The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule Is Giving Way to Shared Governance -- and Why Politics Will Never Be the Same available in Hardcover
The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule Is Giving Way to Shared Governance -- and Why Politics Will Never Be the Same
- ISBN-10:
- 0826515401
- ISBN-13:
- 9780826515407
- Pub. Date:
- 12/11/2006
- Publisher:
- Vanderbilt University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0826515401
- ISBN-13:
- 9780826515407
- Pub. Date:
- 12/11/2006
- Publisher:
- Vanderbilt University Press
The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule Is Giving Way to Shared Governance -- and Why Politics Will Never Be the Same
Hardcover
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$99.95Overview
The stories of civic experiments in this book can show us the realpolitik of deliberative democracy, and illustrate how the evolution of democracy is already reshaping politics.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780826515407 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Vanderbilt University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/11/2006 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
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Read an Excerpt
The Next Form of Democracy
How Expert Rule is Giving Way to Shared Governance ... and Why Politics Will Never Be the Same
By Matt Leighninger
Vanderbilt University Press
Copyright © 2006 Vanderbilt University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8265-1541-4
CHAPTER 1
Good Citizens and Persistent Public Problems
Most of what we hear about the state of citizenship today seems dismal and abstract. There is the persistently bad news about voter turnout and public mistrust of government. There are the constant reminders that young people in particular feel disconnected from public life. There are the concerns of experts who believe that volunteerism and membership in neighborhood associations, political parties, community organizations, and other groups is lower than ever before; this is a subject of great debate among political scientists and sociologists, who pore over opinion polls and historical data, and though the tone of the discussion is ominous, the answers are never clear. It is a cloudy and depressing vista, and there doesn't seem to be much we can do about it. We have become apathetic about our supposed apathy.
The picture becomes a little less blurry when we take a closer look at how citizens and public employees typically interact, how neighborhood associations and other grassroots groups operate, and what happens when residents try to "get involved." At that level, the capacity of ordinary people is clear; this book is filled with examples of what citizens have accomplished. But one of the other realities is that people only participate when they feel like they have to: when a problem has gone from bad to terrible, or when an important decision is being made (or has already been made) that will affect them directly. Usually, the crisis is something that could have been averted if citizens had been part of the process earlier on, but for a number of reasons, the regular opportunities for this kind of participation—neighborhood associations, parent-teacher associations, public meetings, and so on—fail to attract people until the crisis hits.
At the local and neighborhood level, most communities don't provide the kind of meaningful political opportunities that will compel and sustain long-term involvement. Local leaders talk about the need for persistent, widespread participation, but what they get are occasional bursts of active citizenship, often occurring in situations where the energy can't be channeled in any productive way. In most places, local democracy is like a boring college lecture course with a tedious professor: most of the students skip every class until the final exam, when they troop into the room, chewing their pencils with fear, anger, and determination.
On one hand, looking through the eyes of the average resident gives us a view of citizenship that is dismal and specific rather than dismal and abstract. On the other hand, it affirms that most people are not in fact apathetic, or incompetent, or permanently alienated from government, or so busy they are incapable of participating in public life. It helps us understand why expert rule is increasingly unattractive to citizens and leaders alike. It shows us how the sad state of our democratic infrastructure reinforces our guilt-ridden avoidance of active citizenship. It helps us see why neighborhood council systems and democratic organizing efforts are proliferating, and how these experiments in shared governance are different from the usual kind of local politics. It gives us a picture of citizenship that is both more hopeful and more complicated.
Looking carefully at the state of democracy in communities also reminds us why active citizenship matters so much. When we take stock of our progress on key public priorities like education, race relations, land use, and crime prevention, the consequences of the disconnection between citizens and government become more apparent. On almost every public issue, there is a lack of cooperation and coordination between residents and public employees. Citizens are often unaware of the nature of a public problem, the steps they might take to address it, and how they might get assistance. Citizens are unconvinced of the need to support and fund public services and capacities, while public employees are unconvinced of the need to legitimize the roles of active citizens and consult with the public on questions of policy. Some of the greatest difficulties are caused by the erosion of shared community values and by deepening divisions between different groups of people. The state of citizenship seems like an abstract idea when boiled down to a statistic like voter turnout; it becomes more real when we see how it affects the issues that affect our lives.
Overwhelmed by these limitations, expert rule is slowly being overtaken by forms of governance that foster and reward active citizens. So while most of what is written about citizenship focuses on the apathy or alienation of people en masse, we can learn the most from the experiences of individuals who, despite all the obstacles, are doing their best.
A Good Citizen
Providence, Rhode Island, 1997
I am standing with Lisa Giordano on the sidewalk in front of her house on Willow Street in Providence, Rhode Island. We are talking about all the things she has done for her block.
During the last ten years, Giordano has spent much of her time making life better for her neighbors. Despite the fact that she has a full-time job as a housecleaner, she has spent countless hours with the young people on the block—taking them on field trips, organizing activities, talking with them about their problems. She has worked with the police to make the neighborhood safer. She has put pressure on absentee landlords to clean up their properties. She has led efforts to clean up graffiti and litter. She has brought neighbors together for block parties where people got to know each other.
But for Giordano, active citizenship comes with a price. When she tells me about her greatest achievement of the past year, she lowers her voice. "... And so far the drug dealers have been doing a lot less dealing out of the blue house across the street," she says. "Since the landlord, after repeated requests from us and the police, threatened to evict the tenants who lived there, things have been quiet."
I make the mistake of looking over at the blue house. "Don't!" she says quickly. "They might see you—they're pretty sure we're the ones who've been making waves, but I don't want that confirmed. We've received threats already."
Being a good citizen is more difficult than it ought to be. People like Lisa Giordano are sometimes praised for their acts of kindness and generosity (usually with an aside: "I don't know where they find the time!"), but the way they are singled out reinforces the notion that their actions are unusual, uncalled-for, and done out of saintly virtue rather than any direct individual or community interest. Giordano is a "good" citizen in the sense that she is active and effective for her neighborhood, but for most people, this quality is overshadowed by a different kind of goodness: her altruism and self-sacrifice. Giordano is an admirable person, but not a realistic role model for other citizens. Though it is dismaying, it doesn't surprise us that her efforts have earned her threats from drug dealers. This appears to come with the territory—the consequence of being a "good" citizen in a "bad" neighborhood.
Even in neighborhoods without drug dealers, few people question the assumption that improving your community is—and must be—lonely, arduous, thankless work. Knowing that a clean conscience may be the only reward, the average person is likely to forego good citizenship in favor of some safer, more pleasant activity, less connected to public problem-solving and community decision-making. It is easier for most of us to demonstrate our virtue by giving blood, helping with a food drive, or donating to charities. If we are active in our communities, it is a direct reflection of our own intrinsic virtue and devotion; if we do not, it is because we just aren't virtuous enough, or because we choose to demonstrate our goodwill in more convenient ways. "Getting involved" seems like an old-fashioned cough syrup: it is "good for you," so it has to be unpleasant.
Lisa Giordano moved into her house on Willow Street in 1990. She was single and in her twenties. She had been looking for an older house for a reasonable price, expecting to do some renovation work. She hadn't thought much about the diversity or quality of life of her new neighborhood.
The West Broadway neighborhood in Providence is dominated by a colossal, 1903 armory building just around the corner from Willow Street. It has a mix of Latinos, Asians, African Americans, and whites, of all different income levels, living in Victorian houses in various states of repair. It is a beautiful neighborhood.
As soon as Giordano moved in, she started recognizing Willow Street's challenges. Litter and graffiti kept appearing on the street, and it was clear that drug dealers were operating in some of the houses. What pushed her over the edge was a very simple problem: every day, kids chasing one another would hop over her back fence, trampling parts of her garden in the process, and run off. When she talked to a few of them, she found out they were just playing a game.
"I stopped them from jumping the fence, and I was surprised when they didn't understand why I was mad," she says. "That was the first hint I got—when they didn't understand that what they were doing was wrong—that they should respect other people's property, not to mention all living things (my poor plants!). I started to notice differences between their lives and experiences and mine. I started telling them about the principles I learned—not to change them, but so that they could understand me. The farther I got, the more I realized some of my own prejudices—before I got to know them, I hadn't understood or respected them as much as I should have."
As Giordano got to know the young people who lived on her block, they began spending more and more time with her. "We started playing basketball, playing video games. I remember helping a couple of them make birthday cards for their mother." Giordano's interest in protecting her property led her into relationships she hadn't expected; in order to maintain her good fence, she became a good neighbor.
The Plainclothes Problem-Solver
The more involved Giordano got in the lives of the young people, the bolder she became about some of the other problems on Willow Street. As well as the drug dealing, there was some prostitution activity, and there were reports of domestic violence in some of the houses. One Halloween, someone set fire to all the trash cans on the block and scattered burning refuse in the street. "But that wasn't the worst part," Giordano recalled. "When the police and firemen came to put out the trash fires, some of them started making jokes about the situation. They seemed to think that the people in our neighborhood ought to expect things like this."
When Giordano tried to get help from the police department and other offices of local government, the results were mixed. Some departments would respond to her calls, and some wouldn't. Luckily, a neighbor named Gerry Roy, who lived a few blocks away, encouraged Giordano and gave her tips on who to talk to in City Hall. "Gerry was a key person for me," she says. "I would tell him about the problems on the block, and he's the one who always said, 'Yes, that is a problem. You should talk to so-and-so.'"
Dealing with graffiti was one way of demonstrating to outsiders that the residents of Willow Street were determined to get things done. "We got so efficient that we had cans of paint to match the color of every house on the block, all tagged and lined up in my basement. We would clean things up right away, since the longer you wait the more likely it is that the property will be vandalized again."
The Department of Code Enforcement, which monitors the maintenance of buildings, was usually the quickest to respond to Giordano's calls. "Usually, they did something within twenty-four hours," she remembers. The state's Department of Environmental Management, which deals with lead paint, asbestos, and other hazards, was also responsive. Big, wisecracking John Lombardi, the local city councilman, often helped her out when she couldn't get calls returned.
Responses from the police, who were so critical for dealing with many of the problems, were more varied. "Some of the community police officers we've had have been great—really involved with the kids, really friendly and easy to work with. Others were awful. There's this image of power that a lot of people buy into when they become cops—they want to make the big drug bust, catch the bad guys. Being a good role model to the kids just isn't as popular with them."
The worst were the officers on the narcotics unit. "You had to call and call and call to ever get a response. I started to document every call, so that I could complain to John [Lombardi] or someone in the police department when they never responded. At one point, I even gave them keys to my house, so they could do stakeouts."
Several times, Giordano actually confronted people living in the blue house or one of the other houses that were sites for drug dealing and prostitution. "Sometimes we'd actually have good conversations," she said. "Other times, especially after they knew I'd called the police, I'd get yelled at, or have my house vandalized. Sometimes people would call me a racist—not all the dealers were people of color but many were. It made me question myself—question why I was doing this."
Finally, the narcotics police recognized what a problem the notorious blue house had become and were able to make some arrests. Afterwards, some of the detectives apologized to Giordano. "They actually told me, 'We thought you were just some snooty neighbor.' I couldn't believe that! Here I was trying to help the police and help my neighborhood, and their first inclination was not to believe me." Giordano may have been a good citizen, but to the police her complaints were illegitimate until proven otherwise.
Legitimacy seems like a strange word to use when talking about citizenship. After all, we know that one essential feature of our citizenship is that we have rights—as long as we obey the law, we are entitled to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." People are used to the limited kind of legitimacy that comes with these individual rights, and in the abstract, it may be hard to imagine what else we might ask for.
The rights guaranteed to us in the Constitution allow us to vote, give us freedom of speech, protect us from various forms of persecution, and provide us with many other liberties. But nowhere does it say that narcotics detectives have to return our calls. As she struggled to improve life on Willow Street, Lisa Giordano started asking her government for more than just the protection of her rights: she wanted to be considered a legitimate partner, an unpaid problem-solver, a citizen with powers and responsibilities that went beyond voting.
Certainly, some of the public employees of Providence responded to Giordano right away, and eventually even the narcotics unit became more cooperative. Invariably, however, she had to make the first call, she had to introduce them to the neighborhood, and she had to justify her concerns. Even the Office of Code Enforcement, always there within twenty-four hours, had no presence on Willow Street until Giordano came along.
Our limited citizenship is an immediate, practical problem at the neighborhood and community level. At one of the meetings in the West Broadway neighborhood, one of the policemen Giordano worked with said, "Maybe once in your career as a cop you will turn a corner and find the burglar coming out a window with a VCR. All the rest of the time, you need citizens to tell you what they saw, to help you identify problem spots, and to take good precautions against crime." Police officers can't enforce the laws by themselves—they rely on citizens.
Despite the reception she got from local government, Giordano was determined to be a good citizen. The fact that Giordano was willing to do all of those things—even to confront the drug dealers and let the police set up shop in her home—should have earned her legitimacy in the eyes of the police. In our romantic visions of the Old West, the sheriff would be handing her a shiny deputy's badge. Instead, most of what Giordano said went unrecorded, her offers to help unanswered, and her role unrecognized.
Willow Street Values
Though the drug dealing, prostitution, and vandalism on Willow Street began to decline, what pleased Giordano most was the time she spent with the kids. During most of those years, there were ten or fifteen young people living on Willow Street; Giordano estimates that she got to know about fifty kids. "We really started to get creative about all the activities," she says. "I took them fishing, we had cookouts and pizza parties, we always went to a haunted house on Halloween. We went on a tour of Brown University, and went to the art museum at the Rhode Island School of Design. We delivered Christmas presents to needy families. I just wanted to get them out of the neighborhood once in a while—spark their ability to dream."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Next Form of Democracy by Matt Leighninger. Copyright © 2006 Vanderbilt University Press. Excerpted by permission of Vanderbilt University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments, ix,Foreword, xiii,
Introduction Things Your Mayor Never Told You: The Recent Transformation of Local Democracy, 1,
Section 1—The State of Democracy, 23,
1 Good Citizens and Persistent Public Problems, 25,
2 Is Everything Up to Date in Kansas City? Why "Citizen Involvement" May Soon Be Obsolete, 44,
Section 2—Appeals to Citizenship, 69,
3 Of Pigs and People: Sprawl, Gentrification, and the Future of Regions, 71,
4 The Increasing Significance of Race in Public Life, 93,
5 Washington Goes to Mr. Smith: The Changing Role of Citizens in Policy Development, 117,
Section 3—Building Shared Governance, 149,
6 The Strange Career of Chuck Ridley: Drug Abuse, Community Organizing, and "Government by Nonprofits", 151,
7 "Marrying" Schools and Communities: Endless Love or Affair to Remember?, 172,
8 Sharing the Buck: Communities Rethink Public Finances and Public Responsibilities, 195,
Conclusion—Things to Come, 224,
Notes, 251,
Index, 281,