The Future of Democracy: Developing the Next Generation of American Citizens

CIVIL SOCIETY

HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES

Series Editors:

VIRGINIA HODGKINSON, Public Policy Institute, Georgetown University

KENT E. PORTNEY, Department of Political Science, Tufts University

JOHN C. SCHNEIDER, Department of History, Tufts University

Peter Levine, The Future of Democracy: Developing the Next Generation of American Citizens

Elayne Clift, ed., Women, Philanthropy, and Social Change: Visions for a Just Society

Brian O’Connell, Fifty Years in Public Causes: Stories from a Road Less Traveled

Pablo Eisenberg, Philanthropy’s Challenge: The Courage to Change

Thomas A. Lyson, Civic Agriculture: Reconnecting Farm, Food, and Community

Virginia A. Hodgkinson and Michael W. Foley, eds., The Civil Society Reader

Henry Milner, Civic Literacy: How Informed Citizens Make Democracy Work

Ken Thomson, From Neighborhood to Nation: The Democratic Foundations of Civil Society

Bob Edwards, Michael W. Foley, and Mario Diani, eds., Beyond Tocqueville: Civil Society and the Social Capital Debate in Comparative Perspective

Phillip H. Round, By Nature and by Custom Cursed: Transatlantic Civil Discourse and New England Cultural Production, 1620–1660

Brian O’Connell, Civil Society: The Underpinnings of American Democracy

PETER LEVINE

The Future of Democracy

DEVELOPING THE NEXT GENERATION OF AMERICAN CITIZENS

TUFTS UNIVERSITY PRESS

Medford, Massachusetts

Published by

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF NEW ENGLAND

Hanover and London

Co-sponsored by the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service

Tufts University Press

Published by University Press of New England,

One Court Street, Lebanon, NH 03766

www.upne.com

© 2007 by Tufts University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Members of educational institutions and organizations wishing to photocopy any of the work for classroom use, or authors and publishers who would like to obtain permission for any of the material in the work, should contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Lebanon, NH 03766.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Levine, Peter, 1967–

The future of democracy : developing the next generation of American citizens / Peter Levine.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978–1–58465–648–7 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1–58465–648–4 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN: 978–1–61168–788–0 (eBook)

1. Youth—United States—Political activity. 2. Political participation—United States. 3. Social participation—United States. 4. Democracy—United States. 5. Youth development—United States. I. Title.

HQ799.2.P6L48 2007

323.6'508350973—dc22              2007011141

CONTENTS

List of Tables and Figures

Preface

Introduction

1. What Is Civic Engagement?

1.1 From Lists to a Definition

1.2 Legitimate Public Concerns

1.3 The ethics of Civic Engagement

1.4 Open-ended Politics

1.5 Conclusion

2. Why Do We Need Broad Civic Engagement?

2.1 Democracy Should Not Depend on Civic Virtue Alone

2.2 Civil Society is a Necessary Complement to the Government

2.3 Equity Requires Broad Participation

2.4 Institutions and Communities Work Better when People Participate

2.5 Everyone Has Civic Needs

2.6 Civic Engagement Is Linked to Culture

2.7 Civic Participation Is Intrinsically Valuable

2.8 Democracy as Learning

3. Measures of Civic Engagement

3.1 Participation in Associations

3.2 Political Participation

3.3 Political Voice

3.4 Knowledge and Cognitive Engagement

3.5 What about Resistance?

3.6 Commitment to Purely Civic Goals

3.7 Conclusion

4. Why Do We Need the Civic Engagement of Young People?

4.1 Young People Have Distinct Interests

4.2 Civic Engagement Is Good For Young People

4.3 Improving Youth Civic Engagement Is the Most Effective Way to Enhance Civil Society

4.4 Youth Have an Autonomous Culture with Powerful Effects

5. How are Youth Engaging Today?

5.1 Trends in Behavior

5.2 Trends in Values

5.3 Differences by Income, Race, and Gender

5.4 Civic Innovation among Young People

6. What Are the Barriers to Civic Education?

6.1 Civic Education Is a Public Good

6.2 The Citizenship of Choice

6.3 Technocracy

6.4 The Lack of a Civics Discipline

6.5 Implications

7. Civic Learning in School

7.1 Courses

7.2 Discussions of Current Issues

7.3 Student Voice in Schools

7.4 Service-Learning

7.5 Extracurricular Activities

7.6 Simulations

7.7 Controversies in School-Based Civic Education

7.8 Implications for Policy

8. Civic Learning in Communities

8.1 Community Youth Development in After-School Settings

8.2 Digital Media Creation

8.3 Youth Participation in Local Government

9. Developments in Higher Education

9.1 A Generational Story

9.2 New Scholarly Attention to The Public

9.3 New Forms of Public Work

9.4 Policy Implications

10.  Institutional Reforms

10.1 Comprehensive High School Reform

10.2 New Forms of Journalism

10.3 Political Reforms

11.  Youth Civic Engagement within a Broader Civic Renewal Movement

11.1 Elements of the Movement

11.2 The Strength and Growth of the Movement

11.3 Political Leadership for Civic Renewal

Notes

Bibliography

Index

TABLES AND FIGURES

TABLES

1 Civic Engagement by Education and Class

2 Core Indicators of Civic Engagement

3 Purpose of Public Schools

4 Major Themes that 15–25-year-olds Remember from their Classes

FIGURES

1 Political Participation and Human Development

2 Turnout (ages 18–25)

3 Attentiveness to News (ages 18–25)

4 News Consumption and Confidence (ages 18–25)

5 Measures of Community Participation from the DDB Life Style Survey (ages 18–25)

6 Two Measures of Youth Volunteering

7 Free Speech Rights for Gay Teachers

8 Priorities

9 A Map of Civic Renewal

10 Index of Civic Health

PREFACE

This book is an argument about why and how we should prepare young people to be active and responsible democratic citizens. I present new data, including statistics from a 2006 survey of American youth and quotations from various recent interviews and focus groups. Most of the empirical base, however, comes from previous quantitative research that I summarize and synthesize.

I also direct attention to normative questions: issues of value and principle that are often left implicit in the literature on youth civic engagement. For example, why should people participate actively in community affairs? There is evidence that when many citizens participate, public institutions work better. I cite data to support that causal theory. There is, however, an equally important reason for democratic participation that has little to do with its effects. To engage in community affairs is dignified and rewarding; to encourage others to participate is a way of demonstrating respect for them. We can explicate and defend the value of civic engagement in such terms, not merely by citing data about its consequences.

Likewise, why should we give serious civic responsibilities to children and adolescents? Advocates of positive youth development have shown that by involving young people in important roles, we can increase the odds that they will succeed in school and avoid delinquency. That evidence is worth investigating, but positive youth development reflects a more fundamental ethical commitment. It is a way of treating fellow human beings as responsible agents and enabling them to develop their talents and political autonomy.

It will already be evident that this is an opinionated book, written in the first person singular, and I am solely responsible for the opinions it contains—as well as for any errors of fact or logic. Its empirical basis, however, has been a group effort. To a large extent, the facts come from five years of collaborative effort by CIRCLE (the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement) at the University of Maryland.

Given CIRCLE’s enormous impact on this book, the center will receive all proceeds from its sale. I owe especially deep gratitude to CIRCLE’s staff, past and present: our founding and visionary director, William Galston; our scrupulous and dedicated research director, Mark Hugo Lopez; my colleagues Deborah Both, Barbara Cronin, Carrie Donovan, Abby Kiesa, Emily Hoban Kirby, Karlo Barrios Marcelo, Demetria Sapienza, and Dionne Williams; and several cohorts of graduate students, including Gary Homana, who helped me with the book. It is a cohesive, talented, and committed team.

CIRCLE has been primarily funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and Carnegie Corporation of New York. I must also acknowledge four program officers at these foundations for their vision, guidance, and patience: Michael X. Delli Carpini, Cynthia Gibson, Geraldine Mannion, and Tobi Walker. Cindy Gibson has also been my close collaborator on several projects, notably the Civic Mission of Schools report of 2003, and I have learned an enormous amount from her.

The circle of CIRCLE is large, encompassing twenty-eight members of a distinguished advisory board and at least eighty recipients of CIRCLE’s research grants, which were made possible by The Pew Charitable Trusts and Carnegie Corporation of New York. All of these people have influenced this book, and their names fill the notes, but I am especially grateful for the intellectual guidance and personal support of Harry Boyte, Constance Flanagan, Diana Hess, Lewis Friedland, Carmen Sirianni, Judith Torney-Purta, and James Youniss.

INTRODUCTION

Civic education sometimes sounds like a rather specialized or optional matter—especially at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when we are desperately trying to make all our students competitive in a global economy that values mathematics, science, and literacy. Under these conditions, it is necessary to explain why civic education is not a luxury that can be considered only after we are satisfied with all of our children’s basic academic skills.

Strong, just, robust democracies require the skillful and committed participation of their citizens. It is easiest for people to obtain the necessary skills and commitments when they are young. Therefore, civic education—which is not just the name of a course, but is the shared responsibility of schools, families, political institutions, the press, and communities—is a critical component of a struggle to sustaining democracy itself. So this book will argue.

When adults consider the character and behavior of contemporary youth, they often portray decline or decadence. As early as the eighth century B.C., Hesiod complained: I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. In 1906, William James argued that the gilded youths of his day ought to be drafted off to do some form of civilian national service to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.¹ In 1997, Judge Robert Bork wrote, Every generation constitutes a wave of savages who must be civilized by their families, schools, and churches. He recalled the exceptionally large wave of the 1960s as especially barbarous, devoted to violence, destruction of property, and the mindless hatred of law, authority, and tradition.²

The Enlightenment philosopher Condorcet, writing during the French Revolution, observed that every generation accuses itself of being less civic-minded than its predecessors.³ (And each cohort of adults fears that its children will be even worse.) Such clichés of decline or crisis can be seriously misleading. For example, contrary to popular belief, the adolescent pathologies that most people worry about—teen motherhood, failure to graduate from high school, smoking, violent crimes, and deaths of teenagers by firearms—have moved in favorable directions since the mid-1990s. None of these indicators of moral behavior looks worse than it did twenty-five years ago.⁴ Thus it would certainly be a mistake to portray today’s youth as especially remiss.

Nevertheless, each generation should worry about the civic and political development of its children. Citizens are made, not born; it takes deliberate efforts to prepare young people to participate effectively and wisely in public life. Good government requires widespread civic participation and virtue; yet the development of the necessary skills and attitudes is not in anyone’s narrow self-interest, nor does it occur automatically. Therefore, civic education—again, broadly defined as the job of society, not merely of schools—must be continuously renewed and redesigned to address the specific challenges of each age.

Like the statistics on crime, pregnancy, and health, the data on citizenship in America today show some favorable trends. For instance, young people are increasingly likely to do volunteer work and are more socially tolerant than any previous generation for which polling data are available. On the other hand, they score poorly on assessments of civic knowledge; they are relatively mistrustful of other citizens; they are less likely than in the past to join or lead traditional membership organizations; and they usually vote at low rates. Most are skeptical about their own power to make a difference in their communities.

In this book, I will explore two basic models for understanding these challenges. The first is a psychological deficits model. It assumes that there are problems with young people’s civic skills, knowledge, confidence, and values. These problems are not the fault of young people. Hardly anyone would hold a sixteen-year-old personally accountable for lacking interest in the news or failing to join associations. If we should blame anyone, it would be parents, educators, politicians, reporters, and other adults. Nevertheless, the problems are located (so to speak) inside the heads of young people. We should therefore look for interventions that directly improve young people’s civic abilities and attitudes. Such interventions include formal civic education, opportunities for community service, and broader educational reforms that are designed to improve the overall character of schools. The government, the press, and political parties can also enhance young people’s civic commitments and skills by directly communicating with them.

As an alternative, I will consider an institutional reform model. This paradigm assumes that there are flaws in our institutions that make it unreasonable to expect positive civic attitudes and active engagement. For example, citizens (young and old alike) may rightly shun voting when most elections have already been determined by the way district lines were drawn. They may rightly ignore the news when the quality of journalism, especially on television, is poor. And they may rightly disengage from high schools that are large, anonymous, and alienating. If this model holds, then we do not need interventions that change young people’s minds. Civic education that teaches people to admire a flawed system is mere propaganda. Instead, we should reform major institutions.

These two basic models admit variations and combinations. For example, one might hold that there are problems located inside young people’s heads—namely, inadequate habits and skills for civic and political participation—but that adolescents would gain these habits and skills if they had more incentives to participate. Then our goal would be to change young people’s psychology; but the only way to do so would be to restructure institutions so that they sought and rewarded youth participation more.

This book is not a polemic in favor of one basic model over the other. As I argue in chapters 10 and 11, we need a broad movement that improves civic education while it also reforms the institutions in which citizens engage. We must prepare citizens for politics, but also improve politics for citizens. Neither effort can succeed in isolation from the other. Educational curricula, textbooks, and programs, if disconnected from the goal of strengthening and improving democracy, can easily become means of accommodating young people to a flawed system. But political reform is impossible until we better prepare the next generation of citizens with appropriate knowledge, skills, habits, and values. Students should feel that they are being educated for citizenship, but also that they can help to renew American democracy.

CHAPTER 1

What Is Civic Engagement?

1.1 FROM LISTS TO A DEFINITION

The purpose of civic education (broadly defined) is to enhance the civic engagement of young people. Civic engagement is a very popular catchphrase in foundations, government agencies, schools, and universities around the English-speaking world. In many contexts, it has supplanted participation and participatory democracy, which were more common phrases in the 1960s and 1970s, when they acquired a politically radical edge. Many specialists in the field prefer the phrase civic engagement over citizenship—let alone "good citizenship—finding those alternatives old-fashioned, primly moralistic, and limiting. (After all, not everyone holds legal citizenship in the country where she resides, yet everyone can participate in helpful ways.) Despite its popularity, however, civic engagement" is very rarely defined with any conceptual clarity. Indeed, I suspect that its lack of definition, combined with its generally benign connotations, accounts for its popularity. It is a Rorschach blot within which anyone can find her own priorities.

While rarely defined in a coherent sentence or paragraph, civic engagement is often operationalized as a list of variables. For example, Scott Keeter and his colleagues designed a major national survey of civic engagement, using questions that emerged from focus group interviews.¹ CIRCLE replicated their study as our 2006 omnibus survey, which I cite frequently below.² Both polls measured nineteen core indicators, in three main categories:

•Indicators of community participation include measures of membership in various types of nonprofit voluntary associations (including religious groups); regular volunteering and fundraising; and community problem-solving, which is defined as a positive answer to the following question: Have you ever worked together with someone or some group to solve a problem in the community where you live?

•Indicators of political engagement include registering to vote, voting, and various activities that might influence other people’s votes, including volunteering for campaigns, displaying political stickers and signs, and giving money to parties and campaigns.

•Indicators of political voice include protesting, canvassing, signing petitions, contacting the mass media, contacting elected officials, boycotting products, and buycotting products or companies. (To buycott is to purchase something because you like the social or political values of the company that produces it.)

According to Keeter and his colleagues, you are civically engaged if you regularly perform several actions on this list of nineteen.³

There are arguments in favor of expanding or changing this list. Some scholars believe that relatively unusual forms of engagement should be included, even though they do not show up in focus groups and national surveys. These atypical civic behaviors include acts of civil disobedience, participation in transnational youth movements (such as the campaign against globalization), and Native Americans’ membership in tribal councils.⁴ Second, one could argue that some relatively common forms of service were overlooked in the survey designed by Keeter and colleagues: for instance, helping to raise younger siblings, or confronting friends and relatives who use racist or other immoral language. It is controversial whether these forms of behavior constitute civic engagement. Third, some scholars believe that following and understanding the news and public affairs is a form of engagement.⁵ (We could call this mental or cognitive civic engagement.)

Finally, most of the indicators measured by Keeter et al. are signs that people support and want to improve the regime in which they live. Those who are deeply critical of the status quo may prefer indicators of resistance and revolt, such as participation in violent protests, or the ordinary foot-dragging and noncompliance that is often the resort of poor people in response to coercion.⁶ For those who are hostile to the existing regime, a lack of engagement in school—as shown by truancy or evident boredom—could be a sign of political resistance, hence an indicator of civic engagement.

In short, there are arguments for expanding the list of nineteen indicators to twenty-five or thirty. Such arguments beg the question of what makes any indicator appropriate for the list. What is the underlying philosophy of civic engagement?

Two mechanical objects are said to be engaged if they are capable of affecting each other. Likewise, a person who is civically engaged somehow connects to the civic domain so that she can affect it. A distinguished committee of the American Political Science Association recently wrote, "For us, civic engagement includes any activity, individual or collective, devoted to influencing the collective life of the polity."⁷ But what is the collective life of the polity or (as I had put it) the civic domain? It can’t be everything; otherwise, people would be able to say they were civically engaged if they merely participated in their own families or businesses.

Some analysts define the civic domain in sectoral terms, as the set of all institutions that are either part of the government or not-for-profit. On that definition, you are civically engaged if you work without pay (then you are a volunteer), if you influence the state (as an advocate), or if your paycheck comes from the government or a nonprofit organization (which makes you a public servant). This scheme is misleading. Newspapers are civic institutions, even though they are usually profit-making corporations that pay their reporters and editors. A hospital may be organized as a private enterprise, a public agency, or a not-for-profit institution: the difference does not necessarily matter to employees, patients, or members of the surrounding community. Grocery store owners who display fruits and vegetables outside their businesses at night contribute civically by making city streets safer and more attractive.⁸ When people boycott and buycott, they are said to be civically engaged even though they are consumers who attempt to influence firms.

Another way to define the civic domain is to say that it includes any venue in which people work together on public problems. That definition trades one difficult word for another. There is no consensus about what problems are legitimately public. Just because an issue is taken up by a legislature or a court, it does not follow that the matter is public: perhaps the government has reached illegitimately into private affairs. Conversely, the government might fail to address an issue that is genuinely public. Meanwhile, private firms take up public problems, for instance by providing jobs and goods that people need. Firms can also encourage collaboration and problem-solving among groups of their own employees and partners. Nevertheless, most theorists would not define routine business collaborations as civic engagement. Why not?

1.2 LEGITIMATE PUBLIC CONCERNS

I do not think there is any substitute for a theory that defines public concerns and problems in contrast to those of the private sphere and the market. We can then define civic engagement as behavior that addresses legitimate public matters. Unfortunately, no definition of public matters attracts consensus. However, discussing the limits of the public’s concerns is itself an important and perennial aspect of civic engagement, fundamental to the ongoing debates between left and right.

Liberals, conservatives, libertarians, left-radicals and others hold different views of the public’s interests, but they ask some of the same questions. One important question concerns the nature and welfare of the commons. Although this word has a collectivist ring (reminding some people of communism), people of all political stripes—including libertarians and anarchists—care about the commons; it is the definition that varies.

A commons consists of all the goods and resources that are not privately owned. The list of such resources varies depending on how a society is governed: it may include the atmosphere and oceans, the national defense, the overall plan of a city and its physical public spaces, the prevailing norms of cooperation in a society, the rule of law, civil rights and their enforcement, the store of accumulated scientific knowledge and cultural heritage, and even the Internet (understood as a whole structure, not broken down into its privately owned components).⁹

It is difficult or impossible to divide any of these resources among private owners. Things that cannot be divided cannot be traded. No one owns Shakespeare, traditional Southern cooking, national defense, the ozone layer, or freedom of speech. Because markets cannot generate or preserve such public goods, we rely instead on the state, nonprofit associations, or voluntary collaborations among firms, families, and individuals. Part of civic engagement is work that protects or enhances the commons. Again, we do not agree on which resources should be treated as common, but debating that question is itself an important part of civic engagement.

We can reach a similar conclusion from a different point of departure. Economists say that an externality occurs when some people conduct a voluntary exchange that affects other parties who never consented to their agreement. The externality is the effect on the third parties. It can be positive: for example, a new downtown store can benefit me even if I never shop or work there, by lowering crime, beautifying my city, providing jobs for my neighbors, contributing taxes, attracting visitors, and so on. In fact, many of the best things in life are positive externalities that arise as side effects of market transactions or as the public effects of people’s work in private, voluntary associations. An externality can also be negative, and the usual examples are environmental. For instance, smoke can blow from a factory into the lungs of people who never consented to receive it. Coarse or inconsiderate personal acts are also good examples of negative externalities: think of cases when A talks loudly to B on a cell phone, annoying C, D, and E who are sitting nearby.

Much of ethics consists of acting so that one’s externalities are as positive as possible. We can define the commons as the sum total of our externalities, the negative ones subtracted from the positive ones. Then civic engagement is work that improves the balance of externalities. People create positive externalities and mitigate negative ones by volunteering and by influencing the state.

This definition of civic engagement encompasses some aspects of life that we do not usually tag with that label. For example, fundamental research on cancer promises to provide basic knowledge, which is a public or common good of enormous value. Therefore, a cancer researcher is civically engaged, by my definition. To be sure, science is not identical to volunteering or political participation; it has its own standards, logic, and history. Some features of science can be observed in commercial laboratories that generate patented goods for the consumer market, not only in academic or government-sponsored research labs that tackle public problems. Nevertheless, I believe it is illuminating to recognize that science—along with medicine, art, law, teaching, religious ministry, and other professions—has a strong civic dimension. Licensing bodies limit entry to these professions to people who are trained and pledged to enhance the commons (regardless of how they are paid). Such professionals are supposed to address issues that a broader public has identified as important and to deliberate respectfully with laypeople, including the taxpayers and clients who fund their work. Some sociological theories of science invoke values that we expect of good citizens, such as the open sharing of knowledge, disinterestedness, and a willingness to examine hypotheses critically.¹⁰ Scott Peters finds that scientists in land-grant universities often enter their professions with explicitly civic goals—to work with communities to address common problems—and they are frustrated when they realize that other goals (such as generating commercial patents) have taken over.¹¹ More generally, Boyte finds a strong and often painful sense of loss of public purpose among senior scientists and researchers.¹²

Recognizing the civic potential of paid employment prevents us from equating civic engagement with volunteering, which narrows and even trivializes it. Civic engagement is public work (in Harry Boyte’s phrase): a serious business that ought to occur in families, workplaces, professions, and firms, not only in voluntary associations.

In emphasizing the commons, I have passed over another aspect of politics: efforts to distribute and redistribute private goods. When the state (at any level) taxes some and spends the money on others, it is redistributing. Likewise, when the state provides authors with copyright and inventors with patents, it influences the distribution of goods. When people give contributions of money or time or raise funds through such activities as charity walks (as 84 percent of Americans claim to do annually),¹³ they are also redistributing goods—albeit voluntarily and on a comparatively small scale.

Surely the pattern of distribution in a society is a public issue, a legitimate matter for debate. Civic engagement includes participation in that debate, whether from a libertarian, conservative, moderate, progressive, or socialist perspective. I began, however, with civic engagement that enhances the commons—not with struggles over distribution— because there is a tendency to overemphasize the latter. Harold D. Lass-well’s famous 1958 book was entitled Politics: Who Gets What, When, How.¹⁴ I would say that who gets what is a part of politics and a legitimate topic for engaged citizens. It is not the whole of politics. Another important aspect of politics is more creative; it involves citizens’ work in making public goods that benefit everyone.

There is also the question of who should be allowed to do what—the question that arises in debates about abortion, narcotics, pornography, and other controversial social issues. Again, to participate in these debates—from any ideological or philosophical perspective—is to be civically engaged. Around the same time that Lasswell was defining politics as a struggle over scarce resources, another classic book defined it as the authoritative allocation of values.¹⁵ It is important to note, however, that pressuring the state to regulate or deregulate private behavior is not the only way that citizens can change values. They can also build voluntary associations to promote their moral views in civil society, thereby contributing to and helping to shape the common culture.

In defining civic engagement, I have not invoked a contrast between self-interest and altruism. Civic engagement is behavior that influences public matters, which, in turn, include the commons, the distribution of private goods, and decisions about what actions to prohibit or promote. One can influence these matters altruistically, for instance, by trying to distribute more goods to people who are less fortunate than oneself. One can participate in one’s enlightened self-interest, trying to strengthen an overall system that protects one’s welfare. One can work for the narrow interests of one’s own group. Or one can act in one’s individual self-interest by, for example, trying to get more personal benefits from the government. We may admire altruistic engagement more than selfish advocacy, but they are both legitimate. Furthermore, self-interest sometimes motivates participation that helps the whole system. For example, justice will be better served if poor people vote in their own interests instead of staying home.

Although we should not exclude self-interested motivations, it is a mistake to assume that participation is always narrowly self-interested. History provides many dramatic examples of altruism and public-spiritedness, including heroic self-sacrifice. And on a daily basis, people frequently define their identities in ways that are not highly individualistic. Often a person participates in civic life not as I but as we; and the we can range from a family to the entire nation. If people always calculated the potential costs and benefits of their behavior to themselves as individuals, then no one would vote. No single vote has any impact on policy unless the election would otherwise be a draw, a highly unusual situation. Nevertheless, about half of the U.S. population does vote; the proportion is even higher in many other countries. This behavior indicates that many people define themselves as members of large identity groups or as citizens of a whole republic on Election Day. They do not vote as I but as part of some we that collectively has an impact.¹⁶

1.3 THE ETHICS OF CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

So far, the working definition of civic engagement is any effort to enhance the commons or to influence decisions about distribution and regulation, because these are legitimate public concerns. However, an adequate definition should say something about means as well as ends. After all, one can engage the government by plotting to overthrow it; one can influence a religious congregation by embezzling its funds, and one can address an alleged community problem by violently expelling an ethnic minority. One might even take some of these actions for decent purposes. For example, the organizers of the coup in Thailand in 2006 claimed that their goal was to end a debilitating political crisis, and perhaps they were sincere. To qualify as civic engagement, however, the means of engagement, as well as the ends, must be legitimate. Civic engagement includes deliberation, persuasion, collaboration, participation in legal politics, civil disobedience, and the giving of time and money. It does not include coercion, violence, or deception.

Again, this is something of a list that needs a conceptual foundation. I now suggest that to be civically engaged is to enhance the commons or to influence