Creating Civic Bureaucrats

ABSTRACT

Kirlin (1996a; 1996b) argued that big questions of public management should be placed within a democratic framework emphasizing government's role in creating “civic infrastructure.” For this study, those who build civic infrastructure are called “civic bureaucrats,” and new measures (Civic Bureaucrat Scale and subscales:civic skills, faith in the public, deliberative democracy value, civic motivation, and political system value) are used to examine which factors are associated with encouraging public servants, such as U.S. city planners, to pursue democratic processes. These measures are different from those that examine public service or public participation, and are more focused on finding public servants guided by democratic values. Variables that might influence civic bureaucrats are individual, job, work, and community characteristics. Regression results found Civic Bureaucrat levels associated with gender (being a woman), dedication to civic duty, citizens bashing government, cities’ civic capital levels, and non-competitive elections. Notably, Civic Bureaucrat levels go up when elections are less competitive, suggesting civic bureaucrats picking up the slack when democratic institutions falter. Understanding such factors sheds light on what boosts and saps the civic energies of public servants.     

Civic Orientations: Does Associational Type Matter?

A widespread consensus has emerged that a revival of patterns of civic engagement and citizenship will compensate for the assumed deficiencies of modern democracies. Voluntary associations are widely perceived as pivotal facilitators and mediators of social and political participation and as making a significant ( direct and indirect ) contribution to civic and democratic well-being. Associations are valorised as social capital manufacturers and for their all-round societal and democratic contribution. However, different types of association are likely to 'produce' very different levels of social capital. Given much of the contemporary focus on the (alleged) associational impact on members, there is a paucity of research that actually links citizens' orientations to the specific types of association they are involved in. This article seeks to make a contribution to that research gap by connecting the organisational context to membership, activism and volunteering. Unique data from a comparative study of associational life in Aberdeen (UK) and Mannheim (Germany) are presented. This study includes extensive mapping of all voluntary associations in these two cities, and interviews with selected members. In spite of the common expectation among social capitalists that groups concerned with social matters, small groups and groups with high levels of involvement will show higher levels of confidence and engagement, the data presented in this article did not uncover any systematic substantial difference (in either city).     

Advocate or Reflection? Associations and Political Culture

This article questions one of the crucial issues of the current social capital debate: do voluntary associations necessarily contribute to the creation or maintenance of a civic culture? Based upon empirical and historical evidence this article demonstrates that associations' cultural spirit simply reflects and amplifies dominant cultural traits of a given time and a given society. Changes in public culture prompt changes in associative culture, and not vice versa. In other words, contemporary associations are more democratic and more civil because they exist within societies which are themselves more democratic and civil than societies of past times. Members in associations represent society's active parts; as activists they have a higher susceptibility to cultural trends and fashions. This susceptibility is the major reason for the modest but statistically significant relationship between membership in associations and a range of cultural attitudes. Zaller's concept of political persuasion is applied to explain the Zeitgeist dependence of voluntary associations.     

Interethnic tolerance,education, and political orientation: Evidence from Denmark

Focusing on the relationship between education and tolerance toward ethnic out-groups in the Danish public, this analysis presents evidence in support of the argument that an important mechanism behind the positive impact of education on tolerance is cognitive constraint: Academic education promotes the ability to connect ideas, and minds equipped with this ability will tend to generalize the norms of the prevailing democratic culture to include ethnic relations. This tendency is particularly apparent when political orientations of the liberal left are added to common democratic norms. The constrained mind that holds left-leaning political beliefs is compelled to express ethnic tolerance. On the other hand, constrained minds permit themselves to be intolerant only when subscribing to right-wing political ideas explicitly at variance with liberal democratic ideals. Interestingly, cognitive constraint is high also in the minority among people lacking in academic education that scores high on tolerance. Compared to their less tolerant peers, the members of this minority are much more likely to be involved in political organizations, for the most part at the ideological left. This indicates that in Denmark such organizations serve a function that in terms of fostering ability to connect ideas is equivalent to the function of academic institutions.     

Challenging the boundaries of democratic inclusion? Young people's attitudes about the distribution of voting rights

In theoretical debates about the quality of democratic rule, the core question concerns membership, and the adequate constitution of the demos: who is entitled to participate in choosing political representatives? This article enhances the predominantly normative debates on democratic inclusion and boundary making by taking an empirical perspective and analysing attitudes of 16–18-year-old teenagers regarding preconditions for the distribution of voting rights. Based on data stemming from 13 focus groups conducted in three Austrian cities in spring 2010, our findings show that principles related to both competence (autonomy, knowledge) and community (showing concern, being subjected to the law) matter when it comes to democratic boundary making. Furthermore, the study reveals that, in trying to explain the formation of juvenile attitudes about boundary issues, institutions are relevant when related to the conjunctive experiences manifested in the group-specific habitus: while young immigrants argue more inclusionarily than natives in terms of community-related preconditions, especially as far as the roles of language and citizenship are concerned, students argue more exclusionarily than apprentices when it comes to competence-related preconditions, especially civic education. Boundary making affects social groups independent of national origin or citizenship and can therefore be considered a permanent process beyond international migration.     

The conscience of a fugitive: sheldon wolin and the prospects for radical democracy

Amidst increasing and seemingly intransigent inequalities, unresponsive institutions, and illegible patterns of social change, political theorists are increasingly faced with questions about the viability of democracy in the contemporary age. One of the most prominent voices within this conversation has been that of Sheldon Wolin. Wolin has famously argued that democracy is a ‘fugitive’ experience with an inherently temporary character. Critics have pounced on this concept, rejecting it as an admission of defeat or despair that is at odds with the formation of democratic counter-power. In this article, I push back against this view of fugitive democracy. I do so by contextualizing the idea within Wolin’s broader democratic theory, and especially his idea of the ‘multiple civic self’, in order to give a more coherent form to a conception of citizenship often concealed by the attention given to the supposedly momentary nature of democracy. This all too common misreading of fugitive democracy has significant stakes, because it shapes not only how we approach Wolin’s impact as a political theorist, but also how we approach practices of democratic citizenship and how we think about political theory and political science’s relationship to those practices.     

The immigrant presence in collaborative structures of urban politics

Participation and representation of disadvantaged groups are important, but partly still understudied aspects of democratic politics. The present article looks at the inclusion of migrant representatives in urban governance networks making use of original survey data from 40 large cities in France and Germany. We find that about half of policy-relevant urban actors in both countries and across cities cooperate with migrant associations regularly. This indicates that urban governance networks are furthering the civic and political presence of migrants. Cooperation with migrant associations is more likely when specific representative local institutions (foreigner/integration councils) exist, and is also boosted by the overall density of governance networks in a city. Politicians and local administrators remain central actors in such networks, while social welfare organizations emerge as important interlocutors with migrant associations. The article identifies and discusses differences between the two countries.     

Outside Funding and the Dynamics of Participation in Community Associations

The poor and disadvantaged are widely seen as having weak organizations and low rates of participation in community associations, impeding their political representation and economic advancement. Many policy initiatives aim to build civic participation among the disadvantaged by funding local community associations. Taking advantage of random assignment in a program supporting women's community associations in Kenya, we find little evidence that outside funding expanded organizational strength, but substantial evidence that funding changed group membership and leadership, weakening the role of the disadvantaged. The program led younger, more educated, and better-off women to enter the groups. New entrants, men, and more educated women assumed leadership positions. The departure of older women, the most socially marginalized demographic group, increased substantially. The results are generalized through a formal model showing how democratic decision making by existing members of community associations can generate long-run outcomes in which the poor and disadvantaged either do not belong to any associations or belong to weak organizations.     

Public sector efficiency: the roles of political and budgetary institutions, fiscal capacity, and democratic participation

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether efficiency in public service provision is affected by political and budgetary institutions, fiscal capacity, and democratic participation. In order to address this issue we take advantage of a new global efficiency measure for Norwegian local governments. We find that high fiscal capacity and a high degree of party fragmentation contribute to low efficiency. In addition there is some evidence that democratic participation increases efficiency, while a centralized top-down budgetary procedure is associated with low efficiency.     

Civic and Political Participation of Women and Youth in Turkey: An Examination of Perspectives of Public Authorities and NGOs

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present a review of the discourses of public authorities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on civic and political participation of youth and women in Turkey. Drawing on policy documents and elite interviews, this article explores the role of civil society organizations in promoting civic and political organizations in traditionally marginal groups. The article is primarily concerned with unpacking dominant discourses, as produced by public documents and official statements by both civil society organizations and policy-makers. The analysis will produce an overview of their general discursive orientations and the related legal changes and policy implementations. The article then looks at the impact of these discursive formulations to the issue of participation. What is important to note is that action plans and strategies are not always implemented in a manner that is in keeping with the original intentions of policy-makers. The review of public and civil society documents highlights serious differences in focus and coverage between the groups. It also highlights limited engagement with the actual issues of civic and political participation. While youth participation is paid limited attention, women participation is mostly associated with political representation in national and local political bodies.     

Volunteering in the Arab World: Bringing Back People into Politics?

This article analyzes the concept of volunteering in the Arab world. The main argument is that the nature of the Arab world in addition to the historical development of civil society directly affected the philosophy of volunteering in the region. Since civic services were not framed nor included in the national agendas of the state, this had a direct negative effect on the development of the act. However, due to social, economic, and political factors, this trend is changing: As of 2000, organizations and societies started to understand the importance of volunteering and its link to the social and economic revival of societies; Arab states started to encourage the act by providing the right legal and political environment. However, these different policies are not building democratic societies nor encouraging civic engagement. The article concludes with recommendations for how to bring people back into civic and political society as well as suggestions for future research.     

Voluntary Organisations and Community Politics: Norwegian and British Comparisons

The study reported in this article compares local political activity of voluntary organizations in a Norwegian and an English city — Tromsø and Birmingham. The two cities display rather striking structural similarities with respect to the relative number of organizations as well as to organizational membership. The relative distribution of major types of organizations is also rather similar, although there is a greater degree of organizational specialization in the English city.
With respect to political activity of the organizations the two cities are, however, quite different. While two thirds of the organizations in Tromsø have been active in local political matters, this holds true for less than 30 per cent of the organizations in Birmingham.
This difference is attributed to the finding that in the Norwegian case local government assists organizations with goods and services, while in the English case organizations have to depend on their own internal resources. An additional factor is that Norwegian organizations, when compared to their English counterparts, have greater access to political decision-making bodies.     

Exporting ‘active citizenship’: foreign support for citizenship education in the Arab world

What explains the rise in support for active citizenship programs in the Arab region? How has active citizenship been envisioned and taught with support by foreign states? How do participants understand the usefulness and impact of such programs? In this paper, we examine the contexts in which citizenship programs that embody the political aspirations of foreign states, are implemented. Embedded in local political realities, participants in these programs routinely question the ef?cacy and applicability of training modules focused on active citizenship and civic engagement. We argue that the proliferation of active citizenship programs for civil society organizations in practice serves to both bolster state legitimacy and discourage community leaders and activists from expressing political dissent. By submerging con?icting values, practices, and perspectives while encouraging civic participation based on conformity rather than dissent, active citizenship programs risk fostering a depoliticized civil society that is detached from the local political context.     

Civic Involvement and Modernization

Abstract

This paper investigates how broad processes of modernization affect individuals' relations to the civil sphere. It first introduces a model of civic involvement as a system of expectations between participants and associations. Next, the issue of change is explored. It is argued that recent social transformations, such as individualization, globalization and technology changes, undermine classic notions of civil society participation. Old types of involvement vanish, while new ones emerge. We investigate in more detail how macro-changes affect three core models of civic involvement: as a member, a volunteer and a citizen. Each model holds particular relations between adherents and associations. The conventional understanding of each model is examined in the light of ongoing processes of dis- and re-embedment of civic involvement. The paper is based on secondary analyses of literature concerned with the issue of change within the civic field. The findings can be summarized in four points. First, we observe a shift from face-to-face interaction in long-lasting civic groups towards mediated interaction within networks in flux. Falling rates of participation seem to be followed by new types outside traditional measures of civic engagement. Secondly, individuals seem to move from value-based to consumer-based relations within the civic sphere. Associations, on her hand, increasingly present her activities as ‘products’. This means that civic engagement, more often than before, is mediated in ways usually associated with the for-profit market. Thirdly, civic engagement is shifting from diffuse horizontal involvement to centrally coordinated activities. ‘Amateurism’ gradually becomes replaced by professional standards, administered by staff-led bodies, in close connection with central authorities. As a fourth conclusion, we observe a shift from an engagement mediated by associations to a direct involvement, or engagement mediated by structures that usually are not defined as civic ones.     

Public policy and employee ownership: Designing economic institutions for a good society

While there are many types of economic arrangements compatible with democratic institutions and smoothly functioning markets, the predominant institutional arrangement in most marked-based democracies is one where the average employee has neither a share of direct ownership nor involvement in governing the company where he works. The substance of this essay deals with recent American attempts to redesign this arrangement, focusing specifically on the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). The way we design the ownership of our economic organizations touches issues at the heart of practical political economy. It combines the realities of practice with visions of the good society. The challenge for lawmakers, then, is to think of employee ownership not only in terms of the technical details of public policy-making but as an institutional arrangement with wide-ranging potential implications for how we see and achieve the good.     

Romania's Total War: How Political Marketing Strategies Work in a Democratization Process

Political marketing needs to consider specific factors when dealing with a democratization process such in the Romanian and Eastern European case. The emergence of democratic institutions and practices creates an amalgamated and diverse context for political marketing strategies. Different historical stages of communication, marketing, and elections practice have produced after 1989 a landscape where it is easy to confuse political marketing orientations of political parties. An investigation is carried on how political organizations have addressed marketing instruments and how the need to survive and achieve power has altered the meaning of what we call political marketing exchange.     

Confidence in Institutions in Post-Communist Societies: The Case of the Baltic States

The transition from totalitarian to democratic rule in the Baltic states raises the question of conditions for regime legitimacy and stability. The article focuses on the level of confidence people have in institutions after change of regime. The confidence in political and social institutions is at a surprisingly low level. The data suggest that people have more confidence in institutions producing symbols than they have in policy-making and implementing institutions. There is also evidence to show that leaders are more trusted than institutions as such. A survey of the potential background variables shows that people with higher education have lower confidence in institutions than the less well educated. But low confidence in institutions does not necessarily spell gloomy prospects for procedural democratic development, as long as the elites do have some popular support and the capacity for consensual integration.     

Norms, Procedures, and Democratic Legitimacy

The overall thrust of the argument points in two opposite directions: it pleads for dimming the contrast commonly drawn between political philosophy and political science but calls for a more radical distinction between the activities of politics and of philosophy, and between its rationality and that of political mediation. Within the first strand of the argument, the fact-value problem is re-examined, whilst within the second strand - the central theme of the article - the operatively legitimizing source of political norms is viewed within a procedural locale that is recognizably democratic, in that its validation is a matter of opinion, of appraisal and reappraisal in and through civic activity itself, and not directly the work of extra-political doctrines that substantively predetermine it. Although not thus preconditioned, procedural democracy is portrayed as being governed by a cognitive and institutional 'space'in which the'conversion'of doctrinal'isms'issues in'performative principles, rather than a regime of pragmatic ad hocism .     

Europe as a Beacon of Democracy? Citizenship Policies Relating to Youth and Migrants in Portugal

Abstract

This article aims to compare discourses about national and European policies on active citizenship and democratic participation, with a particular focus on youth and migrants. For this purpose we analysed official documents of public institutions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in order to assess how the process of Europeanization has influenced national policies with regard to increasing political participation and citizens' civic awareness. Additionally, we conducted interviews with policy makers and NGO leaders in order to integrate and compare different levels of discourse and thus identify potential dissonances. Analysis of the documents shows that there is a strong concern to match national policy priorities with those established by international organizations. Notwithstanding positive perceptions, NGO leaders and policy makers criticize the ways policies have been implemented, stressing the need to adopt a strategy that bridges the gap between the prescribed and the real, as well as the importance of overcoming the hegemony of economic factors in policy decisions. In this regard, NGO leaders criticize the cynicism of political leaders and policies motivated by demographic and economic concerns. In relation to European identity and integration, NGO leaders argue that Europe must be collectively constructed; yet, policy makers stress that the failure of the Constitutional Treaty in 2005 resulted from a deficit in the negotiation process. In sum, this article suggests that it is necessary to promote greater involvement of civil society in the design and implementation of policies which, in turn, may contribute to the strengthening of shared democratic principles.     

Terrorist group survival: ideology, tactics, and base of operations

The paper applies survival analysis to identify the determinants of terrorist group duration. Our sample includes 367 terrorist organizations that operated during 1970?C2007. Consistent with the theory, determinants of these groups?? survival include their tactics, sizes, ideological basis, regions of operation, and base-country characteristics. Cross-sectional and panel estimates are reported. Terrorist organizations fare better if they are larger in size, diversify their attack modes, are animated by religiosity rather than secular political goals, and base their operations in the Middle East or Africa. Groups?? longevity is bolstered by democratic institutions and an intermediate level of ethnic fractionalization at home.