Archives: Reg Murphy Pubs

I spent some time last month working with a non-profit organization that has been developing their Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) plan. In light of the social justice issues that have gained prominence and public attention this year, the organization is seeking to improve their operations, mission, and hiring practices to ensure that they are not contributing to systemic racism. Quite simply, they are trying to “do better.” It is important work that needs to be done.

I realize the idea of systemic racism has become contentious for some, so before I get to my main point, I would like to take a moment to define what that term means and what it does not mean. Systemic racism, also called institutional or structural racism, is the processes, systems, and structures that create disadvantages for Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC). Here are some examples to illustrate what this means. Statistically in the U.S., unemployment is about two times higher among blacks than whites. This holds true no matter what is going on in the economy as a whole and even when we compare similarly-qualified groups (college graduates of different races, for instance). Similarly, when you are applying for a job, research has shown that you are 50% more likely to get an interview with a “white sounding” name versus a “black sounding” name. Again, this holds true when all other factors (like qualifications) are held constant. This does not mean that those engaged in the processes have any particular racial motivation; in fact, people may not even be conscious of race in their decision-making, but the decisions themselves perpetuate racial inequality. There may be a perfectly rational reason or incentive to make these decisions, but the result is the perpetuation of disadvantage. 

So, knowing this, it is not surprising that many businesses and non-profit organizations are seeking to address these issues by intentionally bringing them into focus in their planning. In fact, addressing systemic racism isn’t anything new from a policy perspective – we have been grappling with it since the 1960s when Kennedy introduced the idea of affirmative action in an Executive Order.  Since then, the implementation of affirmative action has taken place in the courts rather than legislatures. In other words, as a policy, it has been refined through the legal system as opposed to the development of new laws.

Employment discrimination laws were introduced in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Title VII. The 1976 Supreme Court case, McDonald v. Santa Fe Trail Transportation Co., ruled that “discriminatory preference for any [racial] group, minority or majority” violates Title VII (employment discrimination). This extends to favoring minority employees over White employees as well. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, educational institutions, in particular, began using minority quota systems to improve minority admissions into schools. This was ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in 1978, but consistent and clear rulings on affirmative action have not been the norm from that point on. Two cases in 2003 and 2016 upheld the idea that race can be a consideration in hiring and admissions decisions, but designating spots or quotas is not. This is about the extent of the guidance on affirmative action and diversity/inclusion in hiring.

Interestingly, in talking with the non-profit I was working with, the approach they are taking in their EDI is to include quotas in their hiring to ensure that they have adequate BIPOC representation in the organization. They are hoping to create more diversity in the organization through inclusive hiring practices (necessary and admirable), but the tool they used throughout the plan was quotas (X% of people hired in this area will be BIPOC, for instance).

My warning to them, and to other CEOs and Executive Directors, is this: do not rush blindly into anti-discrimination initiatives that may result in violating anti-discrimination laws. While the work of affirmative action must happen to address systemic racism, organizations also need to be wary of violating existing law.

Now, if an organization or individual wishes to challenge these laws, they certainly could by taking cases to the court system. Otherwise, other methods will need to be employed as we navigate trying to improve systemic racism in our businesses and communities. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) along with several organizational success stories offer some good guidance in this regard. I’ll take up the topic of effective, legal, affirmative actions in my next column and I hope it will be useful in both illuminating the legal landscape on this issue and helping to give organizations some ideas on how to “do better.”

Dr. Heather Farley is Chair of the Department of Criminal Justice, Public Policy & Management and a professor of Public Management in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia. She is an associate of the College’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies.

I am a millennial. Technically, I am what some people refer to as an “Xennial”; these are individuals in the micro-generation right between gen-X and Millennials who bridge the gap between strictly analog generations and digital generations. We have been described as having “both a healthy portion of Gen X grunge cynicism, and a dash of the unbridled optimism of Millennials” (Anne Garvey, 2015).

I was recently listening to a fellow-Xennial, John Mayer’s, 2006 song “Waiting on the World to Change” and was thinking about the lyrics. In the song, Mayer laments that Millennials are “misunderstood,” that we “feel like we don’t have the means to rise above and beat it,” and so we “keep on waiting on the world to change.” He ends by saying that “one day our generation is gonna rule the population.” Technically, John, we have reached “one day.”

This election year, Millennials (27% of eligible voters) combine with new voters in Gen Z (born between 1996 and 2002) will make up nearly 40% of the electorate. This is noteworthy not because it makes me feel special as a Millennial, but because it highlights an important phenomenon; the slow unfolding of a changing electorate. It’s a fascinating thing to watch in an election year, because it can mean that every election has the potential to be surprising and interesting depending on who actually shows up to the polls.

In years past, the Baby Boomers have been the demographic that matters most in an election. They are large in numbers, they have a longer life expectancy than any time in history, and they show up to vote. As recently as 2012, they made up half of the electorate and they vote consistently. As such, savvy politicians have spent a great deal of time ensuring that their messaging resonates with those born between 1946 and 1964. This generation will remain the leaders in expected voters in 2020, but Millennials and Gen Z are hot on their trail – in number at least. Their willingness to actually vote is unclear.

Gen Z, in particular, is going to be much more racially diverse when compared to the older electorate – they are comprised of 55% white and 45% nonwhite eligible voters compared to a 74% white Baby Boomer electorate. Younger voters are also far more likely to vote Democrat as we saw in the 2018 midterms where they voted for Democratic candidates almost three to one.

Those kinds of numbers should be very exciting for Democrats, except for one major problem – this population doesn’t show up to vote. Non-voters in the 2018 midterms were young and racially diverse. Only 11% of actual voters (as opposed to eligible voters) in 2018 were under 30 years of age. The same group who now have clear advantages in numbers, don’t exercise that advantage and so the impacts of the changing electorate remain slow.

Now for my anecdotal observations. I have taught and listened to students in this younger population for the last ten years in my classes. They consistently report that they haven’t really paid much attention to current events until they were forced to do so in college. They overwhelmingly get their news from social media, which of course comes with a whole host of problems in an election environment tainted by foreign interference via social media. They have good ideas, they are problem-solvers, and they know what they care about it when they see it, but they haven’t yet discovered their strength and potential as a democratic voting body. If they do in 2020, there will be significant changes on the horizon. But, if they continue to stay home and not vote, they will continue to “wait on the world to change.”

Dr. Heather Farley is a professor of Public Management in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia and Chair of the Department of Criminal Justice, Public Policy & Management. She is an associate of the College’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. 

Recently the College of Coastal Georgia introduced a new Bachelor of Science in Data Science degree. Students in the program will learn through statistical analysis, computer programming, and mathematical modeling how to add value to data through analysis. In other words, they will learn how to produce consumable information. This is a highly valuable skill and will make these students very competitive in both the public and private sectors.

Most of us, however, find ourselves in the data consumption camp. Data and interpreted data come at us in large doses and very quickly. How we understand this information can, in turn, shape how we view the world. So, understanding how to be good data consumers is of great consequence.

In this week’s column, I want to explore one particular area of data consumption: Presidential polling numbers. Where Presidential candidates land in the polls has long been fodder for the media and political pundits. As voters, we often rely on this information to tell us how campaigns are going. The 2020 Presidential election cycle is no exception, particularly in light of virtual conventions, diminished rallies, and reliance on media coverage almost exclusively.

We know from the 2016 election, however, that polls are not necessarily great predictors of Presidential outcomes. In August of 2016, Hillary Clinton had an 8-point lead over Donald Trump (50% to 42%) among registered voters in some of the largest Presidential polls. Now, in August of 2020, major polls indicate a 9-point lead in favor of Joe Biden (51% to 42%). Prior to the 2016 election, the Biden campaign probably would have found this relatively strong lead comforting. But, we know that despite these almost identical numbers, Hillary Clinton did not win the election. Why? In short, because polling registered voters on a nationally-elected position like President has some caveats that must be considered.

Most importantly, the President is not elected by popular vote, but rather by an Electoral College. Indeed, Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote in 2016 with 2.9 million more votes than Trump, but that has never been the number that matters in a Presidential race. Only the state-by-state electoral counts will get you a win, and Clinton simply did not have those numbers in the “rust belt” states.

So, while polls can show us how voters on the whole are feeling about the candidates, they do not predict the outcome of the election in and of themselves. This was a major polling downfall in 2016; there was significant national polling, but anemic battle-ground state polling. If you want a more predictive picture of the outcome in 2020, you would do better to follow local polling in states where Trump won by 5 points or less: Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Next, unless you have the time to dig down into who actually responded to a poll, it can be hard to know whether the poll is really representative of the population. In polling in general, for instance, there often is an overrepresentation of certain populations that are more likely to respond such as college-educated respondents, older respondents (who have a land-line phone), English-speaking voters, and white voters to name a few. The results of these polls, therefore, may not be as representative as we would like.

Finally, there are a few bias issues that are not readily apparent in a polling news headline. “Social desirability bias” is the idea that people may simply lie to a pollster because they think doing so will reflect well on them. In other words, a respondent may not want to tell the stranger on the phone who they are voting for due to a perceived fear of judgment. There can also be leading questions or biases within the way a poll is delivered. For example, questions can be framed in such a way that leads a respondent toward a certain answer.  Another example of a bias issue in polling is the fact that many more people will say they intend to vote than actually vote. There are a number of reasons why this happens, but the result is that a poll suggests that likely voters are leaning in a certain direction, but the outcome turns out quite different.

As we enter party convention month, these specifics of polling will be something to keep in mind. There will likely be a significant uptick in national polling, but unless you are interested in digging into the details of those polls, I recommend looking elsewhere for your data. My hope is that pollsters were stunned enough by the misinterpretation of the 2016 data that they will focus more on state-level, representative (as much as that’s possible) polling.

Dr. Heather Farley is a professor of Public Management in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia and Chair of the Department of Criminal Justice, Public Policy & Management. She is an associate of the College’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies.

This summer, I have been team teaching a Global Issues class on COVID-19 with a multidisciplinary team of faculty at the College of Coastal Georgia. We have, along with our students, been exploring the COVID-19 pandemic from every angle with professors from across the College’s disciplines: psychological impacts, economic impacts, the biological origins of the virus, challenges in health informatics, and many more. My lecture for the class this week focuses on the socio-political changes and challenges that have emerged in the midst of the pandemic. In simpler terms, what’s going on with the government, laws, policies, and social norms in our American society right now? One trend we can observe is different attitudes toward government according to one’s political ideology.

When I am talking to students about political ideology, I try to make it clear that one’s ideology is not the same as one’s political party affiliation. Ideology is a spectrum ranging from conservative to liberal and statist to libertarian; political parties tend to fall within the ranges of these different ideologies, but not perfectly. When analyzing or predicting the way certain parties might approach a policy, however, we can generally look to the liberal/conservative ideological positions to get a good idea of what to expect. What I found in researching my Global Issues lecture topic, however, is that attitudes about how well the federal government is doing during the COVID-19 crisis is not following political ideology, but rather party loyalty.

In 2010, under the Obama administration, Pew Research Center asked Americans in a large-scale survey how they felt the Federal Government was doing. Then, in May of 2020 under the Trump Administration, the progressive thinktank Data for Progress asked the exact same questions in order to generate comparisons. We would predict that in general, conservatives would favor smaller government and more state control. Likewise, we would predict that liberals would favor greater big-government intervention. Interestingly, the surveys revealed something different.

When liberals and conservatives were asked “Is the federal government having a positive or negative effect on the way things are going in the country,” there was a major reversal on the part of conservatives. While in 2010 77% of conservative respondents said the effect of the federal government on the country is negative, this dropped to just 32% in 2020 while the view of liberals remained stable at around 55%. Similarly, when asked “All in all, how good a job does the federal government do running its programs,” conservatives had a large 27-point drop where liberals had just a 10-point increase. Finally, when asked what level of government they trusted more to handle he pandemic, 37% of liberals trusted the federal government more than their local government versus 64% of conservatives. In other words, while we would expect a certain outcome based on traditional ideological stances – liberals favoring big government, conservatives favoring small government – we are seeing something different that speaks more to party affiliation and loyalty.

There could be a variety of reasons for this outcome, but what seems clear is that respondents, and especially conservative respondents, are equating the federal government with the President. Their support for that institution, therefore, seems to depend much more heavily on who is in office than on their attitude toward national government in general. The effect is that policy development and analysis cannot rely solely on ideological predictions. Instead, consideration of party loyalty has to be accounted for as well, which is a much more challenging and fluid metric.

Dr. Heather Farley is a professor of Public Management in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia and Chair of the Department of Criminal Justice, Public Policy & Management. She is an associate of the College’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. 

We are living in an unprecedented moment in our history: COVID-19, racial tensions and a push for restructuring an anti-racist society, social isolation and distancing, economic gaps and inequities. Well, if not unprecedented, at the very least we are seeing a stunning confluence of events and tensions in our political, societal, and economic systems that leaves us thinking about really big questions.

Academics would call many of these issues wicked problems – social or cultural problems that are difficult or impossible to solve because we either have: 1) incomplete or contradictory knowledge, 2) too many conflicting people or opinions involved, 3) a large economic burden, or 4) highly interconnected problems. My colleague Don Mathews touched on this in the June 17^th, 2020 column in his discussion of race and poverty from an economic perspective. Race and poverty are linked to other issues like access to education, nutrition, healthcare access, and so on. There is no definitive formula for figuring out these questions and the solutions are centered on improvement rather than an end state.

The good news is that history and research can provide guidance to reach a state of improvement. I recently read a study by Jason Coburn et al. (Health in All Urban Policy: City Services through the Prism of Health, 2014) that examined inequality factors and health; another wicked problem. It sought to explain some of the determinants of health and social equity. It also highlighted a policy strategy called “Health in All Policies (HiAP)” that ensures that policy making outside the health sector addresses the determinants of health and social equity. There is an explicit focus on equity and participation by government, experts, and communities.

The Coburn article made me think about the COVID-19 pandemic and the disproportionate impact on people of color. The same determinants explained in the article and by the World Health Organization – economic policies and systems, development agendas, social norms, social policies and political systems – are creating conditions that lead to disproportionately higher death rates in people of color due to COVID-19.

Pre-pandemic realities that limit access to health and wealth for people of color are also leading to higher death rates during the pandemic. For instance, higher rates of underlying conditions (related to less access to quality healthcare), lower access to transportation, and disproportionate representation in occupations that are now frontline jobs, have all led to this unequal share of deaths due to the pandemic.

This wicked problem is a systemic issue. As a result, solutions have to be tailored to address the system. For example, because predominantly African American communities in New Orleans had lower access to personal transportation, Louisiana changed their testing strategy from drive-through testing sites to targeted testing within these communities. This is but one of a set of structural issues related to the pandemic, but it illustrates ways that our public health organizations and states can improve outcomes for racial and socioeconomic groups that are being impacted in unimaginable ways by simply meeting basic needs.

When you can’t access food, private spaces to self-isolate, transportation, quality healthcare, or outdoor spaces away from others, your prospects for successful recovery from COVID-19 shrink significantly. As we grapple right now with ways to combat systemic racism, we should also be considering ways that the system can be changed to generate better outcomes for those communities that are most vulnerable during this ongoing pandemic. The HiAP strategy provides one such option by “integrat[ing] community knowledge and health equity considerations into the agendas of policymakers who have not previously considered health as their responsibility or view the value of such an approach” (Coburn et al. 2014). Tackling these wicked problems is going to require new thinking, but fortunately we have some tested strategies and ideas to guide us along the way.

Dr. Heather Farley is a professor of Public Management in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia and Chair of the Department of Criminal Justice, Public Policy & Management. She is an associate of the College’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. 

This column has been full of COVID-19 analysis over the last couple of months. As academics, it is sort of in our nature to want to analyze something from every possible angle, so forgive us this preoccupation. But, as I promised in an earlier column of mine, I wanted to start thinking about this year’s Presidential election and the electoral politics surrounding it – some perspectives on the history, data, and political machinations taking place.

Presently, we are facing a very uncertain autumn and an unusual election season. Many people are turning to previous pandemics for guidance or lessons learned. While the details of those pandemics, like any historical event, have gotten a bit muddled, ultimately, they can offer some insights as to how we might approach our own lives right now. This week, I want to look at the 1918 midterm elections and how the United States pulled it off in the midst of one of the deadliest pandemics in history.

The first relatively mild wave of the flu swept in during the spring of 1918 followed by a second stronger wave that emerged in September. In the month of October, 195,000 Americans perished from the flu. But, what was going on other than the pandemic at the time? Politically, Woodrow Wilson was in an unenviable position. He and his fellow Democrats were attempting to keep control of Congress in the thick of World War I. In at least eight states, alcohol prohibition was on the ballot and suffragists were trying to build on the momentum of the first twelve states they had won to date. The stakes were high not only for national candidates, but also for state politics. So, how do you implement the Constitutional duty of holding elections during such rough waters for the nation?

Just like the 2020 election season, campaigning had to be planned with strict social distancing and quarantine rules in place. This meant there could be no rallies and campaigning had to take place via alternative communication methods like newspapers and campaign literature. Today, of course, we have widespread television and internet media, which offers rapid distribution of information and tremendous opportunity for both diverse opinions and the spread of misinformation. While plenty of conspiracy theories have popped up during COVID-19, even then some candidates suggested that public health officials were conspiring to limit election turnout calling it a “Republican quarantine against Democratic campaign speeches” (see New York Times Oct. 22, 1918).

Voting, of course, is another issue. Under the purview of local and state governments, the 1918 midterms looked quite different depending on where you lived in the US. Voting ranged from closed polls to strict social distancing guidelines to mandatory mask-wearing. There was no discussion of postponing the election. The result of these measures was a significant drop in voter turnout. One analyst in the Election Law Journal suggested that when controlling for loss of potential voters due to WWI deaths, the flu accounted for a 10% drop in voting with approximately 40% total voter turnout. Six days after the election, the armistice ended WWI, people took to the streets to celebrate, and a new surge if flu cases was reported across the country.

A democracy is only as strong as its participation. That is the definition of democracy: by the people. The job of our state election boards, therefore, will be to ensure that turnout does not suffer in the same way it did during the 1918 pandemic.

One way to allow people to stay home and still vote is mail-in ballots. Interestingly, while I was doing research for this article, I came across no evidence of mail-in voting in 1918. It seems this practice did not emerge until the 1980s. This is currently a political hot-topic, so I wanted to address it here. Statistically, voter fraud in the case of mail-in ballots is quite low and participation is high. I know you’ve heard otherwise, but the data simply do not support the idea that mail-in ballots will lead to rampant voter fraud. There are five states that currently do all mail-in voting and there is no evidence in these states of statistically significant fraud. This is likely due to their best practices: voter signature, signature matching, laws limiting ballot harvesting, and ballot tracking via bar code. Additionally, a 1996-2018 study by Stanford’s Institute for Economic Policy Research found that the partisan effect (ie. does mail-in voting help one party or another) was neutral but that overall average turnout rate increased modestly.

If COVID 19 threatens a possible 10% drop in turnout as it did during the 1918 pandemic, I would argue that even a modest increase in participation would be worth pursuing. Mail-in voting is one option, but election officials will have to consider a range of options to ensure the process is open and accessible to all eligible voters while maintaining public health and safety.

Dr. Heather Farley is a professor of Public Management in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia and Chair of the Department of Criminal Justice, Public Policy & Management. She is an associate of the College’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies.

In the formulation and implementation of policy, words matter. This is particularly true of environmental policy. How the government regulates environmental issues depends largely on how the components of the policy have been classified. Presently, this is playing out in the Georgia Legislature where House Bill 756 is being considered.

Introduced in mid-January, HB 756 attempts to reclassify coal ash – the solid byproduct of burning coal for electricity. Though coal ash contains heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead, and mercury, it is not classified as hazardous waste by the EPA. There is no regulation requiring coal ash ponds to be lined in order to prevent contact with groundwater.

Compare this with regulations surrounding household trash. Trash from our homes must be disposed of in municipal solid waste landfills that are required to have not only liners, but also collection systems to avoid slurry contamination into water systems. Our household trash is more stringently handled, from an environmental protection perspective, than the heavy metals in coal ash.

Georgia is a top coal-ash generating state with 11 coal plants producing more than 6 million tons of ash annually. HB 756 came about in response to Georgia Power’s current coal ash pond closure wave. Twenty-nine ponds are in the process of closing in response to a 2015 Federal rule requiring ash ponds and landfills to be excavated or closed in place. Rather than excavating all of the unlined ponds and transferring them to lined ponds, present plans are in place to excavate 19 and close 10 in place. By putting coal ash in the same category as household garbage, the bill ensures that liners and collection systems will be required.

The coal ash case is an excellent demonstration of a core environmental and public health policy challenge: risk analysis. While it seems odd, at best, that we would control the storage and disposal of household trash more stringently that the heavy metals found in coal ash, a few innate characteristics of risk assessment make environmental policy development difficult.

Acceptable levels of pollution (and the associated risks to human health) are a cornerstone of the environmental policy-making process. In the policy arena, tradeoffs between different interests are constantly being weighed and debated, and human health happens to be one of those interests. Even carcinogenic exposure is not banned though no safe threshold of exposure can be determined. Thus, we tend to rely upon risk analysis to determine acceptability. Unfortunately, the result is that we focus our attention on “acceptable” levels of risk rather than alternatives to that risk.

Now, in the case of the existing coal ash ponds, it’s too late to find an alternative. The byproduct exists in ponds already and must be disposed of, heavy metals and all. However, it certainly raises the question as to whether the byproduct of burning coal, also called an externality of the process, is worth it. Is the increased cost to human and environmental health worth the benefit of the relatively cheap energy? I think your response to that question largely depends on how coal impacts you, whether directly or indirectly. If you are living next to Plant Scherer in Juliette, just north of Macon, that “acceptable” level of risk may be decidedly unacceptable.

Dr. Heather Farley is a professor of Public Management in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia. She is an associate of the College’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. 

We’ve made it, folks: 2020. And for this political science nerd, that means election season.

It’s going to be quite an election year which, for many, is an unbearable thought as images of mudslinging, endless campaign ads, and overwhelming robocalls fill their heads. As an academic, however, it means plenty of data to analyze.

Specifically, this week I want to look at national voter turnout from a comparative perspective as a sort of next step in a series of articles you’ve seen here. I’ve written before about the 2020 census and its importance vis a vis policy. Last week, my respected colleague wrote in this column about the perception that apathy and cynicism are endangering American Democracy. His conclusion was that our democracy can handle the levels of apathy, cynicism, and political polarization we are seeing today. We’ve fared worse, and come out on the other side.

This sparked my interest, however, in examining the measures of apathy among voters. How can we tell that apathy exists and to what degree? This is an important question if we want to understand where our democratic system stands.

The Pew Research Center conducted a survey to understand voter turnout in the U.S. during the 2018 midterm elections. Midterms occur two years into a Presidential term and determine Congressional seats. During the 2018 midterms, we saw higher voter turnout than we had in the last 20 years with 55% of eligible voters participating in the election. This can be considered a surge with voting going from 36.4% in the 2014 midterms to 55% in the 2018 midterms.

Now, to put it in perspective, in a Presidential election year we have had historical averages hovering around 60% of our voter population showing up to cast a vote. In midterms, like the one described above, the number drops to about 40%. In a local election that is not tied to a bigger national election, this number will on average be around 20%. This jump in participation, therefore, is pretty significant and certainly does not indicate apathy among voters but rather indicates a surge in interest. The districts where there were highly contested races drove this jump in numbers.

Comparing these numbers internationally tells a somewhat different story of participation. Compared to other developed countries, even this surge in numbers ranks us on the low end of things. Countries like Spain (61%), Canada (62.1%), the UK (63.2%), New Zealand (75.7%), and Sweden (82.6%) far outpace us when it comes to voters showing up to the polls.

What does this indicate about the 2020 election, voter apathy, and turnout? What will matter is how contentious races impact turnout. As dissatisfaction rises, apathy decreases. And though we are lagging compared to other democratic systems in developed nations, it appears that apathy is not a problem when people are fired-up enough to participate.

So, whether you are fired-up to keep our incumbent President and members of Congress in office, or fired-up to make a change, I hope you will. Then we can all summarily put the apathy debate to rest.

Pew Research studies:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/24/voter-turnout-always-drops-off-for-midterm-elections-but-why/

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/03/turnout-in-this-years-u-s-house-primaries-rose-sharply-especially-on-the-democratic-side/

Dr. Heather Farley is a professor of Public Management in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia. She is an associate of the College’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. 

This is Thanksgiving week. A time when we traditionally gather, catch up with one another, interact and connect; sometimes willingly and sometimes less so depending on your family dynamics. This time also represents the calm before the inevitable Presidential election storm that looms ahead in 2020. And so, it felt timely to look at where we stand as a state in terms of our civic health – “the degree to which citizens participate in their communities, from local and state governance to interactions with friends or family” (2019 Georgia Civic Health Index).

The Georgia Family Connection Partnership, the Georgia Municipal Association, and the National Conference on Citizenship released the second Georgia Civic Health Index following the first report produced in 2013. The report seeks to compare our state with the rest of nation on indicators of civic health – namely social connectedness, community involvement, and political action. Spoiler alert: we aren’t thriving as a civic body.

In general, our state lags in many areas of civic health compared to national averages. Compared to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, Georgia ranks 49^th in both “group participation” and “contacted/visited a public official.” We are 50^th in “frequently hear from or spend time with family or friends” and “frequently talk with or spend time with neighbors.”

I found this shocking. I grew up in Marietta Georgia and have lived in the Golden Isles for the last eight years. In the south, and in Georgia specifically, we pride ourselves on southern hospitality. We view ourselves as very socially engaged, polite, and connected. As it turns out, we are much more isolated from one another than we might expect.

As with any data, the story changes when we break down these numbers. For instance, when looking at frequency of contact with family and friends, just 77.3% of males reported spending time frequently with family and friends compared to 84.5% of females. When comparing rural and urban communities, 85.3% of rural Georgians were frequently connected versus 76.1% in urban areas. This may be because we tend to have less geographic mobility in rural areas, which often means we live in closer proximity to family and friends. This rural/urban divide is confirmed when looking at the county level where frequency is higher in rural areas.

The report also shows that Georgia declined in several areas as well compared to the 2013 data. Voting in local elections dropped from 29th to 40th; volunteering dropped from 34th to 44th; contacting a public official dropped from 34th to 49th; group membership or participation dropped from 28th to 49th; and donating to charitable or religious organizations dropped from 40th to 47th.

But why does it matter? How does civic health correlate with other indicators of societal strength? It turns out there are correlations between civic health and improved public health, stronger workforce development, employment, improved child-hood development and adolescent well-being, improved mental health, lower violent crime rates and delinquency, and reduced mortality. Wow. Now, to be clear, correlation is not causation. These variables are not caused by strong civic health. Rather, there are links between all of these factors. So, presumably one strengthens the other.

My hope for you this Thanksgiving is that you attempt to personally build on your own civic health. Spend this holiday connecting, sharing, and even civilly discussing politics (gasp). As a nation we have become so polarized that talk of government and politics is taboo, even dangerous. But maybe, no matter your family dynamic nor your political ideology, we can remind ourselves as we enter this season that we are all Americans, all Georgians, and ultimately, we all care about the health and well-being of our community and neighbors. Call me an idealist, but I think this could go a long way in bolstering what appears to be a pretty anemic civic health score.

2019 Georgia Civic Health Index:

https://www.ncoc.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/2019-Georgia-Civic-Health-Index.pdf

Dr. Heather Farley is a professor of Public Management in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia. She is an associate of the College’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies.