Necessary Conditions for Improving Civic Competence

Arthur Lupia
University of Michigan

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     Last modified: February 3, 2005

Abstract
If citizens are incompetent, what is the optimal response? Actual responses vary. Many simply decry the situation, doing nothing more than bashing the masses for not being more interested in politics. A special few attempt a more constructive response. Some advocate and others implement mechanisms designed to change the amount and content of information available to citizens.

Prominent scholars, legislatures, and foundations participate in this endeavor. Scholars contribute by attempting to document extant levels of political knowledge and by extolling the virtues of civic education. Public and private entities direct resources towards activities such as deliberation, voter education campaigns and political information web sites. When such efforts enhance civic competence, they constitute valuable public goods.

My goal, in this paper, is to increase the effectiveness of scholarship and practice conducted for the purpose of increasing civic competence. I want to make success more likely for such ventures and failures or inefficiencies easier to anticipate. To this end, I have integrated empirical findings on human cognitive capacities with theoretical insights about the dynamics of communication in political contexts to produce a set of necessary conditions for increasing civic competence. These conditions, and their implications for a wide range of competence-related proposals, are fully described in "Questioning Our Competence: Elitism, Deliberation, and the Science of What Citizens Know About Politics" a book that I will finish later this year. In this paper, I focus on three of these conditions.

I refer to the first necessary condition as The Battle for Attention and Working Memory. If one person wants to increase the competence of others by providing information to them, the target audience must pay attention to that information rather than all of the other stimuli that regularly compete for their attention. Physical attributes of working memory – the cognitive apparatus through which all incoming stimuli are initially processed – impose severe constraints for those who desire a target audience’s attention. In short, we cannot help but ignore almost all of the information that is presented to us. This fact is frequently overlooked in claims about how to improve civic competence. Advocates of many competence-inducing proposals falsely presume that these constraints will not apply to them. As a result, this battle is far harder to win than many civic competence advocates anticipate.

I refer to the second condition as The Battle for Elaboration and Long-Term Memory. In short, even if a piece of information is attended to, it can increase competence only if it is processed in a particular way. Increasing competence requires that new information produce a unique cognitive legacy in the target audience’s long-term memory. But not any legacy will do. The change in long-term memory must be one that corresponds in a particular way to the tasks for which greater competence is desired.

Several scientific research agendas, including clinical research on memory and experimental research on persuasion, clarify the mechanics of long-term memory changes. Among other things, this research shows that what people remember about a particular event or speech is often very different than what those who provide information might hope for. An implication of this work is that many people who write about or attempt to increase civic competence are far too overconfident in their ability to change another person’s long-term memory in ways that increase that person’s competence.

I refer to the third condition as The Battle at the Precipice of Choice. Even if a piece of information yields a unique cognitive legacy in long-term memory, it can increase competence only if the new information is acted upon later. Specifically, a person must decide to act on the new information rather than old information that may have worked well for them in the past. The persistence of status quo biases in decision-making is but one force that renders this battle more difficult to win than is commonly appreciated.

These necessary conditions, along with others described in my book but not here, reveal serious challenges for those who make broad and general claims about the benefits of endeavors such as civic education programs and deliberative mechanisms. They reveal that inattention to current and evolving social scientific knowledge about attention, memory, persuasion, and strategic communication is a recipe for failure and inefficiency.

In sum, the necessary conditions described in this paper yield engineering principles that can help others adapt to the challenges of civic education. It shows how greater attention to basic scientific principles can help people who want to increase civic competence use the generosity of donors and the hard work of well-intentioned citizens more effectively.