Research in Action: The Marquette Democracy Lab
By Amber Wichowsky
Two years ago, after many months of meetings, public discussions, and focus groups, and after administrators, faculty and staff several drafts, Marquette announced its new strategic plan: Beyond Boundaries — Setting Course for Marquette’s Future. Not surprisingly, it called for increased research, enhanced educational opportunities, and greater diversity — core objectives for any university. But the most compelling “strategic themes” called for the Marquette Community to commit themselves to “Research in Action” and to “Social Responsibility and Community Engagement.” These were rather unique goals to academics, and faculty sometimes struggled to understand how they applied to their own research.
Amber Wichowsky, Assistant Professor of Political Science, found a way. This is her account of her work with Marquette Democracy Lab.
This past summer, I launched Marquette Democracy Lab (MDL), a new research initiative to connect social science research to local public policy. The goal: identify policy interventions that can increase civic engagement and improve neighborhood well-being. The idea for MDL came about more than two years ago, following some discussion with other political scientists from around the country about how our research could better inform public policy. I joined Laboratories of Democracy, a new network of political scientists who collaborate with public officials and nonprofits to evaluate policies, programs, and practices using randomized control studies. In other words, we
experiment. We randomly assign some people to receive an intervention and compare their outcomes to those in a comparison group who did not receive it. Our collaborative field experiments provide a fair and rigorous test of program impact, and through our partnerships we hope to build a repository of evidence-based policy and practice. The name of the network draws inspiration from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who wrote in 1932:
It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system, that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.
Through MDL, Marquette is now part of this network that includes some of the country’s top universities: Duke, George Washington, University of Southern California, Washington University in St. Louis, among others.
However, MDL’s research priorities also fill a particular niche and draw heavily upon Marquette’s own mission. As noted in the University’s new strategic plan:
Marquette’s students, faculty, staff and alumni live out a deep commitment to serving others and promoting solidarity and the common good. As a Catholic and Jesuit university, Marquette has a special responsibility to contribute to needed solutions for urgent problems.
Our focus is to collaborate with local stakeholders (residents, nonprofits, other community-based organizations) to address two challenges facing the Milwaukee region. The first is the need to increase neighborhood civic capacity. Participation in civic life — from voting to contacting government to working with others to address collective action problems — is highly unequal; those with more resources are more likely to take advantage of opportunities to shape local policy. In my own research, I have found that such divides are even more pronounced in residentially segregated cities like Milwaukee, thereby contributing to a vicious cycle of social isolation and political marginalization. However, social scientists, including Robert Sampson who gave this year’s Boden Lecture at the Marquette Law School, have also shown that poorer neighborhoods with rich networks of community organizations and where residents share stronger perceptions collective efficacy are healthier, safer, and more resilient than similarly disadvantaged neighborhoods that lack these kinds of social ties and feelings of empowerment. But although civic capacity is vital to policy success, we know too little about how we can support community stakeholders’ efforts to increase it, particularly in places that have suffered from under-investment and public neglect. A second challenge is to direct scarce resources to policy interventions that have an impact. Although policymakers and funders want to see evidence of results, most local governments and nonprofits do not have the resources or expertise to conduct rigorous evaluations of their efforts.
In explaining what we do to others, I have found it best to use examples of our work to date.
Our first study started out as a pilot project in collaboration with the Harambee Great Neighborhood Initiative (HGNI). Like many neighborhoods around the country, Milwaukee’s Harambee neighborhood was hit hard by the foreclosure crisis. HGNI had received funding to help connect residents to housing resources, but wanted to know how they could use their funds most efficiently to increase resident engagement. And so, we randomly assigned residents to receive different types of community outreach (personalized mailings, door-to-door campaigns, flyers) and then tested which of their efforts did the most to boost participation at neighborhood housing resource events. We found that personalized mailings — particularly those that emphasized residents’ connections and contributions to the neighborhood — had the biggest impact. We also tested whether this outreach around housing issues increased engagement in other neighborhood activities — what we might call a “spillover effect.” In this case, we found little evidence of spillover, which has led to further discussions about how we might better organize residents around multiple issues.
Our second study took us into middle schools in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. For this study, we partnered with 13 schools (over 500 students) to test the effectiveness of a program (STEMhero) created by Marquette alum, Nathan Conroy. In this program, students gather data on water and energy consumption in their homes; use these authentic data in their science and math classes; and then engineer, test, and evaluate real-world solutions to conserve water and energy. As a political scientist, I was particularly interested in whether empowering students to act as “citizen scientists” would make them feel more efficacious about working with others to address environmental and community challenges. In this case, we randomly assigned schools to use STEMhero and surveyed all students enrolled in our study before and after the program to test STEMhero’s impact on student outcomes. We found that STEMhero increased students’ sense that they can address collective action problems and also boosted their interests in taking science and math classes in the future. We are now working with STEMhero to replicate and extend this study in another school district.
Most recently, we’ve worked with the Near West Side Partners on the PARC initiative. This is an effort to revitalize the Near West Side through collaborative efforts to promote economic development, improve housing, unify neighborhood identity and branding, and increase public safety. Program partners realize, however, that this initiative will fail without the sustained engagement and input from local residents. MDL is advising this initiative on resident engagement strategies, conducting community surveys, and evaluating targeted interventions to increase perceptions of collective efficacy.
To help make this all possible, MDL received seed funding from the Strategic Innovation Fund. These funds have allowed us to hire graduate and undergraduate research assistants and to pay for related research expenses. My goal is to use MDL’s studies to engage students in collaborative research that prepares them to be more active in civic life. Through our community partnerships, students apply knowledge and gain skills; community stakeholders learn what works and build relationships across and between sectors; and the research community benefits by conducting these studies and replicating them in a variety of contexts. Most critically, I hope MDL provides students with opportunities to live Marquette’s mission as we discover and share knowledge in order to serve others.
Amber Wichowsky is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University’s Center for the Study of American Politics. Her dissertation, The Competition Cure? The Consequences of Competitive Elections was awarded the Carl Albert Award for best dissertation in legislative studies by the American Political Science Association in 2011. Her scholarship focuses on voter turnout, campaign finance reform, legislative representation, presidential primaries, and the civic implications of public policy evaluation.
