How broken is our democracy? And how can we fix it?
by
Martha McCoy
June 1, 2010
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Washington, D.C.
Everyday Democracy's Executive Director Martha McCoy gives her remarks at the Brookings event, "How Broken is Our Democracy? And How Can We Fix It?”
The Open Government Directive that the president issued his first day in office was hopeful and exciting for many across the country. The three commitments in that directive – to transparency, participation, and collaboration – are critical aspects of the democracy reform movement.
The challenge with talking about participation and collaboration is that the words get used incorrectly so often that most people don’t know what they really mean. The most common misconception is that they’re just good PR – and while good public relations can be part of an effective participatory process, it also requires political leadership, analysis, and resources. Without that, it’s just window dressing, and doesn’t change anything about politics as usual.
Unfortunately, the faux versions of participation end up getting a lot of press, because they might make good theatre, or even offer up some good conflict to watch. The town hall meetings on health care reform last summer were great examples of how not to do public participation. In the past decade, when most elected officials or candidates have used “town hall” language, they’ve really been talking about explaining their ideas and then taking questions (or demands) from others. In the worst examples of the past few years, audiences were carefully screened for ideological fit, and then the events were slickly portrayed as town halls that had been open to all.
More civility might seem like the answer. That would be welcome, but it’s not an adequate response. Lack of civility is a symptom of a structural problem that requires a structural remedy. Hannah Arendt once said, “Democracy needs a place to sit down,” and it still does. We need structured opportunities to hear from people who are not like us, express ourselves honestly, work through issues together, become informed together, use conflict productively, talk with public officials, find areas of commonality, and to be heard. Then, we need to use that participatory process as a basis for collaborating together to have an ongoing voice in decision making, and to solve problems. This means collaborating with government and it means holding government accountable. It requires transparency at every step.
There are some major challenges that any leader trying to create good participation and collaboration will have to confront if he or she is going to call for and work for the kinds of opportunities that would strengthen our national democracy:
• First, this isn’t the way that politics usually works. The power of money makes it very difficult to implement participatory processes, even for public officials who want to. That’s why electoral reform and campaign finance reform have to go hand in hand with participation and collaboration.
• Second, there is a profound lack of social trust between people with different views, and a major distrust of government. Because of the way our media are structured, they exacerbate these trends on a regular basis. As E.J. Dionne pointed out years ago, if the airlines were to advertise the way most candidates do, they’d be showing the crashes of their competitors, and then no one would fly. Now, instead of just the candidates demonizing each other, there is regular demonizing of “the other” across the board. The very fabric of our democracy seems to be disintegrating.
• Third, there are large and growing disparities between racial & ethnic groups, and people from different socioeconomic groups. We mostly don’t talk about these issues as a country, and that denial shows in our lack of attention and public will. Disparities show up in how people are faring economically, in health care, in education, and in housing. (The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race & Ethnicity at the Ohio State University, among others, has been mapping and documenting these disparities.) As a country, we don’t spend time trying to understand where those disparities are coming from, even though they are undermining our ability to tackle some of our most serious problems. These disparities also get replicated in voting rates & in all forms of participation – and even in which kinds of participation receive credibility -- which further cuts us off from the voices of people who need to be heard if we’re really going to solve our problems.
When participation and collaboration are carried out well, they have the potential to confront these dynamics and even transform them.
We can see that happening, in a growing number of local communities of all sizes across the country, including tribal communities. A small but growing number of public officials from different political parties are figuring out that they need to govern differently. And there are citizen innovators who are figuring out that they can collaborate with government, nonprofits, and the private sector to help create these kinds of opportunities.
One example of an effective participatory process took place in New Orleans, where AmericaSpeaks worked with the city to build a large-scale deliberation so that people from all backgrounds across the city (and the diaspora) could have a voice in rebuilding. Or, in the South Bronx (a community that Everyday Democracy is working with), the faith community initiated a participatory processes to bring together residents and police to talk together and find ways to work together on public safety and community policing. Now, the borough is supporting those efforts, along with the police department. Some of our partners in the Deliberative Democracy Consortium – an international consortium of scholars and practitioners working to make these practices a regular part of democracy -- are working with very similar efforts.
The point is – this is happening, and it’s having results on some very intractable issues. People are meeting in small groups to deliberate, meeting in large groups, sometimes meeting online, sometimes using technology. They are talking with each other, grappling with issues, building trust, working with public officials, and having a voice in decision making. I recommend Matt Leighninger’s The Next Form of Democracy for more examples.
At the same time, there is a group of federal managers who are innovating within federal agencies, to use strong participatory processes in their work. There is a long history of this in some agencies, such as the EPA, whose work helped create the watershed movement, alongside active citizen groups. These innovators within agencies need more resources and support to take those practices to any kind of real scale. For more examples of this work, I recommend Carmen Sirianni’s book Investing in Democracy.
Another sign of hope is that there is a growing body of empirical knowledge about these processes… Archon Fung has looked at processes through the lens of democracy deficits, so that it is possible to see what kinds of processes address what kinds of needs, and with what results. There is also a growing community of practice – people and organizations dedicated to good engagement that are looking at this research and using it. There is a growing consensus within this community on the principles that ground good participation and collaboration. As part of the Open Government Dialogue after the directive was issued, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation collaborated with others to develop principles of public engagement.
And finally, a growing number of participatory and collaborative efforts at the local level are finding productive ways to tackle racial and ethnic disparities, and disparities among socioeconomic groups. These are some of the hardest issues to talk about or to do anything about. But people are finding ways not only to talk about them productively and in diverse groups, but to tackle the very roots of the growing gaps we are facing and to do something about them. With structured opportunities, people can meet and talk across racial divides, across economic divides, and with public officials and public institutions such as school districts. This is difficult to do, but people are participating in the efforts by the thousands, and tens of thousands. The racial equity and civil rights fields are critical as part of the democracy reform agenda. One last book recommendation here: Kathy Cramer Walsh’s book Talking About Race is a very readable analysis of the governance implications of participatory efforts on race and equity, looking at communities in the networks of Everyday Democracy and Hope in the Cities.
We need to build on all of these practices and the empirical knowledge we have, and tap into the growing network of elected officials, nonprofit leaders and citizen practitioners to take this to scale. This is URGENT and this is DOABLE. This would offer hope for bridging our largest divides and helping to solve some of our most critical problems. Those of us working on participation and collaboration cannot do this alone – we need to work with other parts of the democracy reform movement: media reform, electoral reform, racial equity, community organizing, youth engagement and civic education, national and community service, and transparency. That is why we are here today. We are committed to working together to strengthen our democracy.
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