Skip to content

Private Individualism and Political Withdrawal, Part 3

Posted by Paul Lachelier on Thursday, January 14, 2010.

This is the third in a series of articles on politically disengaging forms of individualism (part 1 and part 2). This series explores the connections between individualism(s) and politics through in-depth interviews I conducted with young (20s and 30s) American professionals for a book I am writing on American political culture.

Individualism is a word familiar to academics and non-academics alike. Academics and political liberals often equate individualism with selfishness. But individualism as Americans speak it and live it is not simply selfishness, though it has profound and often problematic implications for whether and how Americans connect with government and politics.  Part 3 examines the common American language of choice, and its political implications.

In the course of my interview with Madison, a married bank credit officer in her mid-twenties, “Rock the Vote” – a non-profit offshoot of the music industry officially dedicated to increasing youth voter turnout and political hc_protesterengagement – came up as an example of an organization whose approach to engaging citizens she approved of (italics below are mine):

Madison: I think that Rock the Vote, that sort of thing, they really made a valid attempt. Granted I don’t know, you know, how successful they were, but that’s a great start to just to keep people more informed, like, what the heck, you know?

Paul: What’s a great start? What is it about Rock the Vote that’s good?

Madison: Just that they encouraged people that normally wouldn’t listen, probably the younger demographic, to say “listen you have the power to – as an individual – you could be part of this group that could change something.”  Go for it, if you want to.  If you want to, go for it.  They didn’t force anybody to do it, but they made people want to be involved, you know, and that’s cool.

“Go for it” is such a common expression in American speech that it can seem patently uninteresting, merely a way to encourage a person or group to pursue a line of action.  But in listening to my respondents, and in reading the transcripts of our interviews, it became apparent to me that several of my respondents used this mundane expression “go for it,” and they used it in the same or similar way Madison uses it – not just to encourage, but to signal a choice, an opportunity – not an obligation, individual or collective.  The expression “Go for it” is part of a language of choice, and that language generally frames actions instantly or ultimately as individual choices rather than social artifacts, whether these social artifacts are commands, felt obligations, shared ethics, situational norms, or else. 

Madison was not alone in asserting politics as a choice.  Most of my interviewees did not identify with the activist or “political animal,” but they nonetheless encouraged those who feel so inspired to pursue their passion for politics.  As Jane, a single health researcher in her mid-twenties, colorfully responded to the political animal, “Fantastic, rock on! I hope your views are good.  Represent women’s health and health care in general….I admire their moxie….they’re doing something and they are being true to themselves and they’re being genuine about it, so—that’s what it’s all about.”  In addition, in the course of my interviews, several of my respondents, mostly unsolicited, expressed preference for political organizers who convey the importance of voting without prescribing who to vote for, who fairly present different political choices rather than seeking to sway people toward one choice.  No one argued contrary to these sentiments.  Also, when I asked my respondents the following question:

Which of the following statements seems to you a more effective approach for an individual to pursue to change people’s minds or behavior?
1) Lead by example. 
2) Join with others in a group working toward the same goal. 
3) Seek to persuade people you know by engaging them in discussion.
4) Pray, and have faith in God. 

(Read More. . .)

Filed in Democratic Theory, Voting | | Comments (0)

A Manifesto for Educational Democracy

Posted by Paul Lachelier on Thursday, December 10, 2009.

Schools as “Leader Training Grounds”

A couple of years ago, I received news from Deerfield Academy, a prep school in Massachusetts and my high school alma mater, that its headmaster, Eric Widmer was to become the first headmaster of the newly formed “King’s Academy,” in Madaba, Jordan.  As Deerfield’s alumni newsletter indicated, The King’s Academy aspires to be a “training ground for the region’s next generation of business, community, and government leaders.”

Sounds altogether laudable.  It is, after all, perhaps the highest aspiration of ambitious schools – especially preparatory schools and many colleges and universities – to become “training grounds” for the best known “leaders” since such boosts a school’s prestige, and higher prestige brings more student and faculty applications, selectivity and funding.

studentsBut does this “leader training ground” approach to education advance the public good?  Surely it does if students are selected from far and wide according to their academic merit rather than their social status, right?

Contrary to common belief, this approach fundamentally undermines the public good regardless of how meritocratic it may be. Determining what is the public good can be an endless debate, but if we as modern people maintain that democracy is a critical part of any public good there is good reason to question the “leader training ground” aspiration of most schools.

Behind the Meritocratic Mask

Many if not most well-meaning people in modern societies see education as the rightful engine for social progress.  Underlying this belief is the modern conviction that merit – rather than birth, tradition, race, gender, class, religion, age, sexual orientation, etc. – should determine advancement up the social “ladder” or hierarchy.

Such meritocracy is a nice idea except for at least two problems.  First, those who apply to good schools and do well in school come disproportionately from privileged families, which tend to have more time, taste and money for education.  So, no matter how meritocratic the school, most of its student and faculty applicant pool hails from middle and upper class families.  Second, no matter how meritocratic the school, current meritocracy rarely questions the social ladder’s height, let alone its existence.  Meritocracy simply seeks to ensure free movement up and down the ladder so that those most capable rise while those least capable fall.

Accordingly, far from reducing social inequalities, meritocratic schools perpetuate and intensify inequalities.  As prestige-conscious school administrators know well, a school’s prestige thrives when it attracts and produces elites, people who command the highest positions in major political, economic and cultural institutions.  Schools may well seek to achieve need-blind admissions and advance knowledge for the common good, but these efforts leave intact the ways they deepen social inequalities through their taken-for-granted practices, including the following:

(Read More. . .)

Filed in Democratic Theory | | Comments (0)

On the “political wetlands”

Posted by Bill Ball on Monday, November 16, 2009.

In a series of recent articles David Matthews, President of the Kettering Foundation, has offered the concept of  the “political wetlands” as a wellspring of an organic and deliberative form of democracy.1 He argues that the political wetlands lie underneath the superstructure of institutional politics where in “informal gatherings, ad hoc associations, and the seemingly innocuous banter that goes on. . .problems are given names, issues are framed for discussion, decisions are made, and the results are evaluated.” According to Mathews “we are seeing ways of acting, of generating power, and of creating change that are unlike what occurs in institutional politics.” He also refers to this process by the term “organic,” in other words, things “that are natural or close to ordinary life.” The political wetlands outlined by Matthews is a positive place, a place where, like real wetlands, the toxic by products of our civil society can be filtered out and public life can be refounded on civility and a desire to work together to solve a community’s problems.wetlands_doorway

Yet recent research in informal politics strongly indicates that there is nothing organic or positive about these political wetlands, if they exist at all. Two studies in particular cast doubt on the existence of political wetlands as a counter to the negativity and divisiveness of institutional politics. Katherine Cramer Walsh spent three years listening to the informal talk of a group of “old timers” (supplemented by additional groups) and how they constructed their social identities while discussing politics and other issues.2 She found that informal talk among organic affinity groups consists primarily of distinguishing “us” from “them,” most often, in her key study group, along racial lines. Public issues are then filtered through these self-constructed social identities, usually resulting in unquestioned attachment to one side of the issue. Her qualitative research points to her conclusion that “not only do people self-select into associations in which they are not exposed to cross-cutting points of view but in this interaction they reinforce communities of concern that further diminish the potential for future discussion with people of different perspectives.”   The use of national, large sample quantitative data by Diana Mutz resulted in exactly the same conclusion.3 Further, Mutz found that the more voluntary associations one belonged to, the less likely one is to have conversations with people of a different point of view. This birds of a feather phenomenon is becoming increasingly known in political science not as the political wetlands but as the “dark side of social capital” — it may well be roots of the problems with our institutional politics rather than the solution.

Beyond these studies a cautionary tale lies in the two-part posting by Bill Nylen (The Promise of Local Government, below). As he details, the local institutional political scene is hideously complex, even in a small town. It creates daunting prospects for groups of  ordinary citizens to find common ground and work together to effect change. The obstacles to a better form of politics at the local level lies in both the citizens themselves and in their political institutions.

Yet, while I argue that we cannot look to an organic political wetlands to fix what is wrong with our institutional politics, I do not mean to suggest that the decades of work by Matthews and Kettering on the problems of democracy have been misdirected (www.kettering.org). Indeed, they are all the more vital once the true scope of the problem is more systematically assessed. A political wetlands that brings citizens of differing perspectives together in a civil and deliberative manner to work with local institutions to solve the community’s problems will never emerge organically, it would always be an artificial and highly fragile place. Yet it is probably the only hope for a more satisfactory political system overall and thus is a goal worth pursuing with eyes open to the inherent difficulties that lie before us.

Notes:

1 Matthews, David. 2009. “Afterward: Ships Passing in the Night?” in Barker, Derek W.M. and David W. Brown (eds). A different Kind of Politics. Dayton, OH: Kettering. Also available online in slightly different editions at The Broker or on the Kettering website.

2 Walsh, Katherine Cramer. 2004. Talking about Politics: Informal Groups and Social Identity in American Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

3 Mutz, Diana. 2006. Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative versus Participatory Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Filed in Democratic Theory, Local Government | | Comments (0)

The Promise of Local Government as a ‘School of Democracy’ (Part Two): The City of DeLand, Florida

Posted by Bill Nylen on Thursday, November 5, 2009.

“Not only did citizens see their local governments as more relevant; they were also more accessible.  Relevance and accessibility, de Tocqueville argued, translated into active citizen participation — in local government bodies and in numerous voluntary associations — and what political scientists today would call high feelings of personal efficacy.” [from Part One of this blog post]

If Alexis de Tocqueville and his many contemporary followers are correct, a close and engaged citizen-government relationship at the local level fosters a habit of political participation among citizens; and such a habit (or ‘political culture’) is essential for the functioning of democratic governance at all levels of government.  Without citizen participation in multiple public decision-making processes, as opposed to only on election day (if even that!), democracy too easily ‘trickles up and away’ to become an elitist affair of the well-heeled, well-connected and well-placed.

So let me turn to my hometown — DeLand, Florida — as a case study of contemporary North American local-level governance.  What I describe below is a system that only loosely resembles the relevant and accessible “secondary institutions,” and the efficacious participating citizenry, of De Tocqueville’s story of democracy in America.1

rich_ave_w

First, it’s hard to avoid the fact that the City of DeLand functions primarily as a deliverer of services.  When you drive into the parking lot of DeLand’s brand new city hall, a bank of parking spaces is labeled “customer parking” — not ‘citizen parking.’  Residents’ most common interaction with the city is when they pay their monthly water bills (with penalties for late payment, including shutting off water if payment is a few days late).  Other basic services, such as sewage, garbage collection, police and fire services, and parks and recreation are primarily paid for in the annual property tax bill.  In recent polls commissioned by the city, DeLand residents expressed their overall satisfaction with the services delivered by the city, even when they don’t necessarily enjoy paying the taxes that make those services possible.  Stetson University Sociologist, John Schorr, who carried out the polls, argues that in DeLand, “democracy at the local level is often seen by city residents as the effective provision of services.  Polls of residents can be a form of democracy since their results are presented to the City Commission in open public meetings.”2 Actual citizen participation, however, is not part of the service delivery equation … until service rates need to be increased.  As Mayor Bob Apgar told me, “People participate when they’re mad.”3 So when they do participate, they don’t often do so in a ‘civically-conscious’ manner.  Citizen-customers, according to Mayor Apgar, have a “fast-food mentality” (also described as an “instant-gratification mentality”): they expect a high level of quality of city services, but they’re “ill-informed” about what it takes to actually produce those services even though they’re very aware of the price they pay, and get very impatient and angry when the price increases.  In the current economic crisis, increased property taxes on declining property values have fueled this impatience and anger, and have fed into local manifestations of the anti-tax and anti-‘Big Government’ sentiment seen all over the country.

(Read More. . .)

Filed in Democratic Theory, Local Government | | Comments (0)

Private Individualism and Political Withdrawal, Part 2

Posted by Paul Lachelier on Tuesday, October 27, 2009.

This is the second part of a piece started in this post.

Private individualism’s third inclination is to define freedom in individual rather than collective terms.  Freedom is commonly considered a, if not the cardinal American value.  Contrary to political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville’s early sense that Americans value their equality more than their freedom, it seems fairer to argue at least for contemporary Americans that they value their freedom more than equality.  But whereas Tocqueville spoke of political liberty, contemporary Americans like my interviewees have a very different meaning of liberty in mind.  Given its cardinal value, the meanings Americans ascribe to freedom have enormous implications for whether or not freedom advances or undermines citizen engagement and democracy.  For this reason, I asked my interviewees to tell me what freedom means to them.  In one of the questions I posed to them, I presented them with four definitions, and asked them to choose their favorite, then explain their choice.  The question I posed went precisely as follows:woman_alone_stadium

Which of the following definitions of freedom better expresses your understanding of what freedom means?

  1. My ability to be what I can be, to develop myself to my fullest potential.
  2. My ability to do what I want so long as I don’t interfere with others.
  3. My voluntary submission to the common good of my community.
  4. A group’s ability to govern themselves as a group, to together determine the conditions of their group life.

There is abundant scholarship on freedom, and those scholars who study freedom are well aware of the body of thinkers who have advanced collective rather than individual conceptions of freedom, including such disparate figures as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Karl Marx.  Countless liberal thinkers have, rightly or wrongly, expressed concern if not horror at the implications, theoretical or actual, of collective conceptions of freedom such as those of Rousseau and Marx (e.g., concerns for minority rights, private property, individual privacy).  Yet at their debatable best, many collective notions of freedom simply, basically insist that freedom entails collective self-government, and social self-development.1 Nonetheless, whether or not academics who study freedom embrace or reject collective freedom, it is, as noted, a familiar concept to them.  The same, however, cannot be said for my interviewees.

(Read More. . .)

Filed in Democratic Theory | | Comments (0)

Age, Race, Ethnicity, and Electoral Competition in the 2008 Election

Posted by David Hill on Monday, October 19, 2009.

To state that the 2008 presidential election was historic is, of course, now a bit passé.  The election, however, was historic.  Not only did 2008 witness the first African-American and female candidates with a legitimate chance of winning the presidency (and the first woman on the national Republican ticket), the American electorate, in fact, elected the country’s first African-American president. Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 was in part the result several forces (a very unpopular incumbent president, an equally unpopular war, and an historic economic crisis just before the election) that came together to advantage the Democratic candidate and disadvantage his Republican rival, John McCain.

In a recent paper, Seth McKee and I argued that another factor crucial to Obama’s victory was his ability to change the composition of the electorate by bringing in traditionally low participation groups such as the young (18-29), African-Americans, and Hispanics (McKee and Hill, 2009).  Turnout for all three groups increased between 2004 and 2008 with African-Americans experiencing the largest increase of any demographic group (eight points) and young and Hispanic citizens witnessing smaller but nonetheless noticeable increases.  Most other demographic groups (e.g. older Americans, whites as a group) also experienced modest increases in turnout.

The increases noted above are based on data taken from the Census Bureau’s 2004 and 2008 Current Population Survey: Voter Supplements and represent national trends. Presidential elections, of course, take place within the context of the Electoral College, and thus there is variation in the nature of the presidential election across states. Specifically competition levels across states vary considerably, with some states being highly competitive (e.g. Florida and Ohio) and other states (most of them) uncompetitive (e.g. Massachusetts and Utah).  Electoral competition is crucial to turnout because it stimulates interest in the electorate and more importantly induces the parties and candidates to expend resources to win the votes of potential supporters.  Because of the great variation in competition across states, Seth and I hypothesized that the increases in turnout among our three groups of interest (the young, African-Americans, and Hispanics) would be greater in competitive states than in non-competitive states.

(Read More. . .)

Filed in Race & Ethnicity, Voting | | Comments (0)

Private Individualism and Political Withdrawal, Part 1

Posted by Paul Lachelier on Friday, October 2, 2009.

This is the first in a series of articles on politically disengaging forms of individualism.  This series explores the connections between individualism(s) and politics through in-depth interviews I conducted with young (20s and 30s) American professionals for a book I am writing on American political culture. Individualism is a word familiar to academics and non-academics alike.  Academics and political liberals often equate individualism with selfishness. But individualism as Americans speak it, and live it, is not simply selfishness.  Yet it has profound and often problematic implications for whether and how Americans connect with government and politics.  The first article, in two parts, examines what I call “private individualism.”

two reading the paperHistorically, if it can be said that there has been a broad trend in the United States toward the rejection of politics since the late nineteenth century, that rejection has taken two forms.  First, in certain ways there has been a shift from collective to individual political engagement, e.g., from public to private voting, from grassroots political parties to professional, money and media-driven parties, plus a steady decline in labor union membership.  Second, there has been a more recent shift, dating roughly from the 1970s onward, from political to civic action, as politics becomes a dirtier word due in part to the watershed that was Watergate, and as more and younger Americans opt for civic ways to help others or “give back.”  This rejection of politics springs in part from certain forms of individualism some if not many Americans share.

To briefly define individualism, it’s arguably most fundamental principle is a belief in the intrinsic value or sacredness of the individual.  Beyond this core principle, individualisms develop in different ways in different times and places.  Yet however they may diverge, individualisms all tend to have implications for the public life of citizens in a democracy because they fundamentally define how people should understand and relate to each other.  This brings us to what I call private individualism, the first in a series of forms of political disengaging individualisms I have found in interviews with contemporary young Americans.

(Read More. . .)

Filed in Democratic Theory | | Comments (0)

Brief Review: Leighninger, The Next Form of Democracy

Posted by Bill Ball on Wednesday, September 23, 2009.

Leighninger, Matt. 2006. The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule Is Giving Way to Shared Governance — and Why Politics Will Never Be the Same. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press (082651541X).

Matt Leigninger, executive director of the newly formed Deliberative Democracy Consortium, has provided a volume that exceeds the quality of what is typical on the theme, i.e. a series of inspirational case studies with little basis for useful generalization by the reader. The Next Form of Democracy is certainly replete with local case studies of citizen participation in governance. Yet even in these alone Leigninger improves upon previous works by conveying not only how participatory efforts can get off the ground, but also the myriad ways in which they mostly fail to become self-sustaining in the end. Moreover, he approaches the citizen-government relationship from all points in the community, from that of government and nonprofits as well as that of citizens.

The real value in the book, because it is so rarely found in works by practitioners, is the content that can be generalized from individual case studies and thus provides workable knowledge for everyone in the field. While not engaging in empirical analysis, nor rising to the level of what I would call “theory,” Leighninger does have a way of summarizing experience with wisdom and presenting it in a refreshing manner. For example early on one encounters “The Seven Deadly Citizens,” the error of treating citizens solely as voters, consumers, socializers, volunteers, advisors, the disempowered, or deliberators. Similar passages can be found on the problem of scaling up participatory democracy, community organizing, building new “citizen structures,” and others. In addition to these useful summaries of experience the author regularly connects individual cases to broader issues of governance in the relevant policy domain (e.g. education, race relations) and to the rise and institutionalization of the participatory governance movement in North America.

The book’s limitations are primarily organizational. The overarching structure is disjointed; there is not a logical progression of topics from earlier to later chapters. The summaries noted above can occur almost anywhere in a chapter, and don’t occur uniformly across them. Yet The Next Form of Democracy is clearly written from the perspective of someone who has directly observed the rise (and fall) of a wide variety of individual local efforts and at the same time understands the driving forces at work in a broader national struggle for participatory governance. It’s a worthwhile read as a result.

Filed in Book Reviews, Community Organizing | | Comments (0)

Reconnecting with America’s Invisible Democracy

Posted by Paul Lachelier on Saturday, September 12, 2009.

Ask Americans to tell you whatever comes to mind when they think of the word “politics” and to no one’s surprise, a lot of what they say will be negative.  But beyond the negative association with politics, there is another pattern less often noted yet perhaps just as significant for democracy in America: when most Americans think of politics they think of national politics, and particularly presidential politics – not state politics, not county politics, not municipal politics.

Ask Americans whether they vote, and many will claim they vote always or most of the time.  Then ask those supposedly avid voters whether they vote only in presidential election years.  If they are honest, many will admit that they will vote only when there is a presidential election, and this does not mean that they vote for all offices down the ballot. Many voters simply do not know who their U.S. Representative or U.S. Senators are, let alone where they stand, let alone who their state, county, or municipal representatives are, or what they do.

Of course, none of this is new to political scientists, or anyone who pays attention to statistics on voter turnout and political knowledge.  But there are political statistics, and then there is political culture. Political culture can help explain the statistics.Voting Booth

For a couple of years now, I have been asking the above questions of young Americans as part of a book I am writing on how they think about politics, community and citizenship.  What is striking is not just the turnout and knowledge statistics, but the political imagination these kinds of questions reveal.  What questions like these indicate is that when Americans are prompted to think about politics, the vast majority of democracy in America – the enormous and enormously consequential apparatus of government below the U.S. president – does not even occur to them.  And when prompted to think about that vast majority of democracy, many Americans not only know little about it, but refer to it, often dismissively, as “local politics.”  The contrast with Alexis de Tocqueville’s account of the 19th century American citizen proudly and busily engaged in local government is striking.

Here are a few facts to give a sense of the magnitude of that democracy so many contemporary Americans dismiss or simply don’t see:

There is just one federal government, but there are 50 state governments, 3,034 county governments, 35, 933 city, town and village governments, and 13,506 school districts across the United States.  That’s 1 federal government, and 52,523 “local” governments.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, our federal government employs 4.9 million people, including full-time, part-time, and full-time equivalent (FTE) employees, civilian and military.  In contrast, our fifty state governments employ nearly double that number: 9.5 million people.  Our municipal governments employ over five times the federal number: 26.4 million people. That’s 5 million employed at the federal level, and 36 million at the “local” level.

Dogmatic conservatives, of course, cringe at so much government.  They see nothing but inefficiency, failure, and corruption.  I see opportunity, whether for good or bad, for engaged democracy or unaccountable bureaucracy.

Most of American government need not be invisible to Americans.  I am sure readers of this blog can all quite easily imagine ways to make state, county and municipal government more salient in the minds and lives of Americans.  Clearly, news media, as one of the major shapers of Americans’ political imaginations, have a large role to play, though the decline of newspapers and the intensifying profit focus do not bode well for news media as engines of political education.  But there are other possibilities.

(Read More. . .)

Filed in Higher Education, Local Government, Voting | | Comments (0)

The Closing of the Florida Frontier?

Posted by Bill Ball on Sunday, August 30, 2009.

Recent feature articles in the New York Times (August 29, 2009) and Orlando Sentinel (August 17, 2009) have highlighted the beginning of the decline of population in Florida. After a century of rapid population growth that provided the mainstay of economic development and dominated state politics, Florida appears to be entering a new era.

It is easy to be fooled into believing that the decline is only temporary and rapid growth will soon resume. For example check any existing population projection for the state or its counties and you will see a steadily upward reaching line out to 2030 and beyond. However all projections are based on past trends and thus inevitably miss the reversals in trends. Instead of looking at projections, take a look at estimates of actual population as they become available. For example, I have graphed the U.S. Census bureau’s population estimates for my home region of Volusia County, Fl.

From U.S. Census estimates by Bill Ball

From U.S. Census estimates. Graph by Bill Ball.

The rapid growth in population in the county in this decade slowed significantly in 2007 and the population actually declined in 2008. Note that this decline happened before the real estate crises and subsequent current recession. It is not hard to imagine what the trend will look like for 2009. It won’t be pretty for an economy driven by cheap, fast residential growth.

Indeed I will make a couple predictions:

  1. Volusia county will not see a return to rapid population growth, not next year, not the year after, not for the foreseeable future.
  2. This will create a crisis for the current economic system and policy regime that are built around rapid growth, a crisis that lasts beyond the current recession.

These are daunting prospects in a region whose sole competitive advantage is cheap land and where there is relatively little industry or agriculture, dwindling water resources, no investment in education, and where incomes are well below the national average.

Also, the current political system is not designed to meet a challenge like this. Indeed, the campaigns leading up next fall’s vote on the Hometown Democracy ballot issue will only make the search for common ground on the future of economic growth harder. Both sides are gearing up to paint the issue of construction-led growth as a black-or-white, take-it-or-leave proposition.

Well times of crisis are times of opportunity. The opportunity to redefine the engine of economic growth in the region is presenting itself. Will we take this opportunity?

(Read More. . .)

Filed in Economic Development, Local Government | | Comments (1)

The Promise of Local Government as a ‘School of Democracy’: Alexis de Tocqueville (part 1)

Posted by Bill Nylen on Thursday, August 27, 2009.

TocquevilleAlexis de Tocqueville is widely considered to be the founding father of studies in community-based empowerment and participatory democracy.  Researching and writing his famous Democracy in America back in the early 1800s, he was the first to argue the relationship between, in the first instance, a particular democratic institutional design (“administrative decentralization,” and vibrant local-level “secondary institutions” and “voluntary associations”) and, subsequently, a cooperative democratic political culture (“self interest properly understood”).

De Tocqueville found in the Northern states of the early North American republic a political arrangement very different — clearly better, in his mind — than what existed in his native France.  The central, or federal, government in the U.S. was relatively limited in its size, scope and reach.  At the same time, state and especially local governments grappled with issues that were of great daily and practical concern to most citizens.  Not only did citizens see their local governments as more relevant; they were also more accessable.  Relevance and accessibility, de Tocqueville argued, translated into active citizen participation — in local government bodies and in numerous voluntary associations — and what political scientists today would call high feelings of personal efficacy.  The next and highly significant step, according to de Tocqueville, was that local-level participation initially rooted in the pursuit of self interest would gradually be transformed into a “habit” (or culture) of participation; and as this habit developed, citizens would come to see the essential interconnectedness of their own interests with those of their fellow citizens.  Indeed, they would come to realize that their own interests could rarely be protected or promoted without, at the very least, considering, if not actually protecting and promoting the partially-overlapping interests of their fellow citizens as well.  Thus did administrative decentralization and local participatory institutions combine to foster a democratic political culture.  All three would then continue to interact with each other to produce a virtuous cycle of democratic public administration.

Well, one might say, that was then, and this is now.

Over the last 170 years or so since de Tocqueville published Democracy in America, the political-institutional design he so valued has changed significantly.  The federal government has grown exponentially, both in size and in responsibilities.  A great deal of that growth has been both inevitable and (arguably, of course) beneficial: the United States is no longer pre-industrial, isolated, and sparsely-populated; and it’s no longer acceptable that “We the people” include only white, literate males, or that the judicial system not apply to such previously ‘private’ domains as child labor, impure food and drugs, unregulated monopolies, and family abuse and violence.

But what about local governments?  Cetainly, they too have changed in both size and scope.  How has that change affected the relationship de Tocqueville so valued between local political institutions and democratic political culture?  Are local institutions still the “schools of democracy” so touted by Tocqueville?

NEXT:  A case study of my own town — DeLand, Florida — as an illustrative example of contemporary local-level ‘Democracy in America,’ and as a means to begin a fruitful discussion.

Filed in Democratic Theory, Local Government | | Comments (0)