Characterized by seemingly contradictory sentiments of self-satisfaction,
disappointment, and exhaustion, the end of the twentieth century is a peculiar
moment in the history of American democratic government. On one hand, we in
United States rightly celebrate the evident worldwide victory of our political
model--representative government combined with basic human rights--over various
kinds of dictatorships (Fukuyama 1989). While this victory has so far been
moral rather than practical--many rulers do not enjoy the electorally expressed
consent of their governed--it is nevertheless decisive. There are no broadly
credible political forms that fall outside these liberal democratic
boundaries.
In the United States and other mature liberal democracies, disappointment
rather than elation fills this moment of triumph. Unlike newcomers to
constitutional democracy, we do not look upon the machinery of electoral
government and the administrative state with the naïve eyes of those at
the beginning of a long adventure, but rather with the weary hindsight of an
experienced traveler. Our experience with this kind of government has generated
at least three disappointments. First, the people lack the enthusiasm necessary
to utilize their hard won rights to political representation. All democracies
exhibit low levels of electoral participation, especially in lower-level
elections, and the trend in recent decades has been downward (Lijphart 1997;
Sartori 1987:103). In the United States, the turnout for presidential elections
has declined from 60-65% in the 1950s and 1960s to 50-55% in the 1980s and
1990s. In off-year elections, turnout in local elections has ranged around 25%
(Teixeira 1992). The second disappointment is that these low rates of
participation do not seem to indicate satisfaction or even apathy about the
state's performance, but instead have been accompanied by a precipitous decline
in popular confidence toward government. Public opinion polls, for example,
reveal that the percentage of survey participants responding that they "trust
the government in Washington to do what is right "all of the time" or "most of
the time" has declined from a peak of 70% in 1966 to less than 25% in 1992
(Putnam 1994).
More practically and urgently, our system of government--elected politicians
that control administrative bureaucracies--have disappointed us with their
apparent failure to deliver the public goods that are most important to us
(Osborne and Gaebler 1992: 1-25). Their mission failures are most evident in
America's large urban areas, especially our hard core inner cities. There, the
very built environment of the streets, electric lights, and sewers
disintegrates like so much melting snow. The schools are some of the worst in
the developed world (Chicago Tribune Staff 1988), and urban American homicide
rates soar at an order of magnitude above that of the rest of the nation and of
other industrialized nations (see chapter 5).
These substantial disappointments of our conventional democratic institutions
have drawn few constructive proposals from democratic theorists. While
practitioners at the local, state, and federal level have embarked on a rather
bewildering variety of experiments,[1] theorists
and critics of democracy have failed to follow their lead by offering
constructive proposals to amend the basic structure of representative
government and bureaucratic administration. With precious few exceptions,[2] even those theorists once committed to radical
and participatory transformations seem strangely exhausted and resigned to
accept the forms and defects of more conventional institutions (Habermas 1992,
1996; for comment on this trend, see Phillips 1993 and Galston 1993).
It may be that these scribblers have fallen silent because they have discovered
a deep truth that we have indeed approached the end of history. Perhaps no
amount of creative institutional tinkering can carry us beyond these basic
disappointments of representative government and its ironic inability to
advance those values most closely associated with the idea of democracy. While
this pessimistic thesis may turn out to be true, no one has yet proved it.
Given the gravity of democracy's disappointments, then, prudence dictates that
we proceed as if it were not true by continuing to search for undiscovered
institutions that better vindicate our deep, professed democratic commitments.
The challenge is simple: find institutions that better realize our core
democratic values--in particular the fairness, effectiveness, and popular
determination of public action--than the currently dominant arrangements of
electoral representation and technical bureaucracy. Though there must be many
rejoinders, this volume offers one sustained response by developing a proposal
for radical democratic governance called Street Level Democracy (SLD).
Any such response must inevitably take into account numerous contentious
speculations concerning, for instance, the abilities of ordinary citizens and
the tractability of complex urban problems. Since these tendentious empirical
matters are unavoidable, we do not begin theoretically, as many democratic
theorists might,[3] but instead develop SLD by
examining and extrapolating from very concrete urban initiatives.
To a much greater extent than in any other American city, two Chicago programs
set into place structures for direct democratic governance of educational and
public safety institutions in its neighborhoods. In 1988, a state reform law
devolved control over basic issues to elected governance councils--composed of
parents, teachers, and principals--located each school. In 1994, city-wide
policing reform established a parallel structure in community policing. In each
of the city's 280 beats, residents meet frequently with police to jointly
establish public safety priorities for the neighborhood as a whole and to
direct police power toward the resolution of those priorities. Throughout the
chapters that follow, we use the empirical developments in school and police
governance to develop abstract radical democratic intuitions into workable
institutions and to explore speculations about what citizens and their
institutions can do. We use the theoretical lens of SLD as an abstract
structure, in turn, to advance the interpretation of these agency
reorganizations beyond mere description into a template for democratic reform.
By using each as a step for the other in this way, we hope to move the project
of building a workable democratic proposal beyond what the theorist or the
empiricist working alone could accomplish.
The nub of the proposal is that radical democracy has a lot to offer modern
complex society. Contrary to the view that the sheer scale and complexity of
tasks set to the modern nation state prohibits direct forms of democracy, I
argue (counter-intuitively) that precisely these modern features of complexity
and scale have frustrated the received institutions of elite-mediated mass
democracy and hierarchical administration, and that increasingly complex and
diverse contexts of public action open spaces for bureaucratic reconstruction
along more decentralized, participatory lines.
From the realm of past ideas, SLD borrows freely from two intellectual
streams--participatory democracy and pragmatism--to construct a decentralized,
participatory, experimental, and deliberative institutional alternative to our
received form of democratic state action (electoral
representation-cum-bureaucracy). Following the central claim of participatory
democrats, SLD contends that those most concerned with a particular site of
public action should be given the power, resources, and responsibility to carry
out that action. In the case of education, for instance, it recommends
decentralization of authority to the school level (site-based management) and
governance structures that include parents, school administration, faculty, and
(where appropriate) students. Whereas participatory democracy principally seeks
the devolution of democratic power and authority from the center to the
periphery, pragmatism sees decentralization as just the first piece--necessary
but far from sufficient--of a much larger puzzle. Always attentive to results,
pragmatism forces participatory democrats to focus more closely on what their
institutions will look like and what they will do, "after the devolution."
To answer this question, SLD builds upon the decentralizing instinct of
participatory democrats by giving contemporary institutional form to John
Dewey's (1927, 1935) notion that the core of democratic activity is social
exploration that engages both ordinary people and experts.[4] The proposal treats decentralized governance groups, such
as residents and police in a neighborhood beat or a school's governance
council, as democratic communities of inquiry that find and implement fair and
effective means to carry out functions such as the education of children or
maintenance of public safety. The image of inquiry is properly evocative on
several dimensions. First, participants in SLD realize that the solutions to
their problems are not obvious--that answers must be sought out because the
routines prescribed by experts have for the most part failed them. Second,
deliberation--the practice of decision-making through reasoned discussion
rather than interest--settles disagreements about proper courses of group
action. Third, as in inquiry, all such decisions are tentative and subject to
revision based on further evidence, assessment of previous experiences, or in
light of others' comparable experiences.
But decentralized democracy and deliberative pragmatism are not completely
compatible. Most justifications for decentralization--for instance that it
maximizes opportunities for political participation or that allows public
action to be tailored to local preferences--do indeed unambiguously
favor tiny polities. But does localism optimize the capacity for effective
problem-solving inquiry? Pragmatists should favor small units for at least two
reasons. First, front-line operators (patrol officers, teachers, production
workers) know more about their specific local conditions, and so are likely to
know what will work and what will not in light of that knowledge. Second, those
who are close to the point of action are better positioned to assess the
results of past efforts and bring that new knowledge to bear on future public
choices. If individuals in a particular community of inquiry treat each other
reasonably, are capable of formulating good guesses about the best course of
action, can deliberately decide on a collective course, command the resources
necessary to follow it, and improve upon past decisions through assessment,
then self-regulating communities of inquiry may indeed generate fair and
increasingly effective solutions to their respective public problems.
As this cursory yet demanding list of requisites already suggests, pragmatists
may rightly voice reservations about prematurely eviscerating organizational
centers. Centralized power, if not authority, might support efforts of
inquiring communities in several critical ways. First, some units will be less
capable than others, and that this difference in capability will correspond
somewhat with background inequalities of wealth and power. The center can
provide capacity building support--training in the individual skills of
analysis and social skill of deliberation--to disadvantaged communities.
Second, a central organization can enforce fairness in case the self regulating
mechanism of deliberation fails--when there are momentary violent disputes or
when one faction of a community entrenches itself and is not subject to
reasonable appeals. Third, inquiring efforts of communities will benefit from
access to the experiences of other communities. If we think of each community
as conducting independent experiments in public policy, then random variation
dictates that some will invent effective solutions more quickly than others.
Connections between communities can diffuse these best-practices. These
revelations about the character of centralized power and that connections
between inquiring communities can be more or less conducive to communities'
problem-solving capacities lead quickly to the conclusion that the overarching
institutional structure encompassing these communities is itself an object of
experimentation. A fourth function of the center, then, is to continually
modify itself in ways that enhance the capacities of its component communities
of inquiry. A fifth function of the center is not distinctive to pragmatist
goals; decentralized units engaged toward similar ends will often encounter
situations in which they each will benefit from common actions such as the
creation of a common pool resource or joint action on a problem that overlaps
jurisdictions.
The constitutional architecture of Street Level Democracy, then, defies the
simple-minded dichotomy between power that is either centralized or dispersed.
For a given public purpose--education and public safety are the ones that I
will discuss--SLD recommends that the bulk of decision making authority and
control over public resources be devolved to small, geographically based,
operational units composed of both line level public servants and consumers of
public services. In the case of education, the natural unit is the school and
participants include teachers, parents, and the community. The appropriate unit
in public safety is the neighborhood, and participants are police officers and
residents. These units are charged with overcoming the obstacles that stand
between the condition in which they find themselves and more desirable
states--effective schools or safe neighborhoods. The central office or network
that connects these operational units is muscular, but its goals are far
different from the task definition and supervision roles of bureaucratic
head-offices. Instead, it seeks to support component communities of inquiry by
ensuring the integrity of their deliberative experimental processes, spreading
the lessons generated by them, holding them accountable to their own plans and
promises, and progressively redistributing capacity to those less
advantaged.
These elements of Street Level Democracy--decentralization, direct citizen
participation, deliberative problem solving, and a muscular center that
simultaneously supports local units and holds them accountable--constitute an
institutional set that can supplement and to a limited extent replace our
received institutions with a directly democratic form that just might be able
to overcome our disappointments with electoral/bureaucratic government.
In the next chapter, we expand on this general discussion about the
relationship between the institutions of governance and democratic values. In
particular, we lay out five core democratic values--effectiveness, fairness,
autonomy, deliberation, and solidarity. We say that one form of governance is
more democratic than another just in case it more ably advances each of these
values. Taking democracy seriously, then, entails searching for forms of
governance that are more and more able to realize these core democratic values.
With this theoretical democratic ruler in hand, the argument proceeds in three
parts that make up the bulk of this volume. The parts explain the "how,"
"what," and "whether it works" of Street Level Democracy. The first part shows
how SLD institutions can be built at all, given the resilience of hierarchical
agencies, by describing how reformers constructed them in Chicago during the
1980s and early 1990s. Part II explains exactly what SLD is by providing a
theoretical blueprint that lays out the roles of citizens, the local units in
which they participate, and the "supportive center" that links these units
together. The third part explores whether or not SLD works by empirically
examining its operational characteristics in the streets of Chicago.
The first part, chapters 3 through 5, reviews the transition from centralized
bureaucracy to decentralized pragmatic organization that has taken place in the
Chicago Police Department (CPD) and the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Until
less than ten years ago, the CPS and CPD resembled the large urban
bureaucracies that can be found in many American cities and were exceptional
only in the tragedy of their failures. Changes in these two bureaucracies,
then, may point out a trajectory of reform applicable to other cities and
bureaucracies and shed understanding on how such revolutionary reform
occurs.
I argue in that such a shift has indeed taken place and that it was a
conscious response to "performance gaps" between public expectations of these
urban agencies and what they actually were able to accomplish (Downs 1967).
Whether or not large bureaucracies were ever the most efficient organizational
form to keep the domestic peace or educate the nation's children, they
certainly perform these functions less well than they once did and much less
well than we would like them to do. In the poorest of inner-city neighborhoods,
agency failures approach complete breakdown. Diverse reformers with quite
different ideologies and motives banded together and used this undeniable
breakdown to set in place two central planks of Street Level Democracy:
decentralization and popular participation.
Whereas the Progressive watchwords of centralization and hierarchy gave birth
to the great urban bureaucracies, the contemporary ideas about effectiveness
recommend decentralization. Professional reformers, then, advocated
administrative decentralization--site based school control in education and
neighborhood patrolling in the police--as a core component of reform. In both
education and policing in Chicago, remnants of the American New Left had formed
minor social movement advocacy groups that emphasized the importance of
community participation. Professional reformers in the late 1980s, perhaps
because they saw it as one manifestation of "customer-orientation," were not
hostile to these social movements and incorporated local voice and control into
their reform packages. Thus, quite happily for advocates of neighborhood
government and participatory democracy, decentralization and participation
became two central reform principals in both the CPS and CPD.
In the years immediately following these dramatic reforms, those charged with
educating children and preserving safety have discovered major deficiencies in
these new organizations. While some used the new latitude of local control to
make their schools more effective and neighborhoods safer, others were less
successful. In some schools and neighborhoods, few participated. Others simply
failed to take advantage of the new freedom and continued to execute the tried
and ineffective routines in which they were practiced. Some seemed to lack the
skills of analysis, deliberation, planning, and assessment necessary for
self-directed action. The more and less successful alike wondered whether other
similarly situated groups in the city had developed effective solutions to the
same problems. In response to these implementation difficulties, the central
offices of the police department and the school system, together with a host of
interested organizations, developed additional institutional responses that
resembled the recommendations of Street Level Democracy that come from its
pragmatist moment: supportive mechanisms such as training, dispute
facilitation, assessment devices, channels for information sharing and
best-practices diffusion, and common pool resources.
The project's second part builds a constitutional architecture of Street Level
Democracy that draw upon these CPS and CPS restructurings and upon the method
of constructive political theory. How exactly do these pieces of Chicago reform
fit together into a coherent alternative and why is the alternative promising?
The ideal institutional account of SLD describes the political conception of a
community of inquiry at three levels. Chapter 6 lays out the role of a citizen
of a community of inquiry. That citizen must embrace the public ends for which
the community is convened (a safer community or more effective schools) as her
own ends, possess the capacities necessary to participate on an equal footing
with others, and abide by the requirements of reasonable deliberation. Chapter
7 describes the local unit of SLD--a neighborhood beat group or school
governance council. At this level, SLD is a deliberative problem-solving
procedure that requires participants to identify and prioritize problems,
strategize about how best to solve those problems, implement solutions, and
constantly evaluate their efforts in order to improve their effectiveness.
Finally, chapter 8 describes the requirements of an administrative "Supportive
Center" that links and assists these communities of inquiry by pooling
information, assuring accountability, and providing technical assistance.
By way of justification, I contend that SLD as an institutional alternative is
more fair and effective than the bureaucratic form that it
replaces. In Chapter 9, I argue that SLD is more effective than centralized
bureaucracy in the complex and unstable problem environments posed by modern
citizes because it yields several mechanisms that are unavailable to
hierarchical administrations. Whereas bureaucracy discourages civic
engagement, SLD depends upon it and can thus draw upon the information and
energy of ordinary citizens. While the separation that professionalism imposes
between public servants and citizens sows distrust, partnership partially
constitutes SLD and so is likely to generate a capillary-level of trust
between civil society and the state that in turn makes cooperation possible.
One genetic defect of bureaucracies is that they persistently strive toward the
impossible goal of eliminating the discretion of their low-level operatives.
SLD, on the other hand, increases discretion at the operational level
but attempts to harness it and make it accountable by inviting public
direction. In the impulse to rationalize, bureaucracies seek clear divisions of
labor between different functions--e.g. policing, sanitation, housing
inspection, education, parks and recreation--that make difficult the
coordinated, strategic deployment of these energies. Since SLD focuses on
particular problems, it can more easily orchestrate and recombine such
specialties to resolve problems such as drug houses, truancy, and
school-to-work. Another constituent characteristic of professional bureaucracy
is that they seek autonomy--isolation from politics, civil society, and other
professions--which cuts them off from potentially constructive and
transformative feedback about the effectiveness of their strategies.
SLD, on the other hand, incorporates continuous assessment as a central
feedback mechanism of its deliberative procedure.
Chapter 10 argues that SLD will also generate public action outcomes that are
more fair than insulated hierarchical agencies. One objection is that SLD
depends too much on the frail method of deliberation. Outcomes are fair to
individuals within a community of inquiry when deliberation regulates that
community's decision processes. One function of the center is to detect and
correct persistent failures of deliberation within these units. Another
objection to decentralizing schemes like SLD is that better off communities
will leave disadvantaged ones behind, and the response is twofold. First,
unfairness between localities is inevitable whenever background social
inequalities are geographically correlated, and SLD is no more vulnerable to
this criticism than bureaucracy. Another function of the center is to
redistribute capacity, if not resources outright, to more needy units.
One persistent criticism of bureaucracy that has been made in many ways is
that the consequences of a good idea at the top frequently get messy and
generates unintended consequences at the bottom. With only the historical
discussion of SLD as forward-looking citywide reform (in a city of some three
million residents) and a conceptual constitutional defense that is necessarily
abstract, SLD is similarly left wide open to the objection that it sounds good
to practitioners (Part I) and theorists (Part II) but, hard reality being what
it is, cannot work. Some common variations on this theme are: people won't
participate (Olsen 1965; Riker and Ordeshook 1968); only rich people will
participate (Nagel 1987; Verba and Nie 1987); only educated people are capable
of participating effectively (Verba et. al. 1995); people will not subordinate
their self-interest to the constraints of reasonable deliberation (Austen-Smith
1992); ordinary citizens are not knowledgeable enough to interact with experts;
and a community of inquiry requires a homogenous community.
Part III of the project uses both city-wide data and a series of six
neighborhood-level case studies to explore the extent to which these and other
objections weigh against SLD as an institutional alternative to hierarchical
bureaucracy. The Chicago reforms in public education and the police department
provide a ideal large-N laboratory in which to explore of how and whether
flesh-and-blood citizens in all of their situated complexity can deliberate and
solve problems as SLD asks them to do.
Chapter 11 uses a variety of quantitative city-wide data on participation in
school reform and community policing institutions to explore whether SLD
"works" in the sense that various kinds of citizens participate in the
deliberative opportunities that it constructs. Some of this chapter's findings
may surprise skeptical critics. Over the period for which data was available,
participation levels are not stunningly high, but are sufficient to sustain
SLD's deliberative problem solving in both community policing and local school
governance. Unlike nearly every other channel of political participation,
residents from poor neighborhoods participate at rates equal to or greater than
those from wealthy ones. In community policing, participation rates of poor
neighborhoods are greater than those of wealthy ones. Weighing against
the concerns of feminist theorists that deliberation favors male over female
participants, it turns out that many more females than males participate in
both community policing and school governance. Contrary to theorists (Putnam
1993) who argue that high levels of social capital--civic associations and
civic norms--are critical components in "making democracy work," empirical
researchers have found that neighborhoods poor in social capital are as
effective as those who possess it richly in both school and police governance
in Chicago.
While these city-wide statistics usefully sweep away substantial peremptory
challenges against SLD and participatory democracy generally (e.g. "no one will
participate" or "only the rich will participate"), they nevertheless treat
neighborhood processes as black boxes of participatory democracy and thus
cannot be used to examine more fine grained claims concerning SLD's
deliberative mechanisms of problem solving. To answer these questions, chapters
12 through 16 explore the operations of SLD in six neighborhood-level cases:
three school governance and three community policing groups. I observed the
deliberations of each of these groups over a period of approximately ten months
between 1996 and 1997. The cases are distributed across two dimensions of
"initial conditions:" wealth and interest dispersion. Roughly, we expect that
richer, more unified communities will exhibit more successful deliberation and
problem solving.
In each case, we examine whether or not parties conducted their discussions
according to the deliberative process described in chapter 7, and whether their
joint action yielded fair and effective solutions. Chapter 13 examines
community policing in a neighborhood separated by lines of race and class;
chapter 14 explores SLD in two quite poor but unified communities; chapter 15
examines two groups that are both poor and internally conflicted; and the case
of Chapter 16 is a wealthy school where the participants have a long history of
solidarity and cooperation.
Not surprisingly, these case studies bear out expectations about the effects of
initial conditions: wealthy groups find it easier to deliberate and solve
problems than poor ones, and fair deliberation is more frequent in the absence
of entrenched conflict. Three more surprising finding of these six cases
relates to the relative performance of SLD compared to prior institutional
arrangements--bureaucratic command-and-control in shorthand--in each of these
neighborhoods. First, SLD arguably generated outcomes that were superior to
those of the command-and-control mode in each case, across all examined
variation in initial conditions. Like Mae West, even when the quality of
deliberative problem solving was bad, it was still better than hierarchical
bureaucracy. Second, the gains in problem-solving capacity in switching from
command-and-control to SLD institutions seems greater for poor communities than
for wealthy ones. In the wealthy areas that we examined, residents had for
decades employed rich networks of political influence, voice, and self-help to
circumvent the problem-solving deficiencies of school and police bureaucracies.
For them, SLD reforms simply added additional channels and methods to an
already satisfactory system. In the poor areas that we examined, by contrast,
SLD reforms introduced channels of political participation, voice over city
services, and problem solving methods for residents who lacked these capacities
in any meaningful degree. Finally, SLD's success under inhospitable conditions
depended much more on the actions of the "Supportive Center" described in Part
II. When teams and individuals dispatched from the CPS and CPD central offices
performed their facilitative and technical assistance functions well, groups in
poor and divided communities deliberated more effectively.
Now the purpose of a study like this is not to establish definitive
conclusions, but rather to open new avenues for debate and further exploration.
The successive aims are threefold. Rhetorically, the project implicitly argues
that more democratic theorizing should concern itself with the design of real
institutions that advance core democratic values. Second, I hope to show by
example that such efforts are fruitful by offering a feasible and intriguing
proposal called Street Level Democracy for radical, deliberative democratic
governance that can solve pressing urban problems and advance other democratic
values such as fairness and deliberation. Third, the empirical exploration of
real world reforms that approximate the design of Street Level Democracy show
these institutions operate roughly according to the specified design.
Therefore, they offer some basis for optimism about democracy's unrealized
possibilities and hold open the way for further exploration. Hopefully,
fulfilling these three tasks will advance practical and theoretical discussions
about overcoming democracy's disappointments one small step.
[1] We shall explore two in detail in this
volume.
[2] See Unger (1987a); Dorf and Sabel (1997);
Cohen and Rogers (1992).
[3] See, for example, Barber (1984). For a
purely theoretical argument about why no institutional form can overcome the
disappointments of electoral-bureaucratic government, see Zolo (1992).
[4] Dewey himself gave institutional expression
to his notions of social pragmatism only in the case of school organization,
and only weakly there. Some of his contemporaries, however, did worry about the
problems of institutionalization (Follett 1930) and others even built nascent
forms of these experiments (Phillips 1919; Devine 1919; Monney-Melvin 1981).