Search Results

This chapter illustrates the complete array of current citizen engagement by presenting a lay-of-the-land exposition of what people do across a wide variety of behavioral and cognitive indicators. It discusses political engagement, civic engagement, cognitive engagement, and public voice. It also describes the patterns of involvement found among these four cohorts, finding sharp differences in political and cognitive engagement, but greater similarity in civic work and the expression of public voice. The wide range of ways citizens can participate in public life is captured. A surprising finding of the study is that nearly half of Americans report having engaged in some form of consumer activism in the past year.

This chapter provides a detailed look at the process of engagement, beginning with an overview of the ways a host of resources are linked to participation. Next, it builds a model of citizen engagement that illustrates how a plethora of conditions, attitudes, and orientations come together to influence participation. It also takes a closer look at what young people are currently doing in their own environments (in and out of school), the ways their engagement is being spurred, and how these positive influences might account for the divide between the civic and political participation of this cohort. Furthermore, it notices the ways individuals, institutions, and organizations are currently shaping the activism of this youngest cohort, and point to how these various influences may be favoring civic, as opposed to political, engagement. The data from the models suggests that there is no “silver bullet” antidote to apathy and disengagement, but also that widening the many narrow pathways can help more young people find their way to active citizenship and public life.

This chapter discusses the remixing of citizen engagement in United States. It also looks on the implications on what it means if current trends continue and how things might be different if a larger group and variety of citizens were to become engaged, or become engaged in a different way. It is also believed that the research provides some possible avenues for improving those areas where the democratic ideal is come short. It is stated that the current and future contours of citizen participation in the United States are changing, largely because members of different generations differ not only in their willingness or ability to participate but also in the types of activities they perform, and that these choices often cluster, even if imperfectly, between involvement in the civic and political realms.

This chapter examines the criticisms leveled against deliberative citizen engagement. It analyzes the merits of those censures and presents counterarguments that deliberation advocates present. Specifically, critics of deliberation point to low citizen motivation and aptitude, excessive idealism, the privileging of reason-based argumentation, and the inability of citizens to be open-minded as significant problems in instituting deliberative systems. Others raise practical concerns such as deliberation's struggle with representing diverse viewpoints or the divide between deliberative events and policy making. Defenders of deliberation maintain that citizens are interested in deliberative styles of governance, and that these systems can indeed be implemented in practical, cost-effective ways. Practitioners have worked in recent years to accommodate alternative styles of communication, and deliberative forums are more effective than conventional political processes at dealing with prejudices and a wide range of viewpoints. Finally, policy-related deliberative events have been successful, although benefits to participants and costs vary.

This chapter examines the attitudes that underpin the behaviors of the public that are relevant to citizen engagement. Even though there seems to be a clear line of electoral cleavage between the oldest and youngest two generations, this shows some important differences between DotNets and GenXers on the one hand and between BabyBoomers and Dutifuls on the other. The chapter begins by presenting new data on the reasons people give for why they do not participate in electoral politics. Then, it looks on how citizens view themselves and the role and responsibilities of citizenship, along with their attitudes about politics, government, and their fellow citizens. The evidence shows there is now a two-generation-wide schism in the realm of electoral participation. The notion of “generational identity” and the views on the obligations of citizenship is explored through a generational prism.

This chapter provides a broad overview of the economic, cultural, political, and technological environments in the United States of the past forty years. These developments provide a roadmap to the current nature of citizen engagement. The focus is placed on the social, political, and economic cultures in which GenXers and DotNets grew up, speculating on how these different socialization experiences may lead to differences in political outlook and participation. In many ways, the experiences of GenXers and DotNets are mirror images of each other. Capturing the nature of youth engagement today is important both for what it implies about the future and what it reveals about the past. The habits and preferences of today's young people provide a glimpse of what the future will be like, as DotNets and Xers grow older and began to take up the reins of leadership in the nation.

This chapter argues that previous empirical work on citizen engagement and popular culture has been dominated by a narrow concept of the political. As a consequence, much of this research focused on factual genres and tended to ignore more subtle expressions of citizen engagement. This chapter makes the case for a wider concept of the political. It suggests that citizen engagement can be understood as an expression of one’s place in the world, which is informed by knowledge of and a relationship with sources of power and social groups, by feelings of affinity and a sense of values.

This chapter concludes the book with a discussion of future the prospects for democracy. It sums up the argument, makes recommendations for future studies, and offers suggestions for new forms of participation. Contrary to the often negative assessment of the state of citizen engagement, this chapter contends that if citizen politics is to thrive, a broadening of the political system itself is required to allow for different forms of democratic participation.

This chapter argues that citizen engagement, democracy, and good governance are all interconnected and each one of them is responsible for the health of the other two. When citizen engagement thrives, it invariably leads to a vibrant democracy and eventually towards an environment of mutual trust, respect, and accountability between the state and the citizenry. That, in turn, can pave way for good governance and democratic functioning of the state's institutions. However, the interpretation of good governance and levels of citizen engagement vary widely between communities and so does the state's willingness and comfort levels with citizen engagement. In such a scenario, both the state and the citizenry have to step out of their comfort zones and take it upon themselves to create space for greater dialogue and innovative ways of engagement. The chapter then assesses whether this is really possible given the changing and complex societal dynamics.

This chapter reviews a wide range of current polling and several important collections of data that offer a window back through time. Specifically, it turns to the question of how the changing nature of citizen engagement is likely to affect the substance of politics and governance. Young people have long been a strong constituency for regulation and spending to protect the environment. American youth today face a political world in transition, wherein a national consensus on the value of government has broken down. The successful politician of the next decades will not have to be more attractive, or more hip, to draw young voters. But it is clear that leaders who stress the longstanding issues that provide the foundation of the current party system may not fully appeal to today's youth.

The concluding chapter draws from the analyses and findings from the rest of the book and puts forward a set of key recommendations for politicians, officials, advisors, and civic activists to help them steer clear of common pitfalls and adopt reliable practices to reconnect state and citizens. These cover how to focus on making citizen engagement a lever for change, so that citizens are confident that their involvement will make a difference; how to identify and publicise the value of democratic cooperation, especially in quantifying the social, political and economic gains more consistently and explicitly; how to select appropriate and feasible involvement approaches in the light of different circumstances; how to cultivate inclusive community relations on a sustained basis; and invest in the development of civic leadership so that the necessary skills and understanding are in place. The chapter closes by pointing to how policies for strengthening state-citizen cooperation have succeeded and can be replicated on a large scale in different countries.

This chapter calls for authentic and sophisticated citizen deliberation in policy making to better address new complexities across public policy and re-visit contemporary understandings of public value. Not only will citizen engagement, relatively weak in Australia, enhance the quality of policy making but will reinvigorate the democratic process at a time of increasing disillusionment with representative government, politicians and the political elite. As an example of failed policy making and the absence of any ‘duty of care’ in working through complex issues requiring fundamental change and adaptation the chapter highlights water reform in the Murray-Darling Basin. Within the broader context the governance-governmentality continuum is explored as well as the attractiveness of ‘localism’ The chapter examines recent government led initiatives in Victoria and Queensland as well as highlighting some popular spaces created from within civil society. The chapter concludes on a pessimistic note that there are few signs of a willingness or capacity to engage in the deepening of democracy as a prerequisite for citizen engagement.

This chapter explores experiences and reflections of having engaged with citizens towards ensuring greater and responsible participation in the electoral processes before and during elections at different levels. In 2013 and 2014, these efforts took shape of a formal campaign in and around Mysuru in India, but received recognition and appreciation in forums across the country. Making participatory democracy work is in the hands of citizens, and exercising their electoral franchise is the first step towards this. A ‘vote’ in the world's largest democracy is however a complex phenomenon given how it is sought, and how people respond to it. Collectively, people ought to put an end to unhealthy trends in the Indian electorate by voting responsibly, by being politically more conscious, by demanding accountability, by participating, or by resisting.

This chapter pulls together the different forms of rationale for the democratic design framework, and offers a detailed summary of its core components and their provenance. This summary includes a practical step-by-step guide to democratic design, from definition of the specific political challenge at hand to consideration of the life of specific democratic designs or models. The bulk of the chapter sets out an illustrative case study of the application of the framework and its guide, focused on democratic challenges and change in the United Kingdom in the light of the principles of equality, resources, citizen engagement, and citizen participation.

This chapter offers information on nongovernmental organizing and the consensus-building efforts of an initiative called “Envision Utah” to bring the ideal and strategy of quality growth to media and public awareness. This large-scale public participation model helped to mobilize resources to promote the strategy of quality urban growth in a political context that was considered by experts in the field to be unfriendly to public planning. The leadership, operational strategy, and an extraordinary commitment to achieving the purpose helped Envision Utah to make the movement for quality growth in Utah a success. This case also highlights how small-scale citizen engagement and large-scale public education campaigns helped manage rapid urban growth in Utah.

Chapter 5 reflects on citizen engagement in civic associations as an important means for providing an education in specifically democratic forms of leadership and citizenship. Addressing the inevitable tensions afflicting leadership in a political system in which “the people” are supposed to rule, either in person or through representatives, the author draws on Aristotle’s conception of political rule as equal citizens learning to rule and be ruled in turn, and Tocqueville’s impressions of American civil associations as intermediaries between state and citizen. Through participation in the best of these associations citizens gain practical skills while developing self-confidence and a sense of mutual respect; they learn what it means to govern through contest, compromise, in the process honing their faculties of political judgment. The author argues that leadership in civic society thus becomes (or can become) a school for democratic leadership.