We are pleased to present to “Fresh Thoughts” readers a new report called Thinking & Doing: Citizen Groups Push for Political Pragmatism Nationwide.
The report shows that the bipartisan instincts put forth by the 1,800 participants to date in the Center’s ongoing Community Conversations are shared by a diverse body of additional regional organizations across the country.
The Thinking & Doing report is especially timely, given the presidential race, the public fiscal pressures in many states across the country, and the ongoing flare-ups of hyper-partisanship in Michigan.
Here’s a little more background on how this report came to be…
A statewide group of bipartisan business and political leaders formed the Center for Michigan in early 2006 to assist our state through its current period of wrenching economic trouble and create informed hope for a better future Michigan.
To do so, the Center:
1) Engages thousands of statewide residents in large- and small-group dialogues to intensify citizen understanding of Michigan’s current challenges and amplify the public’s voice in public policy.
2) Advocates pragmatic, bipartisan solutions to big-picture policy challenges, including creating a globally competitive workforce, diversifying the state economy, instituting a clear, strategic state budget policy, and instituting reforms to improve the efficiency of government operations and improve the accountability of the political system.
As we embarked on this work, the Center steadily picked up anecdotal evidence of other groups engaged in similar efforts across the country. So we engaged the help of Geoff Young, a graduate student at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, to plumb the depths of bipartisan, citizen engagement across the country. Using public documents, database searches, and interviews, Mr. Young explored dozens of non-profit groups and think tanks and found many examples of citizens and community leaders moving beyond traditional two-party politics to address crucial public issues.
Building on Geoff’s initial work, award-winning author James Tobin then studied several such “think-and-do tanks” in-depth to produce this report.
Mr. Tobin is the author of numerous books, including Ernie Pyle’s War: America’s Eyewitness to World War II (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award) and To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight. A historian and associate professor of journalism at Miami University, Ohio, Mr. Tobin has been awarded a 2008 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to pursue research about Franklin D. Roosevelt and the experience of disability.
Mr. Tobin found that the think-and-do tanks profiled herein work in very different parts of the country yet share very similar and deep concerns about the governance systems in those regions. Those shared concerns include the notions that:
• Single-interest groups wield far too much influence over parties and office-holders.
• Effective governance is crippled by the endless chase for campaign cash.
• Term limits threaten to turn compromise into a long lost political art.
• Gerrymandered legislative districts push out moderates and solidify the power of hardened, partisan caucuses.
“The public sees the system as badly broken, so public engagement in civic life declines,” Tobin concludes. “So voting declines and fewer capable people run for office – which accelerates the downward spiral of governance-as-usual, which in turn erodes public confidence further.”
Think-and-do tanks are working to reverse that grim feedback loop. They represent a new and promising way to bring public will and common sense back to our democratic institutions.
