Creative Participation

Responsibility-Taking in the Political World

Michele Micheletti, Andrew S. McFarland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594517198
• eBook ISBN: 9781317261896
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Creative Participation presents the theory and practice of new innovative forms of political participation. Examples covered in the book include consumers engaging in political shopping, capitalists building green developments, UK Muslim youth campaigning on the internet, Sicilian housewives taking on the Mafia, young evangelical ministers becoming concerned with social change and vegetarians making political statements. The authors show how in these new campaigns individuals swarm like honeybees around particular issues, causing those in power to sit up and take notice. This is the essential guide to the new politics of participation.

Chapter One
Introduction

Responsibility-Taking in Politics

Michele Micheletti

Political Participation Anew

As the United States enters a new era of political leadership while facing a series of domestic and international problems, increased focus is put on individual citizens and communities as agents for political change. The “Yes We Can” slogan along with the “Renew America Together” campaign, run by the USA Service Organization, encourage and invite people from all walks of life to register themselves in the problem-solving potential of politics. For the new presidency the reason for activating citizens is clear. Americans have a responsibility to help their communities and fellow citizens. The ideas are not new in the United States, and they are not new for Barack Obama (1990, online). “It,” as he explained in his contribution to the book After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois, “needs to be done, and not enough folks are doing it.” Community organizations and organizers need citizen input to refresh the style and substance of organizing because “[f]ew are thinking of harnessing the internal productive capacities, both in terms of money and people, that already exist in communities.”

Creative Participation: Responsibility-Taking in the Political World explores theoretically and empirically how people from different walks of life in the mature democracies of the Western world develop their politically productive capacities into creative activities to take responsibility for the common good of their immediate community and societies at large. It discusses how people in Europe and North America seek ways to take political responsibility for wrongdoings in politics. In some cases as discussed in the chapters by Forno and Gunnarson, O’Toole and Gale, and Watson, the injustices they seek to right are perpetrated by the state itself through its own actions, incorrect actions, and even inaction. These concerned individuals note that their representatives and governments for different reasons have not taken conscientious action to solve political problems. In other cases, foreign governments and transnational corporations are the targets of political action. The studies in this volume show that these concerned individuals participate and, at times, even invent creative forms of political involvement. They turn to the marketplace and the Internet and use their personal networks and everyday routines to influence societal developments and events. They adopt an entrepreneurial and personal lifestyle that makes political action an integral part of their lives, and they use a variety of societal roles outside the citizenship role (voter, party member, etc.) to make their mark politically.

Whether in North America or Europe, emerging and surging forms of creative political action are characterized by individuals redefining the meaning of politics and taking politics into their own hands. Important features are the de-emphasis of the parliamentary or governmental arena as the only central sphere for political action, the blurring of the division between public interest and private conduct, the infusion of politics into daily lives, and the way in which creative participation allows individuals to combine their own life courses and self-seeking goals with service to the common good.

Creative participation differs, therefore, from conventional political participation, which is represented by such political acts as voting, political party activism, political protest demonstrations, and the joining of large membership-based civil society associations. This makes creative participation controversial in theory and practice. Some politicians fear that it will encourage citizens to flee representative democratic politics in the form of voting and membership in large civic associations. Scholars of traditional forms of political participation and responsibility-taking tend to evaluate creative participation negatively. They believe that it will promote more self-orientation and less other-orientation in politics and question its accountability to democratic politics and its effectiveness in solving political problems in the long term (e.g., Schlozman 2006; Vogel 2004). Moreover, can creative participation be relied on in a crunch? Critics also wonder if political participation and the spirit of democratic citizenship can be located in extra parliamentary activities that use the marketplace, entrepreneurial zeal, and ethnic and personal identity as an arena and a bearer of political expression and behavior (see Jan W. van Deth’s contribution in this volume; Burns et al. 2001). Finally, scholars bemoan the difficulties of investigating and measuring it. The theoretical and methodological problems surrounding the study of creative participation mean that it is hard to establish the importance of the phenomenon scientifically and to develop reliable methods that ensure the validity of research results (Stolle and Hooghe 2004).

The theoretical and empirical chapters of this book address these criticisms and problems of measurement and map the importance of the initiatives that individuals and groups of individuals create to help solve political problems from local to global levels. It investigates why and how individuals decide to engage in creative participation as consumers, clergy, and urban planners as well as through their ethnic affiliation and otherness. The book’s chapters investigate theoretically, empirically, and critically the potentials of creative participation as a form of political responsibility-taking.

Creative Participation—Normative Theoretical Underpinnings

U.S. political activist community organizer Saul Alinsky inspired not only President Barack Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, but also other politicians and political activists in the United States and abroad. In an interview late in life, Alinsky reflected on his career as a community organizer of political responsibility-taking and emphasized the empowering nature of self-interest. He said: “the only time you stand up in righteous moral indignation is when it serves your purpose” (Alinsky 1971, 64). For him as well as for the political actors appearing on the pages of this book, politics is closely connected with one’s own sense of personal being and situation in life. Outrage over personal problems and local community problems that affect one’s own life, family, friends, and community is an important starting point for creative political action. But for others, the concern is the lack of governmental will and might to tackle the problems of environmental destruction and the violation of human rights. A frequent activist strategy now often used to mobilize individuals into creative political endeavors is to show how the performance of certain societal roles affects the common interest both at home and abroad. This book explores these insights through the societal roles of consumers, housing developer, home owners, and the clergy.

Both old and new scholarship shores up the normative theoretical notion of coupling the public role of citizen with those from the private spheres of family, personal development, business, and consumption. Political philosopher Shelley Burtt (1993) theorizes about a “private virtue tradition” of political action to show how people concerned about promoting their own self-interest can benefit the common good. For her it is theoretically unsound and an unwise political strategy to suggest that people leave behind their personal identities and personal concerns in political campaigns for the public good. Not only are such self-sacrificing people dedicated to the common cause too few in number to affect political change, as individuals they also run the risk of overexertion—a political burnout—if their only source of political commitment is the interests of others. Participatory democracy, self-rule, and self-government mean, in other words, bringing the societal role of the worker, consumer, clergy, student, mom and dad, teacher, home owner, and professional into the realm of politics. In these and other roles, individuals see how their own lives are affected by and affect the lives of others.

In a similar vein, the late Iris Marion Young crafted her social connection model of political responsibility. She reasoned that such commercial transactions as the global manufacturing of consumer goods, long and distant global commodity chains that involve producers and consumers from East and West and North and South, and even shopping practices connect people, problems, and countries together across national borders. Deeply embedded in these global commercial transactions is the allocation of societal values and common resources. The values and resources involved in production, often hidden from view, concern the treatment of the workers who labor in food production, workers’ rights in outsourced manufacturing, and the use of raw materials in the forestry and extraction industry. They commonly imply overuse and misuse of natural resources—forests, water, air, minerals, waterways, soil—and questionable treatment of human labor, farm animals, primates, other mammals, and marine life. Thus, through globalized commerce, individuals are drawn inadvertently into endeavors at odds with climate change prevention, human rights, and sustainable development. Because of this, Young and other scholars make the normative claim that we—in our role as consumer and businessperson—have obligations of justice to workers, animals, and nature: “The social connection model of responsibility says that individuals bear responsibility for structural injustice because they contribute by their actions to the processes that produce unjust outcomes” (Young 2006, 119).

This notion of responsibility that ties people together “crossborderly” is unlike conventional participation and traditional conceptions of governmental political responsibility. It does not stop at the national border gate. It does not entirely delegate responsibility to government because it finds the political arena of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches unable or unwilling to deal effectively with many problems plaguing the globe today. At the same time—and this is an important point—it does not seek to replace government authority and regulatory capacity. Rather, it recognizes that the allocation of important global values and resources occurs in structures outside the realm of representative democratic politics and jurisdiction and that these structures need better regulation. The social connection model and theorizing on responsibility-taking stress societal roles active in other arenas than the representative democratic one, because they can play a constructive role in developing better values and better allocation of material and immaterial benefits and burdens. This is the case because they already are involved in the socialization of values and the allocation of resource. They are, in other words, settings for the performance of actions and inactions that affect other individuals and the environment. This gives them a political function and defines them as political (cf. Easton 1953). Moreover, the structures of interaction that develop in and for societal roles connect people together into communities, whether territorial or virtual. It is in these societal role communities that individuals can learn and practice “individualized responsibility-taking” or accountability for actions, inactions, and attitudes associated with one’s roles in society (cf. May 1991; Stolle and Micheletti forthcoming). Mobilizing individuals to view their societal roles differently is, therefore, in essence, a form of community organizing and community-building engagement.

Studying Responsibility-Taking Creative Participation

The chapters in this volume investigate more individualized and creative forms of responsibility-taking. Their theoretical and empirical examples show how political agency is embedded in a variety of societal roles and how they are settings for the performance of actions and inactions that affect both personal and common good. They also discuss the personal skills and socioeconomic resources that characterize creative participation and the kinds of tools, tool kits, and arenas that are important for the task. The first two chapters penetrate the theoretical characteristics of creative participation. Andrew S. McFarland coined the term creative participation. His chapter “Why Creative Participation Today?” in this book addresses a number of important general questions. He discusses types of political participation in response to societal problems posed by globalization and by policy complexity that are not well understood in the existing literature on discursive democracy, voting, and civic engagement. He compares creative forms of participation with mainstream political science perspectives on participation and explores the implications of participation outside the boundaries of governmental representative democracy for political theory and philosophy. He argues that the current views of political participation prevalent in the United States are lacking in enabling understanding of how questions of sustainability of Earth’s environment call forth a response of participation for the cause of the common good, rather than for individual or group welfare. His investigation of political science theory and empirical examples from the field of environmental policy implementation, anticorruption protests, and political consumerism (that is, use of the market as an arena for politics) lead to the following definitional mapping of the concept of creative participation. Creative participation refers to situations in which (1) a large number of scattered individuals (2) share some common notion of the need for public action to attain or preserve some common good, including a common perception of justice, (3) but find that established political institutions do not provide a means for such public action. In such a situation, individuals desiring public action and participation must create their own means of participation.

An important point from McFarland’s chapter is investigated in Alexandra Segerberg’s chapter, “Swarming: Imagining Creative Participation.” Like McFarland, Segerberg finds it problematic that theory is generally lacking on those aspects of contemporary political experience that involve scattered individuals and porous collective projects based on overlapping roles and reflecting more individualized forms of responsibility-taking. She also notes that scholars working in the field of creative participation are desperately grasping for scientific concepts that offer them theoretical assistance to analyze political action in a globalized political landscape not based on hierarchy, exclusive boundaries, and close relations. One increasingly popular metaphor is “swarms” or “swarming,” which is used to describe the collective action of large numbers of independent and decentralized agents acting locally to achieve specific or general political goals that can concern local to global societal issues. Segerberg discusses the political thinking associated with the metaphor and its recent usage. Her chapter traces its metaphorical history and asks what the label of swarming can give to the study of emerging forms of political action understood as creative participation. Her discourse shows how swarming and swarms are generally given negative connotations. Her interesting observation is that swarming—although not done in the same collective way as a street protest, demonstration, or meeting in a membership organization—should not be generally interpreted as a “bowling alone” phenomenon so feared by Robert Putnam as a breakdown of social networks, civic culture, and the democratic polity. Neither is it necessarily a representation of “cocooning,” that is, a retreat from public concerns or defense for a purely self-oriented and self-interested private life. Thus, in stark contrast to the well-known social theorist Zygmunt Bauman’s bleak pronouncements of it as consisting of “no exchange, no cooperation, no complementariness” and his application of this characterization to political consumers, swarming may, in fact, be a way for individuals to turn themselves into self-governing “political entrepreneurs” (Beck 1994, 129) or, as explored empirically in O’Toole and Gale’s chapter, everyday-makers (cf. Bang and Sørensen 1999). Segerberg’s chapter provides us with needed conceptual thinking and clarity about the advantages and disadvantages of more individualized forms of collective action (cf. Micheletti 2003), as represented by such new community organizing developments as “Renew America Together” mentioned previously and “Pledge Bank” (www.pledgebank.com/), which provides a digital venue to collect individuals for “getting things done” in a self-organizing and cooperative way. An important conclusion is that the labeling of such activities has ramifications for how they are perceived, interpreted, and evaluated by social scientists and practitioners alike.

The next four chapters employ different methodological traditions in political science to investigate creative participation “on the ground.” James L. Guth’s chapter, “Two Faces of Clerical Political Participation: Conventional and Creative Participation Among American Clergy,” uses quantitative methods to contrast conventional and creative participation among the U.S. clergy, the leaders of the largest voluntary associations in the United States. The clergy is an interesting case, because people of faith represent a societal role that has for centuries put their spirituality to political purposes. The Quakers were key actors in the global antislavery movement (sixteenth to nineteenth centuries); Catholic activism fuels liberation theology in Latin America; social science research clearly shows strong links between spirituality, civil rights, and peace, and environmental evangelical activity has long roots in U.S. history. Spiritual people in the United States are increasingly engaged in the green environmental movement, trade justice networks, and, as discussed in Michele Micheletti and Dietlind Stolle’s chapter, vegetarianism (Green Religious Movement n.d.). Guth’s chapter underscores the presence and importance of religious actors in politics in the United States. He uses data from a national survey of the U.S. clergy to map their political activism that targets governmental politics in one way or another and their “creative” social activities that focus on local community social welfare and community-building. His detailed statistical analyses show that these religious leaders engage in both forms of participation and, in some cases, some unique political activities such as preaching sermons on political issues and forming church study groups on political or social problems. They are also involved in creative participation designed to address social problems directly, to defend the interests of marginalized groups, and to deal with problems neglected by public officials. Parachurch organizations working outside of and across denominations on both the left and right encourage both conventional and creative forms of activism. Interestingly, Guth finds that conventional participation and more creative social action approaches have rather distinct political determinants and seem, therefore, to appeal to different sets of spiritual leaders. Both left- and right-leaning clergy engage in conventional participation. In contrast, socially active clergy, who are less partisan or ideological, hold a strong commitment to social welfare and engage more in creative participative activities. Young Catholic priests, for example, engage highly in social issues but not in conventional political activism.

The role of religion in politics is the focus of an additional chapter, “Grammars of Political Action Among Urban Muslim Youth,” by Therese O’Toole and Richard Gale. They use the work of Kevin McDonald (2006), who makes an important point about the political involvement of young people and people of faith. He argues that contemporary forms of political Islam should not just be viewed as a “resort to fundamentalism,” “resistant tradition,” or “defensive tradition,” as maintained by such well-known social theorists as Manuel Castells (2004) and Anthony Giddens (2002). Rather, political Islam is also an example of a shift to “new grammars of action” that encompasses forms of expression, emotion, subjectivity, and embodiment not captured by the old “civic industrial grammars of action” characteristic of conventional political participation. They study the new and old grammars of political actions among young Muslim activists in two urban areas in the United Kingdom—Birmingham and Bradford. Both cities are former industrial, urban centers with significant numbers of ethnic minority and Muslim residents. O’Toole and Gale’s in-depth interviews with the activists and the snapshot quotations illustrative of their results give social scientists, politicians, policy makers, and others food for political thought. They find that their respondents are not strongly affiliated to party polities but continue to vote. Their political aspirations and activities are most intensively located in “glocal”—thinking globally, acting locally—personal, and direct forms of action, as exemplified by their very high levels of engagement in community, local, global, consumer, informational, and everyday forms of political action. Noteworthy is that identification with global Islam lies at the core of their political engagement. This is an important research finding, because, as O’Toole and Gale acknowledge, it suggests a need for greater clarity over the varied and frequently dynamic role played by identification with Islam, which is too often dismissed as fundamentalist political extremism at worst or atavistic cultural retreat at best. Thus, their study shows that, whether expressed in protest, e-activism, political consumerism, or everyday lifestyle engagement, political expressions of identification with Islam can create communities for youth, forge their political identity, and entice and empower people into creative participation. More explicitly, the ways in which faith and identification with the umma (the global Muslim community) frame the respondents’ political engagement shows how the emergence of a politicized global Islam is not in opposition to processes producing new grammars of action, the network society, or globalization, but is very much exemplary of them. As such, it links well historically with the efforts by Alinsky and currently by Obama to organize new creative community-building in impoverished inner-city areas.

John S. Watson finds in his chapter, “Capitalist Housing Developers as Green Activists,” that capitalist business ventures can promote environmental protection and trigger others into activism for sustainable development. His case is the Prairie Crossing Conservation Housing Community in Grayslake, Illinois, some forty miles north of Chicago. Prairie Crossing is the first large-scale green development in the United States to make a profit for the developers. To some ears, “conservation housing community” sounds oxymoronic. Profit-making residential housing is normally associated with negative externalities of the urban sprawl, that is, destruction of nature, high energy ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Responsibility-Taking in Politics
• Chapter 2 Why Creative Participation Today?
• Chapter 3 Swarming: Imagining Creative Participation
• Chapter 4 Two Faces of Political Participation: Conventional and Creative Participation Among American Clergy
• Chapter 5 Grammars of Political Action Among Urban Muslim Youth
• Chapter 6 Capitalist Housing Developers as Green Activists
• Chapter 7 Everyday Shopping to Fight the Mafia in Italy
• Chapter 8 Vegetarianism—A Lifestyle Politics?
• Chapter 9 Is Creative Participation Good for Democracy?
• Chapter 10 Creative Participation: Concluding Thoughts From the Land of the Boston Tea Party
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Contributors