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2020-05-20
Cousins Research Group;
In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address, and he spoke of an ideal of government, one that is of, by, and for the people. Do Americans today think our government is really "of" the people? That's debatable. "By" the people? Doubtful. "For" the people? Perhaps for some, sometimes.This Cousins Research Group Report, based on a forthcoming book by David Mathews, suggests trying another preposition—government with the people. It offers a strategy for bridging some of the divide separating the people of the United States from their government and from the country's major institutions. It envisions a form of collaboration that would have institutions working with citizens, not just for them. Such a "with strategy" sees people as creators and producers rather than consumers or clients. It encourages collaboration through mutually reinforcing efforts between the citizenry and the government, and that could have a cumulative effect on the troubles that our democracy faces.
2021-06-23
ACLU of Wisconsin;
Our democracy works best when all eligible Wisconsinites participate. The freedom to vote is central to building an America that works for us all. But too many Wisconsinites face needless and discriminatory barriers that limit this right. This is particularly true of eligible Wisconsinites in county jails.This report updates our July 2020 report, Ballots for All: Ensuring Eligible Wisconsin Voters in Jail Have Equal Access to Voting. In the past year, many jail administrators have taken small but important steps to increase ballot access for individuals in their care. Even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, with restrictions on who can support jail-based voter registration and absentee ballot application events in county jails, advocates and jail administrators found creative ways to ensure that eligible Wisconsinites could have their voices heard in the 2020 elections. While this is progress, troubling barriers remain. This report offers additional recommendations for state and local officials to protect the freedom to vote for every eligible Wisconsinite.
2021-08-05
Center for Popular Democracy;
The purpose of this guide is to assist the staff and leaders of community organizations—especially those that organize Black, immigrant, and communities of color—in understanding the importance of drawing fair election maps, called the "redistricting" process. This information should be used by organizations to empower community members, who may not understand how to participate in the mapping process, with the information they need to plug into and shape this critical process for their communities.
2021-11-22
Pew Research Center;
This is the 13th"Future of the Internet" canvassing Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center have conducted together to gather expert views about important digital issues. In this report, the questions focused on the prospects for improvements in the tone and activities of the digital public sphere by 2035. This is a nonscientific canvassing based on a nonrandom sample; this broad array of opinions about where current trends may lead in the next decade represents only the points of view of the individuals who responded to the queries.Pew Research Center and Elon's Imagining the Internet Center built a database of experts to canvass from a wide range of fields, inviting professionals and policy people based in government bodies, nonprofits and foundations, technology businesses and think tanks, as well as interested academics and technology innovators. The predictions reported here came in response to a set of questions in an online canvassing conducted between June 29 and Aug. 2, 2021.In all, 862 technology innovators and developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded to at least one of the questions covered in this report. More on the methodology underlying this canvassing and the participants can be found in the section titled "About this canvassing of experts."
2021-11-01
Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America;
This report represents the fourth edition of this type of analysis on the veterans community- again showing that veterans outperform non-veterans in multiple forms of civic engagement including voting, donating, and volunteering.
2021-10-04
Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE);
Youth activism and participation in social movements has been one of the defining features of civic life in the past several years: from the anti-gun violence protests after the Parkland school shooting in 2018, to the nationwide actions for racial justice following George Floyd's murder in 2020. Both of those were also election years in which young people achieved historic or near-historic levels of voter turnout. But what, exactly, was the relationship between young people's participation in the streets and at the ballot box?To answer that question, the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) joined a team of researchers to produce Protests, Politics, and Power: Exploring the Connections Between Youth Voting and Youth Movements. This research encompasses two studies that tackled this question with different but complementary perspectives and approaches. The Role of Electoral Engagement in Youth Social Movements is a qualitative study based on interviews and supplemental surveys with young leaders and participants in social movements. The second study, Quantifying the Effects of Protests on Voter Registration and Turnout, uses quantitative methods to study changes in electoral participation in areas where protests took place.
2021-10-28
Institute for Democracy and Higher Education at Tufts University;
This report contains findings from the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement (NSLVE, pronounced n-solve), a landmark study of U.S. college and university student voting. Launched in 2013, NSLVE consists of a database of more than 10 million de-identified student records that have been combined with publicly available voting records for each of the 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and now, 2020 elections. Participating institutions include two- and four-year public and private colleges and universities, including graduate programs. Campuses must opt in, and at the time of this report, roughly 1,200 colleges and universities from all 50 states and the District of Columbia participate. For this report, we examine 1,051 campuses representing approximately 9 million student voters.
2021-10-19
New York Foundation;
This brief builds on Streets to Statehouse: Building Grassroots Power in New York, a report released jointly by North Star Fund and New York Foundation in 2020. Streets to Statehouse documents the crucial role of grassroots organizing in achieving progressive policy wins in New York and sowing a more inclusive and responsive democracy. The report calls on funders to resource these movements more deeply to ensure we build upon the progress that has been made. This brief serves as a companion to Streets to Statehouse and lifts up the ways in which grassroots organizing is building electoral power by engaging new constituencies and seeding a new cadre of progressive elected leaders.
2021-10-28
Pew Research Center;
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states that the country shall have no official religion. At the same time, Christians continue to make up a large majority of U.S. adults – despite some rapid decline in recent years – and historians, politicians and religious leaders continue to debate the role of religion in the founders' vision and of Christianity in the nation's identity.Some Americans clearly long for a more avowedly religious and explicitly Christian country, according to a March 2021 Pew Research Center survey. On the other hand, however, the clear majority of Americans do not accept these views. This report presents findings from surveys focused on American's views on the separation of church and state.
2021-01-21
Knight Foundation;
Knight Foundation's historic $50 million investments in 2019, aimed at accelerating a new field of research at the intersection of technology and democracy, have shown encouraging early signs. This report examines progress among the major research institutions that were funded, considers how the grantees responded under challenging conditions through mid-2020, and details concerns and emerging issues that might be addressed in the coming years. It also details the activities of the Knight Research Network grantees in their initial stages, with primary emphasis on the 11 institutions that were funded in July 2019, although it also makes reference to others that have subsequently been added to the KRN.
2021-11-01
Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees (GCIR);
The 2020 census was among the most fraught in recent history, with threats to a fair and complete count posed by the global pandemic and the federal administration's attempt to limit the inclusion of immigrants. Fortunately, funders and other stakeholders built on the lessons of census 2010, and the California Census 2020 Statewide Funders Initiative coordinated investments with the state to maximize the number of Californians counted. This report documents learnings from the California Census 2020 Statewide Funders Initiative.
2021-11-01
Pew Research Center;
As Pew Research Center surveys have documented, the United States' global reputation has shifted dramatically over the past two decades, often improving or declining depending on who is in the White House and the foreign policies they pursue. At the same time, many other factors have continued to shape how people see the U.S., including its vast cultural reach, its economic model and its divisive politics. A survey of 17 advanced economies highlights the complexity of America's international image. People in other publics find much to admire about the U.S., but they see many problems as well. Americans, for their part, also see both strengths and weaknesses in their society.
