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Does Participation Make Better Citizens?

Jane Mansbridge

Jane Mansbridge is a professor of sociology and political science at Northwestern University. This paper was delivered at the PEGS Conference, February 11-12, 1995.

Contents

Introduction
Origins
The sixties
Fading from view
References

Introduction

Participation does make better citizens. I believe it, but I can't prove it. And neither can anyone else. The kinds of subtle changes in character that come about, slowly, from active, powerful participation in democratic decisions cannot easily be measured with the blunt instruments of social science. Those who have actively participated in democratic governance, however, often feel that the experience has changed them. And those who observe the active participation of others often believe that they see its longrun effects on the citizens' character.

The conclusion that participation in democratic decisions positively effects citizen character began, I will argue, with the observation of small-scale democratic practice. Until de Tocqueville saw and reported on the effects of actual participation in New England town meetings, no philosopher had made the explicit claim that participation in democratic politics improved the participants. Arnold Kaufman, Carole Pateman and other political theorists of the l960s and l970s developed that claim. The theory flourished with the growing practice of participatory institutions, and passed from the center stage of political theory in part because the practice ebbed, in part because empirical political scientists could not demonstrate any positive effects on individual character of democratic participation.

In l960, Arnold Kaufman wrote that democratic participation—by which he meant exercising real power over the decisions that affect one—would improve, generally, one's "powers of thought, feeling and action." Carole Pateman refined the concept of participation so that it required not just some power, but equal power, and concluded that participation of this sort would improve one's sense of political efficacy. Peter Bachrach, with whom I am inclined to agree, did not think any form of participation, even participation with equal power, was automatically good for the participants, but believed rather that we should judge different forms of participation by how much they helped the participants see clearly where their interests lay. Benjamin Barber concluded that participation in direct, not representative, democracies increased an individual's sense of commonality.

The earliest theories about the effects of participation began in America with de Tocqueville, just as our own generation's version began in America with Arnold Kaufman on "participatory democracy." Subsequent theorists promoting the theory of educative effects often assumed that their ideas derived from a long line of such theorizing, stretching farther back, often to the Greeks. In this, however, they were wrong. Although the idea that active participation in political life helps develop human faculties has been in some sense available in Western thought since the fifth century B.C., and is implicit in, or derivable from, certain arguments in Aristotle, Machiavelli and Rousseau, neither Aristotle nor Machiavelli nor Rousseau explicitly made this claim. Conclusions to the contrary stem primarily from our own generation's growing conviction that human development is an important goal in the practice of democracy. That conviction, I believe, built most heavily on our own experiences, although it appropriated threads, often originally meant rather differently, from earlier philosophers.

Origins

In a section of the Politics that has had extraordinary influence over the ages, Aristotle wrote that "man is by nature an animal intended to live in a polis." The end, or goal, of the state is "to ensure a proper quality of character among the members...[and] to ensure that all who are included...shall be free from injustice and from any form of vice...." Any true polis, therefore, "must devote itself to the end of encouraging goodness."

Aristotle did not say anywhere that participating in the decisions of the state makes an individual develop in character, justice or goodness. The context of his writing implies instead that living under the laws of a good polity helps develop the justice, goodness and proper quality of character that he sought. Both Aristotle and others, including perhaps Solon himself, understood the search for good laws in a relatively static way. Just as human beings can discover the preexisting and eternal natural laws for physics and astronomy, so too can they discover the terrestrial laws under which men can develop as nature intended.

Other sections of Aristotle's Politics demonstrate how the participation of the many in a decision may make the decision better. Again, however, the text says nothing about how that participation may make the many better. Instead, several passages point out that various classes—e.g. "the very rich" and "the very poor," or the "mechanics, shop-keepers and day labourers" of the city—are, whether through nature, through habits derived from their positions in society, or simply through their lack of leisure, either not well suited or actually unqualified for political participation. Aristotle did not suggest in these passages that participation in governing might improve these individuals' capacity for governing.

Even in the truncated section of the Politics on education—of which some, perhaps, is lost—Aristotle never reached the point of discussing the educative effects of participation itself. This section does raise the tantalizing question, "Which way of life is the more desirable—to join with other citizens and share in the state's activity, or to live in it like an alien, absolved from the ties of political society?" Although the question's very language seems to require the first of the two choices, Aristotle answers cautiously by first favoring the participative "life of action," then qualifying the meaning of action to permit substituting for active political participation "speculations and trains of reflection followed purely for their own sake."

Aristotle's description of citizenship as "deliberating and judging," and of taking turns in office as involving "considering...the interest of others" provides material from which later thinkers could construct a theory of the educative value of participation. But he himself did not explicitly draw such modern conclusions. Aristotle placed on the intellectual agenda of the western world the idea that the purpose of government was to develop the character of the citizenry. He did not say that this development should or would come about through political participation.

As Hanna Pitkin points out, Machiavelli's "vision of manly Citizenship" placed a high value on internal political conflict, which brought productive results if, as in Rome, it was "ended by debating," with the result of "law," rather than, as in Florence, "by fighting," with the result of "exile and death." In Rome, the people's desire to share power with the nobles was "reasonable;" in Florence, the people's desire to rule alone was "harmful and unjust." Machiavelli's "Citizen image...is neither selfish nor self-sacrificing, but a way to 'give thought to private and public advantages'...."

Pitkin's citations from Machiavelli lead us to conclude that he approved of conflict, debate, law instead of war, accommodating the interests of different groups, reasonable demands, and considering both private and public interests. They do not, in my reading, say anything about what Machiavelli believed happened to citizens in the course of debate.

Hanna Pitkin, however, is a theorist of our generation. She glosses these passages by concluding that Machiavelli's Citizen image "concerns the transformation of narrowly defined self- interest into a larger awareness of one's ties to others, one's real stake in institutions and ideals." Turning to Aristotle, she writes,

one may be reminded of the ancient Greek understanding of man as by nature a polis creature, developing his full potential only in shared responsibility for the nomos by which he lives.

Like Aristotle, Machiavelli suggests that this type of manhood, this development of potential virtu, can only be achieved in actual experience of citizen participation. Only in crisis and political struggle are people forced to enlarge their understandings of themselves and their interests.

Although Machiavelli was undoubtedly concerned with educazione in a broad sense, and although he undoubtedly believed that political experience (e.g. the experience of being overrun by the enemy when one has not held to one's first principles) taught people valuable lessons, he does not seem to have said explicitly that participation in decision-making, through debate and deliberation, for example, changed the participants either for the better or for the worse.

The Christian revolution, which intervened between Aristotle and Machiavelli, made development of character a matter for Church and God rather than the state. Rousseau, in the eighteenth century, had therefore consciously to reach back to classic ideals to introduce the idea that the character of the regime will affect the character of the citizens.

As far as I can tell, it was Rousseau who first brought into the language of normative political philosophy the phrase, "development of the faculties." The development he was concerned with was moral. Like Aristotle, he thought that the job of the civil state was to make men just. In his own post- Christian understanding, however, he had this justice require an internal moral transformation.

The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. Although, in this state, he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man.

What generates this transformative development of the faculties? First, good laws. Second, a civil religion that will promote social unity and make each citizen "love his duty." Finally, perhaps, the natural healthy instincts of humanity, which, when not subverted by bad institutions, lead human beings to develop in the way that is best for them. Reading The Social Contract carefully, I see no passage in which Rousseau explicitly says that participation in the making of political decisions will engender or even maintain this transformation.

Rousseau believed deeply in participation. Without participation, the citizens are not free and the state is dead. Moreover, in Rousseau's theory, participation in the sense of willing the laws oneself makes the people who engage in it better. But this willing does not entail deliberation, or any of the things we mean by political participation. It means instead recognizing what is in the common good (for example, the cooperative move in a prisoners' dilemma) and acting upon that recognition. Rousseau opposed deliberation.

Rousseau never stated explicitly that the act of participating itself develops the faculties by directing each individual's will to the common interest. If anything, the causal arrow is reversed. A concern for the common interest causes one to participate. When each cares more for the common happiness than for his own, "every man flies to the assemblies."

One implicit message of the Social Contract, however, strongly supports the idea that political participation itself develops concern for the common good. Rousseau modeled his political ideals not only on Greece and Rome, but on Geneva and the Swiss communes that in his day made their decisions democratically, in direct assembly. To the extent that Rousseau believed that what he preached was practicable, he did so because he had seen it work in Switzerland. He tells us, with a conviction that may derive from firsthand experience, later romanticized:

as long as several men in assembly regard themselves as a single body, ...the common good is everywhere apparent, and only good sense is needed to perceive it. ...When, among the happiest people in the world, bands of peasants are seen regulating affairs of State under an oak, and always acting wisely, can we help scorning the ingenious methods of other nations...? A state so governed needs very few laws; and, as it becomes necessary to add new ones, the necessity is universally seen. The first man to propose them merely says what all have already felt, and there is no question of factions or intrigues or eloquence in order to secure the passage into law of what every one has already decided to do, as soon as he is sure that the rest will act with him. Theorists are led into error because, seeing only States that have been from the beginning wrongly constituted, they are struck by the impossibility of applying such a policy to them.

To achieve moral liberty one must prescribe a law to oneself. Nor would postulating an external source of inner understanding be consistent with the actual experience of face-to-face democracies. Taking a lesson from our own experiences, we can surmise that Rousseau saw and took in, although he did not report, the ways in which the process of meeting face to face under an oak tree or in a town hall reinforces, and perhaps even creates, the habit of thinking often of the common interest. It is less clear that the experience of face-to-face assembly encourages citizens to understand their interests when these differ from the common interest (a condition in which Rousseau's civil government simply would not apply), but even here the process of local assembly democracy affords some safeguards that let citizens withstand the many pressures toward pseudo-consensus. Rousseau's description of meeting under an oak and his underlying theories of morality and education point toward a conclusion on the educative effects of participation that he did not enunciate.

Rousseau's phrase, "the development of the faculties," was to take root and bloom with marvelous and unexpected flowers in the soil of German romanticism. Many of the Romantics took this idea out of its political context, and portrayed individual development as a relatively isolated, spiritual quest, like the quest of Goethe's Faust, which tore the seeker away from his fellow men rather than making of him a Rousseauian being whose fulfillment came only through adopting the common interest as his own.

Wilhelm von Humboldt, who greatly influenced John Stuart Mill, typified this apolitical—even anti-political—approach. Humboldt began his early work on the state with the words: "The true end of man...is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole." "Therefore, the object "towards which every human being must ceaselessly direct his efforts, and on which especially those who design to influence their fellow men must ever keep their eyes, is the individuality of power and development." For this there are two requisites, "freedom, and variety of situations."

This individual development, Humboldt believed, proceeded from the crude substance of sensuous perception to the "purest form," which "we call idea." The greater the variety of sensuous perceptions, the richer the resulting form. Humboldt advocated a minimal state because he believed that a minimal state permitted maximum variety, "in which each tries to develop himself from his own inmost nature, and for his own sake." In Humboldt's vision, both the direction and the reason for development derive only from the individual. The community is irrelevant, and the job of the polity is to keep out of the way.

Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, and other German thinkers urged against individualist Romanticism the idea that human faculties were best developed in society. Their work did not, however, argue that the democratic process itself had important effects on human development.

It was Alexis de Tocqueville, writing after he returned from America, who first claimed that participation in the making of democratic decisions developed individual character. De Tocqueville's claim derived not only from the intellectual currents of his time, which were almost obsessed by the development of the faculties, but also from his experience of the New England town meeting—the same experience of face-to-face democracy that had implicitly inspired Rousseau. "Town meetings," wrote de Tocqueville, "are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people's reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it."

The native of New England...takes part in every occurrence in the place; he practices the art of government in the small sphere within his reach; he accustoms himself to those forms without which liberty can only advance by revolutions; he imbibes their spirit; he acquires a taste for order, comprehends the balance of powers, and collects clear practical notions on the nature of his duties and the extent of his rights.

Not only political participation in township democracy, but also participation in voluntary associations produces an interest in the common weal, for de Tocqueville is thinking of voluntary associations when he writes, "feelings and opinions are recruited, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal influence of men upon one another."

As for the process by which this transformation comes about, de Tocqueville makes what seems in today's predominantly adversary polity an illogical leap from citizens having an interest in their own affairs to their developing an other-regarding interest in the common good. De Tocqueville is not conscious of this leap because to him a town can be as much one's own as can a personal possession. He writes that a centralized state will accustom a man to "submit," "enervate" him, make him "indifferent to the fate of the spot which he inhabits," and lead him to look upon "the condition of his village, the police of his street, the repairs of the church or parsonage" as things that "do not concern him and are unconnected with himself." Uninvolved in deciding about his polity, such a man will not have "the spirit of ownership nor any ideas of improvement." De Tocqueville's political "ownership," like Mill's later vision of the effects of political participation, is entrepreneurial in spirit, modeled on the experience of a single person with that person's own property. Yet it is grounded in community. It sees no conflict between the individual's and the community's good.

John Stuart Mill, influenced by von Humboldt, de Tocqueville, and by what he later termed a general preoccupation with the "right and duty of self-development," which he thought was "pushed by a whole school of German authors even to exaggeration," was the first to make the effect of participation on individual character a major argument for democracy. Mill published his On Liberty two years before Considerations on Representative Government, where he makes this argument in its fullest form. The two works together indicate both which faculties Mill thought ought to be developed in general and which faculties he thought democratic participation would develop.

As the epigraph for On Liberty, Mill took from von Humboldt the following statement:

"The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity."

The greatest harm done is to those who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped, and their reason cowed, by the fear of heresy. ...Not that is is solely, or chiefly, to form great thinkers, that freedom of thinking is required. On the contrary it is as much and even more indispensable, to enable average human beings to attain the mental stature which they are capable of. There may have been, and may again be, great individual thinkers, in a general atmosphere of mental slavery. But there never has been, nor ever will be, in that atmosphere, an intellectually active people.

Mill concluded On Liberty by departing from the analysis of the effects of liberty to consider development alone. In this final section, he made for minimal government the same kinds of argument that a few years later he would make for democratic participation. After arguing that people should make their own decisions because doing so produces better outcomes ("there is no one so fit to conduct any business, or to determine how or by whom it shall be conducted, as those who are personally interested in it"), he adds, critically for our discussion, that people should make their own decisions because doing so promotes self- development:

... in many cases, though individuals may not do the particular thing so well, on the average, as the officers of government, it is nevertheless desirable that it should be done by them, rather than by the government, as a means to their own mental education—a mode of strengthening their active faculties, exercising their judgment, and giving them a familiar knowledge of the subjects with which they are thus left to deal. This is a principal, though not the sole, recommendation of jury trial (in cases not political); of free and popular and local municipal institutions; of the conduct of industrial and philanthropic enterprises by voluntary associations.

the practical part of the education of a free people, taking them out of the narrow circle of personal and family selfishness, and accustoming them to the comprehension of joint interests, the management of joint concerns—habituating them to act from public or semi-public motives, and guide their conduct by aims which unite instead of isolating them from one another.

In his promised work, On Representative Government, Mill specifies a little more exactly the three forms of individual development—virtue, intellectual stimulation, and activity—that he expects political participation to produce. This triad of categories, borrowed from Benham, had appeared in On Liberty as "[un]selfishness," "comprehension," and "conduct." In On Representative Government, they appear as "the capacities, moral, intellectual, and active." Moral development has to do with caring for the general interest rather than one's selfish interests, intellectual development with originality and cultivation, and active development with energy, courage, and enterprise. In On Representative Government, Mill contends that political participation promotes all three capacities. His argument runs as follows: because it is the most important task of government to promote the development of its citizens, and because the distribution of power has a greater influence on self-development than any other influence except the religious, the ideally best form of government is one in which citizens both have "a voice" in the sovereign authority and, at least occasionally, are "called upon to take an actual part in the government by the personal discharge of some public function, local or general." The way Mill put this is worth quoting in detail:

It is not sufficiently considered how little there is in most men's ordinary life to give any largeness either to their conceptions of labor or to their sentiments. Their work is a routine; not a labor of love, but of self- interest in the most elementary form, the satisfaction of daily wants; neither the thing done nor the process of doing it introduces the mind to thoughts or feelings extending beyond individuals; if instructive books are within their reach, there is no stimulus to read them; and in most cases the individual has no access to any person of cultivation much superior to his own. Giving him something to do for the public supplies, in a measure, all these deficiencies. If circumstances allow the amount of public duty assigned him to be considerable, it makes him an educated man.

... A benefit of the same kind, [as in Athenian juries and assemblies,] though far less in degree, is produced on Englishmen of the lower middle class by their liability to be placed on juries and to serve parish offices; which, though it does not occur to so many, nor is so continuous, nor introduces them to so great a variety of elevated considerations as to admit of comparison with the public education which every citizen of Athens obtained from her democratic institutions, must make them nevertheless very different beings, in range of ideas and development of faculties, from those who have done nothing in their lives but drive a quill or sell goods over a counter. Still more salutary is the moral part of the instruction afforded by the participation of the private citizen, if even rarely, in public functions. He is called upon, while so engaged, to weigh interests not his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by another rule than his private partialities; to apply, at every turn, principles and maxims which have for their reason of existence the common good; and he usually finds associated with him in the same work minds more familiarized than his own with these ideas and operations, whose study it will be to supply reason to his understanding, and stimulation to his feeling for the general interest. Where this school of public spirit does not exist, scarcely any sense is entertained that private persons, in no eminent social situation, owe any duties to society, except to obey the laws and submit to the government. There is no unselfish sentiment of identification with the public.

Mill advocated individual development in unselfishness primarily for its effect on government stability, and only secondarily for the good it might do the individual. Although he has sometimes been misinterpreted on this point, Mill's ultimate goal was a social, not an individual one. In this, he departed greatly from von Humboldt.

Mill did not advocate equal power in decisions as the kind of participation that would achieve this educative effect. He was arguing for "a voice" in politics, not an "equal voice.". He believed, for instance, that the "very peculiar circumstances" which made town meetings in New England produce "better results than might be expected" could not be duplicated in England. Rather, Mill believed that the educative effect of participation works through both the vote and public office. Having a vote (not necessarily an equal vote) induces people to come to their own decisions about policy. It is through "political discussion and collective political action that one...learns to feel for and with his fellow citizens and becomes consciously a member of a great community." Taking local administrative office, however, is the "chief instrument" of the public education of the citizens, because in such offices a citizen has to "act for public interests, as well as to think and to speak." Acting produces a greater sense of responsibility than merely reading newspapers and attending public meetings.

The Sixties

Yet by the l960s, criticism of the existing forms of democracy had, at least in the United States, moved closer to home. In l960, Arnold Kaufman coined the term "participatory democracy," arguing in an influential article that

democracy of participation may have many beneficial consequences, but its main justifying function is and always has been, not the extent to which it protects or stabilizes a community, but the contribution it can make to the development of human powers of thought, feeling and action.

Kaufman was an advisor to the radical students at the University of Michigan who in 1962 drew up the Port Huron Statement. That Statement, which brought the term "participatory democracy" into the language, served as the philosophical inspiration for the entire New Left in the l960s in the United States. The Port Huron Statement focused on how the structure of politics in America, particularly in the l950s, diminished the individual self. It argued that political participation would bring people "out of isolation and into community," and would encourage "independence, a respect for others, a sense of dignity and a willingness to accept social responsibility."

The explicit changes in character that the Port Huron Statement advocated got lost as the phrase "participatory democracy" was translated into practice. Participants in the hundreds of thousands of participatory collectives that sprang up around the United States in the next ten years did not justify their insistence on democratic participation by appeals to its effects on their character. The practice of these collectives, however, demonstrated a strong underlying commitment—in some cases, a self-indulgent commitment—to the end of individual development. By the l970s, nonpolitical communes, religious cults and self-awareness groups had arisen alongside the political collectives of the New Left; self-development had become the most important goal of much of this collective interaction. In the women's movement, individual consciousness-raising became the primary tool for political change. Women came to realize that "the personal was political." They could not change the outside world without either first or concurrently changing themselves. Even in the Weather Underground, the most important political organization in America committed to illegal direct action, the Weatherpeople spent a large fraction of their time both transforming themselves into fighting revolutionaries and debating exactly what that personal transformation should entail.

Ten years after Kaufman's "Participatory Democracy," Carole Pateman published in Great Britain her highly influential Participation and Democratic Theory, also arguing that participation in democracy produces individual development. Unlike Kaufman, however, she made the final target of change not the individual but the polity. For Pateman the goal was democracy, seen as an end in itself. Participation in realms other than the governmental developed the faculties required for participating in government.

Stressing the instrumental function of citizen education for public democracy allowed Pateman to be more specific than Kaufman about the kinds of individual development participation should produce. Because Pateman believed that "confidence in one's ability to participate responsibly and effectively, and to control one's life and environment," was "required" for democratic self-government, a sense of "political efficacy" became the major psychological or characterological quality that participation should develop. "Subsidiary hypotheses about participation are that it has an integrative effect and that it aids the acceptance of collective decisions," she wrote, adding that "the experience of participation...will develop and foster the 'democratic' personality," which she briefly described as involving autonomy and a resistance to hierarchy. These four potential effects—primarily political efficacy, and secondarily the sense of cooperation, commitment to collective decisions, and democratic character—all have value, in Pateman's presentation, because these traits help democracy function.

In two essays written just before and after Pateman's book, C.B. Macpherson speculated in more detail than most on the specific goals of individual development. But Macpherson did not claim that political participation produced individual development. Rather, he contended explicitly that no political system can "maximize individual powers" in the absence of a socialist, or at least non-capitalist, economic system. In Macpherson's eyes, the key to developing "one's powers" was not political participation, but capital and other material resources. Focussing on the economic system, Macpherson never spoke, in either of his two essays, of development through political participation.

Macpherson did, however, address himself specifically to what "individual development" might mean, promoting some forms of development on the grounds that they are "uniquely human." To exert and to develop any human capacity are for Macpherson "ends in themselves." In his view, the "uniquely human capacities"

include the capacity for rational understanding, for moral judgment and action, for aesthetic creation or contemplation, for the emotional activities of friendship and love, and, sometimes, for religious experience.

Although Macpherson was one of the few major thinkers to address the content of individual development, the results are disappointing. Macpherson claimed that what is human, or essentially human, is necessarily good in itself. Yet one need not subscribe to the Christian doctrine of original sin to entertain as a plausible alternative hypothesis that human beings have developed the capacity for evil far beyond that of other animals, to the point where we may perceive a qualitative rather than merely a quantitative difference. Although cats play with mice, and many animals enforce behaviors of subordination, the human is the only species to have developed the practices of sexual sadism, slavery and genocide. Simply defining the destructive aspects of human nature as not genuinely "human" will not do. Macpherson's distinction requires introducing standards of destructiveness and non-destructiveness that extend beyond simply belonging to the human species. If we use Macpherson to understand what kinds of individual development democratic participation might produce, we find no major advance over Bentham's original categorization, adopted by Mill and then Kaufman, of the powers of "thought, feeling and action."

In l975, Peter Bachrach advanced the collective understanding of what faculties democratic participation might develop by arguing that the key faculty to be developed was the faculty of coming to understand one's true interests. Bachrach had previously introduced into mainstream American political science the idea that the power of one set of interests or one perspective might prevent fundamental questions from ever being introduced into the political agenda. Following this logic to its conclusion, he then pointed out that because of the dominant constellations of power, citizens themselves might often remain ignorant of their real interests. As he put it, "not all expressed wants reflect real needs.... [Democratic] participation is an essential means for the individual to discover his real needs through the intervening discovery of himself as a social human being." Participation, in his view, could allow human beings to become "communicative" beings, to reflect, communicate and act on their reflections, and so become aware of their political interests. Because the underclasses are deprived socially and economically, they usually do not take advantage of the opportunities for participation that a system provides. As a consequence, they have less opportunity to come to understand their own interests. If these classes were to participate and come to understand their own interests more clearly, Bachrach suggested, they would probably find those interests coming in conflict with those of the ruling elites.

Recognizing that political participation can obfuscate issues as well as making them clearer, Bachrach concluded that only with a "requirement that all participants in the formulation of issues and in the decision-making process possess approximately an equal amount of power resources" would participation be more likely to guide citizens toward their real interests rather than away from them. Also recognizing that it is almost impossible to achieve even approximately equal power resources in practice, he suggested three standards by which one may begin to judge whether or not political participation is likely to uncover genuine interests or obfuscate them. These standards are:

1. Whether new issues important to nonelites succeed in reaching the decision-making agenda and are debated and seriously considered.

2. Whether the pattern of decisions manifests a shift in the structure of power in the subpolity in favor of nonelites.

3. Whether the pattern of policy outputs reflects a more equitable allocation of values between established elites and nonelites.

Building on Bachrach, I too argued that participation in small face-to-face democracies can help citizens develop a clearer understanding of their real interests. One key goal of participation is to reveal on any given issue whether one's interests complement the interests of others in the polity or conflict with them. If a key goal of political participation is the development of the ability to evolve, with others, a better understanding of one's interests, this goal is promoted by decisions on matters in which the citizens have 1) experiential knowledge, 2) the opportunity for extended deliberation, 3) a critical mass for mutual support in each area of conflicting interest, and 4) an ideology and set of institutions that makes possible the shift back and forth from ways of making decisions appropriate for common interest to ways of making decisions appropriate to conflict.

Recently the focus of many democratic theorists has shifted from the educative functions of democracy to its deliberative functions. Each is the means to the other's end. Good deliberation ought to educate the participants on their interests, clarifying both underlying conflicts and the good of the whole. Educated participants, in turn, will be more likely to produce good deliberation, which takes the ideas of each into account, fosters commonality when appropriate, indicates which issues the group handle with the methods of conflict, and creates, through the deliberative process, mutually satisfactory understandings.

Fading From View

The idea of the educative effect of democratic participation rose in the l960s, flourished in the l970's, and waned in the l980s. The idea faded in impact, I believe, not only because of the usual half-life in all ideas and because for several long Presidential regimes in the United States the federal government turned away from interest in participation, but also because the practice itself faded. The contagious excitement of the thousands of collectives formed between l965 and l975, which infected many who never even belonged, let many experience—in their own lives, or in the lives of their children, students or friends—how taking collective action or responsibility for a group did activate their powers of thought, feeling and action. When the pace of political change began to slow and involvements shifted toward the private, commitment to participation became ghettoized in the feminist and ecological movements, and faded even there.

Theoretical interest in the educative effects of participation also waned because the third step in the triad of "practice-thought-practice" proved hard to take. In the academic discipline of political science, normative theory often influences empirical research. Yet in the case of the educative effects of participation, whose beneficial qualities Arnold Kaufman had said remained empirically to be proved, the postulated effects took subtle forms that could not easily be captured in empirical studies of relatively small numbers of people. Cross-sectional studies showed that people who participated in democratic politics also had many other admirable qualities, but it was hard to find situations for study in which a researcher could measure the qualities of people before and after the addition of participation to see if participation itself had any causal effect in producing those admirable qualities. Indeed, it took forty years of research on psychotherapy, a procedure explicitly designed to produce personal change, to amass sufficient numbers of studies with sufficient cases using a before and after design to demonstrate that such therapy had such an effect. It is highly unlikely that any funding body would finance a study massive enough to pick up the effects on character of participation in politics—an act not designed for the purpose of characterological change. (See Appendix A.)

Without the stimulating effect of empirical research indicating the type and extent of changes in individuals brought about by democratic participation, and with the demise of a receptive political climate, the educative theory of participation has gone the way of most theories. Most democratic theorists, including myself, simply believe, from their own experience, from the work that they aim at one one another, and from their reinterpretations of Aristotle, Machiavelli and Rousseau, that participation does have a beneficial effect on the participants. We do not now inquire too deeply as to what that effect might be.

References

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