The Future of Democracy

Developing the Next Generation of American Citizens

Peter Levine

• Publisher: University Press of New England
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781611687880
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

We need young people to be civically engaged in order to define and address public problems. Their participation is important for democracy, for institutions such as schools, and for young people themselves, who are more likely to succeed in life if they are engaged in their communities. In The Future of Democracy, Peter Levine, scholar and practitioner, sounds the alarm: in recent years, young Americans have become dangerously less engaged. They are tolerant, patriotic, and idealistic, and some have invented such novel and impressive forms of civic engagement, as blogs, "buycott" movements, and transnational youth networks. But most lack the skills and opportunities they need to participate in politics or address public problems. Levine's timely manifesto clearly explains the causes, symptoms, and repercussions of this damaging trend, and, most importantly, the means whereby America can confront and reverse it. Levine demonstrates how to change young people's civic attitudes, skills, and knowledge and, equally importantly, to reform our institutions so that civic engagement is rewarding and effective. We must both prepare citizens for politics and improve politics for citizens.

CHAPTER 1

What Is Civic Engagement?

1.1 FROM LISTS TO A DEFINITION

The purpose of civic education (broadly defined) is to enhance the civic engagement of young people. “Civic engagement” is a very popular catchphrase in foundations, government agencies, schools, and universities around the English-speaking world. In many contexts, it has supplanted “participation” and “participatory democracy,” which were more common phrases in the 1960s and 1970s, when they acquired a politically radical edge. Many specialists in the field prefer the phrase “civic engagement” over “citizenship”—let alone “good citizenship”—finding those alternatives old-fashioned, primly moralistic, and limiting. (After all, not everyone holds legal citizenship in the country where she resides, yet everyone can participate in helpful ways.) Despite its popularity, however, “civic engagement” is very rarely defined with any conceptual clarity. Indeed, I suspect that its lack of definition, combined with its generally benign connotations, accounts for its popularity. It is a Rorschach blot within which anyone can find her own priorities.

While rarely defined in a coherent sentence or paragraph, “civic engagement” is often operationalized as a list of variables. For example, Scott Keeter and his colleagues designed a major national survey of civic engagement, using questions that emerged from focus group interviews.¹ CIRCLE replicated their study as our 2006 omnibus survey, which I cite frequently below.² Both polls measured nineteen core indicators, in three main categories:

•Indicators of community participation include measures of membership in various types of nonprofit voluntary associations (including religious groups); regular volunteering and fundraising; and “community problem-solving,” which is defined as a positive answer to the following question: “Have you ever worked together with someone or some group to solve a problem in the community where you live?”

•Indicators of political engagement include registering to vote, voting, and various activities that might influence other people’s votes, including volunteering for campaigns, displaying political stickers and signs, and giving money to parties and campaigns.

•Indicators of political voice include protesting, canvassing, signing petitions, contacting the mass media, contacting elected officials, boycotting products, and “buycotting” products or companies. (To “buycott” is to purchase “something because you like the social or political values of the company that produces it.”)

According to Keeter and his colleagues, you are civically engaged if you regularly perform several actions on this list of nineteen.³

There are arguments in favor of expanding or changing this list. Some scholars believe that relatively unusual forms of engagement should be included, even though they do not show up in focus groups and national surveys. These atypical civic behaviors include acts of civil disobedience, participation in transnational youth movements (such as the campaign against globalization), and Native Americans’ membership in tribal councils.⁴ Second, one could argue that some relatively common forms of service were overlooked in the survey designed by Keeter and colleagues: for instance, helping to raise younger siblings, or confronting friends and relatives who use racist or other immoral language. It is controversial whether these forms of behavior constitute “civic engagement.” Third, some scholars believe that following and understanding the news and public affairs is a form of engagement.⁵ (We could call this “mental” or “cognitive” civic engagement.)

Finally, most of the indicators measured by Keeter et al. are signs that people support and want to improve the regime in which they live. Those who are deeply critical of the status quo may prefer indicators of resistance and revolt, such as participation in violent protests, or the ordinary foot-dragging and noncompliance that is often the resort of poor people in response to coercion.⁶ For those who are hostile to the existing regime, a lack of engagement in school—as shown by truancy or evident boredom—could be a sign of political resistance, hence an indicator of civic engagement.

In short, there are arguments for expanding the list of nineteen indicators to twenty-five or thirty. Such arguments beg the question of what makes any indicator appropriate for the list. What is the underlying philosophy of civic engagement?

Two mechanical objects are said to be “engaged” if they are capable of affecting each other. Likewise, a person who is civically engaged somehow connects to the civic domain so that she can affect it. A distinguished committee of the American Political Science Association recently wrote, “For us, civic engagement includes any activity, individual or collective, devoted to influencing the collective life of the polity.”⁷ But what is the “collective life of the polity” or (as I had put it) the “civic domain”? It can’t be everything; otherwise, people would be able to say they were “civically engaged” if they merely participated in their own families or businesses.

Some analysts define the civic domain in sectoral terms, as the set of all institutions that are either part of the government or not-for-profit. On that definition, you are civically engaged if you work without pay (then you are a “volunteer”), if you influence the state (as an “advocate”), or if your paycheck comes from the government or a nonprofit organization (which makes you a “public servant”). This scheme is misleading. Newspapers are civic institutions, even though they are usually profit-making corporations that pay their reporters and editors. A hospital may be organized as a private enterprise, a public agency, or a not-for-profit institution: the difference does not necessarily matter to employees, patients, or members of the surrounding community. Grocery store owners who display fruits and vegetables outside their businesses at night contribute civically by making city streets safer and more attractive.⁸ When people boycott and “buycott,” they are said to be civically engaged even though they are consumers who attempt to influence firms.

Another way to define the civic domain is to say that it includes any venue in which people work together on public problems. That definition trades one difficult word for another. There is no consensus about what problems are legitimately public. Just because an issue is taken up by a legislature or a court, it does not follow that the matter is public: perhaps the government has reached illegitimately into private affairs. Conversely, the government might fail to address an issue that is genuinely public. Meanwhile, private firms take up public problems, for instance by providing jobs and goods that people need. Firms can also encourage collaboration and problem-solving among groups of their own employees and partners. Nevertheless, most theorists would not define routine business collaborations as “civic engagement.” Why not?

1.2 LEGITIMATE PUBLIC CONCERNS

I do not think there is any substitute for a theory that defines public concerns and problems in contrast to those of the private sphere and the market. We can then define “civic engagement” as behavior that addresses legitimate public matters. Unfortunately, no definition of public matters attracts consensus. However, discussing the limits of the public’s concerns is itself an important and perennial aspect of civic engagement, fundamental to the ongoing debates between left and right.

Liberals, conservatives, libertarians, left-radicals and others hold different views of the public’s interests, but they ask some of the same questions. One important question concerns the nature and welfare of the “commons.” Although this word has a collectivist ring (reminding some people of “communism”), people of all political stripes—including libertarians and anarchists—care about the commons; it is the definition that varies.

A commons consists of all the goods and resources that are not privately owned. The list of such resources varies depending on how a society is governed: it may include the atmosphere and oceans, the national defense, the overall plan of a city and its physical public spaces, the prevailing norms of cooperation in a society, the rule of law, civil rights and their enforcement, the store of accumulated scientific knowledge and cultural heritage, and even the Internet (understood as a whole structure, not broken down into its privately owned components).⁹

It is difficult or impossible to divide any of these resources among private owners. Things that cannot be divided cannot be traded. No one owns Shakespeare, traditional Southern cooking, national defense, the ozone layer, or freedom of speech. Because markets cannot generate or preserve such public goods, we rely instead on the state, nonprofit associations, or voluntary collaborations among firms, families, and individuals. Part of “civic engagement” is work that protects or enhances the commons. Again, we do not agree on which resources should be treated as common, but debating that question is itself an important part of civic engagement.

We can reach a similar conclusion from a different point of departure. Economists say that an “externality” occurs when some people conduct a voluntary exchange that affects other parties who never consented to their agreement. The externality is the effect on the third parties. It can be positive: for example, a new downtown store can benefit me even if I never shop or work there, by lowering crime, beautifying my city, providing jobs for my neighbors, contributing taxes, attracting visitors, and so on. In fact, many of the best things in life are positive externalities that arise as side effects of market transactions or as the public effects of people’s work in private, voluntary associations. An externality can also be negative, and the usual examples are environmental. For instance, smoke can blow from a factory into the lungs of people who never consented to receive it. Coarse or inconsiderate personal acts are also good examples of negative externalities: think of cases when A talks loudly to B on a cell phone, annoying C, D, and E who are sitting nearby.

Much of ethics consists of acting so that one’s externalities are as positive as possible. We can define the commons as the sum total of our externalities, the negative ones subtracted from the positive ones. Then civic engagement is work that improves the balance of externalities. People create positive externalities and mitigate negative ones by volunteering and by influencing the state.

This definition of “civic engagement” encompasses some aspects of life that we do not usually tag with that label. For example, fundamental research on cancer promises to provide basic knowledge, which is a public or common good of enormous value. Therefore, a cancer researcher is civically engaged, by my definition. To be sure, science is not identical to volunteering or political participation; it has its own standards, logic, and history. Some features of science can be observed in commercial laboratories that generate patented goods for the consumer market, not only in academic or government-sponsored research labs that tackle public problems. Nevertheless, I believe it is illuminating to recognize that science—along with medicine, art, law, teaching, religious ministry, and other professions—has a strong civic dimension. Licensing bodies limit entry to these professions to people who are trained and pledged to enhance the commons (regardless of how they are paid). Such professionals are supposed to address issues that a broader public has identified as important and to deliberate respectfully with laypeople, including the taxpayers and clients who fund their work. Some sociological theories of science invoke values that we expect of good citizens, such as the open sharing of knowledge, disinterestedness, and a willingness to examine hypotheses critically.¹⁰ Scott Peters finds that scientists in land-grant universities often enter their professions with explicitly civic goals—to work with communities to address common problems—and they are frustrated when they realize that other goals (such as generating commercial patents) have taken over.¹¹ More generally, Boyte finds “a strong and often painful sense of loss of public purpose” among senior scientists and researchers.¹²

Recognizing the civic potential of paid employment prevents us from equating civic engagement with volunteering, which narrows and even trivializes it. Civic engagement is “public work” (in Harry Boyte’s phrase): a serious business that ought to occur in families, workplaces, professions, and firms, not only in voluntary associations.

In emphasizing the commons, I have passed over another aspect of politics: efforts to distribute and redistribute private goods. When the state (at any level) taxes some and spends the money on others, it is redistributing. Likewise, when the state provides authors with copyright and inventors with patents, it influences the distribution of goods. When people give contributions of money or time or raise funds through such activities as charity walks (as 84 percent of Americans claim to do annually),¹³ they are also redistributing goods—albeit voluntarily and on a comparatively small scale.

Surely the pattern of distribution in a society is a public issue, a legitimate matter for debate. Civic engagement includes participation in that debate, whether from a libertarian, conservative, moderate, progressive, or socialist perspective. I began, however, with civic engagement that enhances the commons—not with struggles over distribution— because there is a tendency to overemphasize the latter. Harold D. Lass-well’s famous 1958 book was entitled Politics: Who Gets What, When, How.¹⁴ I would say that “who gets what” is a part of politics and a legitimate topic for engaged citizens. It is not the whole of politics. Another important aspect of politics is more creative; it involves citizens’ work in making public goods that benefit everyone.

There is also the question of who should be allowed to do what—the question that arises in debates about abortion, narcotics, pornography, and other controversial social issues. Again, to participate in these debates—from any ideological or philosophical perspective—is to be civically engaged. Around the same time that Lasswell was defining “politics” as a struggle over scarce resources, another classic book defined it as the “authoritative allocation of values.”¹⁵ It is important to note, however, that pressuring the state to regulate or deregulate private behavior is not the only way that citizens can change values. They can also build voluntary associations to promote their moral views in civil society, thereby contributing to and helping to shape the common culture.

In defining civic engagement, I have not invoked a contrast between self-interest and altruism. Civic engagement is behavior that influences public matters, which, in turn, include the commons, the distribution of private goods, and decisions about what actions to prohibit or promote. One can influence these matters altruistically, for instance, by trying to distribute more goods to people who are less fortunate than oneself. One can participate in one’s enlightened self-interest, trying to strengthen an overall system that protects one’s welfare. One can work for the narrow interests of one’s own group. Or one can act in one’s individual self-interest by, for example, trying to get more personal benefits from the government. We may admire altruistic engagement more than selfish advocacy, but they are both legitimate. Furthermore, self-interest sometimes motivates participation that helps the whole system. For example, justice will be better served if poor people vote in their own interests instead of staying home.

Although we should not exclude self-interested motivations, it is a mistake to assume that participation is always narrowly self-interested. History provides many dramatic examples of altruism and public-spiritedness, including heroic self-sacrifice. And on a daily basis, people frequently define their identities in ways ...