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Chapter 7 Further Explorations Despite the expansion of individual rights and entitlements in recent decades, Americans find to their frustration that their control over the forces that govern their lives is receding rather than increasing . . . there is a widespread sense that we are caught in the grip of impersonal structures of power that defy our understanding and control. This condition raises with renewed force the plausibility of republican concerns. The republican tradition taught that to be free is to share in governing a political community that controls its own fate. Self-government in this sense requires political communities that control their destinies, and citizens who identify sufficiently with those communities to think and act with a view to the common good. . . . Whether self-government in this sense is possible under modern conditions is at best an open question. —Michael Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent The possibility of self-government is the question we have struggled with throughout this book. Our focus has been on a type of organization that embodies in its nature the face-to-face deliberations that seem to have vanished in so many other spheres of American activity, yet are often seen as essential for effective self-government. Do such organizations have a role in the future of democracy? We have argued that if they do, three elements are critical to this role: the strength and openness of the participation organizations themselves, their continuing link to the community, and their effective link to government policy making. These elements can be measured and tested in the context of urban governments that have committed themselves to broad-based citizen participation in their governance, and with the neighborhoods through which they have largely fulfilled this commitment. We have discovered that strong neighborhoods succeed where many other 109 political structures fail: in their ability to generate significant levels of citizen participation. As measured through the basic characteristics of the 273 neighborhoods in our study, neighborhood strength is highly correlated with individual participation measures, reaching 37 percent in the strongest neighborhoods studied. Many of these participants might simply have attended one neighborhood event during the year, but many others were active in meetings, committees , and events on a monthly basis or even more often. This participation runs across the board in neighborhoods ranking both high and low in socioeconomic status, even while participation remains highly correlated with individual socioeconomic status. The difference in participation from what one would normally expect based on individual socioeconomic status is significantly correlated with this measure of neighborhood organizational strength. These organizations fulfill many of the requirements of a core participation group quite well, but fall short on other requirements. They do a good job of representing all segments of the community, rich and poor, black and white, and of many and varied interests, at the expense of representing any one segment optimally. While they are generally open to new participants, they are particularly vulnerable to ossification over time and need substantial incentives from both internal and external sources to regularly rejuvenate themselves. The organizations are especially good at fostering both an egalitarian and a deliberative atmosphere. They are able to tackle any and all issues that arise and are better at being open to a wide range of issues and points of view than most other citizen groups. They clearly allow citizens to “insert an issue onto the political agenda” more readily than does the electoral or representative process. In these four highly participatory cities, the neighborhoods all have an ongoing relationship with a fairly strong support network that allows the organization to prosper through good times and bad, with basic funding for staff support , offices, newsletters, and the like. At a citywide level, this can work where there is a strong commitment to neighborhood associations across the city and across the departments of government. To work on a higher level, the same type of commitments would be needed from governors and presidents, congresspeople , and heads of the relevant state and federal departments. Without such commitments, one of the greatest limitations of these organizations is the restricted geographic scope of their issues. Other types of organizations often are able to muster greater enthusiasm and political clout on other concerns—such as development of environmental regulations, production of affordable housing, or the politics of health care—when the issues extend to the whole city, and certainly when advanced to the state or the nation. Despite 110 Neighborhood to Nation • [3.144...

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