What We’re Reading: Civic Engagement Edition

This week’s ‘What we’re reading’ focuses on civic engagement (also referred to as community or citizen engagement, and sometimes as participatory governance)—the process of citizenry actively engaging in their communities on the issues that affect them. It can be led by governments at all levels or driven by community actors; when initiated by the former in a transparent, responsive, and fair manner, it can help foster trust in government. Civic engagement takes many forms, from voting to volunteering to participating in local council meetings and more, but whatever form it takes, it offers citizens the opportunity to influence local policies, priorities, and solutions. As we collectively seek long term approaches to reducing polarization and divisions, it’s worth exploring how we might amplify civic engagement in the digital age. 

(As always, an article’s inclusion here doesn’t mean we endorse it, unless we specifically say so!)

The Policy Circle succinctly explains why civic engagement matters, focusing on the power in promoting agency:

Democracy – and in our case, a federal republic – depends on citizens’ participation. When citizens are engaged, they can exchange ideas, invest in finding solutions, and employ civilized discourse to address the issues facing their communities. This strengthens our democracy, and it also breeds personal empowerment on an individual level by helping people feel like they have a say in what goes on in their communities. By uniting under a shared purpose, we build trust, empathy, human connections, and a strong support base for finding and implementing solutions in our communities.

The one constant in discussions of civic engagement is the concept of increasing trust. Saki Kumagai and Federica Iorio at the World Bank explain the relationship between trust and citizen engagement:

Just as Tocqueville in the 1830s traveled to America to understand democracy, Putnam (1993) draws lessons for democratic theory from his 20-year journey through Italy. [...] Putnam finds that trust, economic prosperity, and institutional competence are achieved also through citizen engagement. From 1970 to 1989, Putnam studied the birth and development of a new institution in newly decentralized Italy. He found that, although the newly created 20 regions are on paper identical and have the same powers and mandates, it is the level of civic engagement that creates strong, responsive, effective, and representative institutions. 

The literature agrees it is difficult to establish a causal relationship between citizen engagement and trust in government, but most authors follow Putnam who states, “civic engagement and trust are mutually reinforcing” (2000, 137). In other words, without citizens’ trust in government, formal citizen engagement is unlikely. Without citizens’ participation, government’s performance will be poor, and trust in government will fall (Brixi et al. 2015). Low trust in public institutions is part of the reason why citizens do not engage, and the lack of citizen participation in government decision making negatively affects performance and accountability, which leads to a decrease in trust. 

[...] Inclusive citizen engagement is an approach for state-citizen interactions in a policy arena to provide citizens a stake in decision making. When citizen engagement is designed and implemented well, it provides government an opportunity to foster “process-based” trust in public deliberation and service delivery. While trust may be one determinant for citizens to participate in this process, citizens’ experiences and satisfaction in the process could also shape trust in government.

Where do we stand now? Rebecca Winthrope at Brookings shares the dismal stats on decreasing civic engagement in the U.S. and its implications: 

Americans’ participation in civic life is essential to sustaining our democratic form of government. Without it, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people will not last. Of increasing concern to many is the declining levels of civic engagement across the country, a trend that started several decades ago. Today, we see evidence of this in the limited civic knowledge of the American public, 1 in 4 of whom, according to a 2016 survey led by Annenberg Public Policy Center, are unable to name the three branches of government. It is not only knowledge about how the government works that is lacking—confidence in our leadership is also extremely low. According to the Pew Research Center, which tracks public trust in government, as of March 2019, only an unnerving 17 percent trust the government in Washington to do the right thing. We also see this lack of engagement in civic behaviors, with Americans’ reduced participation in community organizations and lackluster participation in elections, especially among young voters.[1]

Many reasons undoubtedly contribute to this decline in civic engagement: from political dysfunction to an actively polarized media to the growing mobility of Americans and even the technological transformation of leisure, as posited by Robert D. Putnam. Of particular concern is the rise of what Matthew N. Atwell, John Bridgeland, and Peter Levine call “civic deserts,” namely places where there are few to no opportunities for people to “meet, discuss issues, or address problems.” They estimate that 60 percent of all rural youth live in civic deserts along with 30 percent of urban and suburban Americans. Given the decline of participation in religious organizations and unions, which a large proportion of Americans consistently engaged in over the course of the 20th century, it is clear that new forms of civic networks are needed in communities.

As one of the few social institutions present in virtually every community across America, schools can and should play an important role in catalyzing increased civic engagement. They can do this by helping young people develop and practice the knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors needed to participate in civic life. Schools can also directly provide opportunities for civic engagement as a local institution that can connect young and old people alike across the community. To do this, civic learning needs to be part and parcel of the current movement across many schools in America to equip young people with 21st-century skills.

What about outside of school settings? How do we maintain and build on foundations for civic engagement into adulthood? CSIS offers one approach:

Democracy is not perfect. Since the founding of our republic, its implementation often has failed to live up to our aspirations. Yet, the promise of democracy is not current perfection but the capacity to change, to move toward a more perfect union—if we, the people, are informed and engaged agents of that change. The problem is that civics education has been undervalued and under-resourced for decades, resulting in a lack of civics knowledge and civic skills that has left many Americans ill-equipped to fill this essential role. Too many Americans believe that the system is irrevocably broken and that the individual is powerless to bring about change.

Over the past few months, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) have been engaged in a project looking at how civic skills, competencies, and dispositions can be enhanced across the country. A series of roundtables and interviews [...] reinforced the urgent need to reach adults. The research team confirmed that employers are a particularly trusted source and are well positioned to maximize involvement with and the reach and impact of workplace-based, community-focused civics conversations and initiatives. [2] Moreover, well-implemented activities can forge stronger bonds within a workforce and provide workers with a clearer sense of how they can impact the world around them through civil discourse and informed engagement.

Not all engagement is good engagement. Agnes Batory & Sara Svensson share a cautionary tale from Hungary about political manipulation masquerading as government-led civic engagement and participatory governance, and then offer guidelines on how consultative instruments can be used more effectively:

There are circumstances in which public consultations will achieve anything but greater legitimacy and better policy-outcomes. [...]

[One example] is Viktor Orban’s national consultations in Hungary, probably the most wide-scale consultative exercises in contemporary Europe. The Orban government repeatedly sent questionnaires to every household in the country in some 8 million copies, allegedly to channel public preferences into decision-making on issues from unemployment to how migration should be handled by the EU. However, to mention just the most important shortcomings, the weakness of procedural guarantees and bias in the framing of questions marked out the consultations as a tool of political manipulation and propaganda rather than a genuine instrument for participation.

Our conclusions are not to recommend avoiding the use of consultative and participatory instruments. They do have an important role when the conditions are right – but only then. We aim to help deciding when that is by proposing five requirements: posing questions that allow for citizens’ autonomous choice; strong procedural guarantees to ensure a balanced debate and verifiable outcomes; the result to at least have the potential to settle actual policy; cost-effectiveness; and political communication that is truthful about the aims and consequences of the vote.

Ilya Somin discusses an issue related to declining civic engagement—political ignorance—and explores one potential approach to remedy it from a bottom-up perspective, a remedy that might also incentivize those who might find civic engagement less than enticing: 

The core problem of political ignorance arises from voters’ incentives to be rationally ignorant. There is too little payoff to learning about political issues for the individual voter. If that is the problem, why not change voter incentives by paying them to learn? Economist Bryan Caplan, best known for his work on “rational irrationality,” has proposed the establishment of a “Voter Achievement Test,” under which any citizen who wants to can take a test of fundamental political and economic knowledge and get a monetary payment based on their performance. The higher the score, the higher the pay. This simple approach to addressing political ignorance deserves serious consideration. 

No one need be required to take the test. Moreover, unlike in the case of epistocracy, nobody needs to lose their right to vote if they refuse to take the test or perform poorly on it. [...] In addition, the test could be updated as new issues arise or additional policy relevant information emerges. 

[...]

The most obvious flaw in this strategy is the question of whether the government can be trusted to objectively determine what should be on the test and what the “right” answers are. It is easy to imagine how the test can be biased in favor of a particular political party or ideology. [...] But the risk is somewhat lessened because the test could not be used to actually exclude people from the franchise. Even if we cannot trust the state to develop an objective “Voter Achievement Test,” perhaps private philanthropists or educational organizations might do so. 

At least for now, I am skeptical that either the private or public sector can design a test-and-payment system that is likely to be both effective and widely accepted. Nevertheless, this bottom-up strategy for increasing voter knowledge deserves more significant consideration. It is, at the very least, worth attempting as a small-scale experiment. 

[...]

That said, like the other options considered so far, it is more likely to be effective in combating pure ignorance than in alleviating bias in the evaluation of information. In principle, a test can be designed to improve performance on the latter front, as well. But it would be a much more complicated task and even more susceptible to biases of its own.

To round it out with specific innovation to explore, Anthony Zacharzewski offers a few parameters to shape civic tech: 

Civic Tech describes a range of platforms, both commercial and open source, which offer digital participation opportunities for idea generation, participatory budgeting and similar uses. [...] For years, civic tech has focused on the things that digital tools do well – data, numbers, and text. It has often emphasised written comments, voting ideas up and down, and the statistical analysis of responses. And perhaps most tellingly, it has focused on single events, whether participatory budgeting processes or major events such as the Conference on the Future of Europe. 

Many of these approaches are essentially digitised versions of physical processes, but we are starting to realise now that one-off processes are not enough. Rather, civic tech tools need to bring people into longer-term conversations, with wider participation. 

[...]

So what will the next generation of civic tech need to look like? 

It has to start from an open-source and interconnected approach. Platforms cannot own citizens in the way that Facebook owns and monetizes its users. 

It should create multiple opportunities for people to build local communities, to connect to others and get involved based on their particular interests, and to support the easy creation of new events, conversations or processes.

Finally, it has to allow connection across local, national and international levels. This will help ensure that the results of an event held in one place or by one group are not confined to the commissioning organisation, or to the participants, but can be shared with other citizens and decision makers who are considering the same issues in their own context.

Photo by mauro mora on Unsplash