What is strategic capacity and how can it help achieve 100% student voter participation?

Why strategic coalitions are especially important in the face of political uncertainty.

As student voter engagement efforts ramp up for a critical election season at a time of political uncertainty, it is more important now than ever that campus leaders understand how to build powerful coalitions that can adapt to the changing needs of the moment. 

While all campuses want to build strong leadership to support their work, what makes some more effective than others at achieving their voter engagement goals? In politically uncertain situations, it’s not just about having a great plan to achieve your campus goals, but it’s also about having the strategic capacity to adapt to the needs of the moment on campus. 

What is strategic capacity?

Dr. Kristine Lu presents findings on strategic capacity in nonpartisan student voting coalitions at the SLSV Coalition’s 2023 National Student Vote Summit

To illustrate this challenge, let’s look at a major source of political uncertainty that campus leaders have directly grappled with in trying to construct effective action plans: Across the country, millions of Americans are now confronted with rapidly expanding Voter ID laws, including strict voter ID laws that prohibit citizens from casting a ballot without producing a photo ID that meets the state’s specifications. This means many out-of-state students and students without driver’s licenses on campuses may no longer have eligible IDs to vote. For campus leaders in these states, this means building the capacity to quickly and strategically adapt their action plans to account for this consequential change, including informing students about new stricter Voter ID laws and establishing ways for student voters lacking IDs to get compliant documents. 

In other words, things often don’t go as planned during times of political uncertainty. When this happens, campus groups need to be able to gather themselves, reassess, and strategically deploy resources to account for a new situation. We call this strategic capacity: the ability to take a challenge and build power in reckoning with it, as opposed to having a setback. 

At the P3 Lab at Johns Hopkins SNF Agora Institute, our research teams work in partnership with organizations facing strategic power-building challenges to rigorously understand what strategic capacity looks like and how coalitions can build it to achieve ambitious goals in the face of political uncertainty. 

Building strategic capacity requires learning and resource adaptability

What are some concrete ways that our research suggests can support campus groups in building their strategic capacity?

First, working in diverse, complex coalitions like the Students Learn Students Vote (SLSV) Coalition provides important conditions for strengthening strategic capacity. That’s because coalitions provide important conditions for organizations to learn. The collaborations they foster allow organizations to diversify their knowledge by absorbing that of others – even when mutual learning is not an explicit goal of organizations involved in a collaboration. For example, research shows that knowledge about tactics can diffuse between organizations simply from co-engaging in actions. This learning provides organizations greater flexibility to respond to changing circumstances. Having diverse knowledge and skills provides coalitions both with more resources for achieving their goals in uncertain conditions and the flexibility to adapt those resources as conditions shift. These characteristics—learning and resource adaptability—are the two key components of strategic capacity, as demonstrated by our research.

What are learning capabilities and how can organizations foster them?

For organizations, learning refers to an organization’s ability to recognize, make judgments about, and apply new learnings to a changing situation. When working in coalitions, organizations have different specialties and strengths, which translates into partners being able to diversify their knowledge and tactics. For example, a campus group working with SLSV partners like VoteRiders and Fair Elections Center has access to their deep expertise about additional ideas and strategies for ensuring students can vote despite changes to Voter ID laws. How said campus group analyzes and applies this knowledge and expertise is a measure of their learning capability.

What does it mean for organizations to adapt their resources in changing political situations? And how might collaborating in diverse coalitions help?

Resource adaptability is an organization’s ability to acquire, mobilize, and most importantly, re-organize resources to adapt to challenges and opportunities. This could look like campus voting groups grappling with changing Voter ID laws by reassessing what resources they currently have access to—such as people currently on their leadership committee and what additional organizations they might have access to and be able to inform about the change in Voter ID laws. Taking part in diverse coalitions strengthens and expands the resources you have access to. For example, campus leaders could work with SLSV coalition partners like VoteRiders that offer direct assistance, including arranging and paying for transportation to their local ID-issuing office, to expand the resources available to students.

What does strategic capacity look like in the SLSV coalition?

Strategic capacity, while not straightforward to achieve, is especially important for the student vote movement because it is one that’s inherently susceptible to political uncertainty. These uncertainties can make it such that some campus groups are more or less effective at achieving their voter engagement goals.

To examine strategic capacity within the SLSV network, we partnered with the SLSV Coalition and partners at the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge and Campus Vote Project to conduct preliminary research to see what strategic capacity looks like in campus action plans. In the preliminary stage of the project, our research focused on deducing hints about strategic capacity from the campus action plans. 

The overall project was dedicated to analyzing the campus plans to find any patterns that helped us understand why some campuses were considered higher performing than other campuses at reaching their action planning goals. Using topic modeling tools, we found that in campus action plans evaluated as having high strategic capacity, two factors emerged as being important in differentiating, both of which are crucial organizational choices for supporting the organizational learning that is so important for building strategic capacity:

Accountability and governance are key to building strategic capacity in action planning. 

First, campus action plans evaluated as having high strategic capacity were more likely to mention topics related to building clear lines of accountability within the organization. When organizations build clear lines of accountability, leaders are responsive to their base and tend to be more focused on building a culture of commitment by centering the community and needs of the constituency. This means that these campus action plans were more likely to mention topics related to responsibilities.

Second, these campus action plans were more likely to mention governance topics. An organization’s governance structure refers to the way organizations make internal decisions, especially who and how many people are meaningfully involved in those decisions. Within campuses that were rated highly in terms of governance, a few clear patterns emerged: 

• These campus action plans indicated that they all had some kind of coalitional leadership structure that brought different constituencies together—students, staff, faculty, local community members, etc. For example, one campus rated highly in governance included a leadership committee that included city officials, members of the student government and representatives from the athletics department. 

• Their work was often nested in “federated structures of commitment”: student groups nested within the coalition, nested within an institutional commitment to foster student nonpartisan democratic engagement, sometimes nested within partnerships with the community.

• These plans included reflections about their leadership structure, so that the work was not just focused on tactics of democratic engagement, but on creating a leadership structure that would become the beating heart of a culture of commitment to voting overall. For example, one plan specifically mentioned inclusion of a succession plan that consisted of recruiting and training new faculty, staff and student leaders at the end of the year.

Within campuses that were not rated highly on either governance or accountability, a couple of patterns also emerged:

• Even if they had student representatives on a committee, the work seemed to be much more staff driven, with students taking orders as opposed to exercising leadership

• The leadership committees themselves tended to be smaller and less coalitional. 

• The overall work seemed more tactical and focused on GOTV strategies in the short term.

The upshot: Building Strategic Capacity in the SLSV Coalition

These have important implications for how SLSV partners might think about nurturing cultures of good governance and accountability mechanisms.

For campus groups, one implication could be standardizing action plan templates that include scaffolds for thinking about governance and accountability—for example, questions about “what constituency groups are included in the campus GOTV committee?” and “what decision-making processes and structures are used to make decisions about strategy?”

Specifically, to improve governance structures, ask: Who is involved in decision making? What systems and processes are encouraging people to become authentic partners in this process? For example, this could look like convening strategy meetings with a broad range of campus constituencies involved in the student vote movement, from student leaders to campus administrators to faculty, and deliberating together to choose a strategy all constituencies are committed to.  

When considering how to intentionally build clear lines of accountability, some key questions to ask include: From whom does the organization generate the material resources it needs, and are there mechanisms for developing a culture of shared commitment that holds leaders accountable? For example, having clear lines of accountability would mean campus leaders communicating to campus administrators that those administrators, in turn, have important responsibilities to their students and should commit material resources to ensuring their students are able to get proper identification to vote.

Across our work with diverse coalitions of organizations building power across many contexts, strategic capacity repeatedly emerges as a differentiating factor for organizations and coalitions that successfully move through changing political terrain and emerge on the other side with more power to advance their goals. As we head into a crucial election season with countless political uncertainties, understanding and investing in practices that build campus groups’ strategic capacity is more important than ever. For concrete next steps for further building strategic capacity on your campuses, please check out our self-assessment guide designed for teams and organizations to build a shared understanding of what this looks like in your specific context.

Kristine Lu is a postdoctoral research fellow with the P3 Lab at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and earned her Ph.D. in Learning Sciences at Northwestern University.