Nation's Civic Engagement Problem Reflected in Disparities in Indiana Civic Engagement Study Results

On or around September 14th, the 2011 Civic Health Index was released, including certain above-average results and some below-average. The essential take home message of the results do not shock me, namely that there is a huge disparity between the percentage of residents who eat dinner with friends and neighbors (90.1%) contrasted with the percentage of people who belong to community based organizations (36%), 21.6% of residents report to talking about politics with friends and family a few times a week, but only 6.5% of residents identify themselves as working with neigbhors to address community problems.

The report includes the frank conclusion: "While Hoosiers are actively engaged with one another on a regular basis, that involvement does not always translate into community problem solving." The report itself and the newpaper articles I read focused their attention on low rates of residents' discussing politics as a feature of or indication of low voter trends.

However, I think that these numbers a bigger problem that I've noticed in other state civic engagement reports. I find that there continues to remain a large disparity between the rates of resident who regularly care for their neighbors, and those who work with their neigbhors to address community problems.

While I will reserve more complex commentary for later blog posts, I think that one of America's underlying civic engagement problems is that people feel very empowered when it comes to assisting their neighbors in their personal problems, but they are failing to mobilize on addressing common problems. In "Bowling Alone," the author brought out a concept that citizens who regularly care for their neighbors are more likely to discuss with them common issues and mobilize together to address those common issues. However, even when citizens discuss problems with neighbors, there still can be an "empowerment gap" if citizens only feel empowered to discuss the problems but don't feel empowered to commonly address the problems. Again, addressing this empowerment gap will be left for another post.