Public service is a calling. I truly believe that.

-Congressman Jeff Fortenberry, (R-NE)

Last night I had the opportunity to attend a Georgetown “policy dinner” with Congressman Jeff Fortenberry a 1986 graduate of GPPI.  It was a great experience to meet with a representative in such an intimate setting, and I was very impressed with his charisma and passion for his job.  Once he started talking politics and policy it became clear we see the world differently, but if nothing else I was inspired by his words on why he became, and what it means to be, a public servant.  

Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School?

Time has an interesting article about Harvard Economics Professor Roland Fryer Jr.’s experiment to see if paying children for performance in school results in better outcomes.  This case, in my opinion, brings up three important issues surrounding policy making and education:

-Try something!  Analyze it.  If it doesn’t work, try something else!  Policymakers and leaders are often too afraid to try something new.  As the article describes, Fryer and his team go into schools where he steps on crack needles in the hallway, yet the schools refuse to try novel approaches.  Just because something hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be tried. Especially with Fryer’s dedication to the scientific method and statistical analysis, he is not claiming it absolutely will work; rather he says let’s see what happens.

- Be analytical and look at what the numbers tell you. Washington, D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee puts it well: “If it doesn’t work, we’re going to stop and start doing something else, but if it does work, it should drive where we put our money.”  Call me a policy wonk, but look at the statistics and see if you’re better off as a result of the intervention or not.  Don’t avoid potential solutions because of dogma.

-Don’t be a hypocrite.  Adult critics in the article say that kids should learn because of an intrinsic love of learning.  Okay, great, and the adult critics should do their work for their intrinsic love of doing work — not because of their paycheck.  It’s easy to criticize others’ behaviors, but here I’m reminded of John Rawls’ veil of ignorance: in policy-making put yourself in others’ shoes before dictating policy.

Though I lean towards thinking paying kids for school performance is a good idea, I say let’s try it, see if it works, and then let the results dictate our policy making.  

What do you think?

Facebook, Twitter and Barack Obama: New media and the 2008 Presidential election

Update: I have now posted the entire thesis and created a page for it on here: http://unpoppedcollar.com/thesis  But, if you’d like a .pdf copy, feel free to get in touch and I can send one your way.  Also, if you have any comments, thoughts, or critiques I would love to hear them.  Cheers!

As many of you know I finally finished my master’s thesis last week!  Once everything gets cleared by Georgetown I plan to publish it online (probably with Scribd) so that anyone who wants to endure enjoy 55 pages of econometric analysis can read it.  In the meantime, though, I’m excited to share my abstract with you so that you can get a sense of the work I’ve been doing.  To the best of my knowledge, it’s the first comprehensive study to quantitatively analyze how new media consumption informed voting behavior in the 2008 election.  If you have any feedback, comments, or questions I’d love to hear from you via Disqus comments, email, or Tumblr Ask!  

Political strategists and analysts have dubbed Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential victory as the “Twitter election,” a “triumph of new media in politics,” and “the election decided by Facebook.”  But, does the reality match the rhetoric?  This paper examines the role of new media in the 2008 Presidential election, asking the question of whether the consumption of both new media and old media in the 2008 Presidential election have a significant effect on a person’s likelihood to engage in the political process by voting, or whether disparities exist by type of media.

Through a quantitative analysis based on data provided by the Pew Center’s Internet and American Life project, this study finds that contrary to the popular rhetoric, old media consumption still remains dominant in explaining voting behavior.  This study characterizes new media as that which is two-way in communication, has low barriers to entry and virtually zero marginal cost of participating — as contrasted with old media which remains cost-prohibitively expensive. 

After controlling for a number of demographic variables, the paper utilizes a probit regression model on the likelihood of a person voting with independent variables representing both new media and old media consumption patterns and actions.  The model shows that, holding all other variables constant, getting most of one’s information about the election through old media sources such as television, radio and newspapers has a statistically significant and positive effect on the likelihood of a person voting.  Similar new media variables — including “friending” a candidate on a social networking site and discussing the election on Twitter — fail to have significant explanatory powers.  This study focuses on media’s ability to convert non-voters to voters, but does not address how it informs one’s choice of candidate — a potential area for future research.

The implications for this manifest themselves both in political strategy as well as campaign finance reform laws.  On the political strategy side, this paper suggests that campaigns — contrary to popular discourse — cannot simply rely upon new media to engage voters.  As a corollary, these results show that because the much more expensive old media remains dominant, campaign finance laws need to be reconsidered.  Had new media had a statistically significant and positive impact on engaging voters, one could have argued that campaign spending limits were thus rendered unnecessary.  On the contrary, however, after showing that expensive old media remains more important to campaigns than new media, this paper provides evidence that limits in campaign spending remain crucial for democracy to flourish in the United States.

This paper concludes that in an examination of new media and the 2008 Presidential election, old media remains dominant in getting people to vote who otherwise would not.  The rhetoric simply does not match the quantitative reality.

Update: I have now posted the entire thesis and created a page for it on here: at unpoppedcollar.com/thesis.  But, if you’d like a .pdf copy, feel free to get in touch and I can send one your way.  Also, if you have any comments, thoughts, or critiques I would love to hear them.  Cheers!

Downsizing Detroit

TIME magazine explores how private foundations are working with Detroit’s city government in innovative ways to bring about change in the dilapidated metro area.  This highlights the shifting nature of public-private partnerships and I think foreshadows the future of how government and other entities will interact.  As a public policy student, I’m excited to see that working for the government directly is no longer the only way to enact change and that the future — in my opinion — lies in these collaborative partnerships.