Saturday, August 14, 2010

Notes on Fiorina's Paper

Stanford Professor Morris Fiorina wrote a paper in 2000 called "Extreme Voices: A Dark Side of Civic Engagement." A friend recently sent me this article as "counter argument" to my own work (work on CommonPlace, etc). After reading it, I'm here to say: totally I disagree. In fact, there's no incompatability between the Fiorina's claim that there's a "dark side" to opening more channels for engagement, and my own claim (the claim at the center of CommonPlace, and at the center of the work of the thinkers that I care about, from John Dewey to Roberto Unger to Michael Sandel) that more engagement as citizens in the communities we inhabit -- in the communities that shape our lives -- is at the center of our rights and our responsibilities are free people. In other words, we should be working towards engagement. Almost always. In fact, the "dark side" of civic engagement identified by Fiorina and the "not enough civic engagement" identified by Putnam et al., are just two sides of the same coin.
Let me try to explain.
Fiorina claims that for over 50 years new participatory channels have opened up our political system at every level ("the political system today is far more exposed to popular pressures than was the case at midcentury") -- elections are more candidate-centric, less machine oriented; congress is more transparent; we have more direct legislator-constituent exchange media; we have more single-issue advocacy groups, etc. We've gone from an elitist, "vital center" democracy, of the 1950s, to a more, more "change we can believe in" democracy of 2008.
This is true enough (and let's just leave it at that for now). And yet, as Fiorina rightly observes, despite these new channels for engagement, more Americans are distrustful of their government and cynical about the process. The paradox at hand is that more influence on the government coincides with more distrust of its workings.
The paper suggests three reasons. Two are presented as standard theories, and the third is the core of his argument: first, "overload" -- people become overwhelmed by competition between ideological voices, as the arena explodes open to new views, and so they disengage; two, "seeing the sausage being made" -- people don't like seeing how government works, "in all its messiness."They like to believe in the myth of disinterested statement. More influence of the process means more messiness to be seen.
Fiorina suggests a new causal mechanism. What if the problem is with the "opening up of channels" in the first place? Fiorina suggests that opening up channels has the effect of empowering only those people who are interested in using them; the more open our democracy is, the more partisan and extremist it becomes. Ironically then, more representation gives more voice to non-representative actors.
What is going on here? The answer is clear enough. Ordinary people are by and large moderate in their views -- relatively unconcered and uninformed about politics most of the time and comforatble with the language of compromsie, trade-ofs, and exceptions to the rule. Meanwhile, political and governmental processes are polarized, the participants self-righteous and intolerant, their rhetoric emotion and excessive. The moderate center is not well represented in contemporary national politics -- and often not in state and local politics either.
It's hard not to notice, however, that there's a bit of question-begging to this whole analysis. His case isn't against the dream of civic engagement generally -- it's against an unskeptical acceptance that civic engagement will always result from "more opportunities to engage" institutionally. That caution is certainly healthy. In economics, the term is "adverse selection": just creating channels does not guarantee that they'll be used, and when they are used it doesn't guarantee that they'll eventuate the desired goal whatever that is, in politics, in business, or otherwise.
But if having a small, non-representative class of partisans engaging with our political process is bad, then that's hardly a case against civic engagement; indeed, it's a case for more civic engagement -- for true, widespread, representative engagement.
Fiorina's argument, if we accept it as true, helps us to accept the simple fact that we don't get engagement simply by lowering the barriers to engagement. We need some concomitant shift in the norms that govern our desire to participate -- ie, we need to re-adopt as a culture a language of collective responsibility -- so that we might actually want to walk through the doors of our civic rights when they're their open and hard-won in front of us. And we also need to re-examine what engagement itself means. Democracy is a way of life, not just a political process. Democracy is a way of looking at the world; it's captured in the belief that everything is up for grabs; that everything is politics; that everything is the product of collective decision-making by the community, from the food we eat, to the streets we live on.
Morris is a congressional scholar, so I can sympathise with the bias in his analysis. But the truth is, the channels to participate in our democracy our everywhere -- they're everywhere that people congregate and that the products of people are being forged. To say that "open channels without engagement" is bad is to say nothing except that "non-engagement is bad." I agree. Everyone has the opportunity to participate. The question at hand is whether we take it or we don't -- and how we might get a large swath of the population to chose the former not the latter more often.

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