Government is Us 2.0

Cheryl Simrell King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780765625021
• eBook ISBN: 9781317469452
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Pharmacology

This book talks about the relationships amongst and between citizens and their governments, the possibilities of governing differently in ways that don't oppress, marginalize, or limit people, and about bringing different sensibilities to the practices of administration in US.

Part I

Introduction

The two introductory chapters contextualize citizen–government relationships in the United States and provide an overview of what we know about the efficacy and possibilities of citizen engagement. This section ends with the dilemmas before us, citizens and administrators alike, as we contemplate citizen engagement in public administration and calls for us to not forget that the normative questions of public administration need to remain front and center, no matter where we end up on the citizen engagement continuum (to engage or not to engage, that is the question). It is not just how we serve but why and what we serve and who benefits.

1

The Context

Citizens, Administrators, and Their Discontents

Cheryl Simrell King and Renee Nank

When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us. We, the people. We, the people, hold in our hands the power to choose our leaders and change our laws, and shape our own destiny.

Government is the police officers who are protecting our communities and the servicemen and women who are defending us abroad. Government is the roads you drove in on and the speed limits that keep you safe. Government is what ensures that mines adhere to safety standards and that oil spills are cleaned up by the people who cause them. Government is this extraordinary public university—a place that’s doing lifesaving research, catalyzing economic growth, and graduating students who will change the world around them in ways big and small.

—President Barack Obama Commencement speech at the University of Michigan May 1, 2010

Scholars, pundits, and pollsters have been talking about the state of citizen–government relationships in the United States¹ for as long as the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (2010b) has measured, since 1958, citizens’ trust in government. Each year we mark the dwindling trust in government, from an all-time high just short of 80 percent in 1958, to a low of 17 percent in October 2008 (following the financial crisis and bank bailout, matching a 1994 historic low), with numbers hovering somewhere between 20 and 25 percent in the summer of 2010 (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press 2010a). Poll takers’ responses to questions regarding how much of the time they trust the federal government coincide remarkably with their satisfaction with the state of the nation. The trust numbers are somewhat better for state and local governments, but trust in state and local or regional governments is also at historic lows.

Box 1.1

Citizens and Citizenship

The classic definition of the politics/administration dichotomy situates the two at opposite ends of an engagement spectrum: politics is the field of citizen engagement and the place where multiple, and often conflicting, desires and needs are mediated using political processes. It is here—in the political realm—that citizenship is classically practiced, with the ideal citizen being an active shaper and player in politics. Citizens’ political roles are not limited to voting, but voting is the ultimate engagement act. On the other hand, administration, according to the classic definition of the dichotomy, is the place where political aims and ends are implemented. Administration was once seen as a sterile, objective, and nonpolitical process wherein citizens had no substantive roles. However, as we know, citizens can play significant roles in administrative functions and are asking, even demanding, they be involved in administrative decisions and processes.

It is common, in contemporary conversation, to refer to subjects of government as “clients,” “customers,” “taxpayers,” or even “the public.” These terms are purposively avoided here because of the way they shift and change the relationships among and between citizens and their governments. In using the term “citizen,” the intention is not to proffer a term that, by definition, excludes those who are not legal citizens. Instead, it suggests that citizenship is both a legal status and a practice.

The idea of citizenship has a long history in Western political philosophy, beginning with the city-states of ancient Greece. Within this historical framework, citizenship has long been thought of as both a status and a practice (Stivers 1990). As status, it connotes formal relationships between the individual and the state, including rights (voting, free speech, and freedom of association) but few, if any, responsibilities. As practice, citizenship entails obligation, responsibilities, and activities that make up the essence of political life, such as participation in governance and the duty to consider the general good.

What is at the heart of this distrust? And whom do citizens mistrust? Elected officials and politicians or the administrative agencies and government workers that put public policies into action? As it turns out, people are angry with and distrust pretty much all of government, politicians and bureaucrats alike, and don’t necessarily distinguish between the two. In the first edition of Government Is Us, we sourced this anger and distrust to the antigovernment rhetoric and action of the mid-1990s. Much of the antigovernment rhetoric of that time was engendered by politicians who, in campaigns, promised to take knives to the bloat of various government bureaucracies. Political party was no matter: democratic, republican, and independent candidates alike convinced citizens that governments, and therefore government workers, are parasites feeding off the resources of taxpayers. Jimmy Carter was the first president to campaign on an antigovernment platform, and most candidates for all offices have done so since. As Wamsley et al. (1990) recalls, Jimmy Carter’s administration descended on Washington D.C. as a “victorious army conquering an alien city, intent on dealing bureaucracy and ‘red tape’ a mortal blow” (9). Both the Carter and Reagan administrations, for all their differences, represented themselves as vengeful forces intent on occupying Washington and “making the Potomac run red with the blood of slain bureaucrats” (Wamsley 1990, 9). Politicians at all levels of government have been promising to reduce the size of government since time immemorial; interestingly, it is not so easily done, and few have made lasting changes.

For our part, U.S. citizens seem to swallow, without question, the antigovernment rhetoric shoved down our throats. We neither recognize the irony that the architects of bureaucracy—those who authorize bureaucratic institutions and endeavors—are those working to tear down the edifices they designed (Wilson 1989). Nor do we seem to understand that government is us—that government workers are our spouses, relatives, neighbors, friends, and colleagues. We don’t seem to connect government to essential services that make civil life possible, such as roads, sewers, schools, water, law enforcement, and so forth. We want smaller, invisible, less greedy (with our tax dollars) government until a disaster strikes or something goes wrong with services we take for granted.

Discontent in a Historical Context

Discontent, distrust, and anger directed at governments is nothing new; distrust in government seems to be written into U.S. citizens’ collective genetic structure. The values upon which this nation was founded—freedom, liberty, and individual rights to name a few—go hand in hand with distrust in government. As Michael Nelson (1982) observed, the birth of the United States was marked as much by anger against government—the British monarchy—as by a positive desire for something new. A constitutional government may have soothed fears about governmental power, but the elitism of the authority and power structures of the government, economic inequity, the suffrage tied to economics, and the practice of slavery left simmering resentment on the part of the average citizen. This resentment took form in small rebellions, but didn’t serve national ends until it became the base upon which Andrew Jackson was elected, some fifty years after the birth of the nation. Reforms enacted during Jackson’s presidency (1829–1837) helped make the government legitimate in the eyes of ordinary citizens, as well as to assimilate vast numbers of immigrants during the course of the nineteenth century.

Indeed, for much of the nineteenth century, Americans exhibited relatively positive attitudes toward government. Virtually all white males became eligible to vote, and electoral turnouts soared (Marone 1990). As Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1945) well-known observations attest, mid-nineteenth-century America was marked by a high level of public activity on the part of ordinary citizens. The so-called populist era (Marone 1990) of the late 1800s saw active political participation as well as active grassroots demonstrations against the federal government’s failures to help farmers (Goodwyn 1978). Participation at that time reflected a very different attitude toward public life than those of the present day. Active Americans, those with the franchise, believed their actions shaped governments. According to de Tocqueville:

However irksome an enactment may be, the citizen of the U.S. complies with it, not only because it is the work of the majority, but because it is his own, and he regards it as a contract to which he is himself a party. … It is the opulent classes who frequently look upon laws with suspicion. … The people in America obey the law, not only because it is their own work, but because it may be changed if it is harmful. (1820/1845, Vol. I, 256–257)

The twentieth century saw a significant shift in attitudes toward government. Voting rights were extended to all, although plenty of barriers kept many people from voting and from public life in general. As the nation grew, individual interests could no longer be represented directly. Instead, interest organizations represented particularized interests and pluralistic democracy/politics was born. Governments grew as the nation grew, and these new governments were staffed by technocrats with specific expertise. Perceptions about who knew “best” shifted to government bureaus and workers. The citizenry, for the most part, allowed governments to make decisions for them, and citizens either trusted or feared those decisions, depending on the individual’s socioeconomic status and race, up until Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Everything seems to have shifted during the Johnson administration. Perceptions that Johnson’s War on Poverty delivered benefits to narrow groups, as well as reactions to civil rights legislation and a very unpopular war, led many to believe that the federal government not only practiced favoritism (e.g., sending working-class boys to fight while the elite avoided military service), it was also incapable of getting anything done except to waste the public’s tax dollars in dubious, large-scale efforts that benefited relatively narrow groups. Thus, the citizen as taxpayer was born. In the 1970s, tax revolts took place against governments at all levels (e.g., Proposition 13 in California), reducing tax revenues almost overnight and weakening local, regional, and state government, a trend that continues in the twenty-first century. Today, as indicated earlier, people do not trust government, antitax/antigovernment sentiment is high on both sides of the political spectrum (conservatives as well as progressives), and people are seriously disconnected from or discontent with governments.

Reasons for Citizen Discontent

Citizens often have good and justifiable reasons to be discontented with their governments. Berman’s (1997) arguments are as relevant today as they were when the first edition of this book was published. He argues that citizens question their relationships with government and experience a sense of discontent and disconnection under three conditions: (1) when citizens believe government is using its power against them or not helping them; (2) when citizens find policies and services to be ineffective, inefficient, or otherwise problematic; and (3) when citizens do not feel a part of government, feel ignored, or feel misunderstood by government (105–6).

Governments, however well intended, often use their power against citizens. Governments sometimes don’t satisfy citizen needs and are often apparently wasteful, inefficient, and ineffective in providing basic services. Governments enter wars that aren’t supported by all the citizenry, withhold information for national security, and make reforms that disenfranchise citizens or only serve a small, narrow group, thereby disenfranchising others. And, all too often, governments can’t solve the sticky, difficult problems of modern life. You don’t have to be an antigovernment radical to believe governments intervene too much in citizens’ lives, robbing them of the basic value of individual liberty and the ability to make their own decisions about their land, families, or behaviors. Governments are regulators and jailors, and in these roles, they are often unwelcome participants in citizens’ lives. Government is also mostly disconnected from citizens’ everyday lives. If all is going well, government is invisible—roads are repaired, water is safe for drinking and available to all, the garbage is picked up, people in need are receiving food and housing, and so forth. When government is obvious, when it is connected, it is often a negative occurrence (taking a child away, telling you that you can’t develop your shoreline as you like, etc.) or because something awful has happened.

For the everyday citizen of the United States, governments are the invisible, somewhat ghostlike structures that shape citizens’ lives, whether they like it or not. The American Dream—in which citizens are always employed, not wanting for health care, can afford to purchase a home, live a relatively comfortable life, and have children who eventually achieve more than they have—is one of the nation’s most sustaining myths. Although economic success has always been influenced by factors other than ability (privilege, race, class of origin, etc.), what nourishes our market system is the belief that in hard work lies the promise of opportunity, virtue, and greater wealth, regardless of ec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I. Introduction
• Part II. Democracy and Engagement Through Different Lenses
• Part III. Stories of Practice
• Part IV. Imagining the Possibilities
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index