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5. Aggressive Outreach
- Tufts University Press
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Chapter 5 Aggressive Outreach Democracy is of little value if kept secret. Many organizations can have a highly democratic core and egalitarian, deliberative internal processes, but if they fail in relating to the rest of the community, they fail as a participatory democracy . If the typical community member has no opportunity to be actively involved, if he/she is unaware of that opportunity, or if he/she is not even aware that the so-called participatory organization exists, how can the organization in any sense represent that individual? Of Dahl’s conditions for democracy considered in Chapter 2, the first three hinge on this point. That is: (1) there is no way in which individuals can insert an alternative on the decision-making agenda if they do not know that an agenda is being formed or if they are excluded from the formation process; (2) individuals certainly do not possess identical information about the alternatives if they are not even aware the alternatives exist or have information about how to find them; (3) individuals cannot participate in the decision-making process if a realistic opportunity to participate is not provided for them. The problem is twofold. First, providing a realistic opportunity for all members of a community to participate takes substantial resources. These are resources that community leaders may not have, or may not be willing to expend for this purpose (especially since an effective outreach effort may be seen as diminishing their own personal influence). This is often compounded by the lack of realization of how much effort is really needed to accomplish the task. Second , citizens have a lot of other things on their minds. For most people, most of the time, politics and government is a minor blip on the radar screen, drowned out by personal, family, and economic pressures and concerns. The responsibility of voting every few years is considered to be some sort of civic duty by many; the responsibility of participating beyond voting is rarely so considered. 73 Political parties know what outreach is all about—when the election campaign comes around. But they almost never see their role as stimulating participation between elections. Outreach efforts such as door-to-door canvassing, massive phone-call campaigns, saturation mailings, literature drops, or media ads are undertaken by parties between elections at a tiny fraction of the scale they attain during the last few months of an election campaign. This is true even when the issues most central to the party platform are on the verge of being decided by a legislature or agency proceeding. Parties simply are not in the business of non-electoral participation. Most advocacy groups, on the other hand, are at the peak of their outreach performance between elections. Some, such as those that focus on lobbying, engage in most of the same tactics as electoral campaigns, but generally with far fewer resources. Others, such as those that tackle specific community issues involving, for example, a nearby hazardous waste site or a recent rash of muggings , may actually far surpass the intensity of election campaigns, especially in terms of door-to-door canvassing and other forms of personal contact. But such efforts are almost always contained in a very small geographic area— often a matter of a few square blocks. All of the outreach efforts we have considered so far, however, differ in one fundamental respect from those required of a participation organization: they seek to recruit people into an effort to support a predefined position or candidate , while the participation organization must engage people in an openended effort to work on problems that may not have an obvious or immediate solution. The issue and candidate campaigns may have an easy appeal, as when an imminent threat has already alarmed the neighborhood, or a much more dif- ficult task, as when a candidate has accumulated strong negatives in the region. Either way, they can draw stark contrasts, raise as many red flags as possible about the “other side,” and promise nirvana. The participation organization, on the other hand, is primarily selling a process, a community venture. Since it is attempting to bring all sides in the community together on an issue, it cannot generally afford to single out one side of a conflict as the enemy. This can, but need not, lead to a very low-key, unexciting campaign where the issues at stake never become clear. Since at least the days of Saul Alinsky’s Back of...