Scorching the Grass Roots?

Once upon a time, Dana R. Fisher knocked on doors to canvass for progressive issues. Now the sociologist is knocking the concept as bad for liberals and for democracy.

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By DAVID GLENN

They are fixtures of summertime in American cities and college towns: Every year, tens of thousands of college-age canvassers knock on strangers' doors on behalf of environmental or civil-rights organizations. They give an earnest 30-second pitch, ask for a small donation and a signature on a petition, and then head to the house next door.

Sixteen years ago, after completing her freshman year at Princeton University, Dana R. Fisher had such a summer job, and she loved it. Over time, however, she has reluctantly concluded that professionalized canvassing operations like the one she worked for in 1990 are poisonous to liberal social movements and unhealthy for American democracy as a whole.

Ms. Fisher, now an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University, lays out her critique in Activism, Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America, published this month by Stanford University Press. The book is based largely on field interviews that she conducted in the summer of 2003 with 115 young people who worked for one of the country's largest nonprofit canvass networks, which Ms. Fisher refers to by the pseudonym "the People's Project." The book also casts a skeptical eye on the Democratic National Committee's 2004 decision to outsource much of its fund raising and get-out-the-vote work to a for-profit company.

Because the American left relies so heavily on paid canvassers and has developed so few organically rooted local organizations, Ms. Fisher argues, it suffers in comparison with the neighborhood- and church-based groups that conservatives have built during the last 30 years. "Laying sod in the form of outsourced political workers and imported volunteers," she writes, "cannot compete with true grass-roots connections among like-minded neighbors."

The book has already found critics among scholars and canvassing veterans — as well as a threat of legal action from the group she studied.

"Everything is imperfect," says Heather Booth, a prominent veteran activist who once served as co-director of Citizen Action, an organization that developed an extensive canvassing network. "But I think that the canvass is one of the most important tools of direct voter contact that we have. ... To some extent, it helps people to stop bowling alone."

Ms. Booth and other critics — including a scholar whose institution financed Ms. Fisher's research and who wrote a blurb for her book, but has now reversed himself — suggest that she did not marshal enough evidence to prove her central propositions. But not all of the criticisms have been scholarly in nature.

In June attorneys for the organization Ms. Fisher calls "the People's Project" — which is actually the Fund for Public Interest Research — sent a certified letter to Ms. Fisher's department chairman and to members of the Stanford press's advisory board. The letter accused Ms. Fisher of deceiving the organization when she set up her research project, and also charged that she had taken insufficient steps to protect the group's anonymity.

Citing that promise of anonymity, Ms. Fisher has not confirmed to The Chronicle that the Fund was the organization she studied. But the group's identity can be deduced easily with a five-second Google search, since the book names the Fund's major clients, including the Sierra Club. Officials at the Fund also confirmed that they are the group described in the book. Throughout the summer, the Stanford press feared that the fund would file a lawsuit to prevent the book's publication; the Fund says it has no plans to take any legal action.

Ms. Fisher's book is not simply inside baseball for liberal activists. Her study touches on longstanding and highly contentious debates in sociology and political science: Has political and civic engagement declined in the United States, or has it simply changed? If civic engagement has in fact declined, has the decline been caused by the professionalization of nonprofit organizations or by the erosion of local political machines, or both? "The canvass is based around a formula that is quite dysfunctional," says Harry C. Boyte, co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and a leading critic of managerialism in the political world. "The canvass has weakened progressives' participation in a healthier kind of emerging civic politics."

Dialogue or Debacle?

Activism, Inc. was hatched five years ago, when Ms. Fisher was completing her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. One day she attended a visiting lecture by Mr. Boyte, who was once a champion of the canvassing strategies used by Citizen Action, the Public Interest Research Groups, and other liberal activist organizations. In 1986, Mr. Boyte, Ms. Booth, and the activist Steve Max wrote Citizen Action and the New American Populism (Temple University Press), which praised left-wing canvassing as "a vast dialogue with millions of Americans about particular issues and the broader possibility of democracy itself."

By 2001, however, Mr. Boyte had changed his tune. In the Madison lecture — a version of which later appeared in his 2004 book, Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life (University of Pennsylvania Press) — Mr. Boyte condemned canvassing organizations as rootless, bloodless operations that encouraged people to write checks but did not offer opportunities for authentic democratic participation.

Ms. Fisher thought that many elements of Mr. Boyte's argument rang true. She did some digging, and realized that there was very little empirical scholarship about canvassing or the groups that organize it. "Most people who study progressive politics and social movements," she says, "concentrate on volunteers, and don't look very carefully at the people who get paid to do this stuff." By the summer of 2003, she had lined up financing and permission to do fieldwork at six of the Fund for Public Interest Research's canvass sites across the country.

That organization, which liberal activists typically refer to simply as "the Fund," is one of the largest and most professionalized canvass networks. The Fund originally evolved as a means of supporting the canvasses run by various state-level Public Interest Research Groups, the environmentalist and student-rights campaigns that were founded in the 1970s by disciples of Ralph Nader. During the last decade, however, some of the country's largest liberal not-for-profit organizations, including the Sierra Club, Save the Children, and the Human Rights Campaign, have begun to outsource their own canvassing to the Fund.

So if, for example, two 20-year-olds in matching Sierra Club T-shirts rang your doorbell this summer, they were almost certainly employees of the Fund rather than of the Sierra Club itself. Such canvasses today typically include a brief pitch about a current legislative battle — say, the argument about drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — and a request for a small contribution, in the $20 range. In narrow terms, these canvasses usually barely break even; the real financial value to the Sierra Club and other groups is that the canvass generates lists of sympathetic donors who can later be hit up for larger gifts by telephone or mail.

During her fieldwork in 2003, Ms. Fisher found many canvassers who were enthusiastic about their jobs. One canvasser in San Diego said she felt proud that she was having more face-to-face conversations with ordinary citizens than most elected officials ever manage to do.

Others, however, also shared feelings of deep frustration. Some said that their wages seemed too low and that they hadn't been adequately warned about the complexities of the Fund's quota system. Others said that their canvassing pitches — and the organization as a whole — felt too scripted. Some complained about the petty anxieties of the job, including having doors slammed in their faces 10 times a day. (In January, LA Weekly reported allegations that the Fund had quashed union organizing among its canvassers by shuttering two of its Los Angeles campaign offices.)

Ms. Fisher fears that many of the thousands of young activists who take canvassing jobs every year find the experience so disheartening that they give up on liberal politics altogether. Her conservative students, she says, have a much easier time finding worthwhile paid political work than do their liberal counterparts.

"Young people are being chewed up and spit out," she writes in Activism, Inc., "by this standardized model of activism that treats idealistic young people as interchangeable cogs in the machine of grass-roots politics in America."

Ripostes and Retractions

But Ms. Fisher does not offer enough evidence to allow the reader to evaluate that claim, according to Ed Johnson, the Fund's national canvass director.

"She uses this pool of 115 canvassers," he says. "But if you really wanted to assess the effect of the canvass, you'd need to have a control group of young people who became engaged with progressive politics through some different avenue."

A similar objection is offered by Peter Levine, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, which is based at the University of Maryland at College Park's School of Public Policy. Mr. Levine's center financed Ms. Fisher's field research, and in a blurb on the book's opening pages, he writes, "Unless we take seriously the rigorous evidence and acute arguments of Activism, Inc., the future looks grim."

In comments on his blog and in an interview with The Chronicle, however, Mr. Levine largely retracts that praise. "I very much share Dana Fisher's general view of American politics," he says. But he says that he now regrets endorsing Ms. Fisher's criticisms of the Fund because he knows very little about the canvassing world himself. "Even if we take the general view of modern politics as being too Manichaean and too one-way," he says, "that doesn't mean that the Fund is the problem. I'm not sure that the book really makes that case."

Ms. Fisher replies that her book was designed as a detailed ethnographic study of a single organization. "This is a story about the cohort of canvassers at the People's Project in 2003," she says. "And my group of 115 is a much larger sample than you'll usually see in studies of this type."

The second half of Ms. Fisher's book examines the role that professional canvassers played in the 2004 election. That year, the Democratic National Committee and various liberal coalitions hired Grassroots Campaigns Inc. — a for-profit firm that was recently founded by veterans of the Fund — to conduct membership and get-out-the-vote canvasses. Ms. Fisher argues that Republicans and conservative social movements have been more effective at winning elections and setting policy than the left because they are better grounded in churches and neighborhoods, whereas many Democratic activists in closely fought states like Ohio had parachuted in from New York and other liberal states.

'Not About Money'

Some scholars and activists have argued that Democrats and the left lack any natural equivalent to conservatives' church networks, and that paid canvassing is therefore the least-bad option left open to them. But Ms. Fisher rejects that argument. "I would call that a cop-out," she says. "In the 1980s, when the Christian Coalition started to develop its network, everyone thought they were crazy. ... It took them until the 2000 election before that strategy really yielded fruit. ... There's no reason why that couldn't happen on the left, but the Democratic Party would need to be willing to invest in a long-term project. A lot of the people whom I spoke with in D.C. in 2005 told me that they realize now that it's not about money. It's about time."

But other scholars say that the 2004 Democratic canvassing was more successful than Ms. Fisher allows, and they believe that the party is unlikely to abandon the strategy. "I don't disagree with the basic premise that local volunteers are effective," says Donald P. Green, a professor of political science at Yale University. But Mr. Green believes that the Democrats' paid efforts in 2004 also worked.

"You can look at the 2004 election as being very similar to 1988," says Mr. Green, who has led several empirical studies of the effectiveness of various campaign tactics. "In both cases you have a Massachusetts liberal running, with difficulty, in a national contest. But Kerry does fantastically well, considering those handicaps. And you could say, If not for his remarkable get-out-the-vote effort — really his allies' get-out-the-vote effort — he would have finished as badly as Dukakis did."

Ms. Fisher replies that Mr. Green is probably correct, if we are looking at 2004 through a narrow lens. "My point," she says, "is that the Republicans were able to do their get-out-the-vote work with much less money, and with fewer paid staff on the ground."

And the Republicans' local volunteer networks are valuable, Ms. Fisher adds, in ways that go beyond simply winning elections. She concedes that the Republicans' model "is not the Valhalla of civic engagement," but says it is closer to the type of healthy and diverse civic activity that Mr. Boyte celebrates in his current research.

But it is at this point, according to some critics, that Ms. Fisher and Mr. Boyte's arguments become vaguely circular. Are they condemning professional canvass networks simply because they do not embody the idiosyncratic style of high-minded communitarian politics that they admire? "I think the primary purpose of interest groups is not to promote civic virtue," says Jeffrey M. Berry, a professor of political science at Tufts University who has studied political mobilization. "Their purpose is to advance the interests of their members. It's naïve to expect them to adopt some new frame."

Ms. Booth, too, says that she is frustrated by Ms. Fisher's arguments about rooted volunteer networks. "I mean — rooted, not rooted," Ms. Booth says. "Was Ralph Nader rooted? But we have safer cars because of his work. ... This question of authenticity, rootedness — all of those things are very good, and more power to anyone who's building up organizing that is based in those dynamics. But other kinds of organizing are also valuable. We have to accept that many kinds of citizens can be engaged in many different ways."

Leveled Threats

Ms. Fisher uses high-octane rhetoric in her book — no reader should expect a book with the word "strangling" in its subtitle to be a dry academic tome — and the contretemps between the Fund and herself has made the debate even more heated. As far as Ms. Fisher is concerned, the June letter from the Fund's lawyers was an act of bullying by an organization that is uncomfortable with public criticism. "The letter was extremely threatening," she says. "It was certainly meant to intimidate me. There was a discussion within my department about whether I should consider pulling the book."

At least one canvassing veteran says that the Fund acted wrongly when it made its vague legal threats to Ms. Fisher and her publisher. "They're making a big mistake if they react with hostility," says Ralph Nader, who in the 1970s was among the major founders of the state-level Public Interest Research Groups. "They're likely to say that she went in there under false pretenses, and this, that, and the other thing. ... What they don't realize is that after 25 years of losses, they need to start doing something better. They need to take this in a constructive spirit and start thinking about ways they can do their work better."

But Mr. Johnson, of the Fund, says he finds Ms. Fisher's book to be so weakly argued that he cannot imagine taking useful lessons from it. (The Fund is now circulating a seven-page analysis of the book by Woody Holton, an associate professor of history at the University of Richmond who once worked for environmental canvassing organizations. Mr. Holton argues that Ms. Fisher misinterpreted the evidence available to her and cites several instances of what he describes as "illogic and self-contradiction.")

Mr. Johnson adds that the organization felt ambushed — he says that they had had no idea that Ms. Fisher had turned her research into a book, though both sides confirm that their agreement allowed Ms. Fisher to publish her results in any peer-reviewed venue — and that the letter was a natural response to a scholar who had acted in bad faith. "Our lawyers were alarmed by the description on the Stanford Web site," including the book's provocative title, he says. "If nothing else, the book violated the spirit of our agreement in 2003. So they sent a letter noting that we had those legal concerns, which I think is not unreasonable." Mr. Johnson added that the Fund has no plans to pursue a lawsuit. (Both Ms. Fisher and Mr. Johnson declined to share the text of the 2003 research agreement with The Chronicle.)

Ms. Fisher, in any case, is not backing down. In early September, she appeared on a call-in show on Wisconsin Public Radio. "Every single person who called in had been a canvasser," she says. "And all but one of them were not only supportive of my perspective, but were really damning about their experiences. There was a lot of bitterness. ... That was just one more piece of support for the fact that this is a serious problem."