As the world pays its tributes to the critically ailing former South African President Nelson Mandela, youth across Africa are stepping up their own tributes to Madiba in the form of civic service on Mandela Day. The United Nations and the African Union have called on citizens across Africa and the world to volunteer 67 minutes— representing the 67 years of Mandela’s public service—to community projects on his birthday, July 18.

The Africa Peace Service Corps (APSC) has launched volunteering projects in Nairobi, Kenya; Cape Town and rural Limpopo, South Africa; Lusaka, Zambia; Abuja, Nigeria; villages in Uganda and other countries.  Four hundred youths and 35 partners assembled last July at the United Nations conference in Nairobi to launch the Pan-African service project, spurring civic action in health, climate change, youth entrepreneurship and positive peace. 

A 2012 Brookings report, “Volunteering and Civic Service in Three African Regions,” released at the Nairobi conference and co-authored by three African scholars notes the benefits of volunteering (“Ubuntu”) in South, West and East Africa in addressing youth livelihoods, health and peace-building.  The report further documents policy recommendations and strategies linking youth service and entrepreneurship in addressing the daunting task of youth unemployment across the region.  Dr. Manu Chandaria  (Comcraft CEO and Global Peace Foundation Africa chairman) and Les Baillie (chairman of Kenya mobile phone giant Safaricom Foundation, which created Africa’s M-Pesa mobile banking microfinance success) have assembled corporate leaders to back APSC youth social enterprises in tree planting and waste management to generate green jobs and reach Kenya’s goal of ten percent tree coverage.

Nelson Mandela’s life of struggle and triumph, in particular his time and insights during his time unjustly incarcerated on Robben Island, provides a rich textbook for these young social entrepreneurs.  During my recent Harris Wofford Global Service Fellowship with the University of Cape Town Development Policy Research Unit (DPRU) and Cross Cultural Solutions, while teaching an entrepreneurship class in the townships I was able to see the teeming spirit of youth enterprise first-hand alive in the poorest communities.  A South African national assets demonstration has been launched this year to tap the power of service and entrepreneurship in generating savings among township youths from these deliberations with the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, Ford Foundation, University of Johannesburg Center for Social Development and Washington University Center for Social Development and Brookings’ Africa Growth Initiative partner DPRU, among others.

Along with addressing Mandela’s dream of ending poverty, a recent Brookings report, “Impacts of Malaria Interventions and their Potential Additional Humanitarian Benefits in Sub-Saharan Africa,” outlines the potential significant peace-building effects of service in sub-Saharan Africa by highlighting the joint efforts of the Muslim Sultan and Catholic Cardinal of Nigeria in tackling malaria along with those of the Africa Malaria Leaders Alliance with PEPFAR support.  The contributions of volunteering to both peace and development outcomes are further underscored in the draft of a United Nations post-2015 “sustainable development goals” report.

Amidst inevitable political debates over the Mandela legacy, his generous spirit and legacy of reconciliation rises high above Cape Town’s Table Mountain and across the Pan-African youth landscape.  The challenge of applying his vision and spiritual values in addressing poverty through emerging demonstrations of youth service, assets and entrepreneurship will test the commitment of Africa’s next generation of young freedom pioneers, guided by this humble giant’s profound legacy now spanning the globe.

Early voting has started in earnest in many states, marking a dramatic change in how Americans vote and how campaigns are run. Preliminary indications are that more people will cast their ballot prior to Election Day than in any campaign in the nation’s history.

Already, well over ten million people have cast their ballot for this November’s much-anticipated presidential election. This statistic is from just a few states and localities where these early voting numbers are available. In Georgia, for instance, more people have already voted early than voted early in all of the last presidential election.

These early numbers are startling, far outpacing what would be expected at this stage in the election. In the past, early voting starts as a trickle, with the spigot opening as the traditional Election Day approaches. These numbers could portend a higher level of early voting, higher overall turnout, or – most likely – both.

The apparent increase witnessed so far is part of the upward trend in early voting that has swept the country over the past two decades. In 1992, about 7 percent of all voters voted early; by 2004 that number exceeded 20 percent. The increase arises among states that have enacted early voting policies permitting people to vote absentee for any reason, to automatically receive an absentee ballot by mail or to vote at special early voting polling place in a high-traffic location.

Those who vote early have changed over the past 20 years. People who vote by traditional absentee ballot tend to be younger, single and highly educated; essentially students, military and professionals traveling on business.

Today, many people tend to be early voters, though early voters are on average older. This age disparity is consistent with the type of person who is motivated to vote early: a strong partisan who is certain of their vote.

Early voters obviously do not show up to vote on Election Day, which causes problems for exit pollsters stationed outside polling places. In 2004, the media’s national exit poll organization conducted phone surveys of early voters to supplement their Election Day polling. These surveys found that in all states – except Iowa – the early electorate was more Republican than the election day electorate, which is an expected pattern steeped in campaign folklore that a Democrat will win if they evenly split the early vote.

The deviating case of Iowa makes sense. In 2004, the Iowa Democratic Party conducted an intense early vote drive, a move that may have cost John Kerry the state since their Election Day ground game suffered.

We are seeing indications that Barack Obama’s campaign is successfully turning out their supporters in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, three states that provide demographic breakdowns of early voters. In Florida and North Carolina, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by two to one among early voters. In Georgia and North Carolina, African-Americans are a much greater share of the early electorate than of the overall 2004 electorate. What makes these numbers all the more impressive is not just their disparity towards Democrats, but that we would normally anticipate Democrats to lag behind Republicans at this stage in the game. Do not expect the well-financed Obama campaign to skimp on their Election Day mobilization efforts, either.

It is too soon to tell definitively if these early vote numbers represent a coming flood of early voting and Election Day turnout or if these represent pent up demand by enthusiastic Democrats finally able to cast their ballot. But that this question can even be asked is not encouraging for John McCain.

For McCain to win, he needs to turn the election around – now. The presidency is starting to slip from his grasp. Pre-election polling currently indicates Obama will hold all the states won by Kerry in 2004, plus Iowa and New Mexico. Obama wins the Electoral College if he wins Colorado, a state that he has had a small consistent lead in the polls throughout the year. More than 60 percent of Coloradans will cast their ballot early.

If McCain can not change the campaign dynamic, it will soon be too late for him to shift enough votes into his column to win. He may be able to take one of the states currently favoring Obama, but that will be an increasingly difficult task as ballots pile up in high-early vote battleground states like Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon and Washington.

It’s mid-October. Now is the time for an October surprise, before too many people can no longer be surprised.

View 2008 Early Voting Statistics »

Michael P. McDonald is an associate professor at George Mason University and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He calculates national turnout rates for academics and the media and he is co-editor of The Marketplace of Democracy: Electoral Competition in American Politics.

The Horatio Alger ideal of upward mobility has a strong grip on the American imagination (Reeves 2014). But recent years have seen growing concern about the distance between the rhetoric of opportunity and the reality of intergenerational mobility trends and patterns.

The related issues of equal opportunity, intergenerational mobility, and inequality have all risen up the agenda, for both scholars and policymakers. A growing literature suggests that the United States has fairly low rates of relative income mobility, by comparison to other countries, but also wide variation within the country. President Barack Obama has described the lack of upward mobility, along with income inequality, as “the defining challenge of our time.” Speaker Paul Ryan believes that “the engines of upward mobility have stalled.”

But political debates about equality of opportunity and social and economic mobility often provide as much heat as light. Vitally important questions of definition and motivation are often left unanswered. To what extent can “equality of opportunity” be read across from patterns of intergenerational mobility, which measure only outcomes? Is the main concern with absolute mobility (how people fare compared to their parents)—or with relative mobility (how people fare with regard to their peers)? Should the metric for mobility be earnings, income, education, well-being, or some other yardstick? Is the primary concern with upward mobility from the bottom, or with mobility across the spectrum?

In this paper, we discuss the normative and definitional questions that guide the selection of measures intended to capture “equality of opportunity”; briefly summarize the state of knowledge on intergenerational mobility in the United States; describe a new microsimulation model designed to examine the process of mobility—the Social Genome Model (SGM); and how it can be used to frame and measure the process, as well as some preliminary estimates of the simulated impact of policy interventions across different life stages on rates of mobility.

The three steps being taken in mobility research can be described as the what, the why, and the how. First, it is important to establish what the existing patterns and trends in mobility are. Second, to understand why they exist—in other words, to uncover and describe the “transmission mechanisms” between the outcomes of one generation and the next. Third, to consider how to weaken those mechanisms—or, put differently, how to break the cycles of advantage and disadvantage.

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