Date: Monday, November 19, 2018
Time: 11:30 AM – 2:00 PM, Lunch Event
 
Venue: The Inn on Broadway
26 Broadway
Rochester, NY 14607
Phone: (585) 232-3595

$24 per person

Title of Feature Talk: Did Political Engagement Surge in 2018?
    
Abstract of Talk:
News stories routinely argue that Trump’s election produced massive increases in civic engagement. One article in the Washington Post, for example, wrote that since 2016 we’ve seen one of the “greatest surges of American citizen action in half a century.” Although the evidence for this claim might seem obvious along certain metrics — the women’s march, the many resistance groups, all of the new people running for office — along other metrics (including turnout in many elections in 2017 and earlier in 2018) we’ve seen little evidence of a surge. In this talk I’ll use the 2018 November election results as a launchpad for further evaluating this claim. Did we see evidence of a turnout surge, above and beyond what we would expect for a midterm election? And, more generally, why do people become active in politics and why do they refrain from doing so? Are there implications we can draw as we look ahead to 2020?
    
Biography:
Adam Seth Levine is an Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University. He studies activism and civic leadership, including how organizations and campaigns build powerful messages and relationships to achieve their goals. He is the author of several papers as well as a book entitled American Insecurity: Why Our Economic Fears Lead to Political Inaction, published by Princeton University Press in 2015. That book won a 2016 best book award from the American Political Science Association. He is also the president and co-founder of research4impact, a nonprofit founded in 2017 that connects research and practice to answer important questions. As “chief matchmaker” of research4impact he applies findings from his own and others’ research on the psychology of relationship-building in order to create meaningful, impactful relationships between researchers and practitioners.
    
Register on-line now!  Reservations close Wednesday, November 14, at the end of the day. Sorry, we cannot commit to having lunch available for unregistered walk-ins the day of the event.

For event questions, please contact Matthew O’Connor at oconnormatthew1@gmail.com.

For event registration questions, please contact Donna Carl at dc37@cornell.edu.