Category Archives: civic theory

Review of We Are the Ones

(Urbana/Champaign, IL) I am here to talk to a public audience about the arguments of We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America. Meanwhile, I’d recommend Michael McQuarrie’s new review of my book (along with Ben Barber’s If Mayors Ran the World). It’s a good, thoughtful article. I appreciate his summary of my book and his partially critical response.

In the final chapter, I say that a movement for civic renewal should expect and welcome vibrant debate, and three likely topics of debate will be: whether economic reforms must precede political empowerment; the role of anger and conflict versus civility and consensus; and the ideological placement of the civic renewal movement (on the left, at the center, aiming for neutrality, or very broad). McQuarrie meets my hopes by staking out strong positions on exactly those issues.

He also reads me as taking the opposite position from him on some of these questions, when I was trying to be more neutral–considering both the pros and the cons and letting readers end where they like. Thus I would like to respond to certain portions of his review, not because they’re necessarily unfair, but as an opportunity to clarify my own views and engage the debate. For example:

The title of Levine’s book—We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For—is an inspiring call to action, and in this sense, at least, is similar to Alinsky’s Reveille for Radicals (1946). However, rather than arguing for the possibilities of popular power, Levine is more interested in establishing the potential of citizen engagement for policy. Much of the book seems oriented around questions like “What are the measurable effects of community engagement on school effectiveness?” Levine’s form betrays a shift within the civic renewal movement, as it gains a foothold in foundations, academia, and even the White House. In the process it is becoming more communitarian in its celebration of the values and morality of citizens, while de-emphasizing popular authority and political sense. In terms of practice, contemporary advocates of the civic renewal movement emphasize correct deliberative communication among citizens as a solvent for all manner of political differences. In contrast, many in this tradition from Tocqueville on argued that civic virtue could only thrive in settings of relative socioeconomic equality. Challenging elites with popular power and cries that they are economic parasites, once central to populist activism and discourse, have been trimmed away in Levine’s account to make room for the idea that inequality can be overcome through a more virtuous and deliberative politics.

I do collect evidence that civic engagement boosts social outcomes. That’s because I don’t believe that many citizens, let alone powerful institutional actors, are ready to support active citizenship unless they believe it pays off in terms of better schools, safer streets, or a healthier environment.

I am a hard-headed researcher, so I will only claim that civic engagement has such benefits if it really does. In fact, instrumental arguments will carry us only so far. Civic engagement may not always improve communities. It may generate desirable outcomes, but less cheaply and reliably than other strategies would. It may boost outcomes (like “school effectiveness”) that we trivialize when we try to quantify them, thereby erasing deeply contested value questions. And it may degenerate into mere social hygiene if it is viewed as a tool for social improvement rather than a right of democratic citizens and an aspect of the good life.

On the other hand, arguing for civic engagement as a right will not obtain funding, education, media coverage, or legal authorization for civic engagement. Instrumental arguments, if handled right, can be helpful. They are ammunition for a peaceful army of engaged citizens.

I would like to think that I am not a communitarian (celebrating “the values and morality of citizens, while de-emphasizing popular authority and political sense”) or merely a deliberative democrat (viewing “correct deliberative communication among citizens as a solvent for all manner of political differences”). I am certainly not a technocrat, and I offer a pretty sharp critique of expertise in chapter 4. With McQuarrie, I believe in power and conflict. Activist social movements must hold governments accountable. They will be–and should be–angry at the powers that be and at their fellow citizens who stand in their way. The strategies I recommend at the end of the book are aimed at bolstering their efforts. I do not for a moment count on policymakers to open doors willingly.

I do, however, reject the argument that “civic virtue [can] only thrive in settings of relative socioeconomic equality.” Effective activism is more common in Tanzania and India than in the US. It has often arisen from the poorest strata of American society, starting with slaves in the antebellum era.

The problem with putting economic equality first and expecting civic renewal to follow is that someone must then pursue economic equality without a popular following. Who will that be, why will the succeed, and why should we trust them if they do? Saul Alinsky was a great theorist, but his popular movements ended in disaster. I denounce the political influence of economic elites, because that is a valid critique and because political reform is required for civic empowerment. I would not personally denounce economic elites as economic parasites because I am not sure that is true, and I know it will divide a potentially broader coalition.

I wrote a book in the late 1990s about the Progressive Era (and actually discarded some detailed historical research I had done for reasons of length and coherence). Reflecting on that history, I would now say that some Progressive Era reforms were elitist and downright damaging. Others were populist and “civic,” in my terms (deliberative, collaborative, and relational). Robert M. La Follette, Jane Addams, and John Dewey were their paragons.

To the extent that these valuable reforms flourished, it was partly because economic radicals (Socialists and agrarian populists) challenged the government and capital. That made elites amenable to sharing some power. But the actual reforms enacted from 1900-1914 did not challenge economic inequality. Progressive reforms were indeed about reducing the political influence of money and increasing deliberative popular influence over government. Typically, the inventors and proponents of these civic reforms were not Socialists or populists. They had broader and more centrist coalitions, including many people who would have bristled at a depiction of the wealthy as parasites. The left movements may have won space for civic reforms, but the civic reforms had different origins and motivations.

Coming back to our present day: I would welcome more effective left-populist grassroots mobilizing on economic issues. I think it would change the balance of power in ways that would help civic reformers. But I think we also need a civic blueprint: a vision of how our democracy should look if we had the power to demand it. That’s what I hope to offer in We Are the Ones–along with strategies for civic reform and topics for the movement to debate. McQuarrie has joined the debate in a most welcome way.

political science and the public

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At the Midwest Political Science Association meeting over the weekend in Chicago, the distinguished political scientists Arthur Lupia, Jeffrey Isaac, Marc Lynch, Rogers M. Smith, and Lynn Vavreck discussed “Political Science and The Public: It’s Time for More Effective Engagement.” As the program promised, the panel was “about what we are, and can be, doing right now to increase the public relevance of political science.”

Lupia began the panel with a forceful argument that the problem is not with the public. People are overwhelmed with data and opinion; the competition for their attention is fierce. The problem is with us if we fail to communicate effectively. Several panelists noted that we now have many venues for doing so, and political scientists are using them. Lynch, for example, is one of the leaders of The Monkey Cage, the Washington Post’s blog for political scientists; Vavreck is often on TV.

Everyone acknowledged pitfalls and challenges. Writing for the public may not help get tenure; it takes time; and it can seduce you into trading scholarly rigor for public attention. I think the general view was that scientific expertise adds value to public debates. As Vavreck said, there is a difference between data and anecdotes. Political scientists should contribute reliable data (as well as sensitive readings of texts) and not abuse their professional standing by merely opining or making empirical claims outside their expertise. “Stay in your lane” and “Don’t write about the Red Sox” were suggestions made from the podium.

I see important truth in all of this and tried to address similar issues in my Knight Foundation/Aspen Institute White Paper on Civic Engagement and Community Information. But I think Isaac hinted at difficult issues regarding expertise. A simplistic fact/value distinction would encourage political scientists to write about facts for public audiences and leave the public to draw their own value distinctions. That would be a neat division of labor. Unfortunately …

Research programs are always deeply imbued with values. That’s easiest to see when one objects to the values. Plenty of critics have complained that neoclassical economics makes assumptions about social welfare, choice, individualism, etc. that should be controversial. But to say that a research program makes normative assumptions is not to undermine it. Good research programs have good values. For instance, I know and admire the work of Smith and Vavreck, each of whom (in different ways) helps to expand the exercise of political power in the US. That is a good thing to do. But political science, as a science, cannot tell us whether or why it is good.

Further, research is always aimed at some kind of audience and has effects on that audience, whether anticipated or not. Neoclassical economics gives corporate lobbyists arguments to use when they influence voters and policymakers. Sociological research on community organizing should assist community organizers. Choosing an audience is a political act. Expertise cannot distinguish whether that act is good or bad.

One way in which experts affect audiences is by influencing their sense of what is known, what is knowable, and who can know what. For instance, the Monkey Cage announces, “H.L. Mencken said ‘Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.’ Here at The Monkey Cage, we talk about political science research and use it to make some sense of the circus that is politics.” That implies that a person who knows political science can make more sense of the democratic system than someone who doesn’t. I don’t disagree, but the implications are complex. Should people who don’t know political science not participate in politics? In 1914, the APSA’s Committee of Seven argued that citizens “should learn humility in the face of expertise.” Nobody would say that now, but why not? If there is expertise, and some lack it, shouldn’t they be humble in its face?

In short, as Isaac said, there is not one political science and one American public. Fairly diverse political scientists hold a range of normative positions and use a range of tools to various ends; and Americans belong to whole set of competing publics. Asserting that political scientists should communicate facts to the public overlooks complex political and normative issues: Which political scientists? (And who gets to be one in the first place?) Which publics? What kinds of facts? To what end?

Political science, as an empirical research program, can contribute to addressing these meta-questions. For example, it can help us to know which forms of communication are likely to affect which audiences by changing their minds on the issue or by raising or lowering their estimation of their own capacity. But it cannot tell us whether these results are good or bad.

Frontiers of Democracy Conference, Boston, July 16-18, 2014

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Please join the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service, the Democracy Imperative, and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium for:

Frontiers of Democracy: July 16-18, 2014
At Tufts University’s Boston, MA campus

Who’s on the bus, and where is it going? The state of the civic field

Civic work is proliferating: many different kinds of people, working in different contexts and issue areas, are expanding the ways in which citizens engage with government, community, and each other. It is increasingly clear that growing inequality, social and political fragmentation, and lack of democratic opportunities are undermining our efforts to address public priorities such as health, education, poverty, the environment, and government reform.

But attempts to label the responses – as “civic engagement,” “collaborative governance,” “deliberative democracy,” or “public work” – or to articulate them as one movement or policy agenda under a heading like “civic renewal” or “stronger democracy” – immediately spark debates about substance, strategy, and language.

Though it is clear we have many principles and practices in common, we differ on what we should call this work and where it is headed. In order for “overlapping civic coalitions”* to form, the potential partners would have to work through goals, assumptions, and differences. Register now and join us July 16-18 for an invigorating, argumentative, civil discussion on the state and future of the civic field.

Visit the Frontiers of Democracy website for more information and a preliminary agenda.

* Peter Levine, We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For, chapter 7 (“Strategies”)

introducing the Capabilities Approach

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(DeLand, Florida) In Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, Martha Nussbaum proposes that human beings have ten “Central Capabilities.” The first one is: “Life. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length …” The remaining nine all have a similar grammar: an abstract noun or noun phrase followed by a verb in the form “being able to …” The rest of the Capabilities are: bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination, and thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation; other species; play; and control over one’s environment.

I have criticized Nussbaum for making the state ultimately (and sometimes solely) responsible for the Capabilities. She is explicit about this on p. 64, and throughout the book, she writes sentences in which the government is the subject and people are the object. For instance, immediately before she offers the list of Capabilities on p. 33, she writes, “government has the job of making people able to pursue a dignified and minimally flourishing life.”

She does, of course, support human freedom: the government must enable people to pursue their own Capabilities as they wish. Yet I would assign the government a very different role than she does in her overall theory. I would say that we the people have the obligation to ensure one another’s Capabilities. We may decide to use the government as a tool for that; it has strengths and limitations. In any case, we make the government—not in some imaginary moment of signing a social contract, but every day, in how we vote, advocate, pay taxes, educate future leaders, and generate information. In similar ways, we also make churches, neighborhoods, and families. The government is us: a subgroup of us chosen or tolerated to influence the rest of the population by the means of laws and law-enforcement. I would put the state clearly in a subsidiary position and ask pointed questions about how we are supposed to get good governments in the first place. Those questions vanish in Nussbaum’s account.

That said, there is much to recommend in the Capabilities approach. For my colleagues concerned about youth development and civic education, it provides an impressive normative framework.

Why propose a list? Nussbaum does not imagine that she can dictate policies or that her moral assumptions are necessarily right. But her list starts a conversation that we must have if we are to assess policies and communities. If you disagree with her list, you should be able to respond with objections to the components, or add extra items, and give reasons for those changes. Not making a list just ducks the central moral questions.

Why many Capabilities instead of one ultimate good, such as happiness or freedom? Because there are many dimensions of human life and they cannot be measured on a single scale.

Why Capabilities instead of goods, rights, processes, or outcomes? The argument is complex and multifaceted, but in short, Capabilities recognize individual freedom and diversity while also acknowledging the human need for tangible support. If you have a Capability of imagination, you are not obliged to use it in any particular way–or at all. But you will not develop that Capability just by being left alone: you need education, access to public art and nature, leisure time, and other supports that cost money. And nothing (such as cash or pleasure) will substitute for your using your own imagination. Thus imagination is a Capability rather than a right, a good, or a choice. (A strong argument against the Capabilities Approach would take the form of a defense of one of these other keywords.)

Why one list for every nation and culture? I’d answer just as I did the question “Why a list?” Like individuals, members of whole cultures may dispute the contents of Nussbaum’s list. If they do, they should speak on behalf of alternatives. The deliberation about what Capabilities humans should have is a global one, and there will be disagreements. But they are disagreements about the human good. It makes no sense to say, “Bodily integrity is a Capability for you, but not for us.” That means it is not a human Capability.

Dewey and the current toward democracy

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Nevertheless, the current has set steadily in one direction: toward democratic forms. That government exists to serve its community, and that this purpose cannot be achieved unless the community itself shares in selecting its governors and determining their policies, are a deposit of fact left, as far as we can see, permanently in the wake of doctrines and forms, however transitory the latter. They are not the whole of the democratic idea, but they express it in its political phase. Belief in this political aspect … marks a well-attested conclusion from historic facts.

— John Dewey, The Public and its Problems, chapter v

This passage connects at least three ideas: 1) a principle: government exists to serve its community; 2) a mechanism: public selection of office-holders; and 3) a factual generalization about history: it is moving toward democracy.

The usual way to connect these would be to say that people have discovered or created the moral principle of equal political power. To make this principle influential in the world, they have invented and advocated certain “doctrines and forms,” such as regular elections. As a result of their efforts, some communities are now governed by means of these mechanisms. We can use the democratic principle to the assess the actual governments of the world and will conclude that some regimes serve their communities, while others do not.

Dewey puts the elements together in a different way. He detects an underlying current, a tide in the affairs of humankind, that throws up both concrete procedures (such as regular elections) and ideals consistent with those procedures. The importance of the procedures and ideals is a fact that we can observe in the world around us. The deeper explanation is some kind of natural process of human development. I think it has a basically Hegelian form: We homo sapiens naturally associate. Because we have language, we can reflect on the forms that our association takes. Because we have huge potential, we strive to reform our associations so that they give us more scope for creativity and flourishing. Our striving makes the current flow steadily toward democratic forms.

Dewey does not want to separate ideals [“mystic faith”] from facts; and, above all, he does not want to attribute causal power to ideas.

[We] must protest against the assumption that the [democratic] idea itself has produced the the governmental practices which obtain in democratic states: General suffrage, elected representatives, majority rule, and so on. … The forms to which we are accustomed in democratic governments represent the cumulative effect of a multitude of events, unpremeditated as far as political effects were concerned and having unpredictable consequences.

Problems with this method:

1. The current is hardly steady. Indeed, when Dewey wrote these passages, most of the world was under colonial domination; and soon thereafter, most of the colonial powers fell under evil tyrannies. Why should we be confident that the current will generally or ultimately flow in a democratic direction?

2. Many ideals are facts, in the sense that they motivate and inspire human beings. That is true not only of democracy and freedom but also of nationalism, greed, and religious fanaticism. We could substitute nationalism for democracy in Dewey’s argument (above) and conclude: “That government exists to lift its own people over all the other peoples of the world, and that this purpose cannot be achieved unless a government builds a powerful and aggressive military, are a deposit of fact. …” We must be able to use independent reason or judgment to conclude that democratic ideals are desirable, or else they are just some of the ideals that exist in the world.