engaging America’s interested bystanders

The Google Civic Innovation Team (Kate Krontiris, John Webb, Chris Chapman, and Charlotte Krontiris) have released an important strategic report based on original research. They argue that 48.9% of American adults are “Interested Bystanders” to civic life. These “people are paying attention to issues around them, but not actively voicing their opinions or taking action on those issues.”

Looking more closely at how the Interested Bystanders think about politics and civic life (and the actual civic actions that they take), the Google Team uncovers some interesting gaps. For instance, “many Interested Bystanders believe they have the most power at the local level, [yet] most participants reported voting only at the national level.” They also divide the 48.9% into eight archetypal groups, each of which would respond to different messages and opportunities.

The main implication for civic organizers and innovators: “you don’t have to design for activists or the apathetic. You can design for Interested Bystanders and still reach a huge market of people and have a huge impact.”

Kate Krontiris and colleagues advocate a strategy that sounds, at first glance, different from the argument of my book We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For and the findings of “America’s Civic Renewal Movement: The View from Organizational Leaders” by Eric Liu and me. Both documents argue that we ought to focus on a small (but demographically diverse) cadre of civic leaders in America–not 48.9% but more like 0.5% of the population–because only about one million grassroots organizers have the experience and motivations to engage other Americans in civic life. These are the people who not only attend meetings but call meetings; who not only vote but get out the vote. They are already at work on civic renewal in America but need better tools, policies, funds, and other supports.

It’s important to have more that one strategic proposal on the table, so I enthusiastically welcome the Google report even if it lands in a different place from my own work. In any case, these strategies may turn out to be complementary. The “One Million” grassroots civic leaders about whom I write are essential for reaching the “Interested Bystanders” whom Kate and her colleagues describe. In some ways, the Google Team is writing for the One Million–or for an even smaller set of national leaders who have the capacity to engage the One Million through their organizations. They advise these civic leaders to engage the next 48% of the population, which sounds smart to me.

It is a familiar option to try to change a society by engaging a relatively well-placed minority as leaders. Consider W.E.B Du Bois’ early embrace of the Talented Tenth strategy, for example. The advantage is realism: not everyone is ready to participate, and anyone who tries to catalyze a significant change has too few resources to engage the whole population. The potential disadvantage is exclusivity. Marxist revolutions based on “vanguards” have all turned, in my view, into nightmares.

Thus it is very important to my argument that America’s grassroots civic activists are (empirically) a diverse group–diverse in terms of demographics, styles of engagement, and substantive beliefs. My paper with Eric Liu begins to explore the kinds of people who  engage through Ducks Unlimited, PICO, Tea Party Patriots, and United We Dream, among others. Their diversity is important not only for equity and representativeness but also because there is no serious prospect that people this different from each other could turn into a clique or interest group. The question is whether we can get them all working–in different and even competitive ways–to engage their fellow citizens in public life. The “Interested Bystanders” report is a helpful step.

This entry was posted in civic theory, Uncategorized on by .

About Peter

Associate Dean for Research and the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Tufts University's Tisch College of Civic Life. Concerned about civic education, civic engagement, and democratic reform in the United States and elsewhere.

One thought on “engaging America’s interested bystanders

  1. Andrea Morisette Grazzini

    Thinking about your question regards can we get more diverse engagement, even in competitive ways. I wonder what if we can’t? I wonder if we can be at a post-ten percent point with civic engagement? Diverse cohorts or not, it seems as our world becomes more distributed, there seems a palpable risk to the strategy that features the ‘most motivated’ — and, among them, the most polarizing.

    While the one feature of civic engagement that persists as ‘tried and true’ — naming and fighting the enemy — seems to thrive in today’s media mediated world, I find myself continually wondering how can we be about something more than win/loss. Perhaps this is the ouervre of that million qualified and committed cohort you speak to.

    It seems to me that as challenging as a society of greater diversity of players AND, here’s where I think Google and this near 50% number they are going with it, as is the focus of my company WetheP. I wonder if even a small but well developed group is enough anymore, in our more divested or distributed culture.

    If not, what does it take to multiple that million earnest citizen leaders into many more — or at least enough to engage in sustained ways more congruent and representative of national and global mosaics? How does that look? How is it sustained? Where do they learn, plug in and continue to grow?

    Is this a sector we dare monetize more? Would we have more organizers and grassroots leaders if more could afford to be–presuming that, as we’ve seen and heard in our research that a key factor many cite is ‘time.’ If time, not convenience and ease is in fact as big a factor for interested spectators as many say?

    Part of the reason I ask, of course, is due to trying to develop some of the very tools they allude to. And, realizing these are far harder to build in fund than products I’ve done in the past–emphasis on fund. In great part because a civic engagement ‘company’ is competing for technologists and equity with companies more focused on turn-key apps that achieve a quick civic buzz for the user and a quick ROI for the shareholder, but, don’t often address the depth of civic engagement I think you speak to, and, even Google has with this paper.

    I realize some are working this angle in education realms. Beyond formal education channels, how do companies and/or organizations like WetheP support this while competing with not only the noise, but the software, systems committed to the superficial, binary fix?

Leave a Reply