We begin our explanation of the institutions of Street Level Democracy by
looking at their development in historical perspective. Why did these new, more
decentralized and democratic, arrangements of municipal governance replace
hierarchical command-and-control bureaucracies in Chicago when they did? This
chapter offers a structural, somewhat abstract, account of that evolution by
tracing an ideal history of the rise and decline of large-scale, politically
insulated, techno-bureaucratic agencies in terms of two historically increasing
demands placed on modern administration: size and complexity. Encapsulated, the
ideal history traces the growth of large municipal bureaucracies as a solution
to the problems of governance as the population of cities increased throughout
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the citizens of those cities
more and more demanded the efficient provision of municipal services.
Progressive reformers laid out blueprints for the organizational form of that
service provision as hierarchical, autonomous, command-and-control
bureaucracies in the early part of the century, but their plans were not fully
realized in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and Chicago Police Departments
(CPD) until the post-World War II period.
Even as these municipal agencies developed into fully autonomous bureaucracies,
the problem environments in which they operated became increasingly complex.
Some neighborhoods saw poverty concentrate in them, others suffered racial
strife, while expectations for state performance seemed to increase everywhere.
I will argue that the inability of many agencies to cope with this rising
complexity has wrought widespread disenchantment with bureaucratic modes of
state action and calls for reforms to the Progressive design. At the end of the
twentieth century, these calls for municipal reform have brought numerous
reform proposals and measures such as privatization and marketization of public
services (Moe and Chubb 1990), streamlining bureaucracy to make it more
"customer oriented" while retaining is command and control form (Osborne and
Gaebler 1992), and enhanced judicial review of administrative rulemaking
(Rose-Ackerman 1992; Lowi 1979). While this reformist tinkering has yet to
coalesce into an institutional model of public sector organization that enjoys
the wide support that the command-and-control model enjoyed for much of this
century, and while none of them has proven itself beyond a doubt as superior to
the traditional hierarchical form, widespread disappointment about the
performance of public bureaucracies has opened opportunities for ranging
institutional experimentation. In Chicago, to a greater extent than in any
other American city, experimental reforms to old school bureaucracies have
assumed a radically democratic semblance.
This ideal history focuses on two moments of institutional selection: the
establishment of large, politically insulated bureaucracies and the
transformation of those agencies into a more democratically permeable
organizations. An examination of the former exposes the character of the
institutional trade-off of the democratic "Weberian Dilemma" (Bohman 1994) that
has perplexed many democratic theorists. The dilemma is that autonomous,
hierarchical bureaucracies may be the only organization form capable of solving
public problems under social conditions of moderate complexity and scale. But
these organizations require nearly complete liberation from the democratic
polities that they serve. Popular sovereignty entails both effective state
action and democratic control, but the received mode of organizing public
action--the hierarchical bureaucracy--forces us to choose between either
effectiveness or democratic direction.
The second moment of the ideal history points out the social fact that
technocrats and lay citizens alike have recently become disenchanted about the
claims of the hierarchical bureaucratic to deliver on its promise of effective
public action. Having sacrificed democratic control for the sake of system
effectiveness in a Faustian adoption of hierarchical bureaucracies, we now find
that those pyramidal agencies fail to satisfy the tasks we set to
them--educating our children, keeping our streets safe, etc.--as their problem
environments become more complex. Now this claim that there is a widespread
perception that autonomous bureaucracies have failed to deliver their promises
of performance is of course controversial and not yet settled; no one can say
with certainty whether the hierarchical mode of organizing the public sector
will give way to some other form--either more neoliberal or more positively
democratic--or whether the stuttering reform efforts of recent years are simply
institutional fads. This uncertainty has made the terrain of contemporary
democratic theory strange indeed. Once staunch and erudite theoretical
proponents of thoroughgoing democratization--say Robert Dahl (1989) on one side
of the North Atlantic and Jurgen Habermas (1996) on the other--seem now to take
the necessity of the hierarchical bureaucracy more or less for granted. They
seem to have retreated from their earlier, more radical, beach heads (Dahl
1967; Habermas 1975) and devoted their energies toward democratization around
the edges of that axiomatic institution by attempting to strengthen the very
tenuous links that span "a chasm between the expert and the people to be
bridged only by the frail plank of [popular] consent" (Follett 1930: 28).
Meanwhile, many individuals not noted for their radical democratic commitments,
such as the faceless senior bureaucrats in the Chicago Police Department and
the Chicago Public Schools, have dismantled their autonomous hierarchical
agencies and built them back up in quite decentralized, democratically
accessible forms.
This extreme dissonance between theory and practice suggests that we ought to
reexamine our assumption that effective state action necessarily takes the form
of autonomous hierarchy. If this assumption turns out to be a "false
necessity"--an invalid axiom--then perhaps more democratic forms can supplant
the hierarchical agency. A focus on the second historical moment of our
developmental narrative--the possible demise of the hierarchical
agency--clarifies this structural possibility. If the hierarchical agency form
is indeed waning, there is no particular reason to suppose that it will be
followed by more democratic methods of organization. The ideal history of this
chapter points out the only possibility of more democratic
reconstruction. The successor form need not be Street Level Democracy, but
could be market mechanisms, streamlined bureaucracies, or a purely
administrative decentralization that does not increase participation or popular
sovereignty. The political histories in the next two chapters describe how
Street Level Democracy in both the CPD and CPS were products of a contingent
alliance between elite and popular political actors. They utilized the
structural opportunity created by a legitimation crisis of bureaucratic
non-performance to impose institutional reforms that they believed would make
these respective systems more democratic and effective.
Before examining the conjunctures of those political alliances and
commitments, consider the stages of our ideal history in a the simple schema
below. The rest of this chapter and two following it describe in detail the
institutional forms named in this figure and the political forces and ideal
consideration that drove the organization of public action from one form to the
next.
Large Democratic Units |
| |
|
|
|
|
|
Street Level Democracy?High system capacity/ |
This history begins from a situation of high democratic voice and low system
capacity, represented in the upper right hand corner of the figure above. These
institutions might be imagined as the directly democratic town hall of New
England or the Athenian forum. Under these arrangements, individuals exercise
high individual voice over public decisions, but the overall system capacity is
low because decision costs are high and because small size of the polity
exposes it to numerous externalities. The construction of hierarchical,
autonomous technocratic bureaucracies, depicted as the movement from the upper
right to the upper left of figure 3.1, increases system capacity by enlarging
jurisdiction to internalize externalities, lowering decision costs through
hierarchical command structures, and by insulating public action from public
voice through the devices of representation and professional discretion. This
choice between high individual voice and high system capacity, another
rendition of the "Weberian dilemma," is described in the context of democratic
social theory in section 3.2 below. As problem environments increase in
complexity from moderate to extreme complexity, depicted as an evolution of the
system from the top row to the bottom, these hierarchical command systems
internally differentiate themselves in an attempt to cope with complexity, but
ultimately become dysfunctional. This increasing incapacity is depicted as
movement from the upper left of Figure 3.1 to the lower left and is described
in section 3.3. The lower left hand position represents a democratic crisis:
the system is neither particularly effective nor responsive to popular input.
Street Level Democracy is represented as one potential institutional solution
to this crisis, one that offers both high individual voice and high system
capacity, in the lower right hand corner of Figure 3.1.
As we shall see in Chapters 4 and 5 below, the real world movement toward
autonomous bureaucracy in Chicago was settled over decades in the course of
violent battles between local politicians of the decentralized ward machines
and the Progressive, then professional, municipal reform movements (Hofstadter
1956). In this ideal history, however, we momentarily step away from those
particular details to focus on the democratic values at stake in the
development of large scale hierarchical public agencies. The trade off between
the democratic values of individual voice and system capacity is
straightforward and familiar. As an institutional design solution, the large
scale bureaucracy offers three distinct advantages that seem to advance system
capacity at the expense of individual voice: its greater geographic
jurisdiction reduces externalities, the logic of administrative hierarchy
offers substantial problem solving capacities, and the reduction of democratic
voice from direct to representative forms filters the unwise and uninformed
opinion from public action. Consider these in turn.
The desire for greater individual opportunities for political participation
favor smaller units of government, while the desire for greater "system
capacity" favors larger units. Suppose you were part of a constitutional
convention, and your job was to select the size of the polity. You are stuck in
a conundrum. If you pick small units, then your people will be subject to
greater harmful externalities (the army down the street, the polluting factory
across the boarder). If you pick larger units, however, each of your citizens
will have less voice in the determination of public policy, and in particular
losing minorities will be numerically greater (smaller unit, better fit of
policies to preferences).[1] Robert Dahl
(1973) puts it this way:
the logic seems unassailable. Any unit you choose smaller than the globe
itself--and that exception may be temporary--can be shown to be smaller than
the boundaries of an urgent problem generated by people who are outside of the
particular unit and hence beyond its authority. Rational control over such
problems dictates ever larger units, and democratic control implies a larger
electorate, a larger majority. Yet the larger the unit, the greater the costs
of uniform rules, the larger the majorities who cannot prevail, and the more
watered down the control of the individual citizen (Dahl 1967: 959).
The second, more powerful, reason for the rise of bureaucracy is the power of
its internal problem solving logic, its "purely technical superiority over any
other form of organization" (Weber 1946: 214; Yates 1982: 20-32; Wilson
1887).[2] The hallmarks of bureaucratic
organization, "centralization of control and supervision, differentiation of
function, and qualification for office... objectivity, precision and
consistency" (Friedrich 1950) all make up a system that is on its face more
capable of solving moderately complex problems than a group of lay citizens at
a town meeting, for example. A more extreme statement come from Ted Lowi's
(1979) comments on the rise of government agencies:
The fact of the matter seems to be that the immense complexities of development
and control in industrial society are too powerful for thoughtless
institutions...
The modern method of social control involves the application of rationality to
all social relations. In production we call it technology. In exchange it is
called commerce or markets. In social structure we have here called it
differentiation. Rationality applied to social control is
administration. Administration may indeed be the sine qua non of
modernity. (21, emphasis in original)
Now whether or not other styles of organizing public action could have competed
with the logic of bureaucracy on the dimension of effectiveness, bureaucracy
was the principal contender in the United State before World War II, and, along
with competitive markets, the only contender for decades after it (Hofstadter
1956).
When large, expert bureaucracies are charged with administrating functional
areas of social life for relatively large populations, formal popular
sovereignty assumes the representative form. In the Westminster ideal, voters
elect professional politicians who compete with one another for votes, and
these politicians then direct bureaucracies to act in according to platforms
marketed by parties or individual politicians (Committee on Political Parties
1950). According, famously, to Schumpeter (1942), this modern democratic system
is not one in which the policy opinions of millions of voters aggregate into a
coherent social choices,[3] but rather a system
for selecting between various political elites who exercise power:
Suppose we... make the deciding of issues by the electorate secondary to the
election of men who are to do the deciding. To take it differently, we now take
the view that the role of the people is to produce a government... the
democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political
decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a
competitive struggle for the people's vote. (269)
A doubly mediated democratic system in which the chiefs of hierarchical
administrations are themselves directed by political elites becomes more
rational and effective by filtering out the unworkable and untutored opinions
of ordinary citizens. Schumpeter (1950) again argues starkly in favor of this
filter because
The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon
as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way in which he
would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests.
He becomes primitive again. His thinking becomes associative and affective.
(262)
Even without such a low estimation of the average citizen, however, one might
think that public action might be more ably guided by political elites than by
ordinary citizens because of the advantages in training, time, incentive and
disposition that the former enjoys.
These three abstract reasons--the advantages of greater size, the impressive
problem-solving logic of command-and-control bureaucracies, and the competent
governance of representative as opposed to direct democracy--all weigh in favor
of sacrificing direct popular voice in favor of hierarchical administration,
the move from the upper right hand corner of figure 3.1 above to the upper left
hand corner. In the historical accounts detailed in the next two chapters, we
shall see that the alleged efficiency of bureaucracies motivated their adoption
in Chicago police and school systems. In the early part of the twentieth
century, police and school systems were organized along decentralized,
neighborhood lines and functioned as "adjuncts of the machine" (Fogelson 1977).
Ward politicians effectively controlled district police stations and schools
and dictated many of their hiring, contracting, and operating priorities.
Unsurprisingly, politicians at the ward and mayoral level used these agencies
to sustain their own political strength primarily by providing patronage but
also by enforcing the social order desired by their constituents.
Good government Progressives and professionals in education and in public
safety, on the other hand, thought that these organizations ought to maximize
the effective delivery of education and police services. Without engaging in
historical debates about the upper-class bias of progressive reformers or
advantages of this decentralized administrative scheme for immigrant social
mobility,[4] I take it to be non-controversial
that the tension between the logic of patronage employment and effective
service delivery formed a central axis of conflict between progressive
reformers and machine politicians. It would take the reformers and their
ideological descendants half a century to resolve this tension in their favor.
They did so by expanding their anxiety about the disjunction between what
agencies should be doing--providing the best possible service at the lowest
public cost--and what they actually did--support parochial political machine
politicians and provide employment to working class ethnics--into a kind of
municipal legitimation crisis that would be resolved by remaking these agencies
into hierarchical, professional bureaucracies that were largely insulated from
political control.
By the late 1950s, even in late-blooming Chicago, bureaucratic reformers had
largely won their organizational battles against the urban machines. They
replaced each piece of this decentralized system of machine-dominated,
municipal services with modern bureaucracies. In place of decentralized,
neighborhood-level operations, they installed hierarchical, centralized
city-wide authority structures. Whereas agencies had been controlled by
(ostensibly) popularly elected politicians, reformers insulated many aspects of
agency operation from popular control by replacing the rule of politicians with
the rule of experts who would know how best to advance goals of their
particular specialties.[5] Instead of
employment and tenure based on political support, they created training and
credentialing through civil service schemes. Finally, instead of the haphazard,
often corrupt, sometimes brutal procedures of machine controlled agencies, they
installed uniform, measurable agency procedures in accordance with state of the
art professional knowledge.
Accepting the rather large caveat that terms like "system capacity" and
"administrative performance" are always relative to expectations, demands,
alternative organizational forms, and past performance, we might nevertheless
say that these hierarchical bureaucracies were in fact superior to either the
ideal, unworkable form of classical direct democracy (Schumpeter 1950: 250-68;
Pateman 1970) or the real world political machines that they supplanted in
Chicago. The schools and police offices ran more smoothly, with less
corruption, and more effectively on nearly every relevant measurable
administrative dimension (Herrick 1971; Lindberg 1991).[6] Only decades after they had reached institutional maturity,
however, professionals, academics, and critics in the general public would
raise increasingly vocal criticisms that these bureaucracies were not
adequately performing the tasks set to them. Urban police departments (Sparrow
1990), school systems (National Commission 1983), and government bureaucracies
generally (Osborne and Gaebler 1992), suffered a crisis of public confidence
that perhaps began in the turbulent 1960s and accumulated over the following
decades.
While we delve into the details of some of these substantive criticisms of
bureaucracy in the Chicago agencies in the next two chapters, suppose for now
that these criticisms of unsatisfactory performance possess some merit. Given
that the general form of these bureaucracies did not change, perhaps changes in
their operating conditions and organizational goals have rendered them less
able to solve the public's problems than they once were. Increasing social
complexity is often offered (Zolo 1992; Bohman 1996) as a catch-all, black-box
description of these increasingly difficult operational conditions, and I
retain that convention here. Stated simply but believably, these public
hierarchies operate less satisfactorily because their problem solving
environment has grown more complex. This shift to unsatisfactory performance is
depicted in Figure 3.1 above as the movement from the upper-left to the
lower-left hand section.
One source of this complexity is that the tasks that the public asks of them
have grown. Whereas schools for much of this century were asked primarily to
assimilate ethnically diverse immigrant students to mainstream American urban
society or to adjust the attitudes and behaviors of those students in ways
compatible with modern industrial society, we now demand that schools deliver
the more demanding outputs of academic excellence and equal educational
opportunity (Graham 1995). We have come to expect police not only to catch
perpetrators of crime, but that they play a role in its prevention and we take
high crime rates as a failure of policing (Sparrow 1990). A second kind of
complexity comes from trends in urban life such as increasing poverty, cultural
diversity, and spatial mobility. A third source of complexity stems from the
increasing differentiation of public agencies combined with the need to
coordinate them in order to solve public problems (Zolo 1992: 5). For instance,
it may be necessary but difficult to coordinate the efforts of a parks service,
housing court, juvenile services, bus scheduling authorities, a local school,
and the police department in order to solve a problem as simple as persistent
narcotics trafficking in an inner city park.
Under elite-mediated, representative democracy, the abstract notion of system
capacity is realized by the institutions of the administrative state--the
bureaucracy commanded by elected political elites. When the tasks set to
bureaucracy are simple and clear, its objects uniform, its problem environment
stable, and its agents easily monitored, then we can indeed expect system
capacity to increase with territorial scale because such expansion reduces
uncontrolled externalities and captures economies of administrative scale.
However, when the state is charged with tasks that are more complex, in which
the proper course of action is not easily given in general terms because it
varies over place and time, economies of administrative scale are far less
clear. Though this crude division between bureaucracies charged with simple
versus complex tasks abstracts from many important details, it nevertheless
marks an important distinction between the kinds of system/state functions in
which capacity increases with greater size and the functions in which size may
vary inversely with capacity. In his discussion of administrative
decentralization, James Wilson makes a similar distinction between simplex and
complex bureaucratic tasks:
In general authority should be placed at the lowest level at which all
essential elements of information are available. Bureaucracies will differ
greatly in what level that may be. At one extreme are agencies such as the
Internal Revenue Service or maximum-security prisons, in which uniformity of
treatment and precision of control are so important as to make it necessary for
there to be exacting, centrally determined rules for most tasks. At the other
extreme are public schools, police departments, and armies, organizations in
which operational uncertainties are so great that discretion must be given to
(or if not given will be taken by) lower level workers. (Wilson 1989: 372)
If hierarchical bureaucracies are less and less able to cope with these and
other species of increasing complexity, as Figure 3.1 above depicts, then the
"Weberian dilemma" of choosing between high system capacity and popular control
turns out not to be a hard choice, but rather a double loss in highly complex
environments. In organizing public action through command-and-control agencies,
we sacrifice popular control to a set of insulated professionals and the
mediating mechanisms of elite representative democracy. This sacrifice of
democratic control for system capacity, however, seems vain in light of the
contemporary common criticisms of "big government" and proliferation of reform
proposals mentioned above--such privatization, marketization, and
administrative decentralization--that mark the ineptitude of our
bureaucracies.
If the initially powerful reason--greater effectiveness--for adopting
insulated, expert bureaucracies turns out to be less and less persuasive, then
the supposed incompatibility between system capacity and popular control
deserves reconsideration. Other institutional designs might be able to better
reconcile, or even simultaneously advance, these two democratic values. This
possibility, labeled as "Street Level Democracy" is drawn in the lower right
hand corner of Figure 3.1 above. Since the argument thus far has not yet
established SLD as a feasible the transition arrow in the lower row of the
figure is shown in gray.
There
are at least three objections to the contention of our ideal history that some
set of institutions can simultaneously realize high system capacity and popular
control under conditions of high social complexity. The first objection is
theoretical. Contemporary democratic theorists have, with practically one
voice, treated increasing social complexity (Dahl 1989: 332-41; Zolo 1992) as
an obstacle to popular control rather than as an opportunity for democratic
reform. We have already discussed the problems that complexity for the advance
of democratic values in the previous chapter (2.3.2) and supplement that view
only briefly here. The simple, somber view is that non-professional citizens
linked together in even the best political institutions fundamentally lack the
collective capacity to solve complex problems. Habermas put the point somewhat
obliquely in this passage:
These "cognitive" problems of functional coordination... overburden the
problem-solving capacity of democratic procedures. Various symptoms of such a
cognitive overburdening of deliberative politics lend support to the
assumption, by now widely accepted, that discursive opinion- and will-formation
governed by democratic procedures lacks the complexity to take in and digest
the operatively necessary knowledge. The required steering knowledge no
longer seems capable of penetrating the capillaries of a communication network
whose structures are predominantly horizontal, osmotically permeable, and
egalitarian... In a political system under the pressure of social complexity,
these constraints manifest themselves in a growing cognitive dissonance
validity suppositions of constitutional democracy and the way things actually
happen in the political process.[emphasis in original] (1996: 320-1).
So, even if social complexity reduces the system capacity of administrative
bureaucracies, there are many reasons--offered by Habermas in the above passage
and by many others--to suppose that systems with more popular control will
perform much worse still. Even those who work in areas of democratic theory
that would seem most favorable to the case for participation--theorists of
deliberation and civil society--have followed this lead. Indeed, the necessity
of maintaining a safe distance between the discussions and opinions of lay
citizens and the more consequential decisions of state actors seems to have
become something of an axiomatic starting point. Studies and theories of
democratic deliberation lay out how ordinary citizens in the public sphere
might come together and form critical opinions that select elites
(Fishkin 1991) or to which they might respond (Bohman 1996; Cohen and Arato
1988).
If contemporary democratic theory were one's only source of knowledge, one
might well think that "cognitive burdens" and other considerations related to
the problem of social complexity prevent any imaginable institutional
configuration from satisfying the double desiderata of both substantial direct
popular control high problem-solving capacity in conditions of high social
complexity that are represented in the lower right hand corner of Figure 3.1
above. Fortunately, many practical attempts to reform hierarchical
bureaucracies defy this high theoretical skepticism, and this volume explores
two of them. From these concrete activities, we develop a series of
countervailing arguments that show how properly organized democratic
participation actually enhances the capacities of public institutions
especially under complex conditions. In Chapter 9 below, these considerations
are elaborated and incorporated into the design and justification of Street
Level Democracy. Briefly, a deliberative system that can draw such
participation can arguably be more innovative than bureaucracy by shortening
feedback learning loops and allowing broad problem-solving experimentation,
engage the efforts of citizens and gain their trust in a ways that bureaucracy
cannot, and even develop a level of cross-functional coordination superior to
that available to pure administrative interactions.
Abstract and speculative arguments about the potential of citizen democracy to excel under high social complexity, however, cannot forcefully or decisively counter the large body of theoretical work that argues against the simultaneous possibility of high system capacity and popular control. A second, very practical objection is that bureaucracies, even admitting their substantial dysfunction, are nevertheless resilient institutions that possess substantial and demonstrated problem solving capacity, while the label "Street Level Democracy" in Figure 3.1 above marks a merely theoretical institutional possibility. You can't beat something with nothing, and hierarchical bureaucracy is at least something. The straightforward response to this well-taken objection is to supply a detailed theoretical specification of Street Level Democracy and an empirical examination of its operations in the real world. We do this in part II and part III respectively. By using institutional imagination and observation to construct an architecture of Street Level Democracy and then examining its application in the concrete cases of educational and police reform in Chicago, we show that at least two concrete sets of institutions occupy the lower right hand corner of figure 3.1. Therefore, that space is no longer simply a hypothetical possibility, but contains at least two actual and sizable municipal institutions.
A third objection--political in nature--accepts that reformed institutions
could simultaneously realize popular control and system capacity, but doubts
that transitions from dysfunctional bureaucracy to Street Level Democracy can
be easily made.[7] After all, entrenched agency
elites will no doubt have strong interests in perpetuating their fiefdoms
irrespective of social system capacity, and political elites seldom show much
interest in increasing popular control. After all, the abstract possibility of
Street Level Democracy existed in the 1960s as much as in the 1990s. However,
revolutionaries in the late 1960s and 1970s attacked these bureaucracies
sometimes as unresponsive to popular needs, sometimes as part of a larger
repressive state or capitalist apparatus. Police and school bureaucracies--in
Chicago at least--weathered these major disturbances fundamentally intact.
We respond to this political question of regime transition to Street Level
Democracy in the next two chapters by describing how the reforms were
politically constructed in the cases of the Chicago Public Schools and then for
the Chicago Police Department. It is somewhat surprising that a quiet and
creeping legitimation crisis, dating perhaps from the 1980s and still
unresolved, opened the window for municipal agency reform when the more
turbulent 1960s did not. Unlike the Progressive municipal reform described in
3.2 above, this crisis did not arise principally from concerns about
corruption, disorganization, or undue political influence--though of course
these are still serious concerns--but rather about the inability of these
agencies to deliver the goods of effectively educating our children or
maintaining safe neighborhoods.
In Chicago, parallel efforts to address that legitimation crisis in police and
school agencies have taken a curious democratic route that reverses the central
bureaucratic tenants of Progressive reform. Whereas the Progressives recommend
professional autonomy and reduction of popular control, the Chicago reforms
institute a kind of neighborhood democratic control. Whereas the Progressives
sought to centralize authority into hierarchies of command and monitoring,
current reforms decentralize municipal operations to extremely local units. And
where Progressives placed their confidence in the elite generation of practical
professional knowledge, this new scheme encourages the utilization of impacted
local information and development of expertise at the lowest, most operational
levels. This organizational package begins the larger reform ideal that I have
labeled Street Level Democracy.
Two contingent structural factors--neither of which was available in at the
onset of Progressive reform or in the upheavals of the 1960s--make local
participatory democracy feasible (though certainly not necessary) as a response
to anxiety over the poor performance of municipal agencies. First, the aims of
local control advocates no longer conflict with the ultimate goals of
professionals--effective and efficient service delivery. In the Progressive
Era, machine politicians championed local control over municipal agencies as an
institutional strategy to secure patronage. New Left movements of the 1960s,
favored local control to wrest pieces of the state from an established
professional class that was arrogant at its best, and violently repressive at
worst. Neither of these motives were compatible with professional conceptions
of effective service delivery. In the 1990s, however, many advocates of local
control and popular participation shared fundamental aims with professionals;
community activists in public safety and education wanted safer neighborhoods
and better schools, and their conceptions about meaning of these goals very
much resembled those of professional reformers. There was tension in style and
lack of trust, to be sure, but this fundamental alignment of interests between
political and professional reformers at least made alliance a possibility.
Second, vastly changed ideas about efficient organization also enabled
decentralizing reform. For most of this century, Progressive notions dominated
debates about efficient organizational forms. Few doubted that the complex and
demanding tasks set to the modern state would be most effectively accomplished
through hierarchical, bureaucratic organizations that commanded and supervised
from the top-down. To repeat, these notions were very much confirmed by, indeed
based upon, the form of the Fordist mass production enterprise. By the 1980s,
this view of efficiency had come under fire, to say the least. By 1990, few
reformers in any areas would champion hierarchy as their chief recommendation;
terms like partnership, teams, decentralization, and trust had had replaced
centralization and hierarchy as the catch phrases of consultants and popular
writers (Hess 1991: 101-4). No longer married through the wisdom of their
disciplines to the principle of hierarchy, professionals could entertain and
even experiment with the kind of decentralization necessary for Street Level
Democracy.
A third contingent political factor was necessary for Street Level Democratic
reform in the Chicago instances; sophisticated agents who push the case for
popular participation were prepared and on the scene when a legitimation
crisis cracked open windows of reform opportunity. As we shall see below, New
Left remnants stressed the importance of resident involvement during the
planning stages of both CPS and CPD reform. For years before the actual moment
of change, they had painstakingly documented the dimensions of crisis and
assembled detailed participatory democratic solutions. Without such agents for
grassroots democracy (though I don't want to say they were of the
grassroots), these large bureaucracies may have decentralized, but they
probably would not have incorporated extensive channels for popular
participation.
Above, we constructed an ideal history of institutional transitions between
three modes of organizing public action: decentralized machine politics,
hierarchical bureaucracy, and Street Level Democracy. The critical part of this
chapter laid out the trade-offs in selecting hierarchical bureaucracy as an
organizational form and then pointed out the possibility of Street Level
Democracy as a superior institutional choice. The next two chapters relate the
actual histories of bureaucratic construction and then Street Level Democratic
reform first for the Chicago Public Schools and then for the Chicago Police
Department. These narratives illustrate three points in the explication of SLD.
First, they show that the command-and-control structures that we take for
granted as the natural form of state action have existed in mature form only in
the post-World War II period and were constructed out of a long and frequently
bitter political struggle. Second, Street Level Democracy was by no means an
inevitable outcome of the breakdown of these large municipal bureaucracies, but
rather resulted from carefully constructed political alliances with distinctive
participatory democratic ideals. Finally, the histories show that the pieces of
SLD--first decentralization (Chapter 7) and then a supportive center[8] (Chapter 8)--were built not as part of a grand
design, but in stages as part of an institutional learning process that itself
was the product of, and in turn facilitated, deliberative learning at the
street level.
[1] See for example, Rousseau's Social
Contract:
Suppose the state is composed of ten thousand citizens. The sovereign can only
be considered collectively and as a body. But each private individual in his
position as a subject is regarded as an individual. Thus the sovereign is to
the subject as ten thousand is to one. In other words, each member of the state
has as his share only one ten-thousandth of the sovereign authority, even
though he is totally in subjection to it. If the populace is made up of a
hundred thousand men, the condition of the subjects does not change, and each
bears equally the entire domination of the laws, while his vote, reduced to one
hundred-thousandth, has ten times less influence in the drafting of them. (Bk.
III, Chap. 1. ¶11)
[2] See the discussion of the Priority of
Effectiveness in Chapter 2 (2.3.1) for further discussion of the argument for
oligarchic forms of organization based upon their effectiveness.
[3] Indeed, the theory os social choice informs
us that such a system is not generally logically possible. See Riker (1982).
[4] See, for example, Hays (1964) and Erie
(1988).
[5] So Woodrow Wilson (1887) writes that the
trick of progressive agency reform is "to make public opinion efficient without
suffering it to be meddlesome."
[6] For accounts of the long term negative
ramifications of these reforms on the working classes, see Hays (1964) and
Bowles and Gintis (1976).
[7] Adam Przeworski and Michael Wallerstein
illustrate this problem of transition from a less desirable to more desirable
regime in the case of moving from capitalism to socialism in their excellent
essay "Material Interests, Class Compromise, and the State" (1985).
[8] In the institutional design of SLD,
decentralization is discussed in chapter 7 and the "supportive center" in
chapter 8.