Civic Reciprocity: The Measurement and Examination of a Democratic Value

• In Event: Democratic Norms among the Mass Public

Abstract

Honoring the political equality of our ideological opponents and rejecting strategies of domination is necessary to maintaining a healthy diverse democratic community (Allen, 2023). Yet, political polarization and extremism, on the one hand, and feelings of disengagement and powerlessness, on the other, make realizing these conditions difficult. Indeed, younger generations find democracy a less appealing form of government than their older counterparts (Foa & Mounk, 2016). One way of bolstering support for democracy may be to emphasize the importance of reciprocity to democracy, such that decision-making is understood as a way to navigate competing interests rather than to achieve victories that impose consensus. As Allen (2023) argues, committing to practicing civic reciprocity calls on civic participants to identify and uphold their personal values in ways that prioritize the health of the overall democracy (Allen & Kidd, 2022; Allen, 2023).

In the current context in which people around the world, and notably in the United States, increasingly appear ready to reject democracy, however, the call for civic reciprocity and a politics of non-domination may appear overly or even dangerously optimistic. First, there is no direct empirical evidence that commitment to civic reciprocity is positively related to support for democracy. Second, there is the possibility that commitment to reciprocity may be associated with lower levels of civic efficacy and ideological commitment, or, put differently, it may be positively linked with political quietism. In the first case, promoting civic reciprocity may simply not help sustain democracy. In the second, encouraging commitment to reciprocity may lead potential participants to disengage, making the community more vulnerable to those seeking political domination. However, while a commitment to reciprocity should relate to greater openness to competing political viewpoints, this should not come at the expense of authentic civic values and goals. Therefore, we hypothesize that commitment to civic reciprocity will be positively associated with commitment to democracy and political intellectual humility (an indicator of openness to political alternatives associated with greater political tolerance and less biased information-seeking; Bowes et al., 2022; Krumei-Mancuso & Newman, 2020), while not being negatively related with civic efficacy or ideological commitments.

Understanding how commitment to civic reciprocity relates to other civic attitudes and beliefs, though, first requires a method for measuring that commitment. This paper describes a project to develop a brief self-report measure of civic reciprocity and evaluate evidence for its valid use in the context of civic education (early adolescents) and among adults. The first phase of the project included developing survey items with adolescents, followed by an online survey of adolescents (N = 70) that made it possible to evaluate the measure’s reliability using generalizability theory (Shavelson & Webb, 2005) and its correlations with other civic attitudes, including internal civic efficacy (Schulz et al., 2010). In the second phase of the project, the measure was administered in a larger online study of adults (N = 150) to further examine its psychometric properties and correlations with additional variables, including support for democracy (Foa & Mounk, 2016) and political intellectual humility.

Across the two studies, evidence supported the valid use of the novel measure of civic reciprocity. It demonstrated adequate reliability, and, more importantly, its associations with other variables suggest that it measures the focal construct, commitment to civic reciprocity, in the intended way. As expected, civic reciprocity was positively associated with the importance participants placed on living in a democracy, providing empirical evidence of this theoretical association. Critically, although commitment to civic reciprocity was positively related to political intellectual humility, it did not share that variable’s strong negative relations with civic efficacy or the strength of ideological commitments. Indeed, it was marginally and significantly positively related with these variables, respectively. These findings suggest that a commitment to civic reciprocity may lead not to quietism but to authentic and sustaining democratic participation.

However, these studies are limited in ways that make these findings preliminary. Most significant, the samples were drawn from a narrow population of students (Study 1) and young adults (Study 2) in Massachusetts, and results may not generalize to other educational and political contexts. An additional limitation imposed by focusing on these specific populations is that the samples are themselves small, affording adequate statistical power only for limited analyses. Future research utilizing larger and more diverse samples is necessary to obtain more reliable and generalizable estimates of the effects observed in these studies.

Authors

• David Kidd, Harvard University

• Nicolas Riveros Medelius, Harvard University