The last two decades have brought a surge of concern over civic engagement in the United States. There is worry about quantity: the large numbers of nonvoters, nonsubscribers to serious newspapers, nonviewers of nightly newscasts. Catalyzing the debate with his 1995 article “Bowling Alone” (Journal of Democracy 6: 65–78), Robert Putnam presented a range of data showing that as American voters, readers, and viewers were aging, a similarly active cohort of citizens was not stepping forward take their place; the postwar political culture was failing to reproduce itself. There is also worry about quality: the concern that contemporary political discourse, strategies, and behavior are dangerously shallow, impervious to rational reflection, balkanized, and narrowly ideological. Writing about the neopopulist Tea Party, for example, Mark Lilla pointed to their “blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers” (“Tea Party Jacobins,” New York Review of Books, May 27, 2010, 53–56.)
Small wonder that from shore to shore, committees, commissions, and think tanks have offered reports and action agendas determined to address what is seen as a major social problem. Rare, too, is the American college or university that does not have civic engagement and critical thinking placed prominently in their revised mission statement and embedded in their undergraduate curriculum.
Much practical work on nonparticipation as a social problem is focused on behavior modification and civic education. What will get young people interested? What sort of high school service learning could be required to trigger further political activity? What kinds of campus–community work might college freshmen do to imbue a sense of public ownership and encourage problem-solving collaboration that bridges social differences? Despite this flurry of concern and practical application, however, no amount of service learning and credit-bearing civic engagement course work can change what nearly all 18–24-year-olds know very well: Meaningful and efficacious citizen participation is the exception rather than the rule in stratified, professionalized, and often complex American social structures and institutions.
Quentin Kidd's Civic Participation in America and John Gastil and his colleagues' The Jury and Democracy make significant contributions by focusing attention away from behavior and toward the crucial question of which institutions discourage and which encourage citizen participation. While Kidd's book tells a familiar story about American political development, it does so in a way that helps inform the civic participation discussion. The book by Gastil and his coauthors, based on extensive original research, provides much-needed evidence for the importance of an institutional environment to citizen participation.
Kidd distinguishes participation motivated by self-interest from participation motivated by civic duty and argues that the latter has lost much of its institutional support over the last two centuries. Although these are notoriously vague and elastic terms, self-interest and civic duty do mark out different clusters of reasons to be involved in public life and expectations of oneself and others once engaged. Self-interested participants get involved when there is some concrete advantage, they are strategic in their actions, and they expect others to be so as well. People motivated by civic duty, by contrast, see political engagement as a responsibility, are interested in doing what is best for society, and hold others to these standards.
Civic-duty motivations were traditionally supported, according to Kidd, by hierarchical and exclusionary institutions of citizenship, an agrarian and trade-oriented political economy, and a locally rooted decentralized civil society. As nineteenth- and twentieth-century social movements dismantled civic hierarchies and forced open the franchise, a new conception of citizenship as rights-based rather than duty-oriented (and, truth be told, privilege preserving) emerged. Over time, as the American political economy shifted from agriculture and trade to a manufacturing and consumer orientation, communitarian habits faded and self-interested incentives grew into prominence. Similarly, as the national government expanded its range of activities, there was a concomitant decline in social problem solving at the state and local levels accessible to lay citizens.
Kidd argues that institutions of socialization, such as the family, the public school, and the mass media, have been insufficient in encouraging civic duties and are likely to remain so. Even if a high school or college mandates service learning for a student to graduate, for example, civic-duty motivations wither in the face of a work environment entirely focused on economic gain. So what might be done? The author very briefly concludes by endorsing “civic entrepreneurship” that “involves citizens building or transforming institutions to advance solutions to social or civic problems” (p. 163). He leaves this tantalizing suggestion undeveloped, however, and provides no examples of institutional transformations that could counterbalance the macroinstitutional forces he has all too convincingly arrayed against the civic-minded.
Into the breach steps the impressively researched contribution of Gastil and his colleagues. Drawing on their sample of the trial experiences and voting records of more than 13,000 jurors from eight counties in different regions of the United States, they seek to determine whether the institution of jury service encourages further political engagement in the form of voting. They found that for jurors in criminal trials concluding in a verdict, the likelihood of voting in the next few years increased by 4.3%. They discovered an even greater impact for jurors who had experienced the more intense deliberation of a hung criminal trial unable to reach a verdict; for those citizens, the likelihood of voting increased by 6.8%. It is interesting to note that the complexity of the trial influenced the civic impact of jury service. “Each additional charge,” write the authors, “added a 1.3 percent increase in the likelihood of voting. For a complex criminal trial with, say, four charges against the defendant, this would amount to an average increase in voting of roughly 4 percent” (p. 46). Also noteworthy, the researchers found no effect from jury service for those citizens who were already regular voters and no significant effect from civil trials.
What, exactly, makes the jury an effective “school of citizenship,” to borrow Tocqueville's words? The authors hold that the quality of deliberation plays a significant role: “what mattered was not how much an individual participated, but rather the juror's sense of whether the jury as a whole weighed the evidence, followed instructions, listened, and let each other speak. The better the deliberation, the stronger the voting effect” (p. 103, emphasis added). “In a high-quality process, jurors take turns speaking, address each other in terms they can understand, and consider carefully what each juror has to say about the case. The jurors presume one another's honesty and good intentions, even when honestly disagreeing about the facts of a case or the interpretation or application of the relevant legal statutes” (p. 93). The result of such a process is a collaborative product for which participants can take some pride of accomplishment.
The jury offers citizens opportunities for meaningful and efficacious participation because it is a mandatory, representative, mediating, deliberative, and power-sharing body. It is mandatory and thus able to reach the nonparticipating and draw them into civic service. It is representative and thus able to encourage dialogue across narrow social groupings. It mediates between state and civil society, granting citizens official powers without making them full-time members of the state. Because of the trial process and the unanimity rule, the jury is deliberative, putting pressure on citizens to argue with one another in respectful and inclusive ways. Some of these institutional characteristics can be modeled in other policy domains, as the authors note in their concluding chapter. Citizen juries, deliberative polls, and citizen assemblies all resemble the traditional legal jury. None of these new jury forms, however, allows citizens to have the degree of concrete decision-making power enjoyed on the traditional legal jury.
The relationship between citizen participation and the holding of real decision-making power is underdeveloped in the books under review yet relevant to their subject. Indeed, the institution of the jury is in failing health because of the dramatic twentieth-century increase in the discretionary power of the prosecutor to plea-bargain criminal cases. Jury trials were the normal way of handling criminal cases at the time of Tocqueville's visit to the United States; now they handle around 4% of cases at the federal level and around 1% at the state level. Most of the rest are plea-bargained. While they acknowledge what some judges and legal scholars have mourned as the “death” of the American jury trial, the authors do not provide a forceful argument for its resuscitation. Instead, they frame jury service as one of a number of possible ways of encouraging civic engagement (pp. 46–47). Yet to endorse citizen service in the justice system on the extrinsic grounds of further citizen participation misses the more fundamental intrinsic rationale, namely, that laypeople share power in the courtroom because it is every citizen's responsibility to maintain a fair, moderate, and humane rule of law.
Discussions of civic engagement can hardly avoid the core normative question of why participation is important. Kidd stresses themes from social-capital theory: Participation is needed to produce the cooperative group experience that in turn builds the trust and tolerance required for collective problem solving across lines of difference. Gastil and his colleagues view participation as an educative experience and a vehicle for the legitimation of professionalized domains, such as the legal system. I would suggest another line of argument as well, and one the jury nicely exemplifies, namely, that citizen participation is needed because the public world of a democracy presents responsibilities that cannot be delegated without remainder to officials or representatives, but must be owned up to by every citizen. As no more clearly seen than in criminal justice, some problems faced by human communities are inherently public in that their delineation, range of plausible solutions, and the tools available to work on them are all rooted in the public sphere and not simply within expert, professional, or official domains.
What is an appropriate set of tools for social order? What is a crime that must be punished? What is an adequate and humane sentence? Criminal justice is a public and not merely official responsibility because the public speaks through the penal sanction, calling an offender to account in court for violating laws that he or she, as a fellow citizen, also endorses. If this way of thinking is right, then institutions that familiarize citizens with their laws and with the officials that are speaking in their name and that help citizens attune themselves to the public world they are supporting—with their taxes, their voting, and their nonvoting—have immense civic value. Participatory institutions like the jury help us sober up to our unavoidable yet often unacknowledged responsibilities for one another. At a time when America leads the world in per capita incarceration, such civic familiarity, attunement, and sobriety are no small moral matters.
These books are timely, insightful, and very useful contributions to the ongoing discussion of how to increase the quantity and quality of American civic participation. In shifting the focus to the quantity and quality of participation-friendly macro-level institutions, they chart a crucially important direction for future research.
