Mining Political Data, Rebuilding Democracy: Professor Lindsey Cormack

It's early summer 2024. Election season is starting to perk up, but it's not yet white-hot; November is six months away. Stevens political science professor Lindsey Cormack decides to take a vacation. No phone, no email, a week with her family. She figures things will probably stay quiet a few days.

No such luck.

The day before she departs, U.S. President Joe Biden participates in a pivotal debate with former president Trump. The date before she returns, there's an assassination attempt on Trump. The following week, Biden drops a bombshell: He won't seek re-election after all, throwing his support to Vice President Kamala Harris.

In between, national media have churned the speculation, conspiracy and election-handicapping waters to a near-froth.

“Never a dull moment,” laughs Cormack, a leader in the university’s Political Science program and a regular speed-dial for regional and national media needing instant political insight. "Politics can be that way."

But behind all the big headlines and palace intrigue, there's also plenty of hard work happening daily to keep the wheels of American democracy humming.

And Cormack's determined to get us to pay more attention to that daily work — as well as our own roles as empowered, engaged citizens and parents.

From Kansas to Washington, fascinated by people

Originally from Kansas, Cormack became interested in the political yellow brick road at a fairly early age.

"I had a wonderful mentor, Ken Thomas, who was a football coach and government teacher in my high school," she recalls. "I later found out that his dual role wasn't unique. In multiple interviews with high-school government teachers, I heard the joke that you always know who teaches that class, because his name is always 'Coach.' "

Later, attending the University of Kansas, Cormack decided to major in political science — which turned out to be the perfect choice.

“Some people are fascinated by travel, nature. That's fine. I'm intensely fascinated by people,” she says. "And politics is a science of people."

During master’s and doctoral studies at New York University, she worked for then-New York Governor David Paterson and came up with an idea she felt certain someone else was already doing.

That idea was DCinbox, an automated process to collect and publicly archive constituent-bound email communications from every sitting U.S. Congressperson and Senator — hundreds of thousands of carefully crafted messages.

“I had just assumed someone was already doing it, but guess what? To my surprise, nobody was,” she remembers. "I figured it would be easy to write a script that collected and created a digital archive of all those digital Congressional email communications."

Reality check: it wasn't easy at all. (The political Internet wasn't too fully developed back then.) But with the help of two dedicated NYU research assistants, she eventually got it up and running, launching the site in 2009.

Since then, she and others have mined its growing dataset — now supported by a rotating team of four Stevens research assistants — for remarkable insights into U.S. politics.

One analysis Cormack performed revealed how the two parties are quite different in the ways they speak to constituents about veterans' issues. Republicans send more messages and include far more imagery, while Democrats tend to be more wordy... but also talk more directly about their actual legislative actions. The work was widely picked up and reported on by national media.

In a separate study, Cormack discovered members of Congress often attempt to shift their public stances when communicating with constituents, creating more moderate or extreme communications than their actual voting records reveal. In still another analysis, she learned women in Congress reveal and discuss their voting records in constituent communications more often than men do.

Researchers outside Stevens often access the unique dataset, too, analyzing such political phenomena as "blaming" behavior and communications with constituents during health emergencies.

"I'm proud of the resource it has become," she says.

Voting drives, shocking realization; new book

After joining Stevens in 2014, first as a visiting professor and then (a year later) as a junior faculty member, Cormack continued expanding her horizons.

She created a State Department-affiliated Diplomacy Lab to bring groups of undergraduate students to the Department to learn more about government; it was named a semifinalist in Harvard University's Innovations in American Government Awards Competition.

She co-founded a successful student voter-registration effort on campus that continues today. (About 75% of Stevens' students voted in 2020 elections, a huge jump from 2016's 51%, while registration has also soared to near 90%.)

She became a parent.

And she began noticing something curious in her classrooms.

"Over a few years' time, I got a sense that some incoming students were not being taught even the basics of democracy and American government," she recalls. "It was kind of shocking. I had always assumed our schools were delivering civics educations, but it seemed that wasn't the case."

A 2022 University of Pennsylvania survey had revealed that fewer than half of U.S. adults can correctly name the three branches of the federal government.

Now, as she dug into and conducted research nationwide, Cormack's gut impression was confirmed by data tracking K-12 civics coursework (on the decline) and advanced-placement testing of U.S. high-schoolers' government and politics knowledge. (Scores remain persistently low.)

"Many schools are no longer teaching, or barely teaching civics, for a number of reasons," she explains. "Sometimes it's the first thing to go in budget cuts. Sometimes it's local resistance, local politics. Sometimes schools and parents become more focused on college application and standardized-test preparation in their curricula."

When Cormack and a group of student researchers examined national civics requirements from state to state, they found wide variations. Most states only offer a semester, not a full year, of civics. Just 14 states mandate a civics course with a test to certify completion — but only four of those insist on students passing that test to complete the course successfully. Another 25 states and the District of Columbia mandate a civics course, but no testing.

That's a problem, she says, because a functioning democracy depends on informed and engaged citizens who understand their rights, vote regularly, run for office and work for change.

"This means, for the moment, that it falls upon the parent to close that civics gap."

Determined to do her part, Cormack took a sabbatical and wrote How to Raise a Citizen (And Why It's Up to You to Do It), just published by Jossey-Bass. It's a road map of sorts, gently encouraging parents to learn all they can about politics — then get their kids involved in the process as early as possible.

"There are plenty of actions we can take," she notes. "Taking children with you to the polls when you vote, to familiarize them with polling places and the process of voting. Teaching them to register when they become old enough. Keeping them aware of all the various local electoral calendars."

That last point is something Cormack particularly emphasizes in her writing and speaking.

"Many of the decisions that affect our day-to-day lives happen at the local level: school boards, mayors, town councils, state representatives and so forth, rather than at the federal level the national media continually focuses on," she points out.

"Those elections are vitally important. We all have the power to run for those offices and vote in those elections.

"Our kids need to know that."