Spring 1995
Does Civic Journalism Work?
Can civic journalism, working in an innovative, focused effort, cut through public ennui and alienation from politics? Can it pull ordinary citizens into caring about candidates and issues — and even into voting?
Early results from a Wisconsin experiment clearly say yes.
“We the People/ Wisconsin,” a three-year-old civic journalism project, has found that a combination of town-hall meetings, candidate debates and citizenship training can pull more citizens into routine, even boring, campaigns.
Preliminary analyses of survey data show that people paid attention to “We the People” (WTP). As a result:
- 11% of those aware of WTP said they were more encouraged to vote.
- 34% said it made them more interested in the election.
- 55% said it made them better informed about campaign issues.
- 42% felt more positive toward the media sponsors.
Significantly, results showed that the impact of the combined media effort was about three times as great as the normal impact of news media on public knowledge of political campaigns.
We the People is a partnership of the Wisconsin State Journal, Wisconsin public television and radio, WISC-TV (Madison’s CBS affiliate), and Wood Communications Group. They first organized in 1992 to produce a series of statewide town-hall meetings around the presidential campaign, culminating in a televised debate between Democratic candidates Bill Clinton and Jerry Brown in which citizens asked the questions. Since then, WTP, now supported in part by a grant from the Pew Center, has used a variety of civic-journalism approaches to address the federal deficit, health-care reform, property taxes and other state issues.
In the fall 1994 elections, WTP took on the gubernatorial and U.S. Senate campaigns, both involving well financed and heavily favored incumbents who ultimately prevailed.
This time, however, the effort was expanded to include voter education. And to measure the impact, if any, we launched a research project, supported by another Pew Center grant. Civic journalism is labor intensive and sometimes expensive, so editors and news directors need to know whether it works.
WTP used three techniques to involve citizens in the campaigns:
- Town hall meetings in seven cities. The partners recruited a cross section of ordinary voters, who then developed lists of issues that touched their lives.
- Candidate debates televised across the state, with citizens selected from the town-hall meetings asking the questions. (Although incumbent U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl declined to participate, his Republican opponent was featured in a program that also covered the nature and quality of the campaign.)
- Three Sunday, front-page voter-education efforts, entitled “Armed and Dangerous,” that supplied readers with tools to get behind campaign efforts to distort information or manipulate images. One package explained how candidates try to use debates to their advantage and what citizens should look for to get the most substance from the event. Another dissected TV political ads and explored how negative ads can taint the democratic process. The third laid out the duties and powers of the governor and a U.S. senator, so people could decide whether candidates were making unrealistic promises.
To evaluate these efforts, three measurements were taken. In late September, about two weeks after the party primaries, a random sample of 230 adults in Dane County (Madison) were asked about their knowledge of the candidates, the campaigns, their media habits, their awareness of WTP, and their general attitudes toward politics and public affairs.
Immediately after the election, interviewers called those people back and persuaded 141 to answer a longer questionnaire, repeating the original survey and adding questions on political behavior and media performance. Also included were questions about specific facts presented in the debates and the “Armed and Dangerous” series. The longer questionnaire was also administered to a separate random sample of 516 people.
While the data still are being analyzed, here’s an early look at the findings:
- Awareness of the civic journalism project:
Most respondents had heard of We the People, 54% of males and 49% of females. Highest awareness, 60%, was among middle-income people ($30,000-$50,000). Whites were more familiar with the project (52%) than minorities (39% for all minorities, 46% for blacks), though there were few minorities in the sample. Fifty-five percent of higher-educated respondents were aware of the project versus 38 percent for people whose education did not go beyond high school.
While, of course, there was some lack of clarity or certainty about where people had heard of WTP, the biggest group, 56%, said they heard of the project from the State Journal, 50% cited public TV, 49% the CBS affiliate and 30% public radio.
- What did We The People mean to you?
The most promising finding: Among the people who were aware of WTP in both the pre-election and post-election samples, 11% said it made them more encouraged to vote. A third, 34% pre-election and 32% post-election, said hearing about the project encouraged their interest in the campaigns.
In September, 34% said WTP had informed them about issues important to Wisconsin. Significantly, that grew to 55% after the election.
While an encouraging 55%, before the election, said WTP made them feel more positive towards the sponsors, that fell to 42% post-election, a possible backlash to the negative campaigns. Separate measures showed that public cynicism toward politics also increased during the campaign period.
- Did We the People make you better informed?
Of those surveyed after the election, 67% knew the names of at least three of the four candidates in the Senate and gubernatorial races, signaling a high awareness among the respondents about the political campaigns.
The researchers controlled for such demographic differences as education, the best predictor of what people know about public affairs, to focus on measuring the impact of WTP.
The results showed that people who were aware of WTP scored significantly higher in knowledge of the candidates’ names and of the “Armed and Dangerous” material. In fact, the joint efforts of the partners had a much greater effect on people’s learning than did traditional coverage in the newspaper or on TV alone — about three times as great as the normal media impact of the media on public knowledge of political campaigns.
Citizens also were asked whether they believed they had enough information to participate in the elections. When the effects of demographics were removed, exposure to the participating media and, particularly, to WTP significantly increased respondents’ confidence that they had enough information to vote.
The data is still being analyzed. The Pew Center will publish detailed results in a few months.
