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.
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“The Seven Deadly Citizens,” is very much intriguing in which it refers that citizens themselves are characterized by the capitalistic/democratic traits that are portrayed through the liberal media and its egotistical agenda to push the latest trends of merchandise. The problem in treating citizens as predictable products is on occasion the citizens do something unpredictable, though labeling them solely as voters, consumers, socializers, volunteers, advisors, the disempowered, or deliberators, could be and has proven problematic. While at the same time individuals are expected to behave within the seven parameters of a “Deadly Citizen” but how does being predictable citizens entice participatory democracy, how does it allow freethinking, free movements? When the government can predict its own citizen’s behavior and categorize them based on what the government believes you, as an individual should behave as a citizen. Governments should be afraid of their citizens, not the citizens being afraid of their government.
What incentive does the government have to not fear their citizens and oppress them? Could it be that too much wealth and power in the government makes for a weak citizen base, and a powerful government, or should the people be holding the power over the government, and make the government work for the people? Participatory democracy is a grand idea, but what the world has seen out of Brazil from it is the negative side effects of riots, corruption and fear, but who is to say those things are isolated directly to the idea of participatory democracy in Brazil, no matter what government is in charge over any nation, there are these attributes of negative behavior outweighing the positive, it is human nature to take advantage for personal gains, but one thing should be for sure, is that the government should be afraid of its citizens, to ensure that services continually be rendered in support of their freedom, and not to oppress ideological freedoms granted to man.
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