(In Gainesville, FL, en route to Orlando)–Yesterday, as I guest-taught a University of Florida class on “redefining citizenship,” several questions arose that I found interesting. Here are the questions, with answers that the students suggested (or that I have added myself):

1. A life of very active civic engagement and commitment is …

a. No better than any other life, as long as each life meets some basic ethical standards such as not violating just laws.

b. A good life, but no better than several other good lives, such as a life devoted to caring for family or creating art.

c. Equivalent to a good life. If you devote yourself to art or to God (for example), you are doing it for the good of the world, so you are civically engaged.

2. If you are a resident of the People’s Republic of China today …

a. You can be a good person and lead a good life, but you cannot be a good citizen, because that means exercising democratic rights and powers, which do not exist. You are not a citizen; you are a subject.

b. You can and should be a citizen of China as a democracy. Since China is not a democracy, you are a good citizen to the extent that you fight the current regime in favor of democracy.

c. Many people in China are good citizens. That means that they promote the common good by serving others, joining groups, fighting corruption, and supporting the Rule of Law.

Gainesville, FL–I am visiting the Bob Graham Center for Public Service at the University of Florida today. Senator Graham himself is a strong proponent of youth civic engagement and the author of a wonderfully practical book about how to organize a movement and influence the government: America, the Owner’s Manual: Making Government Work for You. I will have a chance to meet him today, before he and William Reilly, who co-chaired the Oil Spill Commission, conduct a public event on the causes and consequences of the Gulf oil disaster. The Graham Center is an important institution in the field of civic education and engagement, and I am looking forward to learning more about their work.

I think that in the Abrahamic faiths, guidance and inspiration come mainly from four sources:

• Scripture, understood as the written word of God, which may variously include the Pentateuch, the whole Hebrew Bible, both Christian testaments, or the Qur’an.
• A personal relationship with God, manifested in prayer and the inner voice of conscience.
• Tradition, understood as the ideas and actions of the historical community inspired by God.
• Religious institutions that provide guidance and doctrine today.

Almost all believers will acknowledge all four authorities, yet the weight that they give each one varies substantially. That variation is so important that I almost think one can classify denominations by how they weigh the four.

For example, the Reformation doctrine of sola scritura (by scripture alone) implies, first, that the Christian Old and New Testaments have a unique status as the perfect and complete word of God, and second, that one needs no other guidance. The Bible is not part of tradition: it is the sole basis of tradition. It is not produced by institutions: it creates them. It checks and inspires personal prayer. Hence the reading of scripture is the most important religious act.

In sharp contrast, Orthodox Christians believe that the Bible is one manifestation of the true (“orthodox”) religious tradition. The Bible is not fundamentally different from other fruits of tradition, such as the liturgy, the writings of the Fathers, the icons, and the shape and orientation of churches. St. Luke wrote the Gospel named after him, but he also painted the first portrait of Mary and Jesus, which is the model for subsequent icons. St. Basil was post-Biblical but he was inspired in the same way St. Luke was. The decision of a church synod is only valid if it is consistent with tradition and becomes traditional.

Meanwhile, Catholics take seriously the Bible, tradition, and personal devotion, but a defining characteristic of Catholicism is the belief that the institutionalized church (founded by Jesus and headed by St. Peter) is able to teach “magisterially,” changing tradition, reinterpreting scripture, and redirecting belief.

Near the fourth corner of the graph would be denominations like the Society of Friends, which strongly emphasize the personal, inner voice of prayer and conscience. Quakers pray collectively as well as individually, but any individual may be moved to speak. They read the Bible but also other works that are seen as inspired, including (at least nowadays) non-Christian writings.

These are all Christian examples, but I think a roughly similar analysis would work for Jews and Muslims.

I am one of several co-authors of a new report released on January 24 in Miami by the National Conference on Citizenship and its Florida and Minnesota partners. According to Tale of Two Cities: Civic Heath in Miami and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Miami is the least civically engaged major city in the country, and Minneapolis-St. Paul is the most engaged metropolitan area.

In both communities (as elsewhere in the United States), people with more education and income tend to engage more in civic affairs. But individuals in Minneapolis-St. Paul who are in the lowest income group are more likely to volunteer, attend public meetings, work with neighbors, participate in politics outside of elections, and participate in associations than are people in the wealthiest tier in Miami. An individual with a high school education in Minneapolis-St. Paul is about as likely to be engaged as an individual with a college education in Miami.

The report finds that the civic culture of Minneapolis-St. Paul is oriented toward enlisting and empowering diverse people–paid employees as well as volunteers–in the common work of shaping the area’s future without abandoning their own cultural backgrounds and values. This culture of civic empowerment generates a widespread sense of optimism that people can shape their common future. Those norms are less evident in the Miami area, which appears to be more balkanized and less reliant on citizens to create a common future. Our colleague Harry Boyte provides a historical and interpretive portrait of civic culture in the Twin Cities that should inspire similar strategies everywhere.

Justice Louis Brandeis is supposed to have said, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Whether or not Brandeis uttered these exact words, it is reasonable to fear that democratic participation is fruitless and frustrating whenever a small number of people control major employment and production decisions through direct ownership and influence government by literally paying for the decisions they like (though campaign finance contributions) and implicitly threatening to move their investments if they dislike policies.

In 2007, the wealthiest one percent of American households held 34.6 percent of the nation’s wealth. The assets of that top percentile consisted mainly of investments that gave them power over other people. Almost 90 percent of their assets took the form of non-home real estate (mainly business facilities and rental properties), business equity, stocks, and other securities—in other words, stakes in firms that employed their fellow citizens and made things. In contrast, typical families (those between the 20th and 80th percentiles) had sunk two thirds of their modest wealth in their own homes and were deeply in debt.

One could conclude that it is naïve to expect ordinary (not to mention poor) Americans to participate in the demanding ways that I advocate: attending meetings, forming groups, and influencing the government. If their participation threatens the economic interests of the rich, one would expect them to fail. It would appear that economic reform must precede political engagement.

A different version of the argument focuses not on the top one percent and their control of the “commanding heights” of the economic and political battlefields, but rather on the bottom 20 percent, who ostensibly cannot participate because they have more pressing and immediate needs than civic engagement. According to Abraham Maslow’s theory of a “hierarchy of needs,” people will not participate in politics until they have sufficient safety, welfare, and love. “When millions lack health insurance, live at or below the poverty level, face racism is their lives, it is no wonder there is disengagement.” [quoting David A. Shultz, “The Phenomenology of Democracy: Putnam, Pluralism, and Voluntary Associations,” Scott L. McLean, David Andrew Schultz, Manfred B. Steger (eds.), Social Capital: Critical Perspectives on Community and “Bowling Alone” (New York: New York University Press, 2002), p. 92.]

The difficulties that this analysis presents are severe. First, it is not clear how we can attain higher levels of economic equality unless lower-income people do engage politically, using their votes and other forms of influence to change policies in their own favor. Strategies that rely on some kind of political “vanguard” to look out for their interests have usually been disastrous, not only in the notorious case of state communism, but also in many machine-dominated American cities, where ostensibly progressive leaders who claim to represent the poor have become corrupt.

Even if our political system does pass redistributive legislation, the resulting spending will benefit lower-income people only to the degree that it funds programs that genuinely serve their needs. Programs are most effective and sensitive (and popular) when citizens engage with them, holding agencies accountable and contributing their own talents and energies. Thus, until there is more and better public participation in institutions, it is not clear that governments can promote equality. I would personally favor expanding certain tools of financial redistribution, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and Medicare. But such programs do not address inequality that emerges from gaps in literacy, nutrition, mental health, residential segregation, and neighborhood-level violence and crime. To address those causes of inequality, one needs effective programs, and such programs rely on active citizens as well as tax dollars.

Finally, it is difficult to use the open-ended, deliberative style of political engagement that I advocate if one is convinced than an essential goal is to reduce the share of wealth controlled by the top one percent of Americans. Many citizens do not share that goal. The General Social Survey regularly asks people to place their opinions on a scale between two statements: (1) “the government in Washington ought to reduce the income differences between the rich and the poor, perhaps by raising the taxes of wealthy families or by giving income assistance to the poor” and (2) “the government should not concern itself with reducing this income difference between the rich and the poor.” The mean answer is always slightly closer to the latter than the former, and between 10 and 20 percent of the sample consistently place themselves at the anti-redistributionist extreme of the spectrum. This is not evidence that Americans are overwhelmingly against modest amounts of additional redistribution. It is evidence that their opinions vary. The issue can be discussed, but to assume that more redistribution is needed is no way to invite all kinds of people to participate.

The dilemma that I have introduced here is real, but it can be overstated. The poorest 20 percent of Americans—not to mention the middle 50 percent—have considerable potential power in politics and the marketplace. They do not own very many securities, but they do make important discretionary decisions about where to live and work and which consumer goods to buy. They also have a lot of potential votes. They do not actually vote or join political organizations and movements at nearly the same rate as wealthier Americans, but that disparity isn’t inevitable.

Consider India, the world’s largest democracy, where “scheduled castes” are groups (including the traditional “Untouchables” or Dalit caste) that are recognized as subject to historic deprivation and discrimination. More than one third of scheduled caste members live below the Indian poverty rate, which is about eight US dollars per person per month. Nevertheless, in the national elections of 1996, voter turnout among the scheduled castes was 89.2 percent, and turnout among the upper castes was about three points lower than theirs. In the same year, the United States held a presidential election in which 58 percent of all adult citizens voted—31 points lower than the scheduled caste members in India. Even Americans who held college degrees (a privileged minority) voted at rates far below the scheduled castes.

Sometimes this kind of comparison is offered to chastise Americans. Why can’t we vote like Indians? Indeed, why do Americans choose to vote at lower rates than in all other democracies except (sometimes) Switzerland? I happen to think the voting is an ethical obligation, like many other forms of civic and political participation. But personal virtue does not explain enormous differences in participation by social class, by nation, and within the United States over time. (Almost three quarters of American men voted in 1900, even though most African American men were still blocked from voting.) Nor can moral exhortation raise the turnout rate or encourage other forms of civic and political participation. Structural factors, such as the competitiveness of elections, the issues that are open to debate, the functioning of parties, interest groups, and the mass media, and the prevailing political culture, affect the rate of participation.

We need to analyze the structural reasons for declining engagement in the United States and suggest reforms. In the present context, the point of invoking India is simply this: economics does not determine political participation. People who experience absolute deprivation and profound relative disadvantage sometimes vote at rates far above privileged Americans.

Voting is by no means the only form of civic engagement, but similar conclusions can be drawn regarding democratic participation in general. The proportion of people who say they take “local community action on issues like poverty, employment, housing, [and] racial equality” is higher in some poor countries, such as Bangladesh and Tanzania, than it is in rich countries such as Germany, Singapore, and the United States. The correlation between economic development and grassroots political participation is weak but negative at the global level. In a study of highly demanding and effective forms of grassroots political action, Gaventa and Barrett find successful examples no less common in poor countries, war-torn countries, and dictatorships than in peaceful and developed democracies. In the United States, voting and volunteering are strongly correlated with social class: wealthy people are the most likely to participate. But attending community meetings and working on local problems are different: rates of participation are almost the same for low-income people as for rich people.

Overall, I think we can conclude that economic disadvantage is not an insuperable barrier to participation. In fact, economic need can spur engagement and make it more common in poor and even undemocratic contexts than it is in affluent communities. Some of our most impressive and innovative civic movements have originated with our poorest and most oppressed people, starting with slaves in the 1800s. That does not mean that democratic participation is equitable in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century, nor that our major institutions allow equal participation. It does mean that we can begin by reforming our political institutions, confident that all Americans are capable of participating in a reform movement if we organize it well.