Donors and philanthropists should support organizations that carry out year-round civic engagement, leadership development, and capacity building in communities and within demographic groups that partisan campaigns often pass over, a group of University of California at Berkeley professors suggested in a new brief.
The brief, “Realizing a More Inclusive Electorate: Identity, Knowledge, Mobilization,”was produced by the Diversity and Democracy cluster at UC Berkeley. The brief pinpoints both young people, age 18-29, and many communities of color, as those who are often forgotten by partisan campaigns.
The brief summarizes important new research on public distrust of media, and its relationship to declining support for democracy and increasing hostility toward religious, national, and racial “others.” The professors also make a series of evidence-based recommendations on how researchers, pollsters, political donors, and public officials can make their work supportive of broader and more inclusive civic participation.
“If we are to work toward a voting electorate that more closely mirrors the country’s diverse citizenry, we must confront the ways the information we do or don’t collect—and the outreach we do or don’t fund—contributes to a cycle of exclusion and non-participation,” UC Berkeley said in releasing the brief.
Read the brief here.
