Renewed Engagement: Building on America's Civic Core

The National Conference on Citizenship has released their 2007 Civic Health Index. The main finding, reported here by Peter Levine, one of the co-authors, and covered on Yahoo News by Ron Fournier, is that there is a "civic core" of 36 million Americans who do the majority of volunteering and participating in civic activities (in addition to voting). The report also finds that volunteering and civic engagement have dropped recently, finally returning to their pre-9/11 levels.

When it comes to Millennials, the report is encouraging. It notes that participation at the ballot box by Millennials continues to rise, and suggests that Millennials are mimicking the civic-mindedness of the Greatest Generation (the report actually tags Gen X and the Boomers with responsibility for the overall decline in civic participation in the last 30 years). When it comes to overall trust, the report finds that Millennials are less trusting of individual actors, but more trusting of government and institutions, and three quarters of Millennials express distrust of the mainstream media as a reliable reporter of information.

What I found very interesting was that of all age groups, Millennials are the most likely to feel that they have little power and few avenues for civic engagement that could result in positive change. More than any other groups, they are looking for those opportunities to further increase their level of participation. Yet at the same time, they are one of the least likely of groups to use the internet to express opinions about politics and take civic actions. This is due primarily to the fact that older generations use email as a political tool at a FAR higher rate than Millennials.

I'm not sure exactly what questions the researchers asked to come to these conclusions and produce the two charts below. It may in fact be that pairing these next two charts is like comparing apples and oranges, but I wonder what this means about Millennial participation in something like MoveOn, the most obvious organization to allow its members to participate and express themselves politically using email. At the very least it is indicative of a disconnect between what Millennials are doing online (IMing, blogging, social networking) and what they regard as effective political action for their community. It seems we still have a long way to go in making those into effective vehicles for political participation.