Monthly Archives: May 2007

campaigns that stir up civic participation

I don’t believe that voting makes sense on its own. If all you do is vote, it takes too much effort to become adequately informed, and the payoff is too small. Very few elections are actually decided by a single vote. However, if you work on public problems in other ways, it makes sense to vote as an additional form of influence. Besides, if you’re heavily involved in civic work with other people, they may give you information about the election, which then comes virtually free. And you can persuade them to vote, which multiplies your impact.

The level of local civic engagement is demonstrably much lower than it was even 25 years ago, and that makes it harder to recruit voters. As a response, campaigns could actually organize local civic work as a way of developing supporters. I’ve looked at the websites of all the major presidential candidates, D’s and R’s. Most provide ways to “volunteer,” but that usually means helping the campaign to mobilize voters. Two campaigns claim a much more ambitious strategy: organizing local discussions and work on issues. We don’t yet know the “return-on-investment” in terms of votes for their candidates, nor can we estimate how much positive civic impact these efforts will have. But I think the attempts should be celebrated, and therefore I quote their websites (at the risk of appearing partial to the candidates, which I’m not):

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choose a fate for Jerry

One: A terraced island rises from a southern sea. Snatches of Gregorian chant can be heard. A barefoot friar, his tonsured pate surmounted by a halo, sings in church Latin: “Brother, you were a schismatic and a heretic. You denied popes, saints, fathers, and councils. To purge your sins, you shall say 50 million Ave Marias. While you perform that penance, your cellmate shall be another American sinner. Brother Fallwell, meet brother Capote.”

Two: A giant lotus blossom floats amid puffy clouds in a cerulean sky. A beatific and cherubic personage, seated cross-legged upon the lotus, speaks in Sanskrit: “Beloved Jerry, you were not very compassionate, were you? It is not my will, but the immortal law of nature: you shall be cast down into the briny depths of New York Harbor to feed, as a flatworm, upon the effluvia of Greenwich Village. May you be a self-effacing and contented flat-worm so that you may be reborn the next time as a grub.”

Three: Peter, wearing long hair and love beads, waves everyone through the gate even though it’s no wider than the eye of a needle. Jerry enters to see, though an acrid haze, clumps of people sprawled on an infinite grassy lawn. Everyone seems to be singing along to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. An angel arrives to ask Jerry whether he would like to join the saved in the single-sex couples area? Or would he first like to try some heavenly kumba?

balance sheets

I spent yesterday at a board meeting, part of which was devoted to reviewing balance sheets. It was my fourth experience with an accountant’s report since spring arrived. During the budget portion of any board meeting, I always feel like a “b-minus” student. I can follow the discussion, but only with a delay that prevents me from participating much. If there were a test, I would get about 20 percent of the answers wrong. I would answer some items correctly by repeating phrases, not because I understood the fundamental concepts. (In other words, I would bluff my way to 80%.) Since I have difficulty in following my more competent peers, my attention tends to wander.

However, I do have good motivation, and that keeps me from failing entirely. It seems to me that a balance sheet is an excellent tool for planning in the non-profit world–if the spreadsheet is organized to answer questions that matter for management. If all you want to know is whether you are headed for bankruptcy, then the exercise is not very illuminating. Usually, all you can conclude is that everyone had better work hard and cross their fingers for grants and contracts to come through. If, however, you want to know whether you are putting discretionary resources, such as time or cash, in the right places, a well-constructed balance sheet can be enormously informative.

new article on activists’ views of deliberation

Rose Marie Nierras and I have just published “Activists’ Views of Deliberation“, Journal of Public Deliberation (vol. 3, no. 1, article 4). We interviewed more than 60 practitioners from more than 20 countries to explore the tension between activism and deliberation and to propose some compromises.

We define an “activist” as someone who tries to advance a substantive political or social goal or outcome. A clear case would be someone who seeks government money for a new health clinic. Activism is always an attempt to exercise power, yet some activists’ motivations are highly altruistic. They try to develop and employ power for ethical ends. To complicate the definition, we note that many activists feel constrained by democratic procedures or principles. For example, they may drop their demands when they see that they have been outvoted or have lost a public argument. They may be sincerely interested in learning from rival perspectives; and they may try to help other people to become independent political agents with goals and interests of their own. In all these respects, activists can be democratic, not merely strategic.

Meanwhile, an organizer of a public deliberation is someone who helps people to decide on their collective goals and outcomes. A clear case would be someone who organizes a forum to discuss how much money the government should raise in taxes and how the funds should be spent. To organize such a deliberation means suppressing or deferring one’s own views about state spending in the interests of promoting an open-ended conversation.

Nevertheless, organizing a deliberation is also an exercise in power. It requires making substantive decisions that can be controversial. Even to invite people to a deliberative session, one must give oneself the right to define the scale and scope of the community, to identify certain issues as important, and to select a method or format for discussion. Even if the process is very open-ended, organizers may rationally predict that a particular outcome will emerge. In such cases, they may use deliberation as a tool to obtain support for the outcome they want.

In short, activists and organizers of deliberations are not sharply distinguishable. It is not only activists who have agendas, desired outcomes, and some degree of power. However, the two groups cluster at opposite ends of a spectrum. At one end, politics is strategic and oriented toward policy goals (albeit constrained by procedures or ethical principles). The main evidence of success is achieving the desired outcome. At the other end of the spectrum, politics is open-ended; the main evidence of success is a broad, fair discussion leading to a set of goals that may be unanticipated at the outset.

If one stipulates that an activist has the right agenda and fully appropriate plans, then it may seem unfair to saddle him or her with the norms of deliberation, which require listening to other people, providing neutral background materials, sharing control of the process, etc. But it is generally unwise to assume that one’s own agenda is right. The value of deliberation lies as much in the listening as in the speaking; as much in the opportunity to learn as the chance to persuade. Learned Hand said, “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.” That is the best argument for deliberation, although there is certainly also a case to be made for forceful political action.

trust and participation

This is just to illustrate my argument from last Wednesday. I claimed that we cannot have massive new government programs without public trust, unless the programs are very simple and transparent–which is virtually impossible in the case of health care. The necessary trust has eroded, in part because people don’t belong to participatory groups that seek their voluntary support and that influence the state. Unions are a major example of such groups.

This graph cannot demonstrate a causal relationship among the three trends: falling trust, declining union membership, and declining participation at the local level. But I hypothesize a connection.

By the way, this graph is my belated response to a comment by David Moore, which I had missed.