CPN is designed and maintained by ONline @ UW: Electronic Publishing Group.

Topics: Community

Kernels of Democracy

By Ken Thomson, Jeffrey M. Berry, Kent E. Portney
Copyright © 1994 by the Lincoln Filene Center at Tufts University

Contents

Introduction
A New Potential

1. Participatory democracy is possible, not perfect
2. Not everyone will participate

3. The starting point is a demand for change and a willingness to respond
4. Face-to-face discussion, decision, and action underlie any participatory democracy
5. Openness, outreach, and legitimacy are key
6. Information must flow freely in two directions
7. Resources are needed
8. Multiple organizational forms increase vitality

9. Government responds, sometimes
10. Participation structures help generate policy balance
11. Impact is highest for neighborhood land use issues, lowest for citywide issues
12. People really solve community problems

13. Participation supplements, not supplants, independent citizen action and elected authority
14. The fear that expanded participation will devalue democracy is unfounded
15. Participation builds trust and works against alienation
16. Conflict exists, but participation often finds means for resolution
17. Participation can cause delay, but for the sake of consensus

18. Participation nurtures efficacy
19. People gain a sense of community
20. People gain a sense of tolerance towards others' ideas
21. People learn through participation
22. People participate through a sense of selflessness, as well as selfishness

Preface

Kernels of Democracy distills our current state of knowledge about effective citizen participation into 22 central lessons.

These lessons arise from the National Citizen Participation Development Project and our work with hundreds of participation projects throughout the country, including our focus on five cities with the strongest participation systems we could find: Birmingham, Dayton, Portland, San Antonio, and St. Paul.

Our conclusions cover what makes participation in the local policy process successful, what we can expect "success" to mean, and a brief survey of its impact upon policy responsiveness, ability to govern, and citizen capacity-building.

This overview is designed to help government officials, scholars, and citizen activists consider the potential for effective citizen participation efforts and how they might be applied to their own community. Anyone who is interested in strengthening democracy at home or abroad should look at these results.

This publication is one of a series that communicates the results of the National Citizen Participation Demonstration Project, funded by the Ford Foundation. This project has attempted to identify the most effective participation efforts in the country and understand how they have had an impact on policymaking, governance, and individual capacity. And then to help other communities use these models to strengthen their own democracies.

The reports from the Citizen Participation Demonstration Project seek to contribute to the efforts of citizen's groups and governmental agencies. We would value your response. Please consider ongoing activities of the Lincoln Filene Center as resources to your local initiatives to enhance citizen action and community building.

We appreciate the financial support provided by the Ford Foundation for the research that is the basis of this report. We are grateful also to the Lincoln and Therese Filene Foundation for supporting the preparation and publication of this and other reports that seek to communicate results of the National Citizen Participation Development Project to city officials and active citizens.

For further information contact the Lincoln Filene Center, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155; (617) 627-3401.

Introduction

Our political structures were designed for an era of the rural village, where the latest news of Washington came from two months ago, and politics for most people was limited by the town line. But we now live in an era of the global village, where information is measured in sound bites and megabytes, and images of far off wars and political battles flicker hourly across our home screens.

Many elected officials, community leaders, and political observers agree today that we must change the way we govern our communities, and ultimately our nation. Dissatisfaction with politics is at an all time high. The Perot phenomenon in the 1992 elections represented an unprecedented public sense of being shut out of "politics as usual", and not being a bit pleased with the prospect. Too many issues have been left festering for too long. Too many scandals and breaches of trust. New approaches need to be tried. New initiatives need to be taken. It is clear that these initiatives need to involve average citizens in ways that we previously have been unable to do.

This booklet summarizes the results of the National Citizen Participation Development Project, and examines where we can go from here. The project, funded in large part by the generosity of the Ford Foundation, was based on extensive research in five core cites-Birmingham, Dayton, Portland, San Antonio, and St. Paul, in ten comparison cities, and in seventy participation projects throughout the country. It included telephone interviews with more than 11,000 residents of these cities, personal interviews with more than 450 community leaders in the five core areas, and a review of media coverage of local issues over a two year period. It's basic question is whether participatory democracy is a realistic direction for our future.

For all the value that citizen involvement is said to possess, the role of citizens is very limited in America's formal public structures. Citizens are expected to spend five minutes in the voting booth once every year, or two, or four. And they are expected to do little more. Practicing politicians, political scientists, and active citizens all tend to assume that a deeper role for the average citizen is impractical and cannot be sustained.

It's not just diminished expectations that drives our aversion to expanded democracy, it's also outright fear. Ever since the discreditation of "maximum feasible participation of the poor" in the 1960s war on poverty, left festering in vague social memories of populist chaos, mob rule, and despotic demagogy, the idea of participatory democracy has been treated as a neglected stepchild of the American experience.

In part, public officials have paid lip-service to the values of citizen participation, but too many, ultimately, didn't want to diminish their own authority by sharing it with others. Liberal critics of public involvement programs have considered them to be ineffective rituals where everybody merely goes the through the motions and the end result is a fait accompli. For conservatives, participation has represented an expansion of already burdensome regulatory procedure and a fear that citizens might be able to force costly changes in their development visions. And underlying all is the terror of the unwashed masses, and the theory that because the uninvolved hold antidemocratic and intolerant opinions, their widespread inclusion would fundamentally undermine the democratic process itself. Perhaps Daniel Patrick Moynihan summed this fear up most succinctly in Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding when he concluded: "We may discover to our sorrow that 'participatory democracy' can mean the end of both participation and democracy."

And so we live in a time of apprehension, re-evaluation, and hope for some of our most cherished ideals. A new federal administration has offered a new hope for reshaping our American communities. This booklet offers an examination of what to expect from one way that such reshaping might be generated. Here, in a nutshell, is what we found at the heart of participatory America, and what we believe is possible.

A New Potential

Our project reviewed hundreds of citizen action efforts throughout the country to rebuild communities and influence government policy, examined the five best citywide models in great detail, and attempted to assess their impact on policy issues, governance, and citizen capacity.

If nothing else, our study proves that participatory democracy can grow and develop within the bounds of America's existing political framework. In each of our five core cities—Birmingham, Dayton, Portland, San Antonio, and St. Paul—we found participation systems that fulfill a substantially different model than the representative democracy that exists in most other American cities. These participation efforts open up broad avenues for citizen roles in policymaking, extending far beyond that which is possible through electoral politics.

The participation system in each community has been going strong for more than fifteen years, weathering many a political storm. Each city has made extensive, ongoing, efforts to provide participation opportunities for every citizen. Neighborhood structures exist throughout the cities and provide realistic channels of impact on neighborhood life and government policy. They successfully promote both the breadth of participation—its ability to reach out to every community resident, and its depth—the ability of those involved to have real impact on final policy. And they are central to many areas of urban life: housing, transportation, environmental protection, community development, budgets, and long-range planning to name a few.

What they don't do is recruit millions of new people into political life. They do not work nearly as well on citywide, or larger, issues as on neighborhood-scale issues. They leave much of the city to "politics as usual". And they run the risk of keeping independent citizen groups off the political playing field. Each of these areas will be taken up in later sections of this booklet.

On balance, however, participatory democracy does exist, within rather closely defined limits in each city. Citizens and administrators agree overwhelmingly that the participation systems have been effective and have promoted projects and policies that have been good for the community. A major factor in their success is that they were, from the beginning, not just administrative but political reforms. They grew from both citizen demands for real participation and a willingness of government officials to provide those opportunities. And they provided clear and specific ways for that participation to end up as effective policy.

And each city can serve as a model to other communities seeking to rejuvenate community life. The cities represent a broad range of demographics and political history. Their experience is wide enough that some aspect can be adapted to almost any major American city. Program elements such as budget advisory committees, neighborhood offices and staffing, community needs assessment and allocation processes, neighborhood newspapers, crime watch connections, early notification, and neighborhood group standing in zoning and policy decisions can suggest similar structures elsewhere. While no other city has exactly the same problems and potentials as any of these five, neither do they have to reinvent the wheel.

We believe these systems represent both an inspiration and a yardstick for strong participation. As an inspiration, they enable other communities to envision the shape of a strong democratic system for their own city, and can help them design a process that will work to meet their own needs. As a yardstick, these five exemplary participation systems can help the citizens and officials of any community judge in concrete terms how far they have come in achieving participatory democracy.

Finally, the face-to-face democracy inherent in these efforts can serve as building blocks for our attempts to involve people in the larger issues of our society. The participation systems in these five cities are designed now to address neighborhood issues. But there is no inherent reason that they be so limited. Through the same political procedures and structures, such community groups can discuss and arrive at consensus (or at least accepted decisions) on citywide, statewide, and even national questions. To do so would require a means to link the groups into the same policy discussions at the same time, a means for repeated two-way communication between the local groups and larger policy bodies, and an outreach and recognition approach that can establish the legitimacy of any decisions reached. Such an effort is ambitious, but not beyond reach. Participatory democracy cannot be obtained overnight, but neither need it wait the millennium before it can begin to develop.

2. Not everyone will participate. Participation takes work. To achieve representative balance requires a dedicated community.

Contrary to the fears of those who expect that opening up participatory opportunities will dilute the processes of democracy with a deluge of the masses, we found the opposite problem. Even in the most participatory of cities, most choose not to participate. Overall, between 49% and 72% of the population in the strong participation cities are aware of the participation system, 16.6% have been involved in the system during the last two years, and 10.7% are active at least once a month.

These participation rates are below the rates expected in electoral politics, and we would anticipate that they always will be. In general the more required of participants, the fewer will choose to participate. And much more is required for the ongoing examination of issues by the neighborhood groups than simply spending five minutes in the voting booth. But if a realistic opportunity for more intensive involvement is available to all residents on an equal footing, the importance of that participation may be well worth the cost. And even the 10.7% figure means that 150,000 people in our five cities are dealing with their community's problems on at least a monthly basis!

If those who choose to participate are not a majority of the population, then it becomes particularly important to understand how well they represent the characteristics of the majority. Are these strong participation systems biased against the poor, minorities, or non-homeowners, in comparison with politics as usual? What we found is almost identical results in this area for the strong participation cities and their comparison cities (average American cities matched to the five core cites on the basis of demographics and levels of community participation). More educated and higher income people are more likely to participate than less educated and lower income people, but at the same ratio in the strong participation cities as those without major participation efforts. The same is true for homeowners and renters. Hispanics and African Americans participate at nearly the same rates and nonminorities, at each income and education level. The poor in poor neighborhoods actually tend to participate more than the poor in nonpoor neighborhoods.

The one overall population effect we did find was that the participation systems tend to change the way that community activists spend their time. In cities without strong participation systems, more people spend their time in social and service groups. In the strong participation cities, these same kinds of people tend to be more active in issue groups, political groups, and the neighborhood associations. In addition a significant effect on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis is seen. For low and moderate income residents, those who live in neighborhoods with strong neighborhood associations tend to participate in community affairs of all kinds more than those whole live in neighborhoods with weak neighborhood groups.

So the strong participation systems do not succeed in breaking through the income barriers in politics, but neither do they make the problem worse. Strong democratic structures do channel participants' energies into communal and cooperative activities rather than activities which are fundamentally isolating. And when those structures have a major impact on government and the community, those people have an increased opportunity to make a difference. But the results underscore the point that effective participation of the poor is a difficult task: extensive, continuous outreach is needed if any participation effort is to achieve a reasonable cross-section of the community.

Preconditions For Success

One of the clearest lessons is that strong motivation must exist from the beginning for participation to succeed: in each city, there existed a citizen demand for substantive participation, a clearly-articulated vision for the process by a group of governmental leaders (a mayor, city council members, or major agency heads), and an additional catalytic event or pressure. In these cities, during the 1970s, that final catalyst generally proved to be a federal mandate or initiative.

These factors led community leaders to recognize that the participation system had to be citywide to ensure that all citizens had a stake in its continued operation. They led to processes which could show clear results very quickly-and demonstrate the value of participation to citizens and government officials alike. And they led to an effective political balance, an avoidance of candidate and partisan politics within the framework of the neighborhood associations themselves, and a focus of participation efforts on the specific issues that face the neighborhoods.

As a result of these factors, each city was able to reach a plateau of strong participation before encountering overwhelming financial or political reversals. Many other cities that had started participation programs under federal mandates failed to establish a broadly-based, highly participatory structure before federal mandates changed or supportive politicians left office. Consequently, such systems had not productively involved enough of the community to turn to that community for support in troubled times. And they quickly disintegrated when federal mandates and finances were reduced.

The ingredients that led to the development and maintenance of these strong participation systems are within the reach of any community today. Extraordinary economic, social, or political conditions are not required. But effective participation does need to be seen in a political and not only an administrative context. The political will is essential.

4. Face-to-face discussion, decision, and action underlie any participatory democracy. We can build upon existing structures.

At the core of the participation systems in each city we studied are small, natural neighborhoods where regular, face-to-face discussion of the issues is possible by all who take the time to be involved. The population of these neighborhoods is typically between 2,000 and 5,000, but in each city ranges widely (from 70 to 14,000 in Portland, for example). This range is primarily due to the importance given to natural boundaries and the indigenous determination of those boundaries.

Rules of operation are informal, people join and leave as their interest peaks and wanes, and generally everybody who attends the meetings has a chance to put in his or her two cents worth. The neighborhood associations take on any and all issues that residents bring before them (with greater or lesser impact depending upon the issue). This does not mean that they are not focused on one or two particular issues at any one time-responding to the discovery of toxics in the water supply, siting a landfill nearby, reacting to new housing developments, launching a crime prevention task force, recycling, or whatever the group decides to be its current priorities.

Some of these are developed very informally at monthly meetings, others come out of a formal survey process of residents that groups occasionally undertake. Many of the issues grow from individual resident concerns, others are responses to city initiatives, and still others are reactions to a dramatic event such as discovery of toxic materials in the water supply or a proposal for a multi-block shopping center.

In each city there is also a mechanism, or more often several mechanisms, for the concerns of residents that develop in these meetings to be brought before city hall. The first stage of this is different in each city: it is represented by the district coalition boards and staff in Portland, by the Priority Boards in Dayton, by the citywide COPS organization in San Antonio, and by the Community representatives, the Citizen Advisory Board, and community resource officers in Birmingham. Only in St. Paul does no intermediate structure of this kind exist-the staff of the individual district councils work directly with city agencies and city councilors, with the exception of a single Citizen Participation Coordinator who has an office in the Planning and Economic Development Department. St. Paul does have, however, its Capital Improvement Budget Committee (CIB), the most powerful citywide neighborhood-based body we found in any city.

In the small group setting, people are able to discuss, decide, and act on the issues that stem from their greatest concerns. And this face-to-face democracy is the reality of the daily experience of neighborhood associations. Yet it must be recognized that this interaction does not automatically lead to cooperative, public-spirited behavior. A majority faction may use its numerical strength to override the concerns of others. In addition, face-to-face forums allow for peer pressure and decisions that mask real disagreements. On balance, however, the face-to-face process inherent in the neighborhood associations provides the essential ingredients of openness and what Benjamin Barber calls "strong democratic talk", that provide the basis for productive citizen empowerment.

5. Openness, outreach, and legitimacy are key. We can change the way people relate to their government.

The legitimacy of the participation system depends upon its ability to continuously renew its ties to the community. Citizens cannot participate without being aware of the participation process, the times and places where they can become involved, and the potential impact of the issues upon their lives.

Accomplishing this task requires substantial effort. It means constant knocking on doors and putting information into peoples hands. The outreach process has to compete with the barrage of advertising and demands upon people's time that come from all other sectors of society. The process can take many forms. In St. Paul, one district council boasts more than 250 block associations, each with its own block captain and active members. The city also has an extensive network of neighborhood newspapers in most of the 17 council areas which regularly communicate the activities of the neighborhood organizations. In Birmingham, a newsletter is sent out to every household in every neighborhood once a month. City hall provides the staff, the printing, and the postage, and individual neighborhoods provide the message. In Portland, the city provides specific funds for neighborhood outreach through the district coalition offices. As part of the annual contract with the district offices, a specific amount is put aside for the printing and postage of at least one neighborhood newsletter for every household. If the neighborhood can creatively find ways to reduce costs for the publication, with donated printing or volunteer door-to-door distribution instead of mailing, for example, the same city funds can support several publications or newsletter issues.

In many ways the dynamic of the neighborhood-city interaction ensures that these outreach efforts continue. For the city, the efforts provide evidence that the neighborhood groups are keeping in touch with the entire community and not alienating a large block of voters. For the neighborhood groups, it provides the basis for their continued legitimacy as a voice for all residents of their neighborhood.

And the outreach process seems to work for the community as a whole. When we asked our population samples if they felt they would be offered the opportunity to participate in an issue of major concern to their community, 62.9 percent said "yes". A second question directly asked if there were "any group or organization that represents your community's interests better than the neighborhood association." A total of 88.5 percent of our respondents said "no," there was no more representative organization.

In addition to overall levels of outreach, a sense of a balanced effort in all neighborhoods is crucial to the ability of the participation system to be the voice of the community. In neighborhoods where people are less likely to participate, all the more effort is needed to encourage them. Maintaining this balance is not easy. When we asked the community leaders if the city tended to treat all groups of people and neighborhoods equally, about half said yes, while the other half could name a type of neighborhood that was treated better or worse than everyone else. One of the most frequent types of groups that were seen as being treated better were "well-organized neighborhoods".

Frequent attempts to reach people and offer them the opportunity to participate are necessary features of an effective participation system. Even the best programs often do not provide enough outreach, and many others fail to recognize its importance at all. In developing new participation systems and strengthening those that exist, of paramount concern is recognizing the time, energy, and resources that are needed for these outreach efforts. Only when outreach is done well and consistently across the city will citizens agree, "yes, this represents me".

6. Information must flow freely in two directions. People can learn and judge.

Productive citizen action depends upon timely information. Citizens need to know what the city is planning and the city needs to know what citizens are thinking. The participation system should ensure that information reaches citizens in time for them to consider and decide; and city policymakers should be aware of citizen concerns and issues when they put together the first stage of any plan.

To accomplish these objectives, each of the strong participation cities have some kind of early notification system. The St. Paul system most clearly spells out the nature of what must be sent to the District Councils and when it must be sent to give timely opportunity for response. The material includes meeting notices and agendas from all major city agencies, 45-day advance notice for liquor licenses, development ads, street vacations, and special assessments, and detailed requirements for rezoning, conditional uses and variances, and building condemnations or demolitions.

Dayton has another approach that provides ongoing, face-to-face exchanges of information between citizens and administrators. Each month, each Priority Board holds what is called an "Administrative Council". This process consists of representatives from each major city agency, typically ten to twelve people, appearing before the Priority Board to field any and all questions or complaints from participants. They may report progress of specific projects or provide answers to questions raised in previous sessions. Not all representatives will speak on any given night. The councils' operation provides for clear, public resolution of routine matters and establishes a strong link between the agencies and priority board members.

Portland's approach involves Budget Advisory Committees (BACs) for each major department. These committees are made up of both neighborhood representatives and other interested citizens. They provide a sounding board of administrative initiatives throughout the year, and particularly around budget preparation time. They provide the opportunity for citizens to grapple with agency problems in depth, and bring in fresh perspectives to the departments.

On most issues, the efforts in these cities are successful in making information available to citizens in time for them to take appropriate action. We found little evidence that these city governments withhold substantive information on any plans or proposals affecting specific neighborhoods. And when information does arrive too late, the neighborhood network has the demonstrated capability of obtaining more time to allow for appropriate citizen input.

Many information problems remain to be solved in the citizen-government relationship-including both too much and too little information flow. But the five core cities of our study provide a wealth of alternative approaches that can be of value to any community considering ways to improve its own approach to strong democracy.

7. Resources are needed. A little can go a long way.

Strong democracy requires resources. Volunteers provide the energy, the enthusiasm, the breadth of perspective, and ultimately the legitimacy for a participation system. But to maintain effective volunteer efforts in every part of the city, week after week and year after year, a support system is essential. Staff is needed. Neighborhood offices and meeting places are needed. Supplies, phones, printing, and logistics support are needed.

Of all these, perhaps the most important is adequate staffing. The staff provide the administrative and organizational abilities that volunteer participants often do not have the time to complete. And they generate the cohesion that keeps the organization together through the ups and downs of volunteer leadership energy and attention. In fact, if only one piece of information were used to rate the strength of a citywide participation effort, the most useful measure would be the number of full-time staff devoted to citizen and neighborhood support. Two of the strongest participation cities in our study have staff equivalent to more than 10 full time people for each 100,000 city residents.

The method of providing support varies according to the specific needs and neighborhood structures of each city. One approach is simply for the city to hire and manage the staff out of city hall. This is Birmingham's system. There are no district or neighborhood offices. The consequences of this system are that the staff agenda is rather closely controlled by the city itself.

At the other end of the scale is the hiring and direction of staff for the participation system by independent citizen-based organizations. This is the approach generally followed by St. Paul, Portland, and San Antonio. In St. Paul, the district councils each hire and fire their own staff subject only to their annual budget, a core of which is provided by the city with supplementary funds wherever they can raise them. Portland's seven coalition district boards have a similar arrangement, although occasionally the staff of the central ONA has played more of a role in this process when a new district board is organized. In all three cities, the decisions of the neighborhood and district staff are clearly all their own. This tends to lend a vitality to the system and provide for independent perspectives on every issue that arises.

In three of the cities-Dayton, Portland, and St. Paul-offices at the neighborhood or district coalition level provide a hub for participation activity. They house the neighborhood staff, provide meeting spaces, and make available a range of support services including printing, mailing, and computers. In all of the cities, either through the neighborhood offices or directly from city hall, basic support is available for the neighborhoods to produce newsletters, mailings, and flyers.

The city and community receives a great deal for relatively few dollars in support of the neighborhood systems. In many cases, the neighborhoods can build on city funds to raise a great deal more on their own, and use these funds to provide a range of direct services from energy audits to home health care. In all cases the funds are magnified many times through the work the volunteers out for the well-being of the community. The more directly these resources are controlled by the neighborhoods themselves, the more citizens gain a sense of ownership of the process. Very often a few resources devoted to a participation system will make the difference between citizen alienation and strong democracy.

8. Multiple organizational forms increase vitality. Strong participation can respond to the needs of each community.

Finally, a key feature of successful participation is the ability of the participation process to respond to the character of each neighborhood. As we saw in the five strong participation cities, and even more in the seventy participation models we examined for our participation casebook, a wide range of solutions are implemented.

At the structural level, they run from hundreds of block clubs and small neighborhood groups to citywide and agency-based committees and coalitions. On citizen action styles they run from fiercely independent "Alinsky-style" community groups to jointly managed efforts by citizens and city officials. On issues they range from the most local and concrete to the most global and visionary. On procedures they run from studiously informal to rigorously legalistic. And on programs they range from pure advocacy organizations to a mix of planning, direct service, and community development approaches.

The most successful participation systems make the most use of each style of organization that exists in the community. It is important that each group knows just how they fit into the system, and that individual citizens know where they can go to have their voices heard on each issue that arises. It's important that each group be encouraged to have the greatest possible openness to all in their constituency. And it's important that all potential constituencies are recognized and brought into the process whether they have an existing organization or not.

A participation system that meets these criteria, that actively encourages a role appropriate to each group, and that mediates between them when necessary is the most likely to be effective and beneficial to the community as a whole.

When Participation Works, Citizens Have Real Policy Impact

9. Government responds, sometimes. Citizens can get results.

The acid test of participation is whether it makes any difference in final outcomes for the community. We tackled the issue of responsiveness in a number of ways, using information from our in-person interviews, our population surveys, and media reporting of local issues over a two year period. It is clear that participation makes a major difference. The three most important results are:

1) Both community leaders and the population as a whole feel that the participation system has a very strong impact on city hall. Between 83% and 92% of the administrators, city councilors, and citizen group leaders we interviewed felt that the neighborhood associations were effective. When given the choice of "good", "fair", or "poor" in rating the job that neighborhood associations did in letting the city government know the needs of their community, more than sixty-one percent of our population samples put them in the highest category. In general, the cities at the high end of the participation scale have higher perceived responsiveness scores, and those at the low end have lower scores. And active participants in neighborhood, issue, and political groups tend to rate the responsiveness of their cities highest of all.

2) Neighborhood associations do not play the leading role in putting issues onto the city's political agenda. Despite elaborate participation structures, the neighborhood associations only initiate about 10 percent of the issues with which city officials deal with. Independent citizen groups, whose overall role is somewhat diminished by the resources channeled through the neighborhood associations, still manage to initiate more issues than the citizen participation structures. Local government itself is the most prolific initiator, playing that role with over 30 percent of the issues. And the remainder of issue initiation is spread among a wide array of agencies and interest groups.

3) Once an issue is on the public policy agenda, the participation system plays a very strong role. The neighborhood associations influence the boundaries of their city's agenda in the earliest stages of the policy process. They are intimately involved in the city planning process and provide a clear vehicle for neighborhood participants to shape priorities and solutions. And they are frequently able to defeat proposals which are seen as detrimental to their community, as well as craft alternatives that all parties eventually come to accept.

Even though participants don't get everything they seek, they feel that government is listening to what they have to say. Greater participation leads to a greater sense of responsiveness, at least for residents of low and moderate socioeconomic status (SES). The higher the level of community participation in a city, the more that councilors and administrators are attuned to the general public's neighborhood-scale issues. On balance, the participation systems clearly make a major difference in outcomes important to the well-being of their communities.

10. Participation structures help generate policy balance. All sides can become part of the process.

In addition to overall responsiveness, the question of bias is central to an effective participation process. If the system increases responsiveness, but does so for the benefit of one population group at the expense of another, it can hardly be seen as a success. The achievement of policy balance means that everyone wins some of the time and no one wins all of the time. It also implies that decisions incorporate sensible tradeoffs between competing interests, such as the potential conflict between business development and quality of life in the neighborhoods. Our sample sizes were large enough to allow us to break down our data for the fifteen cities considerably, and compare the responsiveness of these cities to, for example, high SES individuals, African-Americans, active participants, etc. We developed a broad index of policy responsiveness to allow a valid statistical measure for each group. Overall, we found a strong relationship between levels of community participation in a city and balance of responsiveness to all groups. In particular there tended to be very little responsiveness bias with respect to SES. And issue concurrence scores for community participants did not tend to be significantly higher than for the population as a whole. There was, however, some degree of responsiveness bias with respect to race in the three core cities with relatively small African American populations. That bias was in favor of the minority populations. In general, however, the more impressive finding is that the cities with the strongest participation systems are able to be the most responsive without undue bias or imbalance.

These statistical results mesh well with our direct observations of the systems' operations. Because every neighborhood has an organization that is recognized by city hall, all elements in the city-at least all large enough to have a major role in at least one neighborhood-have a seat at the bargaining table. Community leaders tell us that the parochial concerns that tend to be generated by the neighborhood associations are a welcome balance to the citywide interests that are already well-represented at city hall. And the need for business development is not disregarded by the neighborhood associations. Both business and neighborhoods tend to recognize that solutions need to be found which both provide economic growth and preserve the quality of life in their communities. In addition, we saw case after case of active participants expressing awareness of the need to avoid a narrow position on an issue and encouraging all parties to bring their point of view to the table.

The preponderance of evidence indicates that strong participation systems do a great deal to promote more balanced public policy decisions. Most cities that adopt such structures can expect to improve their responsiveness to currently neglected groups in the city, without the danger of overcompensation. Their greatest concern in building these systems should be to ensure that an outreach effort is made consistently to those who normally would not participate, and that a realistic opportunity to impact the decisionmaking process is offered to all.

11. Impact is highest for neighborhood land use issues, lowest for citywide issues. A major challenge now is for participation systems to expand from neighborhood to larger concerns.

While the participation systems, as currently designed, give citizens real impact at city hall, they do much better on some kinds of issues than on others. On neighborhood land use policies, for example, participants have dramatic impact. To a high degree in St. Paul, and to a lesser but still significant degree in the other cities, the neighborhood position on neighborhood land use issues is the city policy.

However, when land use issues reach a certain economic scale-at the point where the city perceives that its vital economic interests are at stake- neighborhood influence is no longer as powerful. We saw neighborhood preferences being overturned in the case of a water theme park and race track in Birmingham, and a major shopping plaza in Portland, for example. In these cases, some of the neighborhood concerns are usually addressed, but the overall approval of a development project remains in the hands of the city Council and Mayor.

The impact of the participation system on other issues is generally related to the degree they are tied to neighborhood turf. On environmental issues that have a particularly sharp local focus (i.e. toxic spills, water quality, etc.), for example, the groups are often extremely effective. Particularly important are mechanisms that insert neighborhood needs directly into the budget process, that affect specific neighborhood allocations, and that involve capital budgeting for neighborhood projects.

Issues seen by neighborhood participants as the responsibility of the larger community, however, including most "social" issues such as health care, the plight of the homeless, or tax rates, are often neglected by the system. Similarly, issues controlled by institutions external to the neighborhood participation system, such as schools, regional transit authorities, and downtown development operations are often outside the neighborhood group impact.

In our view, one of the highest priorities today for strong neighborhood-based systems like those in the five cities of our study is to deal with this issue dichotomy. In particular, an urgent need exists for these cities to develop effective forums at a citywide scale in which the face-to-face interaction that is so effective at a neighborhood level can work to produce solutions to citywide questions and beyond. Attempts to do so have been tried in many of these cities at one time or another, but few have produced lasting results. At present, many of the volunteer leaders from the neighborhoods seldom if ever get together with other neighborhood leaders from throughout the city or work with them in the context of the most pressing citywide concerns. A successful development of such citywide links could stimulate similar links at a statewide and even national level. With them come the potential for strong democracy growing from the neighborhood to the nation.

12. People really solve community problems. They gain the expertise necessary to do the job.

Productive participation is not an academic exercise. The results are not just abstract policy and good feelings. The most common results are hardheaded compromise and effective implementation of detailed solutions to community problems.

Citizens monitor the workings of government and proposals being made to government by private parties, and then help to reshape the proposals- whether in commercial development, traffic impact, or water quality-when they fail to meet community expectations.

Citizens also create entirely new approaches to a community problem. What starts out as a reaction to a project or series of projects, such as siting of group homes, development of neighborhood convenience stores, measures to control drug houses, or the repeated need for an alternative zoning classification, often turns into a process in which a brand new policy is born and implemented.

Citizens from all parts of the city work on self-help and community development projects, from an occasional neighborhood clean-up day or an ongoing crimewatch to large-scale sweat-equity housing projects and community economic development efforts. Not only do the self-help volunteers get the immediate job done, but they contribute substantially to the more effective use of public resources citywide.

And citizens plan together for the future communities that they envision. The planning process enables community leaders to step back from putting out fires, and take a longer and wider view than they are normally able to do. Through the ongoing links to policymaking and community action, the plans help the neighborhoods focus their energies and marshal energy and resources for their work toward the common goals.

When Participation Works, Ability to Govern is Enhanced

13. Participation supplements, not supplants, independent citizen action and elected authority. All three can become stronger in unison.

The potential for cooptation of independent citizen initiatives or for undercutting representative institutions does exist. But the cities of our study provide a convincing case that if the participation system is designed well, neither calamity need arise. Even with the strongest participation systems, city councils and citywide officials need to continue most of the functions they have in every city today. And even with broadly representative grassroots groups as part of these systems, independent citizen action remains vital to formulate creative solutions, advance otherwise neglected points of view, and raise the consciousness of citizens and public officials alike. Strong democracy does not represent a weakening of existing political forms, but rather the addition of a new political form too often lacking in our communities.

14. The fear that expanded participation will devalue democracy is unfounded. We can bring many new people into the governmental process.

Some observers have argued that while participatory democracy is virtuous in intent, it is damaging in practice. As Thomas Dye and L. Harmon Zeigler maintain: "It is the irony of democracy that democratic ideals survive because authoritarian masses are also generally apathetic and inactive." (The Irony of Democracy, 1978, p. 135). Diluting representative democracy with a heavy dose of participatory democracy is said to lead to persistent conflict, eventual alienation from the political system, and unnecessary and expensive delays.

One of the central lines of this argument is that the large majority of the population, who do not now actively participate, hold attitudes that are authoritarian, racist, and intolerant of any deviation from the cultural norm. Therefore, the argument goes, if more of these people are drawn into active political life, these attitudes will play a much larger role in the political process, thereby undercutting the very values necessary for democracy to survive.

We have found the opposite to be the case. The evidence developed in our project indicates that an expanded participation process will increase, not decrease, the attitudes necessary to maintain a strong democracy. The highly participatory structures in each of the five core cities in this study have now been maintained, and have grown significantly over a fifteen year period - in spite of financial commitments demanded by the participation processes and the heavy political and social pressures each of these cities has faced. The exuberance of the participation activities in each city, and the commitment to them that is demonstrated by administrators and citizens alike, strengthens the argument that pro-democracy attitudes and relationships, and not intolerant or authoritarian beliefs, have been fostered and advanced through structures for strong democracy.

When we found a relationship between participation and support of the system, trust in government officials, or tolerance toward other's points of view, it was almost always in a positive direction. The stronger the participation system and the more people who participate, the greater the support for democratic values. The opposite effects, that greater participation would draw in more of the alienated and intolerant, that frustration and disenchantment with the system would be increased, or that tendencies toward destabilization of existing political frameworks would be stimulated are almost never born out in the strong participation cities of our study.

In brief, democracy is safe for participation. If we reach out to all elements of the population, provide broader forums for participatory discussion and decisionmaking, and allow such forums to have a real impact on government and community, we can expect the commitment to democratic institutions to be substantially reinforced.

15. Participation builds trust and works against alienation. We can recreate government.

One of the greatest incentives for increasing participation in American government is the pervasive sense of alienation that has settled upon American politics. It is reflected in the Ross Perot phenomena in the 1992 national elections, in the tax revolts that have been recurring since the late 1970s, and in direct responses to public opinion polls. And it is part and parcel of increasing urban problems that some claim make our cities ungovernable. The relationship between strong participation and high levels of community confidence in local government is not simple. In general, increased participation does lead to increased governmental legitimacy and enhanced status of governmental institutions. But many factors are at work in promoting both positive and negative relationships between citizens and their government.

Cynicism toward government in general remains high among many individuals and shows little relationship to whether or not they participate in the political process. But when attitudes toward local government are measured against similar attitudes toward the national government, local institutions come out far ahead. More than 37% of all respondents, for example, felt that local government was more likely than the national government to "do what is right", compared to only 13% who were more trusting of national government. Similarly, nearly 31% believe local government more likely to work for the benefit of all the people, while only 8% felt they were more likely to work for the benefit of a few big interests. And the correspondence between citywide participation structure and trust, at every level of SES, is one of the strongest of any measure we examined. These relationships imply that whatever level of cynicism a person begins with, increased participation rates have a tendency to move that person toward greater confidence in the role of local government.

Strong participation is no panacea. Deep-rooted social and community problems cannot be overcome with a tip of the hat and a friendly smile exchanged between the governors and the governed. Government programs will always be the subject of intense scrutiny and frequent criticism from many community sectors. In a functioning democracy, such scrutiny is essential. But participation can lead to greater mutual understanding among citizens and between citizens and their leaders. It can lead to greater appreciation of the limitations of government, and of what it has the potential to accomplish. And, above all, it can encourage and nurture cooperative efforts to address community concerns, cooperation that is critical in a time of rapid social change and increasingly intense economic pressures.

16. Conflict exists, but participation often finds means for resolution. Finding common ground is the heart of strong democracy.

Another common fear about strong democratic processes is that they increase tensions and sharpen the lines of cleavage between different elements of the population. The result, it is argued, is often social disruption and a whole host of contradictory and unreasonable demands on government.

This fear is not confirmed. We found instead that the neighborhood participation system tends to defuse hostility rather than create it. Participants in the neighborhood associations, as well as nonparticipants who know about them, overwhelmingly believe that the citizen participation process in their city is nonconflictual. Between 75 and 93 percent of our population samples felt that the associations decreased rather than increased "bitterness and bad feelings" between people in the neighborhood. Neighborhood association meetings are seen by both occasional and active participants as comfortable gatherings where residents can go and discuss the problems of their community.

Yet there is no question that the neighborhood associations place additional political demands on city government. The resources given to the neighborhood associations guarantee that they will have the organizational capability of bringing demands forward. And the city government is expected to respond. Yet these demands and the city responses are seen in these cities as an integral part of what democratic government is about.

When strident conflict does arise, each of the core cities in our study has mechanisms in place to help resolve it. Portland has a neighborhood mediation center with that specific mission. In St. Paul, the role of the Capital Improvement Budget Committee is designed to bring neighborhoods together and work out competing demands for capital funds. In all of the cities, except St. Paul, the intermediate structures-Portland's district coalitions, Dayton's priority boards, and Birmingham's citizen advisory committee, for example-are specifically built as forums for a wide range of potentially conflicting demands to be at least partially reconciled with available resources.

No democracy is without conflict. A successful resolution of conflict which results in outcomes beneficial to the community as a whole is at the core of our democratic ideal. The strong participation systems we observed are remarkably successful in bringing the multiple sides to an issue together and reaching agreement. As these systems are extended to larger and more encompassing issues, we can expect their role in solution-finding to become even greater.

17. Participation can cause delay, but for the sake of consensus. The loss of efficiency is well worth the gain in community outcomes and credibility.

A final concern about strong participation from government officials is that it just makes everything take too long. Some may have tried an ad hoc effort to involve citizens in the past and were badly burned. They feel that participation needlessly slows down the policymaking process, makes government more inefficient, and risks holding government hostage to special interests who know how to manipulate the system to gain an advantage for their point of view.

Within the strong participation cities, however, these perceptions do not prevail. The predominant response in our interviews with political leaders and department heads was that delay was sometimes a consequence of participation, but that roadblocks were also removed by participation and that the resolution of conflict that participation allows provides more effective long-term solutions. Most respondents believed citizen participation was worth the price in the end because it builds consensus, because it gets people to buy into decisions when they participate in their formulation, and because it makes subsequent appeals by dissatisfied parties illegitimate after the neighborhood association has its say.

In addition, our population surveys found that those involved in the neighborhood associations were the most likely to buy in to the final agreement, even when it went against their initial opinions on the issue. Those who are most likely to believe they are capable of getting government to listen to them are also the least likely to continue to press their case after they have been defeated at the neighborhood level. The neighborhood associations are apparently successful in instilling a sense of legitimacy for their decisions, even among those only marginally active in their deliberations. Moreover, developers and others who interact with the system from the outside tend to support the process even if it requires changes in their original plans-because they can be confident that the decisions reached by neighborhood associations reflect concerned citizens in the area, and that those decisions will not be sidetracked later by surprise public opposition.

When the time required for effective citizen participation is built into the decisionmaking process, the improvements in final results seem to far outweigh the cost to administrative efficiency. Well-designed participation efforts tend to minimize undue delay and slow up a project only when major community concerns legitimately require that the project be rethought. And in the long run, the credibility gained by the regular submission of projects to the participation process allows important community efforts to marshall the support they deserve.

When Participation Works, People Grow

Consequently, we can expect the development of strong participation systems to be accompanied by more citizens becoming aware of their ability to make things happen in their communities. A dynamic may be created in which people feel more efficacious, and thus work with others to accomplish more, thereby increasing their own and others sense of efficacy, and so on in an ever-widening spiral of political reinforcement. This process has the potential to reverse the spiral of frustration and despair which too often reigns in America today.

19. People gain a sense of community. Participation strongly shapes the foundations of the civic culture.

In many ways, a strong sense of community is a central building block of a connected, productive, and stable polity. When people have a sense of community, they are more likely to respond positively to efforts to solve community problems, and will be willing to contribute their share in time, energy, and resources to meeting community needs. And it is precisely this lack of community identification that many observers cite as key to our burgeoning social dysfunctions.

The importance of this quality underscores our finding of an extremely strong relationship between participation and sense of community. In fact it is stronger than that between nearly any other pair of characteristics of the citizenry that we have examined in this study. The difference in our population samples between frequent participants and nonparticipants who express a "strong sense of community" is as much as 27% of the entire sample. The relationship is very strong at all income levels, but greatest of all for low income people. And, unusual for a relationship of this kind, the impact of participation upon sense of community is several times stronger than the impact of socioeconomic status itself. Finally, participation in the neighborhood associations is the most likely to be related to high levels of community, followed at some distance by participation in all other kinds of groups, including political and single-issue organizations.

The strength of the correlation between participation and sense of community does not, however, tell us which causes which. By looking at the development of both over a two year period we were able to reach some conclusions about causation. We found that regardless of their original strength of community identification, participants increased or maintained their sense of community substantially more often than nonparticipants. For example, 72% of the participants who started out with a strong sense of community maintained it, compared to only 54% of nonparticipants who started out with the same strong sense of community. Yet both sides in this "chicken or egg" controversy, are winners. There is evidence that some degree of mutual or reciprocal causation and support prevails. Participation leads to a greater sense of community which in turn leads to more participation.

We can say with a high degree of certainty, therefore, that building participatory democracy also means building an increased sense of community among the population at large. The process is, once again, a stabilizing rather than a destabilizing force. Increased participation efforts do bring in more people who initially have a lower sense of community than is typical for those who are politically involved. But these efforts also develop the participants' sense of community for as long as they remain involved. The impact is felt most directly on the way neighbors relate to neighbors, but it also has far-reaching implications for the polity as a whole. Increasing the sense of community across all strata of our population is an essential ingredient in increasing the well-being of our society.

20. People gain a sense of tolerance towards others' ideas. The participation experience itself stimulates changes in attitudes.

One of the most critical elements of the "participation is dangerous" scenario is that substantially broadened participation will mean empowerment of fundamentally intolerant people. The consequence, it is assumed, will be a more racist, more rigid society.

This logic flows from the observation that community leaders in our generally nonparticipatory democracy are measurably more tolerant toward those who express unpopular opinions than are average citizens, particularly those of low socioeconomic status. The theory is that only rejection of intolerant attitudes among the participating elites coupled with exclusion of the relatively bigoted masses enables the institutions of democracy to be maintained.

Our examination of this issue confirms that lower SES nonparticipants tend to be less supportive of traditional civil liberties than higher SES participants. But the presumed relationship between expanded participation and increased intolerance fails completely to emerge. On the contrary, every indication points to the fact that increasing levels of strong participation—involving more people in the policymaking process than would normally be involved—does not lead to participants with lower levels of tolerance. Instead, for nearly every case of expanded participation there is a corresponding result of expanding tolerance levels. The rejection of the elitist conclusion is based upon evidence involving individual level participation, evidence comparing overall tolerance in highly participatory cities with the national norm, and most strongly upon evidence comparing the tolerance of citizens in highly participatory communities with those in less participatory communities.

Moreover, tolerance tends to increase with participation throughout the population, the strongest effects occurring among low SES people and among those just beginning to participate. It is not just the elites who are more tolerant. Our analysis suggests that whether participation leads to more tolerance or whether more tolerant people tend to participate more, the impact extends to the entire community.

It is clear that strong participation structures serve both as a screening process and a learning process. The more intolerant of others' opinions a person is, the less attracted he or she is likely to be to the strong participation experience. After all, this setting is fundamentally a tolerant one: open to all to express their point of view, and loaded with incentives to avoid a narrow or closed-minded attitude. In addition, people are not the same at the beginning of the process as they are at the end. Initially many tend to be hesitant to join the give and take of debate in the neighborhood meetings. Many have a fear of disagreement. But by watching others disagree and remain in the same room-eventually reaching a consensus, or at least a group decision-and gradually being drawn into that process themselves, they become more comfortable with opposing opinions. And most importantly, they learn that it is possible to reach a decision that succeeds in accommodating many varying points of view.

The participatory experience has proven to be a tolerance-building experience. This is not to say that participatory groups never take intolerant positions. But in large part the participatory organization tends to be more tolerant than the community from which it is drawn. Developing new participatory structures is likely to bring far more tolerance into the political process than currently exists, and lead to stronger, not weaker, support for the rights of all citizens.

21. People learn through participation. The base for future participation successes is steadily being built.

In many areas of our study, it has become clear that strong participation systems offer a large number of opportunities for citizens to increase their understanding and expertise about the political process and about government itself. The range of information sources, decisionmaking committees, planning processes, and demands upon participants at all levels ensure that civic learning is central to participation. This is true in policy areas, in government infrastructure, in conflict resolution, in neighborhood planning, and in every area the participation process touches.

In attempting to measure one aspect of this learning experience, we examined changes in citizen's views about whom to contact to solve a particular community problem. We found that the relationship between this knowledge and the individual's involvement in face-to-face participation is fairly strong and in the expected direction. Perhaps most striking is the pattern for people who initially had no knowledge: as their community participation increases, their knowledge of access points increases rather substantially. In addition, the correlations between knowledge and level of community participation are consistently larger in the more structured than in the less structured participation cities. Clearly, community participation pays its greatest dividends where a citywide participation structure exists.

As strong participation structures grow, the number of opportunities for citizen learning experiences expands exponentially. More and more citizens are put in positions of leadership and decisionmaking where learning about a specific governmental process or community problem is expected and encouraged. The process is not instantaneous. Citizens do not become policy experts overnight. But they do quickly move to a position where they can talk to the experts, understand the options that are presented, and help to translate them back to the population at large. Knowledge is power, and strong participation systems put some of that power in citizen hands.

22. People participate through a sense of selflessness, as well as selfishness. A sense of common interest is alive and well.

A series of questions in our population surveys asked about the reasons that people did or did not participate in the their own neighborhood association. These options ranged from the most selfish-providing material benefits for themselves or their families-to the most altruistic-gaining a sense of contribution and helpfulness toward one's neighbors. These questions helped us to evaluate whether people who actively take part in community participation activities are likely to be more selfish or more community-oriented than people who are less active.

The relationship between participation and altruism is neither strong nor straightforward. More frequent community participation produces slightly more community interest orientation. But most people fall in the middle between altruism and self-interest. This result is independent of the person's socioeconomic status. And for both frequent activists and occasional participants, altruistic incentives are a far stronger inducement to be involved in community politics than is a concern for one's personal goals issues, or material benefits.

These results are particularly important in the context of neighborhood-based participation. One of the concerns that many observers have is that such organizations tend to adopt a rather parochial attitude, and focus on what is good for themselves and their neighbors rather than for the community as a whole. The large measure of more altruistic motivations, combined with the observed behavior of neighborhood-orientation leavened with a strong dose of "we're all in this together" eases the fears that neighborhood associations are just another hotbed for special interests.

The bottom line is that the community-building forces behind strong participation systems emphasize the existence of a common interest among a sea of individual special interests. In a society which places such a high degree of emphasis upon individualism, and at a time when many traditional mediating institutions have broken down, the revival of neighborhood-based institutions within the participation system can represent one of the few opportunities for development of the common interest. The more that citizens are involved in the participation system and its face-to-face discussions with their neighbors, the more likely they are to this keep this common interest alive in a corner of their mind.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Our nation's cities have developed models of strong democracy that work. Our most important task now is to cultivate and enlarge them to help shape responses to the most pressing concerns across our country.

About the Lincoln Filene Center

The Center's goals are to:

• encourage and promote active citizenship and community leadership;
• increase knowledge about citizen action and community building;
• enhance public service education and research at Tufts University; and
• inform public decision-making.

About the Authors

Back to Community Index