Alexis 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.
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Tocqueville’s observations about the nature of American government are still of use today, but – I feel – more in the realm of contrast than in comparison. The interconnectivity of our society now is one serious issue worth examining with relation to his theories regarding local government, but another is the evolution of means to build social capital (most importantly, changes in civic organizations and participatory organs, both on a more recent scale and on a longer scale more in line with the time period Tocqueville speaks of) and their importance, along with local government, in creating a competent structure for an engaged society.
As someone not as informed in Tocqueville as in other theoreticians and commentators of a more recent trend, I’m curious as to whether he saw the foundation of local government and its organs – as in councils, or mayors, or similar entities – or the semi-political, social capital-building civic organizations as more important (or equally important) in contributing to America’s participatory nature. I’m curious because as the size, diversity, and even definition of ‘communities’ has changes since those times, so has the nature of the civic organizations that underpin the social organization inside those communities. In “Bowling Alone” Putnam also comments on Tocqueville’s view of American society and builds a thesis on the significant shifts (on a more recent scale at least) in participation in organizations, and its effect on the gradual degradation of social capital and political activity. Were these organizations more prolific in Tocqueville’s time, and could they possibly explain the stronger sense of activity in local government of that time, or was local government simply much much stronger, considering the rural nature of society in those eras?
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