnership (universities of Wisconsin, Kansas, Arkansas, Texas and Missouri) raise important questions based upon careful questioning of voter panels. Among the questions:

• Is home-based family discussion of political or public-policy issues in the home a good predictor of likely political and community engagement or participation by youth and young voters? What about school-based political or issues discussion?

• Which key media (newspapers, television, radio, Internet), individually or taken together, are most likely to public foster engagement generally and activate those people with natural leadership abilities?

• What forms of engagement (campaigning, attending forums, listening, viewing or contributing to media-facilitated issue discussion) are most affected by which media or discussion?

• How does the concept of trust affect the influence of media (one-way or participatory) and discussion (home, community or online) on political engagement and participation?

Partners design, execution

Because the 2008-election research revealed a multi-media mix of influences as significant predictors of political engagement and participation, our partners for 2010 will include newspaper, television, radio and Internet/citizen media outlets -- and particularly forms of engagement not traditionally thought of as "media" -- such as public forums and online social networks. They will include:

• Major and community newspapers (including weeklies) in both Kansas and Missouri
• Commercial and public television stations
• NPR-affiliated and other non-commercial community radio stations.
• Local online news communities
• Ethnic and niche media

We are exploring specific research ideas:

• The Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio, has expressed interest in a research component for Midwest Democracy. Their objective would be to underwrite an experiment testing the effectiveness of leadership training on the outcome of public forums. They would consider training our student-journalists (possibly in Dayton) to design issue books to help lead constructive public forums, and then ask that that the students host both structured and unstructured sessions. The students would be expected to report the outcomes and any differences in the quality of the resulting public debate.

• Localocracy.org, a web-based startup in Amherst, Mass., founded by University of Massachusetts students, is beta-testing a method for increasing public engagement with specific, local issues through social-networking technology. The technology matches pro-con comments and debate and discussion with real-name, identified voters. We would create parallel sites, one permitting anonymous commenting and one requiring authentication to voter-address roles, and study the quality and impact of the resulting dialog. This test could help determine the best forum for future public-debate sites and contribute important data to the debate of anonymous vs. identified blogging commentary. (Download a PDF slide deck about Localocracy.org)