Fay Lomax Cook

Thanks to President Clinton and the Pew Charitable Trusts, the American public may be getting a real shot at participant democracy.

Concurrent with the president’s town meetings, Pew is underwriting its own series of public forums this year about the future of social security. It hopes these sessions will educate the public, stir debate, and elicit ideas about what, if any, reform is needed.

“This ambitious effort should be seen as an experiment in civic education and engagement that, if effective, might be replicated again and again with other public policy issues,” said IPR Director Fay Lomax Cook. Pew recently awarded Cook and Lawrence Jacobs of the University of Minnesota a grant to evaluate Pew’s “Americans Discuss Social Security” forums held this spring in Des Moines, Phoenix, Buffalo, Austin, and Seattle. Cook’s and Jacobs’s analysis will concentrate on the content of the forums, their impact on participants and community residents, the extent and content of media coverage, and how that coverage has affected public opinion. It also will pinpoint social security issues that were most salient and of greatest concern to participants, and the types of people who spoke and interacted at the forums.

In one component of the study, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) has been interviewing forum par-ticipants before and after the forums to determine whether their concerns about social security, their beliefs about appro-priate responses, and support for different policy actions have changed as a result of their involvement in the discus-sions. These results will be compared to views of a random sample of community residents who did not attend the forums.

The study’s content analysis will include both print and broadcast coverage of the forums by the Associated Press, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, ABC, CNN, and the leading newspaper in each forum city. It will compare this reporting with actual transcripts of the forums.

Cook believes that up to early 1998, the public have been mere spectators as policy elites debated social security. “But,” she argues, “the public as simply the audience in the play of democracy is not what normative political science theory describes as the public’s role.” According to Cook, the Americans Discuss Social Security forums are important “because they provide an opportunity to observe deliberative democracy in action.”

A final report will be completed by September. IPR graduate fellow Jason Barabas and Patrick Dorsey, a political sci-ence graduate student, are research assistants on the project.

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IPR Director Fay Lomax Cook has just been elected president of the Gerontological Society of America for the year 2000. (Full story will appear in the next IPR newsletter.)