Revitalizing American Democracy: The Role of National Service in Fostering a Healthy Civic Culture

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

A certain spirit—what John Dewey called “democratic faith”—is essential to the American system of self-rule. Democratic faith requires intentional cultivation. It requires shared rituals or ceremonies and intentional forms of play, work, reckoning, storytelling, conversation, and gathering that allow everyday citizens to make moral sense of our times in the company of others, and to try to close the gap between our high ideals as Americans and our persistently unjust realities. This civic spirit is a critical ingredient to foster a culture of commitment to American constitutional democracy and to one another.
One way to inspire civic spirit is through national service. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ 2020 report, Our Common Purpose, outlines six strategies and 31 recommendations to reinvent American democracy. A central theme of the report is the theory of change that improvement of our civic culture and of our political institutions must go hand in hand to restore citizens’ confidence in American constitutional democracy and renew the practice of democratic citizenship. One of the report’s recommendations articulates the need to establish a cultural expectation of service such that participating in a year of national service – broadly construed – can become a universal experience for Americans from across lines of difference.
Despite the influx of financial support for service opportunities in recent years, stakeholders in the national service field identify a mismatch between the recruitment numbers of volunteers for service opportunities and the broad enthusiasm for national service. The misalignment between the supply of service experiences and the volunteer demand for participating in national service highlights the need to introduce a data-driven approach to overcome this challenge and build demand for national service.
This roundtable will share results of five focus groups with over sixty current and former service program participants in the state of California in November and December 2022 and a subsequent national service public opinion survey conducted in 2023 by the Academy. The goal of this research is to provide insights on questions such as:
• Barriers that keep young Americans from committing to service and/or recommending it to others.
• Benefits that most resonate with audiences for recruitment.
• Effective recruitment communications.
Through this roundtable, we aim to inform the national conversation about the centrality of a healthy civic culture to American constitutional democracy and ways to strengthen national service as a pathway to inspiring commitment to our democracy and to one another. Roundtable discussants will share research findings and variation in national service incentives, barriers, and opinion changes including for sub-groups sampled in the survey. They will also reflect on the ways of defining, measuring, and fostering civic culture within and beyond national service programs.

Sub Unit

• Division 58: Civic Engagement

Cosponsor

• Theme Panel

Chair

• David E. Campbell University of Notre Dame

Presenters

• Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg Tufts University

• Peter Levine Tufts University

• David Eisner

• Eunice Lin Nichols CoGenerate