Civic Imagination

Making a Difference in American Political Life

Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Elizabeth A Bennett, Alissa Cordner, Peter Klein, Stephanie Savell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781612053042
• eBook ISBN: 9781317262404
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Civic Imagination provides a rich empirical description of civic life and a broader discussion of the future of democracy in contemporary America. Over the course of a year, five researchers observed and participated in 7 civic organisations in a mid-sized US city. They draw on this ethnographic evidence to map the 'civic imaginations' that motivate citizenship engagement in America today. The book unpacks how contemporary Americans think about and act toward positive social and political change while the authors' findings challenge contemporary assertions of American apathy. This will be an important book for students and academics interested in political science and sociology.

Chapter 1
American Civic and Political Life

Americans hate politics. They are skeptical of elected officials, and they suspect that special, elite interests trump the needs of the average Joe. The political system is broken, unfair, and corrupt—on that, everyone agrees, even America's leaders. In the 2008 presidential election, two US senators argued over who was the least like "politics as usual," and was therefore the better candidate.¹ By 2010, the wake of the financial crisis had exacerbated this wave of distrust, which was marked by low approval of Congress and lack of confidence in public officials (ANES 2010; Pew 2010). Disdain for elected representatives continued to hit all-time lows, with Americans reporting that they have a higher opinion of root canals, head lice, traffic jams, and colonoscopies than Congress (Public Policy Polling 2013).² And in today's context of increasing inequality and decreasing state service provision, the political climate has only worsened. In short, Americans have come to distrust their democracy.

The city of Providence, Rhode Island, and the sentiments of the people whose stories fill the pages of this book are no different. In 2010, when we set out to study civic engagement and political culture, the city was in economic and political turmoil. The two-term mayor of Providence, David Cicilline, had just announced that he would seek a US Congress seat, leaving the mayor's office open—and hotly contested. The winning mayoral candidate, Angel Taveras, reflected the contemporary moment of distrust in government, noting in an op-ed that "sometimes, the best thing City Hall can do is get out of the way" (Taveras 2010).

As the city's first Latino mayor, Taveras was celebrated: "Out with the old, in with the new," one headline cheered (Fitzpatrick 2010). But the 2008 global financial meltdown and subsequent recession had hit the state hard. In January 2010, Rhode Island's unemployment rate climbed to 11.9 percent, a full 2 percentage points higher than the national average (US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2013). And by early 2011, the city was so close to economic collapse that the mayor described it as a "category five financial hurricane." Mayor Taveras proposed closing several schools and argued that pensions for city employees would have to be renegotiated. His popularity nosedived.

Amid this turbulence, citizens in Providence and elsewhere were engaged in a flurry of activity, suggesting that it is possible to work for positive changes in American political life, even in times of great economic and political stress. As we began our fieldwork, we were bombarded with a bewildering variety of ways to "participate" and "get involved": Sign a petition to bring US troops home from Afghanistan! Attend a meeting about rezoning local schools! Contribute to the annual food drive! Finding opportunities to "make a difference" was easy, but what was difficult was making sense of it all. Why are there so many different groups working on a single issue? How do people decide which activities are worth their time? For activists of all different stripes, what determines the right way to work for change?

To learn more about the current landscape of civic engagement and political culture in America, we joined civic groups in Providence, attended their events, worked alongside activists, and interviewed both extraordinary leaders and everyday members. What struck us immediately was how inventive people are in thinking about and working toward making change. We attended a "listening party" during the mayoral campaign, where the classic format of voters questioning candidates was reversed: instead, mayoral candidates posed questions to an audience of voters. The organizing group, we later discovered, thought that one important way to influence electoral politics was to be sure that candidates listened to their constituents. We also attended a neighborhood association Halloween event that involved launching pumpkins with a trebuchet (a medieval-style catapult) in the local park. As we helped to clean up pounds of pumpkin guts, the organizers commented that the way to make Providence a better place was to bring neighbors together—first to socialize, then to collectively organize. And flying pumpkins did just that! Throughout the year, we canvassed, protested, and organized with activists of all kinds. No two individuals described political participation—others' or their own—in the same way. However, collectively, their stories and actions share some similarities that help us understand why people try to make a difference in the ways they do.

The Civic Imagination is a report of our findings, a snapshot of civic life in America, and a discussion of contemporary political culture, based on our experiences in Providence. We recount a year in the lives of activists striving to make their city a better place. Those activists are part of seven civic groups, chosen for their diversity of interests, constituencies, tactics, and organizational forms, that allowed us into their work and lives. The book is motivated by the themes that emerged in this field research. Most significantly, where we expected to find cynicism, apathy, and individualistic commitments, we instead encountered reflective, sober, and tremendously hopeful citizens.³ On the one hand, we heard repeatedly that the political system is broken, and we grew accustomed to the common refrains, "I'm not political" and "I don't see my work as political." On the other hand, we learned that these discourses were not necessarily signals of political disengagement, but instead part of a more complicated relationship with political life. Another theme that emerged was a difference in how groups paid attention to inequality, both as a social problem to be solved and as an issue that plagues civic groups themselves. While inequality was central to the work of some organizations, it was more commonly a blind spot–something removed from the forefront of attention and readily overlooked.

Our goal is to explore the contours of these complex relations—between citizens and their democracy, skepticism and engagement, and inequality and activism. Upon closer inspection, it is evident that while skepticism of politics is indeed widespread, as many have reported, a critique of politics is not incompatible with civic engagement. Public officials say, "I'm a nonpolitical guy," to endear themselves to their audiences. Civic leaders say, "Government won't solve problems," while working on political campaigns. And activists say, "I don't like politricks," despite their engagement with city government. Citizens are adamant that they and their activism not be associated with the dirty, corrupt, self-interested, combative sphere of politics. This "disavowal" of the polluted sphere of politics allows people to creatively constitute, and engage in, what they imagine to be appropriate and desirable forms of political engagement. As people envision a future that goes beyond what they see as the contemporary problems of politics, they develop and modify working theories of civic life. These cognitive roadmaps or moral compasses help people make sense of their place in the political world. We call this concept "the civic imagination" and illustrate it in the following example.

In February 2011, Providence residents erupted in protest when Mayor Taveras proposed closing several schools as a partial solution to the city's budget crisis. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called it an "unprecedented power play" (Goodnough 2011). At public meetings, citizens waved banners proclaiming, "It's not about the $; it's about the kids," and children wore nametags that read, "My name is—. I am a good investment." Parents and teachers organized the Save Our Schools Coalition, which accused the board of "assassinating schools." When the city announced which schools were under consideration for closure, an activist called the selection "geographical genocide," asserting the targeted neighborhoods were primarily inhabited by people of color.

In the subsequent months, parents, teachers, ordinary citizens, and public officials came together to debate the future of the city's schools in a series of public forums. During these meetings, we witnessed many different ways in which Americans imagine making a difference in political life. In other words, we observed how people's theories of civic life shape their diagnoses of political problems and guide their prospective thinking about possible solutions. Some people were concerned that the school closings primarily affected students from poor and racial minority neighborhoods; others focused on the opportunity for neighbors and city residents to come together to voice their opinions. Even the simple notion of holding public forums elicited diverse reactions. Cynics said the meetings were a formality—window dressing for decisions already made. Optimists understood the meetings to be a genuine opportunity—a chance to "sit down and talk about our differences" and to generate "productive" and "concrete" ideas as a community. As one citizen put it to the school board, "We will find a solution you haven't."

Our observation is that these diverse civic imaginations organize into three clusters, each with a unique focus and inspiration, a particular conception of success, and a set of blind spots—issues and problems rendered out of focus by the blinders of its own logic.⁴ Each family of imaginations makes different tradeoffs: for example, some groups value making decisions quickly, while others prefer the slower process of consensus-building; some activists employ anger and conflict as tactical strategies, while others use strategies less likely to upset or offend. The plurality of understandings of how political life "works" sometimes creates ambiguities or misunderstandings, as common words come to mean very different things in practice. In Providence, "transparency," for example, was defined in diverse ways: as an innovative technology, as openness about funding sources, or as government's accountability to citizens. Civic imaginations guide action and thus have important consequences not just for a school debate but for civic life in its broadest sense: civic imaginations can both foster democratic values and limit democratic possibilities.

We pay particularly close attention to the connections between these civic imaginations and inequality, something that is both a defining characteristic of the present moment and an aspect of social and political life that is often overlooked. Socioeconomic inequality has been on the rise since the 1970s and was exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession. However, some of the ways in which Americans organize themselves in civic life pay little attention to this fact—something we examine in depth in Chapter 6. We believe that greater equality is good for society as a whole, and so we cannot help but see—and feel concerned about—the glaring omissions of inequality in many discourses, processes, and practices of contemporary civil society.⁵ The consequences are serious, we argue, and include a threat to the democratic value of equal opportunity for all. Thus, while we have a hopeful perspective on the agency of people in working toward positive change, we join other critics in worrying that some current trends in civic life are entrenching or even exacerbating existing inequalities.

Contours of Politics and Civic Life in America

"Politics" is a term central to our argument, and one marked by a wide range of connotations and uses in everyday life. Conventionally, the "political" includes the diverse array of institutions, processes, and actors affiliated with the state, such as politicians and government employees.⁶ In this book, we use the term loosely, in accordance with the myriad meanings attributed by people in our study. Often these uses of the term share a sense that the political system is broken, and that the "political process" is an obstacle to the ideal functioning of democratic principles. Thus, we hear "politics" used as a moniker for the unsavory and undesirable aspects of democracy: corruption on behalf of public officials, deadlocked bipartisan battling, the promotion of elite-based special interests, anger and contention in public protests, the obscuring of discrimination against marginalized populations . . . the list goes on.

As we describe in more detail in the next chapter, our research in Providence employed an ethnographic method: we participated in the lives and activities of particular individuals active in civic life, using our position as (almost) "insiders" to observe and analyze as "outsiders." While we rely on these close encounters for definitions of key terms such as "politics," and indeed, for our findings, we turn first to large-scale survey data in order to set the scene and describe the broader context of our research.

Skepticism

Our research year was marked by a dismal economy, bitter partisan-based backlash, and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials. The Pew Research Center, an independent, nonpartisan research organization that studies attitudes toward politics, argues that these events, taken together, have created the "perfect storm" for distrust of government (Pew 2010, 1). At the most basic level, Pew defines "trust" as a conviction that the government will do what is "right." According to this measure, between 10 percent and 22 percent of Americans trust the federal government in Washington.⁷ This is a low point for skepticism among Americans. Answers to this question were first systematically recorded in 1958. At that time, 73 percent of Americans trusted the government to do what is right "just about always" or "most of the time." Since then, trust has only plummeted to today's extremely low level on two occasions: around 1980 and around 1994 (Pew 2010, 13). If you complicate the measure of trust, the news gets even worse. The American National Election Service measures trust in government by creating an index that combines the answers to several questions: Do you trust the federal government? Is the government run for the benefit of all the people, or does it look out for narrow interests? Does government waste taxes? Are the people who run the government crooked? The indexed responses give an annual sense of where politics stands in the eyes of the public. The years 1994 and 2008 have the lowest scores in half a century (ANES 2010, Table 5A.5).⁸

In the mid-1990s, confidence was at an unprecedented low in the United States, and scholars engaged in a broad conversation over whether American culture could become—or already was—too skeptical for the health of its democracy.⁹ Record numbers of Americans felt "alienated." They even disapproved of the House of Representatives, the institution "designed to represent the public will" (Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1995, 2). A particular concern was that young Americans were more cynical than the previous generation: they had a visceral dislike of politics, did not trust politicians, considered government unresponsive, believed average people did not have any political clout, and saw special interest groups as reigning supreme (S. Bennett 1997). Both within and outside of academic circles, people wondered: What becomes of democracy in times of distrust? In particular, what becomes of civic and political participation?

Civic Engagement and Political Participation

The concepts of "civic engagement" and "political participation" are defined and put into practice in myriad ways. In our analysis, "civic" activities commonly include the following: (1) political action—such as voting, campaign participation, and lobbying elected officials; (2) community building—such as membership in voluntary associations, hobby groups, and social affairs; and (3) values, morals, knowledge, and skills—such as reading the news and volunteering (following the work of Berger 2009). Throughout this book, "civic engagement" and "civic participation" are used interchangeably and refer to any or all of these activities. References to "political engagement" or "political participation" are more specific, referring to activities intended to influence the state, either directly, by affecting the making or implementation of public policy, or indirectly, by influencing the selection of people who make those policies (drawing on Zukin et al. 2006, 6).¹⁰

In the 1990s, not only did Americans' unprecedented political skepticism and cynicism attract attention, but so did changes in how Americans engaged in civic life. In a country that had long enjoyed a reputation as a nation of joiners (de Tocqueville 2003 [1840]), the surprising consensus was that adult participation in voluntary associations was on the decline...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 American Civic and Political Life
• 2 Joining Groups and Following Activists
• 3 “I Am Not Political”: Making Sense of Skeptical Engagement
• 4 The Civic Imagination
• 5 Participation 2.0: The Politics of Civic Innovation
• 6 Inequality: A Difficult Conversation
• 7 Making a Difference in American Political Life
• Methodological Appendix A: How Many Scholars Does It Take to Answer a Question?
• Methodological Appendix B: Life of “Project”
• References
• Index
• About the Authors