Category: Research

According to CIRCLE, the youth vote (18-29) was key to the President winning in these key states:

I was at a forum “What’s In The Water in Illinois? Reform Symposium on Illinois Government” on Thursday and Friday at the Union League Club. The event was sponsored by the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University.
The Institute was described as the late Illinois Senator’s “living legacy.”

The event assembled an all-star collection of Chicago reformers and academics, including Professor Dick Simpson, Professor Paul Green, Brian Gladstein of the Illinois Campaign for the Political Reform (ICPR), Cindi Canary ICPR’s recently retired long-time director, Terry Pastika of the Citizen Advocacy Center in Elmhurst, and a long list of corruption and election-reform scholars.

It was a tale of woe and defeat. The stories and statistics were horrifying reminders of the broken politics of Illinois that has defeated progressive efforts for reform, social justice and equity for decades while showering the wealthy insiders with billions of public dollars.They play and we pay.

No one wore a Freddy or Jason mask – but it was Halloween come early – but with all tricks and no treats.

Some of the papers delivered were  “Chicago and Illinois: Leading the Pack in Corruption,” “The History of Corruption in Illinois,” and “The Illinois Culture of Corruption and Comparison with Texas.” It was a tale of venality and unchecked greed. Illinois and Chicago are two of the most corrupt jurisdictions in the nation. Since 1976 some 1,828 public officials have been convicted of crimes in Illinois – 1,521 were from the Chicago metro region! We are Number One in convicted public officials in America! Professor Simpson called The Illinois Governor’s Mansion and Chicago’s City Hall two of the most dangerous crime scenes in the state.

Our efforts at campaign contribution reform are weak and our tradition of nepotism, jailed officials and conflicts of interest is strong. The assembled scholars seemed to shoot down or discount every popular effort at electoral reform I’m aware of – including public financing of elections, term limits, limiting the amounts of campaign contributions and amending the U.S. Constitution to prevent corporate domination of elections. One particularly annoying session was about character and seemed aimed at a high school audience and suggested that we all should live up to a bullet point list of noble and common sense character traits, such as Trustworthiness, Respect and Honesty. Well, great – maybe if we send all our representatives that list they would wake up and live right.

At the end of the sessions I was left wondering what we poor snookered citizens are supposed to do. I made a suggestion. I urged all the civic groups and leaders assembled there to compile a short list of Illinois election-related reforms that would open up the system and then band together to train and support good government candidates in 2014. I made this observation, “A mentor of mine told me once that politicians have reptilian brains and operate on this calculus – Can you help me or hurt me? If we can do neither, then we are invisible to politicians.” I said that unless we organize for power we would be doomed to see each grow old at events like these.

Here’s one particular striking piece of data from one of the many papers (you can get them all here) on the effect of Illinois’ new campaign limits law on the 2011 Mayoral race. Bottom line answer = Not much.Download this as a pdf.

Six in 10 registered voters polled think state government in Illinois is more corrupt than in other states, according to a new poll from the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute.

Roughly 58 percent of respondents to the recent poll said Illinois government is more corrupt than in other states, about 37 percent felt other states were just as corrupt, and only 2 percent felt Illinois was less corrupt.

The findings are the latest from the institute housed at SIU Carbondale, which surveyed 1,261 registered voters statewide between Sept. 4 and Sept. 10.

Join the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, the Institute for Policy and Civic Engagement (IPCE) at the University of Illinois Chicago, the Spencer Foundation and the Mikva Challenge for an evening of conversation with Harvard Associate Professor of Education, Meira Levinson.

While teaching at an all African American middle school in Atlanta, Levinson realized that her students’ individual self-improvement would not necessarily enable them to overcome their historical marginalization. In order to overcome their civic empowerment gap, students must learn how to re-shape power relationships through public, political, and civic action. Read more about Dr. Levinson’s work.

For one evening in Chicago, Levinson will discuss the themes from her new book, No Citizen Left Behind.

Wednesday, October 3 – Books available for purchase and signing by Levinson at 4:15 p.m. Lecture: 5 p.m.
University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC)
Student Center East, Cardinal Room
750 S. Halsted Street, Chicago, IL

Contact IPCE at (312) 355-0088 or visit www.ipce.uic.edu for more information.

From the Educational Testing Service, “With the presidential election approaching, a new study from Educational Testing Service (ETS) shows that weak civics knowledge among young people is linked to less voting, less volunteering and greater distrust in government. The report calls for sustained efforts on the part of parents, the public, the educational system, and local and national leaders to address these fault lines in our democracy that threaten our nation’s civic well-being.

Fault Lines in Our Democracy: Civic Knowledge, Voting Behavior, and Civic Engagement in the United States was written by Richard J. Coley of the ETS Center for Research on Human Capital and Education and Andrew Sum of the Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern University. The report takes an in-depth look at civic knowledge, voting and civic engagement, and examines how they differ across important segments of our population. In all cases, civic participation was strongly related to one’s age, level of education and skills, and income.

The report warns that many students in U.S. schools lack acceptable levels of knowledge about civics:

• In the most recent national assessment, only about one-quarter reached the “proficient” level, demonstrating solid academic performance.
• Only 27 percent of fourth-graders could identify the purpose of the U.S. Constitution.
• Only 22 percent of eighth-graders could recognize a role played by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Lower voter participation among growing segments of the population is rising just as the United States faces challenges of historic proportions — including a struggling economy, budget deficits, a growing national debt, health care issues, an aging infrastructure, global terrorism and a host of other problems.”

Download the summary.