Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Category: Citizen Participation

  • These are strange and different times

    Returning to form or so it goes takes a bit of effort. Any return to form without effort would inherently discount the journey. Shifting back without a bit of effort might just be acceptable right now. These are strange and different times. This will be the 9th day in a row of posting something to the weblog. That streak is starting to feel a little bit more normal. Every day my thoughts have started to get back into a more orderly form that can be turned quickly into prose. That is the key element in turning the corner and engaging in a bit of writing. Not only is clearing your mind enough to not do anything is a skill, but also allowing your stream of consciousness to spill out onto the screen as prose is also a skill. Transforming thoughts almost directly into keystrokes in an effortless way is the hallmark of being in the writing pocket and that feels like something that happens from practice. 

    This weekend I have spent a lot of time thinking about what exactly election data can tell us about the state of civil society and the general degree of civility at large. Within the world of an election the universe being examined could be all voters or it could be all people that could vote. Some of the best insights available could be about the people who take no action and choose to sit out of the election process. My first response to that investigation into that phenomenon was a simple series of thoughts about how maybe they did not know it was election day. It is entirely possible for a lot of people that government is a thing that stands separate from the routines of daily life and voting by proxy stands separately from everyday life. Certainly some places have moved to mail in ballots and have made it much easier to vote. Other places have gone the other way and made it much harder to participate in the voting process. Now we are starting to get somewhere in the analysis. Three potential reasons have jumped out: 1) being unaware, 2) easily ignored, or 3) it was very hard. That set of thoughts certainly expresses a continuum of sorts that could be expressed as some kind of Likert scale.   

    My initial analysis has started at the congressional district level. My assumption is that I can reasonably roll up my congressional based model to the state level and use a bit of a convoluted transform to get to a national outcome. Within a national election model just using the general sentiment would express a popular vote based outcome and that would not work all the time. Sometimes it would yield the correct result, but other times it might yield a false positive within a condition where having the most votes at a national level is not aligned to the outcome. That is a scenario that political scientists will be writing about for years to come. Social scientists in general will be studying that and how it influences both civility and civil society for decades. Seriously, that is not an understatement. Our beliefs in how democracy functions are a very important part of how we engage in a social contract to participate in the normative routines that allow daily life to function as well as it does. Maybe this watershed event that is occurring now will create some type of shared experience that will help people better relate to each other, strengthening the very social fabric that protects democracy. 

    I’m really starting to think that these are truly strange and different times. The lens in which we see the world and how we interact with things is changing every day as we experience a new normal way to interact with people. A new normal way to visit stores to go about the routines that allow daily life to occur. We all have to figure out how to make meals on a daily basis. Eating is a shared and common experience across all of humanity. It is one of those things that should be a commonly shared experience like voting for those that have reached a certain age. Outside of politics people generally do a lot of similar things every day. All those things could be modeled and sentiment analysis could be produced to figure out preferences based on those things. Somewhere inside of that universe of possible analysis a small slice of things exist that my research is focusing on right now. That is where my research is dialing into understanding voter sentiment and preference within elections. At this point, I’m very focused on the key factor of participation and the sentiment around why a large portion of voters are opting out of the process that literally guarantees the stability of our daily routines. 

    Given that I’m on my 9th day in a row of posting it might be a good time to mention that most of my writing is created and posted without any real editing or revision. My routine is generally to sit down and write until the writing is done and then post it online before starting a new session of writing. My time is not normally spent on the same passage of prose engaging in rework and editing to produce a perfect product. What you are reading right now is really just how the thoughts translated from my head to the keyboard. For better or worse that is generally how this weblog works and how prose is created to be published here. Some of it is grammatically correct and free of atrocious typos and some of it is very clearly not clear at all and free of errors. One of the things that I do a lot is leave out a word that otherwise brings the flow of a sentence together. Some of that is just a weird thinking and typing problem where a word gets left out of a sentence. If you want back and read it, then you would immediately notice it and fill in the missing word. Most of the time that does not impact the meaning of what is being presented it just creates a less than ideal situation for the reader who is wondering why proofreading was set aside or ignored. Please don’t wonder about it. I just elected not to spend my time editing the prose being created. Yeah —- that is questionable. 

    Sometimes I wonder if maybe every Sunday I should swing back and edit the last 7 days of work and just leave a note at the end of the post that it was edited. Most of the time that thought occurs and is discarded. You can tell that analysis about discarding editing is accurate based on scrolling back a day, a week, or even a month to see it was not implemented. For the most part that type of effort is probably not going to be an active part of my routines. If it has not taken root in the last 20 years, then it is unlikely to start happening without some real effort to change my routine. As an analog to that lack of action on the editing front, trying to figure out why citizen participation in elections has been gradually declining is probably similar. It is something I could do with a little time and effort, but I just elect not to do it over and over again. You can kind of get a feel for where my head is at the moment and what is at the forefront of my considerations as I dive into this area of analysis. 

  • The one with a call to jury duty

    We have very few civic duties to perform. One of them that comes around from time to time is jury duty. Today was my day to fulfil my civic duty and show up for jury duty. Fortunately, the courthouse is not very far from my home. Getting to the courthouse was easy enough. Arriving about 20 minutes early meant that parking was pretty easy. They have a lot of parking at the courthouse. People seemed to be a little stressed and every time somebody coughed people looked around. It felt a little bit dramatic, but the fear in the room was real enough. This room might be large enough to hold about 50 people. Assembling the jury is the first order of adventure for the day. We all filled out paper forms and signed them by hand. Nothing that occurred during the assembly process was digital.

    Just a few minutes after the start time on the card the first person was dismissed from jury service. Only one of the people that attended was very vocal about not wanting to serve on the jury today. Everybody else in the room just seemed to be keeping to themselves and preparing for the day. Last time I went in for jury duty they dismissed me without any explanation. I just figured it was due to my education level or something. Right now I’m writing and thinking about how hard it is not to touch my face or rub my eyes in this room. It is strange to sit in a room with so many people where nobody is trying to talk or really make eye contact. I’m normally very outgoing and willing to talk to pretty much anybody at any time. That time of social interaction was not occuring at all today. Maybe it is due to the heightened stress people are feeling.

    My shirt has a nice large sticker on it right now that says juror in capital letters. All I can think about is about getting things done. My mind was racing with the question, “If today was the only day left, then what should that time be spent doing?” The answer would probably be finishing the audiobook version of Graduation with Civic Honors. That is something that will take a few hours and would probably be net beneficial vs. the effort. One of the big problems with my do the most impactful thing you can every day to drive things forward philosophy is when things take more than one day to complete. Sure you can try to break things down into smaller parts, but some things just do not work out that way. Creating something new or coding something might take a lot of time. Well understood things can be broken down and understanding it helps make defying it easier. Tackling the big things takes a lot of dedication.

    It is much easier to sit around and watch television than to sit around and write, create, or build something. Yes —- some people are capable of doing more than one thing at a time and that is fine. Doing something and doing nothing at the same time sounds interesting. I typically write and listen to music at the same time. The music part of it is just something that happens in the background; it does not hold my attention. Sometimes that distracts from purposeful writing. Really engaging at 100% and putting everything you have into creating prose is sometimes a different type of artistic expression. It can be completely and utterly exhausting. This exercise of writing while waiting in the jury duty room has produced 600 words of prose. None of it was exhausting. However, this is more an exercise in commentary mixed with stream of consciousness than a critical exploration of modernity. This is just a look at my thoughts and my reactions to the things happening around me.

    After about an hour or so of waiting the judge dropped by the juror assembly room to advise us both trials for the day had been postponed and everyone was free to go home. It was super anticlimactic, but that is how it goes sometimes.

  • Forgotten platforms and political attention

    Yesterday, I watched part of the 7 hours of testimony from Robert Mueller in front of two different congressional committees. It made me wonder about the amount of attention that is being paid to politics in general at all levels of government. My thoughts wandered to ponder if more people were watching and enjoying ESPN than the hearinings. The attention of people rated in viewership is typically evaluated in terms of how passionate those viewers happen to be at the time. Fans of sporting teams that watch ESPN are typically reasonably passionate about something. That might be one specific team or maybe everything related to an entire city or maybe even a region. Politics are complex and getting even more complex every day. Trying to divide that complexity into two main voting categories that has no index for passion remains deflating.

    That is the point in this thought exercise that seems to stand out to me. Maybe it is an inflection point that snuck up slowly or maybe it is just suddenly ours and very real. The example under consideration is a comparison between what it takes to become a sports fan of typical team vs. what it takes to really become active in a political party. My guess is that throughout the United States more people are actively supporting sporting teams on a daily basis than a specific political party. That is a line of inquiry that is really driving me toward some research questions around local government engagement levels. Understanding civil society has been a passion of mine since before I started to reflect on the intersection of technology and modernity. For better or worse the social fabric that binds us together and informs how we relate is built on the foundation of civil society.

    One of the things that I have spent some time reading over the years are party platforms. Maybe the one that caught my attention the most was the 1960 party platform of JFK. It is pretty easy to figure out the trajectory of your local sports team. They are actively winning or losing and you can get a sense for how close they are to contending for a championship. Trying to figure out the trajectory of a political party and what exactly that party is trying to accomplish is really hard in a world full of very short soundbites that lack context or any real degree of directionality in terms of where the argument is going. Sitting down and reading an entire party platform is a real commitment. Figuring out where all 20 candidates that are running for president stand within the context of that platform would be a daunting task. My honest assessment would be that they all probably do not have defined positions or have throughout out exactly where they stand on the entire platform.