Democratizing Inequalities

Dilemmas of the New Public Participation

Caroline W. Lee, Michael McQuarrie, Edward T. Walker, Caroline W. Lee, Michael McQuarrie, Edward T. Walker

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781479883363
• eBook ISBN:
  9781479880607
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Social Sciences

Opportunities to "have your say," "get involved," and "join the
conversation" are everywhere in public life. From crowdsourcing and town hall
meetings to government experiments with social media, participatory politics increasingly
seem like a revolutionary antidote to the decline of civic engagement and the
thinning of the contemporary public sphere. Many argue that, with new
technologies, flexible organizational cultures, and a supportive policymaking
context, we now hold the keys to large-scale democratic revitalization.

Democratizing Inequalities shows that the equation may not be so
simple. Modern societies face a variety of structural problems that limit
potentials for true democratization, as well as vast inequalities in political
action and voice that are not easily resolved by participatory solutions. Popular
participation may even reinforce elite power in unexpected ways. Resisting an
oversimplified account of participation as empowerment, this collection of
essays brings together a diverse range of leading scholars to reveal surprising
insights into how dilemmas of the new public participation play out in politics
and organizations. Through investigations including fights over the
authenticity of business-sponsored public participation, the surge of the Tea
Party, the role of corporations in electoral campaigns, and participatory
budgeting practices in Brazil, Democratizing
Inequalities seeks to refresh our understanding of public participation and
trace the reshaping of authority in today's political environment.

PART I

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Rising Participation and Declining Democracy

EDWARD T. WALKER, MICHAEL MCQUARRIE, AND CAROLINE W. LEE

Introduction: A New Context for Participation

Deliberation in Michigan

In November 2009, three hundred Michigan residents from all walks of life converged on the state capital in Lansing to take part in a high-level public debate about what should be done to improve their state’s beleaguered economy. In an atmosphere of brewing unrest about the nation’s direction—most clearly marked by raucous congressional town hall meetings over proposed reforms to the health care system—the absence of party activists yelling at one another was notable. This was a sober, state-of-the-art affair paid for by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, in which technocratic expertise, philanthropic resources, and political capital were brought together. Consistent with a general turn to civil and deliberative practices in diverse institutional contexts, the goal was to facilitate rational deliberation among citizens from across the political spectrum.¹ Governor Jennifer Granholm and the president of the University of Michigan, Mary Sue Coleman, both gave keynote addresses thanking the participants for their service to the state. Business leaders and community groups presented information to the participants over the three-day process. Kwame Holman of NewsHour moderated the discussion, and coverage of the events was broadcast on public television stations throughout Michigan. Not pulling any punches, the event was called “Hard Times, Hard Choices.”

The intrepid group of Michiganders had been randomly selected by Stanford professor James Fishkin’s Center for Deliberative Democracy in order to gather a representative slice of the state’s citizens for his “Deliberative Polling” method of assessing public opinion. Such processes are intended to ensure that the collective voice of the people is not drowned out by the most vocal, the most partisan, or those with the strongest preexisting ties to well-heeled interest groups.

Although a principle of deliberative practice is the presumed equality among participants in the dialogue,² the outcome of deliberation may not always reflect preferences for a broader social egalitarianism. Indeed, after participants were polled a final time on a number of policy options for facing the state’s fiscal crisis, James Fishkin reported the event to be an unqualified success when they voted to increase taxes on themselves but to decrease taxes on business:

Support for increasing the sales tax went up by fourteen points from 37% to 51%. Similarly, support for increasing the income tax went up by 18 points from 27% to 45%. . . . People were willing to shoulder new burdens they could feel. By contrast, support for cutting the business tax rose by a gigantic 27 points from 40% to 67%.³

In Michigan, a state widely recognized as the poster child for capital flight and a bellwether of the crumbling national economy, ordinary citizens engaged in far deeper discussions about their civic responsibilities than even the most faithful voters may do in their lifetimes. The result of such intensive participation was a demonstrated willingness to assume greater burdens in their day-to-day lives and more stress on their families’ pocketbooks in order to entice fickle employers to remain in their state. Today, as business health is increasingly dependent on Wall Street investments, and states and localities struggle to balance their budgets and meet their pension obligations, similar deliberations reveal a populace willing to engage deeply in revitalized forms of public deliberation. But in a context of heightened inequality and social precariousness, the capacity of participation to transform that very context may be limited. Indeed, what such a case illustrates is that certain new forms of apparently “empowering” public participation may be doing more to reinforce authority than to challenge it.

Defending For-Profit Education

At the start of 2010, Dawn Connor was just a regular college student, taking night courses to become a veterinary technician at Globe University in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, while working during the day at a local shelter spaying and neutering dogs and cats.⁴ She had been active in a variety of leadership roles around the university, including by serving as a student ambassador for the veterinary technology program, being the president of the veterinary technology club, and playing a role in meeting and welcoming new students on campus. She had graduated from high school early, then drifted from one traditional college to another, ultimately changing majors a few times and making progress without earning a degree. Globe University, a for-profit university with eight branches throughout Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota, turned out to be a great fit for Connor. Despite the substantial tuition for a vocational degree—the two-year associate’s degree in veterinary technology runs over $44,000 plus lab fees and book expenses—the school had the advantage of being located in Connor’s hometown. She especially liked that she was able to maintain a conventional job during the day while working toward her degree by taking classes at night.

Connor’s experience at Globe University was so good, in fact, that when she heard that the Career College Association (CCA)—a trade group for for-profit colleges that has since been renamed the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities—was seeking students to represent the school at a Washington lobbying day that March, she jumped at the opportunity. But the lobbying day was just the beginning.

Only a few short months later, Connor would find herself the newly elected president of Students for Academic Choice (SAC), which describes itself as an association of “proud students and graduates of private, post-secondary career-oriented institutions.” The association focuses on ensuring “access to a quality education,” recognizing both the value that “non-traditional learners” bring to the workplace and the value of career-oriented education for society as a whole. As of September that year, the organization had an estimated 150 members and was working with a lawyer to gain official nonprofit status. More significantly, SAC became active in organizing college students across the entire for-profit university system, ultimately assembling some thirty-two thousand signatures on a petition asking that the Department of Education avoid enacting a proposed new “gainful employment” rule, which would cut off federal aid to colleges whose graduates have high debt-to-income ratios and low loan-repayment rates.⁵ The petition was framed to suggest that the rules change would harm disadvantaged groups, including the “single mothers, veterans, and adult students who work full time while attending school.”⁶

But despite its efforts to be seen as an independent, grassroots uprising of concerned students at for-profit colleges, the industry’s backing was not far behind. Indeed, as Connor herself acknowledged, the idea to form the organization originated not with the students, but with representatives of for-profit schools.⁷ Further, the group was formed at the CCA’s lobbying day in Washington, and the SAC website and its initial resources were provided by the CCA.⁸ As Connor put it, the CCA served as SAC’s “grandfather,” which gave the group its start and guidance. She says, “They kind of got us going. But now they’re taking the training wheels off and saying, ‘Go for it and let’s see what you guys can do.’ ”⁹

SAC, then, became a primary support in a full-throated response to what was seen as a life-or-death fight by the $30-billion industry of for-profit colleges against the gainful employment rule. Cass Sunstein, the Harvard Law School professor formerly in charge of rulemaking at the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, called the industry’s lobbying effort nothing short of “extreme.”¹⁰ And the lobbying efforts seem to have made a difference, as the rules will only affect a small proportion of for-profit universities at the start, and those penalties won’t even go into effect until years down the road.

From Contention to Consensus in Cleveland

Today, the city of Cleveland, Ohio, is a hotbed of civic participation. Yet expanded participation has not necessarily meant a democratic revival, although every day in the city dozens of community organizations, churches, ward clubs, and street clubs meet to discuss issues of concern.

In the city’s predominantly African American neighborhood of Hough, residents meet frequently around a host of civic and political projects. Well-attended ward club meetings discuss policing, garbage pickup, and funding for schools. A meeting at a local community center takes up the need to secure the funding necessary to provide children’s services. A meeting in a nightclub discusses regulatory approval for a Negro Baseball Hall of Fame. In the name of economic development, a group of men meet at a local community development corporation to develop strategies for locating “mentors” who can nurture aspiring entrepreneurs.

In another of Cleveland’s neighborhoods—the increasingly African American but still heavily Eastern European Slavic Village—discussions have a similar flavor. A street club discusses policing and traffic mitigation. A local organization familiarizes residents with a program to paint window sashes on abandoned houses. Community organizers meet with neighborhood residents in order to take action against illegal scrap dealers. One group is discussing outreach to victims of predatory lending, and yet another is attempting to defuse racial tensions through a series of face-to-face relationship-building meetings reminiscent of the encounter groups of the civil rights era.¹¹ Members of a local church gather to discuss plans for a townhouse development to preserve the viability and cultural flavor of the neighborhood surrounding the church itself.

Comparing these settings, the ostensible topics present an interesting variety but are not radically different. The manner in which they are conducted is also surprisingly similar. They have agendas, they tend to loosely follow Roberts’ Rules of Order, and diverse citizens come together to hash out issues of local concern. Within the meetings themselves there are subtle distinctions in the discourse and practice of deliberation: who gets to speak, when they get to speak, and the sorts of authority they invoke when doing so.

However, just as important are the various purposes that participation and deliberation are serving. This concern is evident in both cases. To a local blogger and former director of a community development corporation, Hough is not an example of a Tocquevillian associational democracy, but of a “Maoist” personality cult, led by the indomitable city councilor Fannie Lewis, until her recent death. Her allies, on the other hand, celebrated her familiarity with the people of the ward and her willingness to secure resources on their behalf by hook or by crook. Regardless of which characterization is more accurate, one of Lewis’s main tools was the facilitation of broad-based participation. Indeed, each of the meetings in Hough referred to above were in some way related to Lewis. Participation was how Lewis maintained connections to constituents. For some, this produced deliberation that was less about democratic decision making than it was about performing loyalty to the councilor. If true, deliberation in Hough is unlikely to produce effective citizens, much less democracy.

In Slavic Village, citizen participation flows across a civic landscape that was largely formed in the neighborhood-based social movements of the 1970s. Perhaps the most visible figure in Slavic Village is Barbara Anderson. When Anderson first moved into the neighborhood, her garage was firebombed by racists. Shortly thereafter, she received a leaflet for a meeting to discuss neighborhood issues. When she arrived she realized “the meeting was about me.” Today, the friendly and soft-spoken Anderson leads a street club, Bringing Back the Seventies, which has won awards for civic involvement from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Participation and the Reproduction of Inequality
• Part III The Production of Authority and Legitimacy
• Part IV Unintended Consequences and New Opportunities
• Part V Conclusion
• References
• About the Contributors
• Index