The November Fifth Coalition has just been launched as a collaboration among several major civic organizations (with others to be added to the website very soon). November Fifth is the day after the election. We mean to say that the campaign is not a competition that will end when the votes are cast; it is part of an ongoing process by which the whole American polity governs itself.

Unless we and others intervene effectively, the 2008 campaign will follow a sadly predictable script. Candidates will present themselves as the solution to our problems and will blame our current difficulties on rival politicians. Policy ideas will all be state-centered; candidates will argue for expanding, cutting, or reorganizing the government, as if the state were the only actor. The press will treat the campaign as a horse race, as if the most important question were: Who will win? Reporters will provide some stories about “issues,” but again, it will all be about the government.

Neither journalists on the campaign beat nor candidates will pay much attention to citizen-centered work, such as watershed restorations, land trusts, community planning exercises, charter schools, public arts projects, and service-learning. If they propose policies involving “citizenship,” these will be rather thin: for example, they may promise to increase the number of volunteers.

Citizen-centered work is increasingly robust, diverse, and sophisticated. It is addressing increasingly serious and large-scale issues, from global warming to the reconstruction of the Gulf. The November Fifth Coalition aims to draw public attention to this movement. Candidates should stop running as potential saviors and instead explain–concretely–how they will collaborate with responsible civic groups and movements to address our real problems.

At this moment, there is not a clear mechanism by which an individual can joint November Fifth. But please email me if you are interested and I will look for ways to include you.

I visited Penn State over the weekend to speak. A more interesting speaker than I was Laura McGann. She is now a professional reporter, but last year, as a journalism student, she broke the story that the US Department of Education had shared information about student loans with the FBI. Through a program code-named “Strikeback,” the Bureau searched for “anomalies” in loan applications that might indicate terrorist activities. As McGann tells the story, the government lied to her on several occasions to try to keep the program secret. As soon as she succeeded in proving that “Strikeback” existed, the government closed it down. Officials may have ended the program out of embarrassment, to avoid legal scrutiny–or possibly because it would do no good to analyze loan applications once Strikeback had been revealed.

McGann is a great example of a dogged, smart, courageous, “civically engaged” student who made a difference with her work. And I have grave misgivings about the secret program that she uncovered. Mixing law enforcement with education and financial aid should ring alarm bells.

However, all the people who asked questions or made comments after McGann’s talk treated “Strikeback” as a terrible scandal. I’m not quite so sure.

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Numerous nonprofit groups are involved in mobilizing people to vote–usually focusing on poor, young, or minority Americans, who are least likely to participate. Other organizations fight legal barriers to voting. Often their objectives are progressive: they seek greater political equality so that policies will be more just. I certainly share these objectives, but I argue that we must look beyond voting and also consider how people directly address problems at the local level. Working on PTAs, tenants’ associations, and community development corporations; restoring ecosystems; organizing anti-crime patrols; and maintaining community websites are examples of fundamental democratic work.

1) We need such local, participatory efforts to address our deepest problems in areas like education, crime, the environment, and economic development. Large governmental institutions cannot solve these problems unless there is also strong local participation.

For instance, Harvard professor Robert Putnam finds that the level of adult participation in communities correlates powerfully with high school graduation rates, SAT scores, and other indicators of educational success at the state level. “States where citizens meet, join, vote, and trust in unusual measure boast consistently higher educational performance than states where citizens are less engaged with civic and community life.” Putnam finds that such engagement is “by far” a bigger correlate of educational outcomes than is spending on education, teachers’ salaries, class size, or demographics. (Robert D. Putnam, “Community-Based Social Capital and Educational Performance,” in Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti, eds., Making Good Citizens: Education and Civil Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 69-72.)

2) There are big and widening gaps in local participation by social class. Therefore, anyone concerned about equity in our democracy must worry about participation in local community work, not just voting.

In the following graph, the dark blue line shows attendance at meetings for people with college degrees; the light blue line shows people without high school diplomas. The latter group is almost completely gone from civil society.

Put another way, half of the Americans who attend club meetings–and half of those who say they work on community projects–are college graduates today. Only 3 percent of these active citizens are high-school dropouts.

3) Voting isn’t attractive unless it emerges out of other forms of participation that give people information, confidence, motivation, and a feeling of connection to the community. People who vote are usually also members of groups and networks, community volunteers, and consumers of news media.

According to the 2000 National Election Study, there were strong positive correlations among reading the newspaper, volunteering, working on a community issue, contacting a public official; attending a community meeting; belonging to associations; and voting. To illustrate the relationships with an example: 42.4 percent of daily newspaper readers belonged to at least one association, compared to 19.4 percent of people who read no issues of a newspaper in a typical week.

4) Americans will not vote in favor of governmental programs, funded with their tax dollars, unless they believe that they can influence and collaborate with government institutions such as schools and the police. Therefore, progressives should be very eager to increase local participation.

5) There has been no consistent decline in turnout since the early 1970s. (The voting rate is always too low, but it rises and falls depending on the issues of the day and the performance of major politicians.) However, there has been a consistent decline in local problem-solving and collaboration.

6) Probably one reason for the decline in face-to-face, public work at the local level is the change in the nature of our organizations. Theda Skocpol argues that non-participatory groups are replacing participatory ones. The graph below reinforces her finding. The red line shows that membership in groups is modestly down, but attending a meeting has declined much more substantially. In other words, people still join associations, but the groups they join don’t involve meetings. That means that people have less voice in civil society.

7) Despite the decline in the proportion of people involved in local problem-solving and hands-on work, this sector is very innovative and has great potential for growth. We see all kinds of successful projects, ranging from community blogs to the “21st Century Town Meetings” recently conducted in New Orleans; from youth advisory commissions to whole urban neighborhoods that have been rebuilt by church groups.

For examples and case studies, see Cynthia Gibson, Citizens at the Center (Case Foundation White Paper, Carmen Sirianni and Lewis Friedland, The Civic Renewal Movement: Community Building and Democracy in the U.S (Dayton: Kettering Foundation Press, 2005), Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright, Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance, and Community-Wealth.org.

If the premises presented above make sense, they imply that we need more collaboration among voting rights groups, groups that mobilize citizens to vote, and groups that promote civic innovation and collaboration at the local level. We should devote attention not only to inequalities and barriers in the formal political system, but also to other trends that may cut citizens out of public life. Two examples are the professionalization of advocacy and the excessive deference given to expertise in areas such as education, the environment, and economic development.

Finally, we need to consider policy reforms that take seriously the capacity of citizens to address problems. These reforms should go beyond thin conceptions of citizenship such as we see with the national service programs (Americorps and the like). Examples are here.

I basically just write about civic engagement. My wife actually engages. She’s the “Laura” who appears in this front-page lead of a story in The (Washington, DC) Northwest Current. The article, by Ian Thoms, begins:

The mayor’s school takeover plan colored much of the discussion at last week’s District II school board forum in Cleveland Park, but it was the final question of the night that hit the issue right on the head.

John Eaton Elementary parent Laura Broach asked the question that had been lurking behind most of the night’s queries. Given the greatly reduced role of the board under the mayor’s seemingly soon-to-be-approved legislation, why do the candidates still want the job?

The pending legislation will take budget authority away from the school board and give it to the city council, while transferring day-to-day management to the mayor. The school board will be left to decide some matters of curriculum and standards. I don’t see a matter of high principle here, since the same electorate chooses all three bodies. It remains to be seen whether rearranging authority makes any difference at all; I doubt it will solve our system’s problems, which are very deep. Public participation is a big part of the solution, and the local school board forum was a good example.

Voices of Hope is a new book by Nan Kari and Nan Skelton. It looks very handsome in its published form, richly illustrated. I read it in typescript (with no photos) in order to produce the following blurb: “Voices of Hope is an essential contribution to the debate about public education in America. Its subject, the Jane Addams School for Democracy, does not belong to the government. It is not a nonprofit corporation. It does not grant diplomas or give grades. Yet, in a profound sense, it is a ‘public school,’ a model of what happens when Americans of all ages and backgrounds come together voluntarily to create knowledge, understanding, and power. The spirit of Hull House and the civil rights movement’s citizenship schools is still alive in Minnesota today and deserves our careful attention.”

I visited the Jane Addams School for Democracy in 2001 and returned with the goal of helping to do something similar in Maryland. (This post recalls my experience.)