Mar 25 '14
This article describe the work of the Palestinian NGO Grassroots Jerusalem, which aims at the self-empowerment of Jerusalemite communities by means of participatory democracy.
The Participatory Politics of Grassroots Jerusalem
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Monthly Archives: March 2014
Freedom of the Mind
In The Public and Its Problems, philosopher John Dewey describes:
The notion that men may be free in their thought even when they are not in expression and dissemination has been sedulously propagated. It had its origin in the idea of a mind complete in itself, apart from action and from objects. Such a consciousness presents in fact the spectacle of a mind deprived of its normal functioning, because it is baffled by the actualities in connection with which alone it is truly mind, and is driven back into secluded and impotent revery.
This is, perhaps, more simply put by Langston Hughes: freedom ain’t freedom when a man ain’t free.
That may sound like mere tautology, but the point is more subtle. In Dewey’s thinking, there is no difference between perception and reality. There is no shadow – as T.S. Elliot would say - between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act.
To envision a “mind complete in itself, apart from action and from objects” is to distort reality. It is a hypothetical so far from reality as to be hardly worth entertaining.
This is not how I am used to thinking.
Can men be free in their thought even when they are not in expression?
I think of John Steinbeck’s The Moon is Down – an allegory for the Nazi occupation of Norway. Steinbeck describes how the townspeople – discovering themselves conquered – fight back strongly but subtly. It’s as if a call went through the town: resist. Resist today. Resist tomorrow. Resist. Resist. Resist.
There is power in that final freedom of thought. They are surrounded and outgunned, but their thoughts keep them free. And they resist.
Of course, this may make Dewey’s point for him – the townspeople don’t only resist in thought. They are beaten back that far – their actions and their words are taken from them. But once they decide to resist, once they realize the freedoms they’ve surrendered, they use their remaining freedom – freedom of thought – as a rallying point to fight back, to act.
The power of a mind free in thought even when not in expression speaks to me. The power of a people who will not be broken, who have lost everything but will give up nothing, who will proudly look their captors in the eye and dare them to strike, people who break the rules by following the rules.
But then, again, The Moon is Down is fiction.
John Gaventa considers a dangerous and common “third dimension” of power. “A sense of powerlessness may manifest itself as extensive fatalism, self-depreciation, or undue apathy about one’s situation,” he writes. “The sense of powerlessness may also lead to a greater susceptibility to the internalization of the values, beliefs, or rules of the game of the powerful as a further adaptive response.”
Such a consciousness presents in fact the spectacle of a mind deprived of its normal functioning.
Freedom ain’t freedom when a man ain’t free.
Perhaps Dewey is right. Perhaps we tell ourselves romanticized stories of resistance, of freedom of the mind, so that we can rest easy at night. Assured that we are free, that we still hold power.
Perhaps we are wrong to consider a mind apart from action and from objects. We are our minds, and our minds are us. Our actions shape our thoughts and our thoughts shape our actions. There is no differentiation. No shadow between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response.
Perhaps we’ve been fooling ourselves all along, the spectacle of a mind deprived.
Innovation Readiness Over Capacity Building
We wanted to share a great piece we found on the tension between merely improving capacity and being ready to innovate – even when it means making radical changes – at NCDD organizational member Rich Harwood’s blog. We are developing a partnership with the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation that we hope will contribute to building our own innovation readiness here at NCDD, so stay tuned for more details. You can read Rich’s piece below or find the original post here.
One of the key obstacles in bringing about change in communities is that many organizations, leaders and networks (among other factors) need to beef up their capacities to help create change. Oftentimes the response to this challenge is to do “capacity building” – when it’s “innovation readiness” that’s needed most.
I make this distinction thinking about the scores of local United Ways, public libraries, public radio and television stations I’ve worked with and their own challenges in bringing about change. Or the countless number of conversations I’ve had with foundation presidents and program officers about their frustrations that more community change is not being produced as a result of their funding. And it’s the numerous meetings I’ve had with leaders of faith-based institutions and organizations that worry about their very relevance.
It’s not that capacity building isn’t necessary. My own organization has spent the last year strengthening its internal operations, board of directors and financial systems. Without this strength, it’s hard to move forward, and it’s impossible to sustain good efforts. Moreover, we all recognize that it is critical for individual leaders to develop new skill sets to run meetings better, improve planning, and learn to engage in an increasingly diverse world.
The problem is that too often “capacity building” helps us to do what we already do, only better. Our path forward remains largely the same. We can all name an organization or two that have undertaken new strategic plans under the banner of “change,” only to end up incrementally modifying their programs, or even creating new ones, but without having shifted their approach to tackling the challenges and underlying conditions in their community.
And yet challenges in our communities call for us to think differently about the best paths forward, and to act differently. In Spokane, Wash., for example, leaders of the local United Way started to ask themselves the question, “What would having a real impact in the community look like for us?” Ultimately, it meant upending their long-held model of raising dollars and distributing them to local agencies and instead focusing more on building collaborative efforts on education concerns.
This required the United Way’s leaders to organize their work differently, and to organize themselves differently. It meant changing their very notion of what constitutes a partnership – and changing their partners. It meant dislodging themselves from basic assumptions about what was actually needed in the community and their potential role. And it required them to imagine fundamentally different strategies for creating genuine progress.
Closer to home, my own Temple Micah, where I attend synagogue, came to the realization that our religious school could do better in producing the kinds of Jewish-spirited children we all want. Many incredibly smart and dedicated people there tried to “improve” the existing school, undertaking one “reform” after another, only to conclude that what we needed was a fundamentally different approach to education – one that integrates the congregation’s different generations, emphasizes hands-on learning, and helps each child develop a personal Jewish identity. That’s happening now.
My own experience is that “innovation readiness” takes a certain mindset and set of practices. I’ve just started to write my next book on this topic. But I’m curious about what you think and about your own experiences. What does “innovation readiness” mean to you?
You can share your answer to Rich’s question and other thoughts in our comment section below, or you can join the conversation already happening in the comments on the original post, which can be found at www.theharwoodinstitute.org/2014/01/capacity-building-vs-innovation-readiness.
branding a nation
An excellent paper by Temple University’s Diane Garbow made me think about efforts to “brand” countries. Her topic was the “Colombia es pasión” campaign. Its logo looks very corporate, and it even comes with slogans like “Colombia: the only risk is wanting to stay.”
The fact that Colombia now has a logo as well as a tricolor flag doesn’t mean that it has turned into a corporation. I think we could assess the use of a brand in two different ways.
First, the reputation of any nation is a common pool resource shared by all the people who are associated with that country, whether as legal citizens or not. Consistent with the definition of a common pool resource, a nation’s brand is rivalrous but non-excludable. That is, individuals can easily reduce the value of the brand to serve their own interests (the narcotraficantes are busy hurting Colombia’s reputation), yet individuals cannot easily be excluded from the benefits of the brand. For instance, if “Colombia es pasión” makes us feel better about the nation, then every Colombian and Colombian emigrant will profit slightly. In this sense, a national brand differs from a corporate brand, which benefits individuals in direct proportion to their financial ownership of the firm. “Colombia es pasión” is more like the Parthenon or the Union Jack than (say) Coca-Cola’s brand, “Live Positively.” A nation’s image is the shared property of its people. That is one reason that people have contributed to enhancing their nations’ reputations since ancient times.
Nor is that goal especially capitalist or “neoliberal.” Here is Che Gevara’s iconic image serving as a kind of logo on the facade of Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior, which houses the police and security forces.
Of course, the Cuban people don’t get to decide what logo is erected on the Plaza de la Revolución, nor did the Colombian authorities put their new logo to a vote. An advertising campaign is an implicit assertion of facts: Colombia is safe, exotic, aesthetic–a source of coffee and flowers for the US market and a good place to visit. Its official brand implicitly rejects certain other claims about Colombia: for instance, that a low-intensity civil war has been going on there continuously since 1964, funded in part with $3 billion of US military aid. (Wanting to stay in Colombia is not the only risk of visiting.)
I think that enhancing common pool resources is a perfectly appropriate objective. But it’s also important to debate how things are actually going in a community or a nation. The “Colombia es pasión“ campaign could contribute to the debate, and valid points can be made in defense of the country’s policies. (For example, its Human Development Index has been rising steadily.) But insofar as an advertising campaign ignores contrary evidence and employs slick designs and sloganeering to persuade, it undermines deliberation.
The deeper point is that both making common goods and debating matters of fact and value are legitimate political acts, but they often come into conflict. The same conflict arises, for example, in “asset based community development” efforts, which contribute to the common good but also transmit a somewhat one-sided view of the community’s well-being. People should be able to assess and debate any claims made on their behalf. Yet developing one basically positive image of a community is a valuable objective. The two do not sit easily together.
The post branding a nation appeared first on Peter Levine.
Keralas Volkskampagne für dezentralisiertes Planen
Mar 25 '14
Anmerkung: Eine weitere Version dieser Fallstudie ist unten als Anhang mit dem Präfix ‚VD‘ zu finden. Diese Alternativversion wurde ursprünglich als Mitbewerber für den Reinhard Mohn Preis 2011 bei Vitalizing Democracy eingereicht. „Kerala ist einer von Indiens 28 Bundesstaaten und liegt an der südwestlichen Spitze des Landes.“ (Justino 3; Übersetzung:...
Judging Morals
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve recently been exploring moral network maps. That is, using a network framework to visualize the ideas, themes and morals that drive a person.
But once you’ve created a network map of your morals…what should you do with it? Should you file it away with last year’s taxes? Perhaps put it on a shelf next to the award you received for acting like an adult? Or maybe you should carry it around with you for consultation at moment’s notice.
Or maybe not.
It may sound absurd when I put it like that, but this cuts to the idea that morals are not – and shouldn’t be – simple rules we set in stone then set aside, dusting them off for occasional validation. This is what makes the network framework such a powerful tool. A moral network is as complex, dynamic, and fluid as the situations we encounter.
I believe that we each have a personal responsibility to develop the best moral networks we can – to be the best person we can be. But how do we know whether our complex, dynamic, and fluid morals are appropriate for our complex, dynamic, and fluid world? How do we know if we are “good”?
The simple answer is that we cannot know, but since that is a somewhat dissatisfying conclusion, I’ll carry the question a little further.
My colleague Peter Levine argues the we should evaluate our moral networks along three dimensions: “1) truth, or at least the avoidance of error; 2) community or justice; and 3) happiness or inner peace.”
I find that somewhat dissatisfying as well. First, I could argue against each item on the list: 1) truth is a construct; 2) communal life is not required for morality and 3) well, let’s just say there are far greater virtues than happiness. Second, I could add to the list – perhaps it’s not only a respect for other people that’s required, but a respect for all other life.
But aside from quibbling over the specifics, more deeply I find this model…too static.
Perhaps it’s my background in physics, but I can’t stop thinking in terms of a universe built upon uncertainty, where observation affects measurement, where the “law” of opposites attract is overridden by a force much stronger.
If our moral networks have complex, dynamic, and fluid reactions to the complex, dynamic, and fluid situations we encounter…then it seems like we need complex, dynamic, and fluid measures to evaluate them by.
What do I mean by these terms?
1) Complex. In network analysis terms, you could look at the density of a map – are there many connections between nodes or few? You could also look at how nodes are connected – is there a path from any node to any other node, or do some ideas form their own, isolated network?
I’d not go so far as to claim there’s an ideal complexity, and I’m not sure complexity should be used to claim that one type of map – eg, all nodes are connected – is better than another. But it does seem like there could be such a thing as too simple a map. If you only had one node, for example, that would be an awful narrow a lens to process everything through.
A sufficiently complex map should have conflict and tension. Life has conflict and tension.
2) Dynamic. Your network should be capable of change. Unless you are in a coma or otherwise dead, your network should respond dynamically to situations.
And this is no trivial matter. It’s easy – perhaps even good – to fall into patterns and set routines. But if habit is the state our inertia naturally draws us into, a dynamic engine must counter that stagnation. It’s not uncommon to complain of people who’ve become too set in their ways. Consistency and sustainability are perfectly admirable traits, but staying the course can also be the road to damnation.
3) Fluid. In physics terms, a fluid is a substance that continually deforms (flows) under applied stress. Perhaps we shouldn’t want our morals to “deform” so greatly, stressed though we may be. But the key thing with a fluid is that…its form is not its substance. A 600-pound octopus can fit through a hole the size of a quarter, and yet it remains, continually, an octopus.
Similarly, our network should be able to survive in tough environs. It should find the cracks and push its way through. It should shift and bend, perhaps, but remain consistent in the way only a fluid can – true to itself until the end.
There is, perhaps, a danger in all this. If you open wide the doors of “good,” then any one could walk through. The traits I’ve described above are arguably a description for anyone who is alive - perhaps not sufficient for an evaluation of morality. Calling morality situational, embracing conflict and change, could be to deny the existence of evil – a topic for another time.
But, I’ll leave with this thought – much comes down to who is doing the judging. I’m not prepared to judge others, and I don’t generally appreciate it when others judge me. I don’t know what is “good” or what is “right,” and I certainly am in no position to apply such criteria to others.
The best I can hope for is to be my own worst critic. To question hard every decision, action, and impulse. To strive to be better tomorrow than I was today.
Was that right or was that wrong? We don’t always have the answer, but, I’d argue, the question should haunt us.
Detroit and the temptation of ruin
In Detroit, they call it “Ruin Porn”: images of a 35-acre abandoned automotive plant, the 18-story abandoned railway station (modeled, in turn, on ancient Roman baths), and other vast and decayed structures.
I can certainly understand why citizens of Detroit would object to the aestheticization of poverty and abandonment–to their city’s being used to produce marketable images of tragic grandeur. But the story of Detroit is tragic, in the Aristotelian sense. Recall the plot: the city rises from a few thousand residents to 1.8 million when hubristic men like Henry Ford invent forms of mass production that transform work itself. Black people migrate there from the South, face violent hostility, but manage to obtain political and cultural power. The city builds cars, weapons, and pop music that conquer the world. It becomes a model of modernity, vividly depicted by Diego Rivera on the walls of its world-class museum. And then Detroit collapses to 700,000 people who live amid the empty shells of its industrial past, while the nation looks away.
There is nothing new about treating a tragic fall as sublime. “Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Or: “It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”
In fact, because the Detroit Institute of Arts is an encyclopedic collection, one can find on its walls many images of ruin. For example, Jacob Isaaksz van Ruisdael paints the Jewish cemetery of 17th-century Amsterdam falling to pieces in a wild storm, as a momento mori. I don’t know why he picks Jewish graves, but perhaps because their dead are dead for good (in his view), not subject to resurrection.
van Ruisdeal, “The Jewish Cemetery” (ca. 1654)
The American Frederic Church imagines the coast of Syria as a kind of museum or theme park of ruins: Roman, Gothic, and Islamic piled almost on top of each other.
Frederic Edwin Church. “Syria by the Sea” (1873)
Anselm Kiefer paints a vast three dimensional canvass, parts of it literally burnt by the artist. He means to represent a particular brick factory in India (one that manufactures its own walls and sells the same walls, brick-by-brick, to consumers) and also the ovens of Auschwitz–which was another kind of Jewish cemetery.
Anselm Kiefer, “Das Gewiert” (1997)
The DIA even includes a whole Gothic side chapel moved to Detroit from a chateau in Lorraine–reconstructed there from a real Old World ruin. When you stand inside it, with its streaked and burnished stone and stained glass all around you, you are in a late-medieval building, inside a much larger structure patterned on the ruins of ancient Rome, near the center of a modern American city that is partly falling into ruin.
The DIA itself is hardly ruinous. On a Friday night, it is packed with visitors of all ages and backgrounds who stroll through its magnificent galleries, listen to live jazz, or play chess. But the collection, whose market value might reach $1 billion, will likely be sold to make a small dent in the bankrupt city’s pension obligations. In the best case, the purchasers will be a consortium of foundations whose wealth derived from Detroit and which have pledged to give the art back once they buy it. It’s a strange twist that some of the objects they may buy and return to the city from which their endowments came will be “ruin porn” of other times and places.
The post Detroit and the temptation of ruin appeared first on Peter Levine.
ICMA’s State of the Profession Survey Results
The International City/County Management Association (ICMA) recently released the results of its 2012 State of the Profession survey, and we think that the results make good food for thought. From feelings about the purposes of public engagement to the state of civic discourse, the survey provides insights on where we are and where we might go from here. You can read the ICMA write up on the report below or find the original at www.icma.org/en/press/pm_magazine/article/104159.
The Extent of Public Participation
by Robert Vogel, Evelina Moulder, and Mike Huggins
Local governments use a variety of strategies and techniques to encourage public involvement in local planning and decision making. The International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) describes public involvement as occurring at five levels ranging from informing all the way to empowering.
In this article, we summarize the responses to ICMA’s 2012 State of the Profession Survey, which asked respondents to rate the importance of achieving the five levels of involvement in their communities. The levels are illustrated in a case study of an online public participation project in Rancho Cordova, California. We conclude with a list of questions to help local government managers improve their public participation strategy.
Goals of Public Participation
Previous ICMA surveys examined how local governments share information with residents. The 2012 survey delved more deeply into the nature and purposes of local government public participation efforts.
IAP2 has designed a widely-accepted Spectrum of Public Participation that identifies a range of interactions that a local government can have with its community. Distinguished by increasing levels of direct public involvement and intended outcomes, the IAP2 Spectrum includes the following five types of goals that a government can strive for in its public participation efforts: inform, consult, involve, collaborate, and empower. A number of the 2012 survey questions addressed the perceived importance of these types of public interactions within the local government profession.
Inform: Eighty-five percent of the responding local governments report that it is “important” or “highly important” to provide the public with objective information to assist them in understanding problems/solutions/alternatives.
Consult: Seventy-five percent indicate that it is “important” or “highly important” to work directly with the public to ensure that their concerns and aspirations are consistently understood and considered.
Involve: Some 70 percent report that it is “important” or “highly important” to obtain feedback from the public on analyses of problems, solutions, and alternatives.
Collaborate: The results show that 57 percent of respondents reported that it is “important” or “highly important” to partner with the public in development of alternatives, identification of the preferred solution, and decision making.
Empower: Nineteen percent of respondents indicate that it is “important” or “highly important” to place decision making in the hands of the public.
Being clear about the underlying purpose of the engagement effort as well as the promise it intends to make to the public is essential to the success of any public participation effort. Without objective information and a clearly understood purpose, the public cannot provide meaningful feedback nor can they partner with the local government in developing alternatives, identifying solutions, and making decisions. Unless concerns and aspirations are understood, problems cannot be successfully addressed.
Rancho Cordova: A Case Study
When residents of Rancho Cordova, California (population 67,000), asked their city council to loosen restrictions on raising chickens, the council wanted to first hear from a broad spectrum of residents. Before finalizing their decision, councilmembers wanted to encourage participants to first learn about the issue, then engage in a nuanced discussion without polarizing the community for or against the proposal.
Under the leadership of City Manager Ted Gaebler, the city decided to use the Open Town Hall online public engagement service to broaden the discussion beyond the few who typically attend in-person meetings. To encourage the public to understand the issues around this proposed new ordinance, the online service presented objective background information before inviting users to participate in the online discussion.
To ensure that the public’s concerns and aspirations were well understood and considered, the city created a map of “Engaged Rancho Cordova Districts,” enabling decisionmakers and others to see what residents from each district were saying. Anyone could click on the “word cloud” in the online tool to see statements containing frequently occurring words (e.g., enforcement) and on demographic tallies to see trends in perspectives by age and gender.
Compared with Rancho Cordova’s traditional face-to-face meetings, participation in the online forum was both large and civil. More than 560 residents visited the forum, 66 posted or supported a statement, and 147 subscribed to updates enabling them to remain involved after the forum closed. Statements were monitored for compliance with the city’s guidelines for civility and all but one were found in compliance.
Much like a public hearing, each participant was allowed to make only one statement. Monitoring statements and allowing only one per resident resulted in a collaborative online forum providing clear feedback on the proposed ordinance as well as potential improvements to that ordinance.
After the period for public discussion had concluded, the council directed staff to prepare a draft ordinance that reflected the feedback and addressed the concerns expressed both on the forum and in other public venues. This outcome was also posted on the forum and e-mailed to forum subscribers to strengthen the partnership between the city administration and the public in the decision-making process.
In line with the preference of most of the respondents to the ICMA survey, Rancho Cordova chose not to place decision making directly in the hands of the public. The online forum was designed specifically to preclude the public perception of a public vote or a referendum.
The city never mentioned the “v word” (vote), and it chose to collect open-ended statements from residents rather than have them respond to a poll or survey that asked for a yes/no position on the proposed new ordinance. The forum can be found at www.peakdemocracy.com/1379.
Civic Discourse and Extent of Public Participation
Citing the complexity of issues and the breadth and depth of knowledge needed for sound policies, local government officials often express reluctance for expanding the public’s direct role in decision making. Over the past several years, the often disconcerting tenor of civic discourse has also contributed to concerns about greater public participation.
A perception of the public as increasingly “nasty, brutish, short” and polarized inevitably raises questions for local officials about the efficacy of their collaboration with that public.
Civic discourse. Close to 40 percent of ICMA survey respondents described the civic discourse in their community as “very polarized and strident, often rude” or “somewhat polarized and strident, occasionally rude.” Respondents in the New England division show the highest percentage (45 percent) reporting civic discourse in their community as “very polarized and strident, often rude” or “somewhat polarized and strident, occasionally rude,” as did 44 percent of respondents in those communities with the town meeting form of government. The 2013 Weber Shandwick and Powell Tate survey Civility in America, which was conducted nationally online, found 71 percent of respondents believed the lack of civility in the United States was worse than several years ago, and 82 percent believed the general lack of civility in politics is harming the country.
Slightly more than 50 percent of respondents with council/administrator/manager and council elected executive also described civic discourse as “very polarized and strident, often rude” or “somewhat polarized and strident, occasionally rude.” Of particular interest is that out of the 777 survey respondents overall who reported that civic discourse is “very polarized and strident, often rude” or “somewhat polarized and strident, occasionally rude,” 399 also indicated that partnering with the public in development of alternatives, identification of preferred solutions, and decision making is “important” or highly important.”
If we look at the same group of respondents, we also see that 127 of them reported that it is “important” or “highly important” to put decision making in the hands of the public. Not surprisingly, when these 127 are examined by form of government, the town meeting and representative town meeting governments represent, respectively, 19 percent and 20 percent of the total respondents.
Level of resident participation. These are by far the highest percentages of respondents by form of government that rated putting decision making in the hands of the public as “important” or “highly important” and rated civic discourse as “very polarized and strident, often rude” or “somewhat polarized and strident, occasionally rude.”
When asked about the level of resident participation, only 12 percent of respondents indicated that there is a high level of participation in their local government’s engagement efforts. A majority of local governments in communities under 10,000 population show low participation levels. Pacific Coast respondents show the highest percentage – 19 percent – reporting a high level of participation.
Outcome
Local governments are encouraging the public to participate in the identification of problems and their solutions, to share their concerns and aspirations, and to provide feedback and develop alternatives as part of the decision-making process. The outcome is optimized when local managers first ask themselves these six questions:
- What is the readiness and capacity of my organization for public engagement?
- Why am I involving the residents?
- What do I want to achieve?
- What do I want to know?
- What is the role of the public?
- How is that role communicated to the public in face-to-face and online interactions?
Answers to these questions enable local governments to constructively engage the public in both face-to-face meetings and online public participation methods. Through careful design and monitoring of online forums, localities can significantly improve the effectiveness of public participation by expanding the number of people participating, restoring the civility of their participation, and ensuring clarity about the role of the public in final decision making.
University of Bremen Graduate Students Use Teamwork to Contribute Translations and New Content to Participedia
Mar 23 '14
Graduate students from Canada, Germany, Mexico, Russia, Singapore, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States use teamwork to learn about democratic innovations and contribute content to Participedia.
Who Participates in Africa? Dispelling the Myth
picture by Britanny Danisch on flickr.
Whenever discussing participation in Africa (as well as in other developing contexts) the issue of “who participates” often emerges. A constant in these conversations is an assumption that participation in the continent is strongly driven by material and immaterial resources (e.g. money, time). In other words, there seems to be a widespread belief, particularly among development practitioners, that the most privileged sectors of society are disproportionately more likely to participate than the least well-off.
In part, such an assumption is empirically grounded. Since the early 70s, studies have shown inequality in political participation, with the most advantaged groups being disproportionately more likely to participate. Considering that policy preferences between groups differ, unequal participation leads to the troubling possibility that public policy is skewed towards favoring the better off, thus further deepening societal differences and access to public goods and services.
However, often ignored is the fact that most of these studies refer to participation in traditional western democracies, notably the United States and European countries. But do these results hold true when it comes to participation in Africa? This is the question that Ann-Sofie Isaksson (University of Gothenburg) tackles in a paper published in Electoral Studies “Political participation in Africa: The role of individual resources”.
By looking at an Afrobarometer dataset of 27,000 respondents across 20 African countries, Isaksson’s findings challenge the standard thinking on the relationship between resources and participation:
(…) it seems the resource perspective does a poor job at explaining African political participation. If a resource is relevant for meeting the costs of participating, more of that resource should mean more participation. If anything, however, the estimations suggest that having little time (i.e. working full-time) and little money (i.e. being poorer) is associated with more participation.
Isaksson’s analysis is not confined to participation in elections, also examining non-electoral participation, i.e. attending community meetings. With regard to the latter only, there are modest effects associated with exposure to information (e.g. radio, TV, newspapers) and education. Yet, as the author notes, “the result that community attendance is higher among the poor remains”.
To conclude, as underlined by Isaksson in her paper, she is not alone in terms of findings, with other studies looking at Asia and Latin America pointing in a similar direction, slowly dispelling the myth of the role of resources for participation in developing countries. Development practitioners should start to take note of these encouraging facts.
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P.s.: An earlier ungated version of the paper can be found here [PDF].
