REVIEW ESSAY: DEMOCRACY, CITIZENSHIP AND PUBLIC POLICY

By Carwin C. Williams,
Brigham Young University

Simmering unease about our collective affairs is initiating consideration of status quo-alternatives. People are looking for healing change as well as greater freedom, life control, and community. At the heart of this renewed interest in making our democracy more functional are revived concerns about civic capacity, effective citizenship, collective responsibility, and ideological contradictions which pull us apart instead of bringing us together. Three provocative new books contribute significantly to this dialogue by focussing on citizenship, participatory democracy, the impact of public policy on citizenship, and nonprofit provision of public policy to citizens.

The Berry, Portney and Thomson volume, The Rebirth of Urban Democracy, is an exceptional longitudinal study of five cities -- Birmingham, Dayton, Portland (Oregon), St. Paul, and San Antonio -- rebuilding citizenship and resolving community problems through neighborhood participation. The first four cities have successfully integrated strong citywide neighborhood associations into the political process (p.289), have thus created nurturing opportunity structures for face-to-face interaction and problem resolution (p.286), have empowered their neighborhoods by altering the balance of power between them and business (p.287), have been more accessible and responsive to neighborhood needs (pp.289-90), and have increased citizens' external efficacy (belief in political system responsiveness), level of trust, social learning, and sense of community (pp.291-92).

In short, their "neighborhood associations are creative mechanisms for tying people into their communities" (p.299), are not a threat to democracy nor an alienating or destabilizing force (p.291), have not "functioned at the expense of governability" (p.14), have enhanced a balance between economic development and livability (p.298), and have given "people of all income levels more control over" quality of life decisions (p.294). The authors conclude increased urban participation is possible, neighborhood associations can promote policy responsiveness, such responsiveness does not necessarily promote particularism at the expense of larger community interests, participation can help increase citizen capacity, and practical steps can be taken to increase participation in urban government. Their work presents an interesting contrast to accounts of resource-ruling regimes in cities such as Houston and Atlanta (Cf., Regime Politics. Clarence N. Stone. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989).

Smith and Ingram in Public Policy For Democracy share the vision that policy design matters and can "empower, enlighten, and engage citizens in the process of self-government" (p.1). Their valuable book attempts to identify and promote effective policies and strategies "to balance or integrate the public sector in new and different ways" (p.2) for democratic renewal.

The eleven essays in their text rethink "the links between citizenship and public policy" (p.7) to expand the frontiers of public policy analysis. Leading off, Marc Landy says policies shape citizens; some "are fatally flawed because they establish privileged rights and entitlements that remove critical issues from the give and take of the deliberative process" (p.15). He indicates that resort to rights claims prevents the reasoned deliberation essential to identifying the stakes involved and clarifying concrete options (p.30). Such claims should be balanced against considerations of mutual obligations for the good of all. Citizens can be empowered by decentralizing, enlivening local governments, and making significant policies. His argument supports the participatory practices cited in The Rebirth of Urban Democracy.

Likewise, Richard M. Valelly, in the last Public Policy For Democracy essay suggests citizens are empowered in "schools of democracy" -- through meaningful "association, deliberation, and the performance of civic duty" (p.239). He asks us to take public policy for democracy more seriously, to recognize that policy design can increase dependency and powerlessness or reconnect citizens with one another and the political system. Such reconnected citizenship may help us avoid the dangers of organized politics bashing and egoism, which "can gradually corrupt a community's capacity to address its problems" (p.244). And policy design can "signal to citizens that effective government is possible" by ordinary people (p.246).

Valelly implies that it is not just participation per se that enhances citizen capacity, but rather self-transcendent (rather than private-regarding or exploitive) participation, a vital point weighed in the Berry, Portney, and Thomson book. He would probably agree with John Stuart Mill that participation has redemptive value.

When an individual participates, he is forced "to weigh interests not his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by another rule than his private partialities; to apply, at every turn, principles and maxims which have for their reason of existence the common good." (Berry, Portney, and Thomson, p.5, citing Mill)

Other contributors to the Ingram and Smith volume suggest that clinical reason and authority give politicians and judges an easy out in defusing intense political conflict, and the civic teachings of public policies can be profoundly intrusive, antidemocratic, and disempowering (Deborah A. Stone, chap.3); that policy designs in combination with social constructions can send subtle dysfunctional and disempowering messages to target groups. Policy tools should rather build capacity and teach (Helen Ingram and Anne Schneider, chap.4); public information campaigns and other policy instruments can also manipulate, disempower, and induce passivity, or answer citizen questions and encourage active deliberation. Such instruments generate interacting processes to achieve policy objectives and to reconstruct governing relationships (Janet A. Weiss, chap.5); federal citizen action policies and programs in Tucson and other cities have enhanced citizen capacity at all levels (but especially the middle class) through informal neighborhood interaction and have left a "lasting legacy at the local level of changed political terrain and institutionalized [capacity-building] opportunities for neighborhood participation" (p.96) (Sallie A. Marston, chap.6); the Immigration and Control Act of 1986, with group advocacy, has mobilized a new constituency with increased participation opportunities as an unexpected amnesty provision consequence -- showing public-private partnerships, under the right circumstances, can nourish empowerment (Susan Gonzalez Baker, chap.7); empowerment can also flow from consumer sovereignty and economic liberation, citizen capacity to exercise choice in the marketplace and hence more control over their lives. Resource-empowering policies will help the poor gain sufficient purchasing power to fulfill their wants in the mix and form they desire (R. Kenneth Godwin, chap.8); on the other hand, privatization policies such as the expansion of governmental contracting may destabilize nonprofit agencies, make them dependent, and undermine their role as alternatives to government. Policy analysis should thus examine the effects of such policies on citizen participation, voluntary associations, and comprehensive decision-making. Polices can be devised to balance government accountability and nonprofit innovation and autonomy (Steven Rathgeb Smith, chap.9); but shifting public services such as mental health care to nonprofits may also produce service deterioration, citizen alienation, and the "hollow state," a less accountable public service without in-house competence and substance (H. Brinton Milward and Keith G. Provan, chap.10).

Steven Rathgeb Smith, with his coauthor Michael Lipsky, expands his analysis of the "reconfiguration of social service provision" (p.vii), through the expansion of government contracting in Nonprofits For Hire. These authors note that public discourse recently "has been dominated by the belief that the public sector has been overextended, inefficient, and destructive of savings and investment initiative and innovation" (p.188), and "some analysts have argued that the welfare state was in crisis" (Ibid.) -- leading to a public impulse to privatize public services and extraordinary growth in governmental contracting. The voluntary sector, which some view as "an important alternative to state action" (p.207), however, has been "significantly compromised" (Ibid.) by extensive governmental intervention and its dependence upon government support. Increased contracting has produced unbalanced reciprocity between government and nonprofit service providers, with government in control. The authors fear privatization has "gone too far" (p.216), that it may exacerbate reliance upon interest groups and social movements (p.210), increase service provision complexity (p.211), and diminish citizen capacity to act as power and priorities shift in nonprofit organizations. The authors call for a more balanced approach to communal service provision stressing equity, holding contractors accountable to outcomes (instead of process standards), and recognizing the innovative capacity of "the nonprofit sector as a laboratory of invention for social policy" (p.228).

In combination, these books with their enlightening insights, make fascinating reading. While the world views and specific recommendations of such writers as Smith and Lipsky may seem to clash with essayists such as Landy and Valelly, their collective focus will undoubtedly encourage new perspectives on public policy analysis and citizenship, and perhaps objective synthesis.

The astute pioneering of these authors will contribute to the general discourse on democratic renewal and invite more. Other perspectives can be found in emerging works on communitarianism, the writings of authors such as Clarence N. Stone, Lynn A. Curtis, Robert N. Bellah, Bill Moyers, Robert L. Woodson, James Q. Wilson, and James Rouse.

Future research can build on all these sources and might well focus on mobilizing cooperation for the production of values, as well as managing conflict for their allocation; on positive freedom (power to, or the capacity to act and fulfill our dreams) as well as negative liberty (freedom from, or the absence of interference from others); investing in America by rediscovering our common interests and purposes and developing our human resources (Note, e.g., the exemplary Civic Capacity and urban Education Project of Clarence N. Stone and his colleagues in progress.); cultivating a culture of compassion, self-transcendence, and trust in place of unrestrained egoism and predatory exploitation; overcoming our ideological biases and contradictions as well as our profound distrust of self-rule and democracy as conversation (Cf., the political correctness movement); and nurturing our integrative and inclusionary impulses as opposed to disintegrative and exclusionary forces. Robert N. Bellah and associates suggest "democracy means paying attention" to things that matter most and avoiding the distractions -- that matter least (The Good Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). That is our common task.

BOOKS REVIEWED

The Rebirth of Urban Democracy. By Jeffrey M. Berry, Kent E. Portney, and Ken Thomson. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1993. 326 p. $36.95 (c), $16.95 (p).

Public Policy For Democracy. Edited by Helen Ingram and Steven Rathgeb Smith. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1993. 274 p. $34.95 (c), $14.95 (p).

Nonprofits For Hire: The Welfare State in the Age of Contracting. By Steven Rathgeb Smith and Michael Lipsky. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. 292 p. $35.00.