Opportunity for Leadership: Full and Informed Participation (review)

The subtitle of this short book, if it were punctuated with a question mark, shows Mark Winston’s underlying research question. In six chapters treating deficits in information access and use, Winston, a faculty member of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, addresses his concern that a foundational democratic principle of an “an informed citizenry, capable of informed participation” has yet to be realized in the United States to the extent that it should. (p. x)

The brief case presented here for improving citizens’ capacity to employ information and engage in our political processes is rapidly covered. An assortment of topics are offered, backed up by references to more thorough treatments of each: Brown v. Board of Education, linking equal access to education with equal access to full participation in citizenship; controversy and control linked to suppression of information; the response (or non-response) of decision-makers to information; contemporary ethical deficits in the public, private, and non-profit sectors; the need for better educational preparation for decision-making; and the many new “literacies” (political-, information-, media- literacy) advocated today to improve the quality of citizen participation.

In the first chapter, Winston describes the Brown v. Board of Education decision to end legal segregation in schools, which he selected for its significance as a forerunner of subsequent non-discrimination legislation such as the Voting Rights Act. Its correction to the “separate but equal” argument for segregated access to education acknowledged the purposeful disfranchisement of the black population as a means of maintaining political and economic dominance by the white elite. Having established that access to education is a foundation for citizens’ capacity to employ information effectively in decisionmaking, Winston switches in Chapter 2 to another topic of access—proposed restrictions to information deemed inappropriate or offensive by some segments of the public. His primary examples are comments or presentations broadcast in mass media that provoked controversy and textbook battles based on religious or social beliefs. Alluding to the competitive advantages that well-schooled and informed leaders have demonstrated in society, the arguments against suppressing controversial information that expose competing values requiring public deliberation are summarized in this second chapter.

Concluding that “access to information as a societal principle remains as controversial as ever” the book moves in Chapter 3 to decision-making as reflected in public opinion polls and whether or not more information changes the attitudes of citizens on highly polarizing topics such as capital punishment or abortion. (p. 35) Research cited tends to support the hypotheses of Justice Thurgood Marshall regarding information and the death penalty: an inverse relationship between support for the penalty and knowledge about it, and greater exposure to information on the punishment leading to greater opposition, except when support for the penalty is based on a belief in its retributive merit. Regarding abortion, the 30-year history since the Roe v. Wade decision supporting a limited period for pregnancy termination based on the right to privacy argument shows a surprising stability in public opinion, despite the well-publicized battles between groups with opposing positions on the practice. Winston seems to suggest that the public’s capacity to make decisions has not been limited by either information or restrictions to participation in these cases.

The book begins to lose the focus of its subtitle is in Chapter 4, in which Winston’s concern about a crisis in ethical leadership and the public’s reliance on media figures as role models segues to Chapter 5, which dwells on the relationship between youth and adults as the former develop into decision-makers. Finally, in Chapter 6, the case for better formal preparation for informed decision-making is made with a summary of categories of civic knowledge requiring attention. A daunting bullet list of “complexities” to the U.S. system of democracy is provided to illustrate the challenges of “civics education” in preparing citizens to interact with their representative government. Winston...