One of the pleasures of the year is attending the annual meeting of the New England Political Science Association. This year I was discussant on a panel of undergraduate papers that covered research on the meaning of democracy through Tweets, civic engagement by college students, and unlocking the key to Maine’s moderate politics. The papers were stellar and these undergraduates have great futures.

Tyler Hadyniak of the University of Maine at Farmington explored the history of Maine moderates in the United States Senate. Maine was once the most Republican state in the country but recently has elected candidates from both parties and even Independents, like former Governor and current U.S. Senator Angus King. According to Hadyniak the key figure in Maine’s tradition of moderate senators is Senator Margaret Chase Smith. First elected in 1948, only two years later Senator Smith took to the floor to deliver her “Declaration of Conscience” speech in which she took on the immoral tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy in slandering Truman administration officials as communists. It was a time when very few in Washington would stand up to the Wisconsin bully. Current Republican Senator Susan Collins continues in the moderate path of Smith, William Cohen, George Mitchell, and others. Collins was rated the least conservative Republican senator, and she has been the most independent member of the Senate in voting record according to Hadyniak's research.

Jacob Miller attends the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. His research is grounded in findings that Millennials are engaged in civic life but not in political activism, which they regard as dirty, corrupt, and ineffective. Miller conducted an email survey of 1700 UMass Dartmouth undergraduates asking what kinds of civic or political activities they had engaged in the past year. In contrast to some other scholars, Miller did not find that there was a tradeoff in activism among UMD undergrads. Instead, “Students who volunteer still engage in voting and protesting, while those who are engaged in political actions contact officials at comparable rates of those who are advocates. . . .  Millennials who do engage are likely to be completely civically engaged.” Miller is an optimist about young people: he thinks that looking at the totality of engagement can help reduce the negative outlook of some young people about politics and perhaps spur increased activism. He is commencing a new civic engagement campaign too. Miller is an important Millennial to watch.

Stephanie Chan, Timothy Marple, and Nelson Roland do their undergraduate work at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Their paper recognized a fact that somewhat stunned me – while there has been endless scholarly work on the meaning of democracy, there is almost no research on how the public defines democracy. Chan, Marple, and Roland had an interesting method to begin to fill this gap in the research – they analyzed over 400 Tweets using #democracy between October 31 and November 22, 2014. A follow-up pilot study was done in in two parts, asking respondents their definition of democracy in both closed end and open ended formats. Careful coding was undertaken and a final survey was conducted. Interestingly, the authors found no correlation between different demographic groups and traditional “expert” conceptions of democracy. There was however, a partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans in some of the components each group favored in defining democracy. The methodological sophistication of these researchers was evident but what was really impressive was their innovative manner in operationalizing their research concepts.

Each of these undergraduates should be proud of their work, and their faculty advisers should as well; the quality of the faculty contribution is evident in every page. Moreover, take note that all of these students are doing outstanding work at great public universities.