Tufts’ current and former political science professors Jeffrey M. Berry, James M. Glaser and Deborah J. Schildkraut published their new book, “Everyday Democracy: Liberals, Conservatives, and Their Routine Political Lives,” on Tuesday.
According to Schildkraut, the book provides a positive yet realistic outlook on the American public.
“To put it simply, we conclude that things are both okay and not okay. … There are notes of optimism in our findings, but the country is clearly in a precarious situation,” Schildkraut read from the book.
The project began when close friends Berry and Glaser started collaborating on a series of articles about political behavior. They later recruited their former pupil, Professor Schildkraut (LA’95).
“Professor Schildkraut had actually been both of our students in the early ’90s. … She's become a very prominent political scientist and is also at Tufts. And so for round two, we brought her into the mix, and the three of us then worked together,” Glaser said. Glaser currently serves as provost of Santa Clara University after teaching at Tufts for 33 years.
Schildkraut explained that they enjoyed working on the initial paper so much that they continued to explore the topic together in subsequent articles.
“We kind of fell into the book,” Schildkraut said. “They invited me to help with an extension of [the article], and we had a lot of fun working together on that paper that we then decided, ‘What else could we work on that helps us think about similarities or differences between liberals and conservatives?’”
Berry commented on how the articles eventually developed into a full-length book.
“We kept writing articles, and they did have a commonality, which was ideology and how conservatives and liberals compared along different manifestations of political behavior … after we’ve done about a half dozen articles, we said, ‘We have enough here for a book.’”
The book analyzes patterns of everyday habits and ways of thinking among liberals and conservatives, as well as the health of American democracy. Rather than focusing on major political issues, the authors examine subtle, everyday differences between individuals and how they relate to political ideology.
Berry cited charitable giving as an example of an act shaped by political identity.
“People may not think of [charity] as political, but there's literature that says it is political … that people, based on whether they're liberal or conservative, [individuals] give more or less.”
Glaser added that the book’s primary aim was to explore the origins of the overarching ideas that shape American political life.
“There's a lot of great literature about elections and campaigns … [but] we became interested in the origins of the big ideas that people have about power and about information-seeking and about compromise and civility,” Glaser said. “The focus on ‘Everyday Democracy’ was an attempt to identify a sort of common origin for all of these ideas.”
“There's so much work out there on how liberals and conservatives differ on policy … different ideas about government intrusion, different ideas about law and order versus freedom and those sorts of things,” Schildkraut added. “But maybe there are things about these more day-to-day ways of thinking and acting politically that don't really align in an obvious way with the left-right dimension.”
Despite the partisan framework, Schildkraut highlighted her desire for compromise across the aisle.
“We don’t want people to feel like they’re alone. A lot of times, people feel like politics is so ideological and polarized and partisan, but we actually find a lot of people want compromise,” Schildkraut said.
“We should not think of people on the other side as enemies. There was appreciation for democratic behavior on both sides. Some things liberals were better at, more committed [to] democratic practices than conservatives, and then the opposite was true too,” Berry said.
The book concludes with a discussion of everyday habits individuals can adopt to make a political difference.
“There's a long list of recommendations of things that ordinary people can do without spending money that are small scale … that they can do by themselves,” Berry explained. “What I hope that people take away from the book, is not the complicated statistics [in] Chapters 2 through 6, but Chapter 7, where we have some prescriptions for what we think are building better ‘habits of the heart.’”
Schildkraut reflected on what it meant to work with Glaser and Berry, who had taught her when she was a student at Tufts.
“I will just say what a treat it was to work with my former professors on this book. And, actually, we dedicated the book to Tufts.” Schildkraut said.
Glaser elaborated on the decision to dedicate the book to the university.
“We've dedicated all our books to our wives and our children and our parents and [even] my grandmother,” he said. “We dedicated this book to [Tufts] University, not only because we'd spent so many years there, but because it had nourished us so much and had influenced us so much.”
