News > February 28, 2008

By Maya Yette | Staff writer

With the 2008 presidential elections fast approaching and the growing interest in the power of the youth vote, the results of the Democracy Fellows Project headed by two university professors are especially timely.

The project was a four year longitudinal study of college students and civic engagement headed by Katy Harriger, professor and chair of the political science department, and Jill McMillan, professor emerita of communication.

The project was developed with the encouragement of the Kettering Foundation, a research foundation in Dayton, Ohio that is interested in how to get the public more involved in policy decisions.

“People have become increasingly concerned about the political apathy of young people, especially college students, from whose ranks our future leaders are likely to come,” McMillan said.

“Recognizing that Kettering’s interest represented two prominent Wake Forest academic disciplines, political science and communication, they approached (us) with the question ‘What happens during the college years that causes young people to become politically active or alienated, and can that process be affected by learning and practicing a deliberative model of political talk and discussion?’”

The study was conducted at the university with 30 students who entered in the fall of 2001 and graduated in the spring of 2005.

“Some chosen were drawn to politics; some were not; and some were just interested and curious to help answer the question,” McMillan said.

After being chosen, these students were designated as Democracy Fellows, and they began a series of activities.

The first of these activities was first year seminar on Democracy and Deliberation.

The seminar focused on learning and practicing a civil way to approach political thinking and speaking.

The students participated in many activities, some of which included in-class deliberations on subjects such as race and public education and planning and executing a campus-wide deliberation on community at Wake Forest.

The activities also included extensive researching and conducting a community deliberation on the subject of urban sprawl in the greater Winston-Salem area.

Each year Harriger and McMillan gathered data on the Democracy Fellows’ developing political attitudes and compared them to a cohort group from their class.

Twenty five of the students completed the program.

“We learned that studying democratic theory related to issues of citizenship and learning how to deliberate did make a difference in students’ outlook about being engaged in politics and in their communities,” Harriger said.

“The students in the Democracy Fellows group were more involved in traditional political venues, more attuned to the responsibilities of citizenship, more analytical and critical of political processes, more confident in their ability to make a difference, and more inclined to speak of and think about the greater good rather than their particular self interest.”

“Besides developing more informed, well-tooled citizens, which was the central goal of hope for the study, students learned that good deliberative dialogue can even produce tangible results,” McMillan said.

Last summer the professors published the book Speaking of Politics: Preparing College Students for Democratic Citizenship through Deliberative Dialogue which details the findings of the study. Additionally as a part of the university’s strategic planning, an Institute of Public Engagement has been proposed.

There is discussion about the deliberative democracy model as a viable choice for a residential college.