If the experts are to go round with cameras, and the administrative
officials to sit at their desks and construct policies, and the people to
assent, who is to do the living, who is to make up the "objective situation" to
be reported on? Its "objectivity" seems rather shadowy. But the people do live,
do carry on their activities from day to day, and all that advocates of
democracy want is that this shall be recognized in its full significance.
Democracy is a denial of dualism in every sense; it is an assertion that the
people who do the doing are also thereby doing the thinking, that a divorce of
these two is impossible. Our real problem is to connect the will of the people
as it lives daily in the multitudinous activities of men with the political
will.
Mary Parker Follett (1930)
The first task in our architectural description of Street Level Democracy is
to specify, as generally as possible, the character of the citizens who
participate in it. Why would individuals spend their time in street level
political processes like community policing and local school governance? What
kinds of skills of individual capacities does it take for them, and by
composition the group process, to be successful? Are these expectations about
how people will behave and what they are capable of doing realistic given the
conditions--lack of free time, poverty, poor education--that many citizens
face, or does SLD place too many demands on ordinary people? Finally, how does
SLD's image of political personality compare with that of three major schools
of democratic social theory--rational choice, liberalism, and communitarianism?
These are the main questions of this chapter.
We deduce the characteristics of SLD participants from the basic features of
the local political process itself. Though the thorough elaboration of that
process must wait until the next chapter, we briefly summarize some basic
features of this process that are relevant to the specification of citizens.
Citizens and line-level public servants form an ongoing group, a kind of open
committee, to deliberate about how to improve some important aspect of local
public life such as the safety of their neighborhood or the quality of their
school. These discussions often focus on actual problems such as what to do
about a drug house, selecting a curriculum, or how to deal with overcrowded
classrooms. In contrast to many kinds of popular deliberation that result in
recommendations or criticisms (Fishkin 1991; Habermas 1996; Arato and Cohen
1988; Gunderson 1995; Bohman 1996), these groups typically enjoy the authority
and power to implement their recommendations. Thirdly, whereas most kinds of
deliberative opinion formation and policy decision are forward-looking and
front-loaded, participants in SLD are engaged in an ongoing process in which
current decisions are largely based on the evaluation of past outcomes.
We call the mindset of citizens who participate in these problem solving
deliberations a public pragmatic psychology. They are pragmatists
because they join SLD processes (i) to advance concrete aims such as improving
school effectiveness or public safety, (ii) are open to a wide variety of
strategies that might plausibly advance that end, and (iii) to search
relentlessly for the most effective strategies. This simple pragmatic
psychology[1] is driven by just three central
elements: a hard-driving disposition to finding strategies that work, using
real world results to determine whether strategies are working, and realizing
that an effective search for such strategies entails using this evidence to
break away from, or at least cast doubt upon, deeply ingrained habits,
opinions, privileges, and dogmatic ideologies (James 1975: 31; Pierce 1877,
1878; Dewey 1896). For example, a black Muslim member of the Nation of Islam
and white ethnic police officer engaged in community policing problem solving
may each come to find though close observation of other that many of his
expectations turn out to be mistaken. Though they disagree with one another on
nearly every "fundamental" political issue, and might never see eye to eye in a
Habermassian public sphere, behavioral evidence in face-to-face interaction
could nevertheless reveals that they can work, even trust, one another in the
limited context of advancing neighborhood safety. Being pragmatists for the
purposes of SLD, they accept this evidence, set aside their ideological
preconceptions, and get to work.
This pragmatism is public in the sense that citizens need only hold
this state of mind in their capacity as participants in Street Level Democracy.
Outside of the context of SLD, we expect that they will hold a variety of world
views and habits of thought that may be quite inconsistent with pragmatic
methods and dispositions.[2] Suppose that the
Black Muslim and the white police officer in the hypothetical example above
hold exactly complementary extremist theories of racial difference and
superiority which, in their minds, are not subject to tests of evidence and
experiment. The public pragmatic psychology requires them only to modify these
background views according to evidence and argument within the direct
processes of SLD problem-solving deliberation. We call it a "public"
psychology because it makes no claims or demands outside of the context of SLD.
In private life and other political contexts, citizens can hold a variety of
non-pragmatic "comprehensive doctrines" (Rawls 1993: 13).
We elaborate this basic notion of a public pragmatic psychology by describing
its component motives and capacities. The answer to the first question of
motivation is simple. Individuals participate in SLD institutions because they
believe that their participation will contribute to outcomes that they
desire.[3] They do not participate (primarily)
because they enjoy participation, because they feel a duty to participate,
because they feel embarrassment if they do not participate, or because they
feel particular allegiance to the institutions of SLD. Although each of these
other motivations does not harm SLD, and may indeed explain empirically
observed rates of participation in SLD institutions, the normative conception
relies only on rational self-interest.
In our cases of education and public safety, individuals participate in SLD
governance institutions because (i) they have an interest in better schools or
safer neighborhoods, and (ii) because they believe that their participation
will improve their particular school or make their neighborhood safer. As soon
as they loose these interests or come to believe that personal involvement is
not efficacious, they stop participating. They are, after all, pragmatists. It
should be noted that this requirement of rational efficacy upon political
institutions is quite demanding--electoral institutions, for example, quite
arguably fail it from the perspective of voters (Riker and Ordeshook 1968).
Second, what mental capacities do individuals need in order to be
able to participate effectively in SLD? Citizens must possess the abilities
necessary to deliberate and solve problems with one another in the institutions
of SLD. If they lack these capacities, or if they cannot or will not exercise
them, then the deliberative process will fail to generate fair and effective
outcomes. SLD assumes that normally functioning individuals possess these
capacities to an equal extent, though the degree of development of the
capacities will vary among different individuals depending upon experience,
socialization, training, background socioeconomic advantages, and other such
factors. Keeping these caveats in mind, we say citizens need five capacities as
part of their pragmatic public psychology in order to be effective in SLD. They
need the capacity of (i) limited practical reason, (ii) public justification,
(iii) assessment and evaluation, (iv) ironic revision, and (v) moral
restraint.
Practical reason is just the commonplace capacity that everyone has to connect
means with ends--to make fairly good guesses about which strategies will get
them what they want. Everyone has this capacity and most activities in life
involve exercising it, and so it requires no great elaboration.[4] It should be noted, however, that the effectiveness of
one's practical reason in specific areas like education, environmental
protection, policing, or health and public safety no doubt benefits from
training and experience. Furthermore, the practical reason of citizens in SLD
is limited because they guess only imperfectly about optimal strategies
and courses of action, and--since they are pragmatists--they know their guesses
are imperfect. They participate in SLD institutions partly to compensate for
the limitations in their own practical reason by supplementing it with the
insights of others and with the accumulated experience of ongoing
problem-solving.
Subsequently, the capacity of public justification is the second
critical competence of pragmatic citizens. SLD is a deliberative process. As
such, participants must discuss and argue with one another about why the group
should focus on particular problems, devote its resources to some strategies
rather than others, or weigh particular bits of evidence heavily and discard
others. Each of us conducts these thought processes internally, in our own
minds, in the course of exercising practical reason about our individual
decisions. Public justification is simply the act of articulating these private
reasons in group discussion. The engagement of multiple parties in this process
of public justification pools practical wisdom and information and thereby
potentially yields group decisions that are both fair and effective. Though we
all exercise this capacity public justification constantly in our everyday
lives in making family decisions or when we serve on various kinds of civic and
professional committees, I highlight it because the most common everyday
understandings of politics do not incorporate this public justification.[5] In voting, for example, one simply casts a
ballot and need not reveal his or her reasons for supporting a particular
candidate or issue to the rest of the electorate. Indeed, the Australian ballot
does not even require one to reveal one's ultimate choices.
To make this practice of pragmatic, street level public justification a bit
more concrete, consider a real world example. Suppose that a city has a "gang
loitering" ordinance that allows police to disperse groups of suspicious
looking people from street corners without substantial demonstration of
probably cause.[6] Under the non-deliberative
arrangements of command-and-control policing, the decision about whether or not
to enforce the ordinance on a particular corner would be left up to either the
patrol officer on the beat or his immediate supervisors. Public input into this
decision would most likely come in the form of charges of police harassment or
as efforts by civil libertarians to overturn the law on grounds of
Constitutional impermissibility. Under Street Level Democracy, however, the
decision about whether to enforce the law in particular cases must be supported
with publicly offered reasons and evidence from both citizens and police. So,
there might be a formidible public case for enforcing the law on a corner that
has been the site of repeated drive-by shootings or armed robberies. On the
other hand, those who actually hang out on a second, quiet corner might counter
police (or resident) proposals to enforce the ordinance with public arguments
that their presence does not contribute to any criminal activity. They might
further point out that the real reasons for enforcing the loitering ordinance
on this quiet corner have more to do with racist or anti-youth sentiments that
would be rejected in open public discourse. Now many civil libertarians and
social conservatives would no doubt be uncomfortable with leaving important
decisions about police action to the imperfect deliberations of ordinary
citizens and lowly officers--the former might prefer a blanket prohibit in the
form of actionable right while the later might favor tough, unrestricted police
discretion. Since this example is intended to illustrate how public
justification operates, we reserve considerations of objections to this scheme
until Chapters 9 and 10 below.
In addition to limited practical reason and public justification, the third
critical capacity of pragmatic citizens is their ability to assess and
evaluate their own goals and strategies and those of others on the basis of
observed evidence. Following the language of pragmatism, the strategies
developed with the use of practical reason always contain within them, as
tentative hypotheses, expectations about effects that these strategies will
produce. Inevitably, strategies will miss the mark a bit, and sometimes they
miss completely. Since SLD processes are continuous and iterative, professional
and citizen participants practiced in the art of assessment and evaluation can
use this information to develop better strategies. In the example of the gang
loitering ordinance above, for example, it may turn out that clearing
suspicious youth off of a corner where many shootings occur has little impact
on the shootings. SLD only works if citizens possess and utilize their
capacities of assessment and evaluation to recognize this lack of impact and
formulate alternative strategies.
Again, this practice of assessment and evaluation is as obvious as it is
frequent in everyday life, but the most common theories of political decision
and individual choice do not explicitly incorporate this obvious mechanism of
feedback through time. Instead, they treat decisions as once and for all, and
thus depend on foresight, which of course is much less reliable than hindsight.
For instance, the theory of maximizing expected utility looks forward into
time, with agents assigning probability and utility weights to various
outcomes, and then selecting the choice that maximizes the "expected utility,"
which is simply the product of the utility associated with a choice and the
likelihood of its occurrence (von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944). As a second
example, most negotiation theories attempt to forge lasting agreements and
solutions that fairly balance the interests of various parties, when the
outcomes of implementing those agreements are never quite what the parties
think that they will be.[7]
A fourth element of the pragmatic psychology, partially an extension of the
first three, is the capacity of ironic revision. Implicit in pragmatic
thought is the notion that as we take action to achieve our various ends, the
public justification of those strategies and surprises that result from the
implementation of those strategies lead us to revise our strategies, goals,
even identities and interests. We may enter SLD deliberations fairly--but not
overly--confident that we possess the correct strategy to improve the operation
of our local school. We may find in the course of trying to persuade others at
the school that our own strategy does not incorporate important information or
that it imposes unreasonable burdens on other parties such as the teaching or
janitorial staff. Alternatively, teachers, professional, and other parents may
agree that our strategy is a good one, but implementation and assessment may
later reveal it to be fruitless. In either case, the possession of the capacity
of ironic revision means that we are not too tenacious or dogmatic to revise
our initial perspectives based on new arguments or evidence.
Now this same capacity for ironic revision may lead us to transformations that
reach deeper than superficial strategies and policy preferences. We may, in the
course of pragmatic action, come to transform the basic ends that we seek and
our political identities. Return to the hypothetical example of the Black
Muslim and the ethnic white police officer thrown together in a common
community policing discussion. The Black Muslim participates in the process
because he wants to use community policing to contain police abuse of residents
in his community. While he agrees that the community is ravaged by crime and
illicit narcotics trafficking, his main objective in community policing is to
stem harmful police actions such as arbitrary street stops, harassment, and
senseless random arrests. For him, the police are just another of his
community's many problems. In the course of community policing problem-solving,
suppose that he comes to find that the particular officers in his neighborhood,
though they do indeed carry out random, senseless harassment and arrests, do so
because that is the their operative conception of law enforcement and order
maintenance and not because they particularly enjoy it. When he suggests that
random stops don't catch criminals but do arouse hostility in the community,
they ask what else might work better. When he demonstrates with testimony and
other evidence that some blocks are worse than others, the police willingly
re-deploy their energies accordingly. When the police in turn ask for his help
in organizing some residents to file complaints against residents in a
particularly bad drug house, he is pleasantly surprised by their initiative and
new found ability to discriminate between real and imagined problems and so
happy to help. Insofar as identity is constituted by membership in some groups
and opposition to others, the Black Muslim has altered his identity through
ironic revision; rather than sticking to his initial notion that police were a
blight on his community--an enemy to be feared and fended off--he now sees
himself as a member of a tentative partnership with them.
On the other side of this hypothetical example, consider the white ethnic
police officer who patrols the neighborhood in question. He enters the process
because it is part of his job--the community policing program requires him to
be there. As with other parts of his job, such as stopping and questioning
suspicious persons and dispersing the congregations of young black men who
gather on the corners in this neighborhood, he does it because it is his duty
and because he is paid to do it. He is not so naïve, however, to think
that these measures or anything else in his power will perceptibly improve the
safety or livability of the cesspool that is his beat. In the course of
discussions with black residents in the neighborhood at these incessant
meetings, he finds that his patrol activities anger residents, and he complies
with their requests for him to back off certain areas which they claim are not
really problems. They offered some evidence to support this claim, and he has
no interest in wasting his time and some interest in quieting them down. Soon
after, they ask him to focus patrol on particular sections where they claim
most of the criminal activity in the area occurs. Again he complies, and--to
his surprise--he discovers one or two drug houses operating there that he
hadn't known about previously. With some assistance from the residents, they
manage to evict the dealers that live in those houses, and the residents report
in later meetings that things around that area have palpably improved. He
begins to take new interest in the neighborhood; he begins to think that some
police action can make some difference to the people who live there. In this
hypothetical, he used the evidence generated in the process to revise his own
interests from just getting a paycheck and going through the motions of
ordinary policing to taking an active interest in seeing the neighborhood
improve through his actions. In the absence of a capacity for ironic revision,
he would have ignored the new information presented by residents that his
actions did make a difference and clung instead to the dimmer view that nothing
changes.
Street Level Democracy also requires its pragmatic citizens to possess a fifth capacity of moral restraint. Unlike the first four capacities which require potential powers to act in various ways, this final capacity entails a willingness or power of self-restraint. It is an ability to abide by rules of fair play. The capacity of moral constraint as it relates to SLD deliberation has two components: (i) the capacity to constrain the pursuit of self interest according to norms of reasonableness and (ii) the capacity to abide with the results of SLD deliberation in SLD. On the first component, SLD demands that participants be reasonable in the sense that reciprocity and justifiability constrains the rational pursuit of self-interest. Individuals seek to use the powers of SLD only to advance ends which they justify as common for the group in the process of deliberation. If the group rejects those ends as inappropriate in a fair and open deliberative process, then the norms of reasonableness dictate that individuals no longer seek to advance them in SLD deliberations unless additional argument or evidence reveals them to be appropriate. The same principle applies to the selection of strategies to advance deliberatively chosen ends. Individuals agree to implement only those strategies which result from the deliberative process. Finally, the main decision force in SLD is the force of a better argument, not force of authority (as in hierarchy) or numerical superiority (as in voting). Individuals regulate their support for various proposals--especially their own--by honestly evaluating its publicly justified merits compared against other proposals. This is what it means for the norms of deliberation to constrain the pursuit of self-interest.
In a second component of moral restraint, SLD also demands that individuals comply with outcomes generated by its deliberative process. SLD is a process of group decision, and these decisions frequently call upon participants to take action. It requires individuals, therefore, to generate the motivation requisite for follow-through action: to do what they commit to do when they enter the deliberative problem-solving process. Sometimes, participants will retain reservations about the group decision, but their commitment to the process requires them to take action despite such hesitations.[8] One mitigating pragmatic provision is that goals and strategies are always open to reevaluation and reconsideration in future rounds of SLD deliberation.
Having laid out the central motivations and capacities, the "public
psychology," of citizens when they participate in SLD processes, to what extent
can we expect actual citizens to exhibit these characteristics? Is the public
psychology a standard, a set of norms, which describes ideal citizens as we
would like them to be, or does it describe individuals as they actually behave
in Street Level Democracy? The short answer that it is both normative and
descriptive. From casual observation in the world, we see that individuals
possess the motivation of self-interest, and that everyone has developed each
of the five capacities to some degree.
One obvious objection to this pragmatic psychology is that, while there may be
a minimal grain of descriptive truth to each of the elements, individuals do
not generally exhibit these capacities to a sufficient degree that they will
cooperate effectively in Street Level Democracy. So, for example, rational self
interest may overwhelm individuals' general capacity for moral constraint.
Furthermore, the practical reason of ordinary citizens and street level
bureaucrats may not be sufficient to generate effective strategies against the
complex problems they face. A twofold response defends the psychology against
this objection. First, this dispute can only be settled empirically. Once real
institutions that approximate SLD have been constructed, careful observation
can reveal whether individuals are sufficiently motivated to participate in
them and whether, once there, they possess sufficient pragmatic capacities
generate fair and effective outcomes. This empirical examination is carried out
in some detail in the third part of this volume, Chapters 11 through 16.
The second answer, more theoretical and speculative, is that mechanisms of SLD
itself contribute to the development of the psychology that it requires. As
just mentioned, we presume that individuals potentially possess each of these
capacities to some degree, but that the development of these capacities varies
among individual depending factors such as training and advantage. Unlike many
other institutional conceptions, SLD treats the development of these individual
capacities as an internal matter; its institutional design must account for how
even disadvantaged individuals can develop these capacities sufficiently to
participate as equals in the community and process of inquiry. SLD would no
doubt be aided enormously by a robust background of associations, educational
institutions, families, and workplaces that can function as schools of
democracy to develop these capacities, but SLD must provide its own democratic
instruction absent this institutional background (and it is often absent in the
ghettos of Chicago). Therefore, the institutional structure of SLD creates
incentives for participants to develop the five pragmatic capacities and part
of its design is to supply resources, such as subject specific training, for
participants to develop their practical reason. Even if individuals possess the
requisite psychology only minimally when they begin to participate in SLD, we
expect that the institution's incentives and resources will allow them to
develop each of the component capacities.
Consider the two capacities of limited practical reason and re-evaluation and
assessment. In Street Level Democracy, this first problem solving capacity
varies greatly across issues and with training and experience. Keen problem
solving abilities in the area of neighborhood safety, for example, are not
completely portable to school governance. So, since everyone has a lot to learn
when they begin to participate in the process, the design of SLD, as
discussed[9] in Chapters 3 and 4, provides for
substantial training in problem-solving practical reason. A program within the
community policing initiative trained police officers and residents in the
same problem-solving course. A state school reform law requires those who serve
on Local School Councils to take specific courses in issues such as principal
selection, school budgeting, and improvement planning.
In addition to providing such explicit support for psychological development,
SLD provides incentives for participants to themselves build these capacities.
Recall that the main motive for participation in SLD is to improve some aspect
of local life such as the quality of the school or safety in the neighborhood.
The products--strategies and implementation--of SLD are only as good as its
participants; a group of participants who each lack deliberative skills will
find it difficult to solve problems effectively. Therefore, the same motive
which brings them into SLD also motivates them to develop the relevant
capacities. By becoming better able to propose strategies (limited practical
reason) and assess their outcomes, group action becomes more effective because
deliberation includes a richer set of proposals. With better capacities of
public justification, one is better able to detect poor proposals and argue for
superior ones, and the group is thereby more likely to choose wisely. Those who
do not possess or refuse to exercise their capacity of moral restraint by
behaving and arguing reasonably will not be likely to find a receptive audience
among the other participants.
Contrast this institutional incentive structure with more common forms of
politics such as casting a ballot or developing critical political opinions in
the public sphere (Habermas 1989). These two very different forms of political
activity share one common feature; an individual's choices in both are very
unlikely--except with extraordinary individuals or in extraordinary times--to
result in any detectable consequences. Therefore, in a phenomenon sometimes
called the problem of "rational ignorance," these institutions offer no
straightforward incentives for individuals to expend the energy and resources
necessary to acquire relevant information (Downs 1957: 147; Cohen and Rogers
1983) or develop relevant skills. Why bother to form a considered opinion,
except out of civic duty or idiosyncratic interest, about whether the United
States should provide military support to some far off country or whether
increasing prison sentences will reduce crime? Whether the political
institution is the ballot box or the local bar, the quality of an individual's
opinion on these matters will in all likelihood not make an iota of difference.
If one serves on a Local School Council, on the other hand, one need not have
any special interest in educational theory to be motivated to form a sound
opinion on curriculum matters, because one's opinion--for better or
worse--will, almost certainly, make some difference.
To summarize, Street Level Democracy requires its participants to possess
dispositions and capacities that we have called a pragmatic public psychology.
Though all normally functioning individuals possess the critical elements of
this psychology to some minimal degree, the capacities may be minimally
developed. However, we expect that individuals who continue to participate in
Street Level Democracy will continue to develop these capacities because SLD
provides resources and incentives for them to do so. Since the institutional
structure builds the psychology on which it depends with feedback, this
democratic proposal provides its own minimal psychological pre-conditions.
We conclude this discussion of the nature of SLD's citizens by briefly contrasting its elements with those of three common perspectives on political personality: rational choice, liberalism, and communitarianism. Now each of these perspectives offers complex notions of the individual, and each is internally diverse. Our purpose, therefore, is not to treat the differences exhaustively, but rather to construct theoretical bridges between each of these views and the pragmatic notion of citizenship developed above. We highlight points of basic commonality in the views to examine possibility of building such bridges, and then illuminate the differences to examine the robustness of the connections. In the consideration of these three views, bear in mind the limited scope of the psychological claims above. The pragmatic political personality laid out above applies to SLD participants only when they engage in activities related to its deliberative problem solving processes. It is therefore only a partial theory of overall personality; unlike, for example, a comprehensive "economic approach to human behavior" (Becker 1976) that views individuals as utility maximizers in all aspects of their lives, the pragmatic psychology offered above applies only in one small dimension of life--political participation in Street Level Democratic institutions.[10] Since the psychological view is silent about contexts outside of SLD, it may well be that the individuals who behave pragmatically there exhibit these other personalities in various spheres; some may be communitarian in their family or civic lives, rational maximizers in economic (and family and civic) life, or liberals with respect to social policy and Constitutional matters.
The pragmatic psychology described above shares the motive of self-interest
in common with all rational choice views. Pragmatic citizens in Street Level
Democracy participate in programs such as community policing and school reform
out of the selfish interest that they have in seeing their local school improve
or their neighborhood become safer. In rational choice jargon, these goods make
up part of the utility function of participants who participate in SLD
institutions, and they allocate part of their budgets--time, money, psychic
energy--toward securing this good. Despite this common point of departure,
however, two important differences separate the psychology of pragmatic
citizens from most variants of rational choice decision-making.
First, problems involved with improving schools or making neighborhoods safer
are highly complex matters without straightforward answers, and so participants
typically lack clear and ordered preferences over group policy decisions.
Complexity makes it difficult for participants to calculate optimal strategies
prior to discussion or to enter the these democratic governance processes with
fixed preferences about the outcomes that they desire. In other words, the
multi-faceted and difficult nature of the problems that they would like to
solve imposes severe "bounds" on their ability to determine courses of action
(Simon 1955; March 1978). Other than deciding to participate, participants
often have few fixed preferences about courses of action that the larger group
ought to take. As a typical example, someone interested in community policing
to improve neighborhood safety, upon entering the process, will be open to
various approaches such as eliminating the most severe drug houses, regulating
commercial establishments around which criminal activity might be concentrated,
or reducing prostitution which draws potentially violent persons from other
parts of the city. Similarly, someone interested in school improvement might be
open to a variety of approaches to begin that path, such as improving the
physical condition of the building, changing curriculum, or installing new
technology.
Whereas rational choice models and approaches imagine that political actors
have relatively stable preferences over various policies (Becker 1976; Downs
1957; Riker 1982), the context of street level democracy problematizes the
connection between policies and outcomes. Unlike many political decisions--such
as the politics of abortion rights or gun control--there is no straightforward
translation of particular policy choices into desired outcomes such as school
improvement or neighborhood safety. The citizens who participate do so in order
to enter a problem solving discussion and action process that clarifies their
own beliefs about what works--this is just the process of improving their
practical reason as discussed above (6.1, 6.2). In discussion with others about
which proposals to adopt, they consider the merits of various options and use
this new information to re-order their own policy preferences. In the course of
implementing proposals and assessing outcomes, they experimentally improve the
street level social theories that they use to relate strategies to goal. One
difference between the psychology of the citizens of Street Level Democracy as
opposed to citizens as imagined in most rational choice theories is that the
former enter SLD political processes in order to clarify their thoughts on
complex political matters in a continuous process of discussion and tentative
implementation, while the later enter political arenas in order to assert their
prior fixed preferences over various policies. This difference does not in any
way imply that pragmatic citizens are not maximizing their utility with
respect to school improvement or neighborhood safety; the introduction of
complexity does not mean that citizens are a-rational or irrational. It simply
implies that understanding citizens as utility maximizers is not descriptively
or predictively helpful since optimal courses of action must be discovered
rather than asserted.
A second component of the pragmatic mindset in SLD, however, does conflict with
more fundamental tenants of the rational choice view. The fifth capacity of
moral restraint specifies that individuals should and will constrain the
pursuit of their narrow self interest according to the norms of reasonable
deliberation; the norm establishes an upper-bound on self-interest
maximization. On this view, individuals will not maximize their own self
interest when deliberation reveals that doing so is unreasonable. Consider a
hypothetical example to clarify this point.[11] Jones, who lives in a wealthy area of the neighborhood,
got involved in community policing to stop teenagers from drinking in the park
next to his house. Though nothing criminal, tragic, or violent has happened as
yet, he does consider the practice a nuisance, and potentially dangerous since
the kids drive home. Smith lives on the other side of the neighborhood in a
poor area that lies on the other side of the highway from Jones. He joined the
same community policing program because the shooting around the open air drug
market next to his house were beginning to frighten him. When it comes time to
allocate the resources of the group toward various problems, Jones suggest that
the group ought to focus on drinking in the park, while Smith argues for trying
to eliminate the open air drug market. The norm of moral restraint requires
that Jones recognize that Smith's problem is more severe, and that it should
receive priority in terms of scheduling limited problem solving resources. As a
descriptive and normative view, rational choice maximization allows Jones to
push for his priority by lobbying others, arguing more vocally, and stacking
the meetings. Such measures are decidedly anti-deliberative, and the pragmatic
psychology demands that Jones recognize the superior merits of Smith's
concerns.
Absent some too-clever explanation that might involve recognition of
interdependence or the development of norms through iterated interactions
(Taylor 1987), the pragmatic psychology departs from rational choice theory
concerning the degree to which citizens will restrain themselves according to
the deliberative norm of reasonableness. This normative and predictive
departure--whether individuals will limit the pursuit of their self-interest
according to fair-play norms in the political context of Street Level
Democracy--must be settled primarily as an empirical matter, and we attempt to
do this in the case studies of Chapters 13 through 16 below.
Consider secondly points of commonality and difference between elements of the
liberal and pragmatic political personalities. Liberalism is of course a vast
set of doctrines, but perhaps its most foundational commitment is a respect for
the dignity of individual human beings. Liberalism aims to build a social
system that respects, even fosters, the diverse and distinctive creeds and aims
of every individual at the same time that it recognizes our interdependence on
one another and therefore the need for social cooperation (Mill 1989). Liberals
generally recommend at least two sorts of political arrangements to advance
this fundamental philosophical commitment to individual dignity. First,
institutions of popular sovereignty help assure that state actions respect the
wishes of citizens. Second, liberals favor a common set of basic rights should
that protect individuals from a tyrannical state or from the unjust or
arbitrary decisions of political majorities.
On the former, liberalism, not distinctively of course, favors democratic
rule; it supports the notion that the actions of the state require the consent
and direction of its citizens. While liberals don't assert that active
political engagement is the highest form of life, they do contend that a system
in which all citizens have political liberties such as freedom of expression
and association, a universal franchise, and accessible political offices is
essential to producing laws that treat people as equals. Rawls puts it this
way:
We should be clear about why the equal political liberties are treated in a
special way... It is not because political life and the participation by
everyone in democratic government is regarded as the preeminent good for fully
autonomous citizens. To the contrary, assigning a central place to political
life is but one conception of the good among others... The guarantee of the
fair values of political liberties... is essential in order to establish just
legislation and also to make sure that the fair political process specified by
the constitution is open to everyone on a basis of rough equality. (1993:
330)
In a point of commonality with the liberal citizen, Street Level Democracy
extends the liberalism's commitment to popular sovereignty by adding a directly
democratic component to its already rich tapestry of political
institutions--Courts, legislatures, traditional agencies, interest groups, and
the rest. It squares with liberal intentions, perhaps substantially extending
the realization of its values, by extending the quality and quantity of
political channels that insure that the actions of the state conform to the
wishes of the people. Furthermore, as explained in the next chapter, the
opportunities for political participation in Street Level Democratic
institutions are regulated according to the same values of open access,
publicity, and fairness with which we regulate those more familiar political
institutions. In this way, SLD offers liberals one more way for citizens to
participate in the affairs of government and affect its outcomes.
Beyond this general commitment to popular sovereignty, liberals also share a
commitment that individuals should be able to count on a stable set of basic
rights that cannot be easily over-ridden by popular government (Dworkin 1977).
These rights protect them from interference from other persons and especially
from unjust state action. Rawls calls these rights "basic liberties" and
includes among them:
Liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of person along with the
right to hold (personal) property; and freedom from arbitrary arrest and
seizure as defined by the concept and the rule of law. (1971: 61)
The particular list of liberties and their justification varies among liberal theorists, but one common reason to support a set of such rights is that they create a kind of sphere of freedom on which one can comfortably depend in planning one's life whatever the shifting winds of democratic opinion. Hayek, in defending even more stringent limitations on state power, argues that
The essence of free society is that the private individual is not one of the
resources which government administers, and that a free person can count on
using a known domain of such resources on the basis of his knowledge for his
purposes. Government under the law meant to the theorists of representative
government that, in directing the administrative machinery, government could
not use it to coerce private persons except to make them observe universal
rules of just conduct. (Hayek 1967)
Following upon this attractive idea that government ought to ensure that
individuals can count on certain basic liberties in making life plans, a
liberal might endorse Street Level Democracy if it can effectively secure these
rights where traditional administrative and legislative bodies have failed. Any
scheme of liberal basic liberties, for example, includes the right to physical
bodily integrity and personal property. Those who lacks these guarantees, those
for whom physical harm and theft present inescapably oppressive concerns, find
it extremely difficult to formulate and carry out the kinds of diverse plans
that make a life dignified and worthwhile in the liberal view.[12] As we know, many citizens live in dangerous neighborhoods
where they do not enjoy even the basic right of personal and material security.
If Street Level Democracy effectively secures the basic liberty, then liberals
should favor it because they recognize this right as critical.
Similarly, liberals might favor Street Level Democratic governance to realize
their commitment to equality of educational opportunity (Gutmann 1987; San
Antonio 1972; Rawls 1993: 184). Though not all liberals favor public
measures to insure equal educational, many do on the grounds that effective
education provides children with the resources they need to make considered
life plans for themselves and that it enables them to utilize other basic
rights such as guarantees of political participation. As with the problem of
safety, however, we find that our educational system falls far short of this
ideal. If SLD reforms to school systems end up improve our worst-off schools
better than other available measures, then liberals should support it on the
basis of its beneficial consequences for the reality of equal educational
opportunity.
On the other hand, liberals might suspect that SLD's expansion and devolution
of democratic power will erode the structure of basic rights which they hold
dear. The trouble is straightforward; our constitutional system entrenches and
vindicates basic rights through the mechanism of judicial review. Courts may
overrule decisions of legislatures and administrative agencies when they see
that those decisions violate fundamental rights (Dahl 1957; Dworkin 1981). SLD
reforms such as community policing and school reform multiply popular power a
thousand-fold by creating hundreds of tiny deliberative bodies endowed with
public, quasi-legislative powers that penetrate the interstices of neighborhood
life. This empowerment of democracy would threaten an already frail system of
protecting rights through judicial checks if pragmatic citizens regularly
trampled basic rights in the course of zealous problem-solving endeavors. Many
measures that "work" tread on thin Constitutional ice. Relatedly, the pragmatic
psychology's "can-do" disposition might fail to engender sufficient respect for
basic liberal rights.
The short, litigious experience with Street Level Democratic institutions in
school governance and community policing seems to confirm this suspicion that
institutionalizing popular problem solving will invade established rights. For
example, almost as soon as the school reform legislation (discussed in Chapter
4) passed, the Chicago Principals Association challenged the legislation on two
counts (Hess 1991: 187). First, they argued that the 1988 reform legislation
denied them property without due process of law. Whereas principals had
previously enjoyed tenured job security, the 1988 law stipulated that LSCs
choose whether or not to renew principal contacts every three years based on
performance assessments. School principals argued that their previous tenure
was a kind of property, and that the 1988 law was therefore an impermissible
taking of this property. Second, they argued that the scheme of electing LSC
members according to sector (representation--parents electing parents, teachers
electing teachers) violated constitutional provisions for equal political
representation--understood as one equally weighted vote per person. After two
lower courts ruled against the Principals Association on both counts, the
Illinois State Supreme Court ruled in their favor on the second issue and
recommended that the legislature reformulate the law. Eventually, the
legislature passed constitutionally sound amendments in which identical voting
procedures would determine advisory LSC memberships that would be subsequently
formally appointed by the Mayor. This arrangement has thus far passed
Constitutional muster.
Similarly, community policing has also altered the configuration of practical
liberties enjoyed by Chicago citizens. Consider several ways in which these SLD
reforms have eroded the real property rights of landlords to do what they wish
with their buildings. Many absentee property owners in Chicago, as in all
American cities, are less than vigilant in maintaining their properties and in
selecting tenants who will be good neighbors. Since these sorts of residences
sometimes become "hotspots" of criminal activity such as narcotics trafficking,
prostitution, and firearms violations in low income neighborhoods, community
policing groups often target them as "problem properties." More often than not,
strategies to eliminate these problems have targeted these absentee landlords
through direct protest, petitions, and law suits brought in housing court for
code violations. Landlords variously respond--sometimes under court
supervision--with building improvements, persuading tenants to become better
neighbors, evicting tenants, or negotiating memoranda of understanding with
angry residents that include these and other measures. Whereas housing code
violations often escaped notice prior to community policing activists'
attentions, Chicago housing courts more frequently impose fines and jail
sentences on landlords who fail to respond to these charges. Consequently, even
as the legally enforceable rights of landlords as written in the formal
building codes have not changed, these landlords' sphere of action over their
property has constricted due to community policing campaigns.
The Chicago "nuisance abatement" ordinance of 1996 and its "fast track"
building demolition ordinance of 1994, both created in part to empower
community policing groups, have further eroded the formal as well as
substantive rights of Chicago property owners. The nuisance abatement law,[13] whose details are discussed in Chapter 8,
imposes a new duty upon landlords to monitor the conduct of their tenants. If
landlords "permit" illegal activity to occur in or around their properties,
they are subject to daily fines as long as the activity continues. As with the
housing court violations, enforcement of the nuisance abatement ordinance is
often triggered by community policing groups' complaints.
In a tragi-comical escalation of the "broken windows" theory that a few
ill-kept buildings often mark the decline of a neighborhood (Wilson and Kelling
1989; Kelling 1996), it is a well established fact that abandoned building in
Chicago often attract criminal and otherwise illicit activity that blights
neighborhoods. The City of Chicago began its "fast track" demolition program in
1994 to address this problem. Under the program, vacant and open buildings that
presented a special threat were put, often by community policing groups, on a
list for expedited demolition. The owner of the property was notified and given
several short weeks to secure the building by sealing access points such as
windows and doors. If the owner failed to comply, a city agency would demolish
the building, rendering it much less threatening to the neighborhood. Between
1994 and 1997, some 1200 buildings were destroyed under this program.[14] In early 1997, a property owner who had not
been properly notified that his building had been listed on the fast track
brought suit against the city for denying his property without due process of
law. Judge Raymond Castillo of the Seventh U.S. District Court enjoined the
program in May 1997 out of such procedural concerns and because, obiter
dictum, the public has an interest in preserving valuable housing stock.
Two months later, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the injunction
against the fast track program, arguing that the program was established to
advance the reasonable end of protecting public safety while its administrative
provisions did not violate due process considerations (Keith Mckenzie, et
al. v. City Of Chicago, et al 1997).
These four examples from the institutional experience of Street Level
Democracy show how the structure and efforts of effective problem-solving alter
the pre-existing configuration of formal and substantive rights. Each example
was presented as the erosion of rights, but each might also have been offered
as an illustration of the clash of rights, and in particular how pragmatic
efforts to secure, in practice, rights of personal security and equal
educational opportunity were constrained by other rights of job security, a
particular notion of political equality, and expansive property rights. It
seems difficult to deny that these uniform rights--perhaps sensible when
considered one at a time or from the lofty distance of a legislative assembly
or judicial chamber--lie in substantial tension at the street level. The real
question is whether Street Level Democracy's pragmatic problem-solving works to
expand or contract the overall scheme of rights. There are two reasons, neither
of them completely persuasive, to think that SLD will strengthen rather than
shrink the overall protection of rights.
The first follows from two facts about the world and one feature of pragmatic
deliberation. The facts are first that even the most basic liberal rights--such
as personal security--are daily violated in many areas and second that many
obvious ways to extend the realization of this right would violate other basic
rights. In the case of extending personal safety in low income areas, for
example, stronger policing measures might expand the basic liberty of
individual security for many by violating components of that basic liberty--by
illegal search and seizure, requirements of probably cause, restriction of
movement, and criminal due process--for some smaller number of citizens. Other
measures to expand the protection of personal safety might violate or constrict
property rights of landlords in their rental properties, as described above.
When rights clash in this way, pragmatic citizens can balance them--in the
sense of selecting which rights to advance through problem solving and which
methods should not be utilized because they would violate critical rights--in
the process of Street Level Democratic deliberation.
Ideal deliberation is driven by the process of justification in which citizens
offer reasons to support proposals, as we mentioned above and as we shall
elaborate in the next chapter. All of the basic liberal rights would count as
extremely good reasons when offered in this deliberative process, just as they
do in the deliberations of the United States Supreme Court (Dworkin 1981).
These ground level deliberative procedures might then offer a mechanism to
expand the effective scheme of rights by deploying resources to advance
realization of the most important rights. Since respecting rights often
requires refraining from certain actions, deliberation may of course also
result in the rejection of problem-solving actions on the basis that those
actions will violate basic rights. In addition to making rights more secure by
providing a mechanism for the local resolution of rights conflicts, including
the imperfect realization of basic rights, pragmatic deliberation about how and
when to respect certain rights and not others offer the sociological benefit of
entrenching a respect for rights into the minds of citizens by forcing them to
directly consider and weigh individual rights in the context of their own lives
and immediate problems. Rather than simply existing as abstract legal notions,
Street Level Democratic deliberation offers pragmatic citizens an opportunity
to take rights very seriously by considering how imperfectly they are realized
in local practice and how their own actions might extend the scope of these
protections or jeopardize them.
The obvious danger for basic rights, however, is that the deliberations of
well meaning pragmatic citizens will fail to adequately consider the importance
of basic rights that protect disempowered minorities when they obstruct the
pursuit of widely shared goals. Compared to the elite deliberations of judges,
ordinary citizens may weigh narrowly utilitarian benefits too heavily against
rights. They lack professional indoctrination in the importance of legal
rights. By virtue of their superior local knowledge, that may also lack the
critical distance necessary for the kind of dispassionate consideration that
protects rights. Even so, many scholars have contended that the judiciary in
practice offers no greater protection of rights than more popular bodies (Dahl
1957; Rosenberg 1991). Absent further empirical research on these two varieties
of deliberation--elite and abstract versus popular and situated--we must
withhold judgement on whether or not the political empowerment of pragmatic
citizens will protect and extend a scheme of liberal basic rights or whether
such populist bodies will erode those protections.
Fortunately, the real world institutions of pragmatic deliberation do not
force this institutional choice between exclusively elite or popular
deliberation. As we have already seen, American Street Level Democracy always
begins as experiments in governance that are firmly embedded in the more
traditional institutions of legislatures and courts and the checks and balances
that they provide. Therefore the decisions and actions of pragmatic citizens
and the powers granted them by SLD institutions can always be challenged
through these more traditional channels. As we saw above and in Chapter 4, the
structure of SLD governance in the Chicago Schools has been continually
reshaped by state legislation and judicial challenges to various alleged
property right and representational infringements. Potentially
rights-jeopardizing tools utilized by community groups--such as Chicago's "gang
loitering" ordinance and fast-track demolition program--have been challenged
and subjected to the rights-protecting scrutiny of judicial review. Through
this layered approach that begins with multi-point popular deliberation in the
institutions of Street Level Democracy and checks that with the standard
mechanisms of legislative reconsideration and judicial review, SLD hopes to
answer well-founded liberal concerns about threats to basic rights that can
come from overzealous democratic action. Arguably, pragmatic respect for rights
advances beyond the traditional liberal institutional recommendations for
rights protection by focusing on the degree to which these rights are realized
in social practice and by developing strategies to extend the actual enjoyment
of those rights.
This triangulation between pragmatic citizenship other conceptions of political personality closes by briefly juxtaposing SLD's view with central elements of communitarianism. Though the school is vast, like rational choice and liberalism, communitarians share several diagnostic and political commitments relevant to pragmatic citizenship. First, they view liberal philosophy and practice as too individualistic. Philosophically, liberalism fails to recognize the dependence of individual identity and conceptions of the good on their society and its traditions (Sandel 1982; Kymlica 1990). In practice, liberalism focuses too much on individual rights and not enough on responsibility, morality, and tradition (Glendon 1991; Etzioni 1993; Bellah et. al. 1996). According to communitarian political analysts, this legal and cultural emphasis on individual liberty at the expense of social orientation has supported many aspects of social decline, including an over-emphasis on free market ideologies (Bellah 1996: xxv-xxviii), the decline of family stability (Glendon 1987), and even particular social problems such as rising crime. In a book that might be read as a communitarian diagnosis and prescription for problems of crime in the contemporary United States, George Kelling and Catherine Coles (1996: 42) write that:
A revolution in social thinking was afoot in the United States during the
1960s... that ultimately shifted the balance among individual rights and
freedoms, personal responsibility and accountability, and community
interests... [to] the primacy of the "self" and the right to be
"different"...
The increase in urban disorder that has occurred in the past thirty years... is
rooted in these very changes: the emphasis on individual rights tied to the
culture of individualism helped spur an increase in deviant behavior on city
streets, while changes in legal doctrine, especially in constitutional and
criminal law, not only permitted such behavior to continue but safeguarded the
rights of those behaving in deviant fashion.
communitarians offer at least three prescriptions to heal this diagnosed
affliction of the social body. First, communitarians urge citizens to reflect
and adopt shared values, such as moral responsibility, rooted in common social
traditions or in the generation of shared meanings and social commitments
(Bellah et. al. 1991). They argue that such a broad public value re-orientation
would strengthen civil society and bring individual attitudes in line with the
requirements of living under densely interdependent modern conditions. Second,
most communitarians are less squeamish than liberals about using state power to
advance such common values. As exemplified by measures such as the
Constitutional prohibition against state establishment of religion, liberals
typically favor a "neutral state" that does not take sides on controversial
moral issues such as religion (Dworkin 1978; Kymlica 1990: 206-7). Many
communitarians, on the other hand, favor public policies that advances social
virtues such as (Etzioni 1993; Bellah et. al. 1991: 124-38): general
responsibility to others; protection against minorities that can endanger the
larger social body such as people with HIV, smokers, and drunk drivers (Etzioni
1993: 164-91); preservation of the family structure (Glendon 1987); and
maintenance of social order (Kelling et. al. 1996). Finally, communitarians
favor, much more uniformly than liberals,[15]
the devolution of social and political action to the smallest, most local,
appropriate level (Bellah et. al. 1991: 145-6, 282-3; Etzioni 1993: 134-160).
Multiplying the sites of local, face to face engagement in churches,
associations, and even units of local government will help rebuild the fabric
of community by making citizens' commonality more manifest and by strengthening
the values of self-help, civic responsibility, and trust.
Street Level Democracy shares two institutional features in common with
communitarianism that contrast with many variants of liberalism: more robust
affirmative state action and the reinvigoration and empowerment of local
institutions. This resemblance is, however, coincidental. Whereas
communitarianism favors these political forms for their ability to instill or
deepen civic values, SLD favors them for their problem solving capacities.
Unlike communitarian thesis against atomistic individualism, SLD offers no
precise diagnosis about the causes of social ills such as rampant crime and
decaying schools. Indeed, one central tenant of pragmatic citizenship[16] is that solutions and causes of these
complex problems are difficult to determine prospectively and not easily
reducible to uniform explanations or susceptible to silver-bullet solutions.
Therefore, SLD recommends that rights-based constraints on state action be
loosened and that operational power be devolved to local units because these
measures constitute a system more capable of identifying and implementing
solutions, not because they express a common good or restore civic values.
Consider an examples that illustrate this difference between SLD and
communitarian collective action. In Chapter 14, we will encounter a school that
used its increased authority under he 1988 Chicago School Reform law to
transform itself into an Afro-Centric institution. This transformation included
renaming the school after a region of ancient Africa known for its scholarship,
changing the icons of student culture--the colors, the mascot, and athletic
team names--to convey African-American identity, and shifting the curriculum of
the school to focus on Afro-centric themes. A communitarian might favor such a
shift for its public recognition of the shared heritage and commitments of the
students, staff, and parents at the school. This new school, furthermore, might
be more capable than the value-neutral factory school that preceded it in
instruct its students about the values of community and responsibility, and
these lessons might be easily portable from an African-American to the more
diverse American public context. SLD, however, favors this shift as a tentative
attempt to improve the school's effectiveness--as measured by the standard
metrics of graduation, attendance, grades, and test scores--by addressing its
particular problems of low student and staff morale, absence of a coherent
school vision, and lack of parental engagement. In this example, pragmatic
citizens might treat even the communitarian thesis of value decay as hypothesis
to be tested: "If we create a school that instills and expresses our notion of
the common good and its values, will the school be more effective?" If the
answer turns out, upon examination of post-transformation school outcomes, to
be yes, then there is a happy, temporary convergence of the communitarian and
pragmatic prescriptions. If the answer turns out to be no, on the other hand,
then pragmatic citizens are committed to rejecting the communitarian social
hypothesis and using local authority to search out other models and strategies
that work better.
Despite this deep difference between SLD and communitarianism--that the former
treats positive state action and local power as part of general problem-solving
strategy rather than as methods to advance a fixed conceptions of the common
good or diffuse civic values--the two views can nevertheless be partially
reconciled. A communitarian might favor adding SLD to the standard array of
liberal institutions as a measure to provide additional opportunities to
exercise and spread general civic values such as trust and individual
contributions to social health. As an SLD participant, however, the rules of
reasonable deliberation prohibit communitarians from using the institution as
just another occasion to advance shared meanings and values, or to presume that
generating shared values and meanings will solve particular problems without
considering contrary proposals and evidence as required by deliberation.
In summary, this chapter specified the public psychology of pragmatic citizens in five straightforward elements: (i) their participatory contributions are motivated by self-regarding concern, for example an interest in a more effective schools or a safer neighborhood; (ii) they have capabilities of limited practical reason with respect to developing solutions to the problems that motivate their participation; (iii) they can publicly justify their internal processes of practical reason; (iv) they exercise backward looking capabilities of assessment and evaluation; (v) they possess the capacity to ironically revise their own identities and interests in light of the results of join problem solving; and (vi) they exercise moral restraint over the pursuit of their own self interest both according to the rules of reasonable deliberation and in their ability to comply with the results of deliberation. Though all normally functioning individuals possess these capacities to some degree, the we expect that these capacities will be developed substantially in the process of participating in Street Level Democracy. In order to show how this conception of politically personality is distinctive yet partially compatible with more common views of political personality, we sketched the areas of overlap and difference with rational choice, liberal, and communitarian conceptions of public personhood. In the next chapter, we describe the political process of the local unit in which pragmatic citizens participate. These local units are communities not in the thick sense of individuals who share a full history and rich public values, but in the thinner, more practical sense, of individuals who face common, urgent concerns and engage with one another in continuous, inventive, and demanding political processes to address those concerns. [17]
[1] A pragmatic political method is developed
in the next chapter.
[2] This distinction between a common pragmatic
public mindset and diverse attitudes in private life is analogous to, though
weaker than, the notion of many plural views that combine to an "overlapping
consensus" on a constitutional structure in Rawls (1993) at 134-68.
[3] This conceptual presentation abstracts
intentionally from an important motivational difference between professionals
and citizen-participants in SLD. Professionals participate (e.g. beat meetings,
school councils) in large part because it is part of their paid duties.
[4] Theories of rational choice decision-making
incorporate this capacity of practical reason. One accomplishment of early work
in that field was to describe and formalize the process of practical reason in
the theory of expected utility. See von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944) and
Tversky and Kahneman (1986).
[5] Many contemporary understandings of
constitutional politics, by contrast, do incorporate public justification. See
Rawls's discussion of public reason in Political Liberalism (1992) at
212-54 or the discussion of moments of constitutional decision in Ackerman
(1991) and Bohman (1995: 229-32). SLD differs from these views, however, in
that public justification under SLD is an everyday practice conducted by
ordinary citizens.
[6] Such a law was enacted in Chicago in 1993,
enjoyed by Federal Courts in 1995, and will be heard by the Supreme Court in
the Fall of 1998 (Martin 1998).
[7] Contrast, for example, the negotiation
approach of Susskind and Cruikshank (1987) to agreements that set up lasting
regimes of continuous evaluation and re-negotiation, such as the ecosystem
adaptive management strategy of the San Francisco Bay Delta Project (CALFED Bay
Delta Program 1998).
[8] SLD is a directly deliberative process that
aims to advance autonomy. This compliance component of moral restraint is
analogous to Rousseau's (1987) comment that the state can force citizens to be
free in his infamous passage in the Social Contract.
[9] See also Chapter 8 below.
[10] For a more comprehensively pragmatic view,
see Dorf and Sabel (1998).
[11] The case study presented in chapter 13
offers a real world example that is very similar to this one.
[12] "Security," Mill writes, is
to everyone's feelings the most vital of interests. All other earthly
benefits are needed by one person, not needed by another... but security no
human being can possibly do without; on it we depend for all our immunity from
evil and for the whole value of each and every good, beyond the passing moment,
since nothing but the gratification of the instant could be of any worth to us
if we could be deprived of everything the next instant by whoever was
momentarily stronger than ourselves. Utilitarianism (1979), Chap 5,
para. 25.
[13] "Amendments of Titles 8 and 13 of
Municipal Code of Chicago Concerning Liability of Property Owners and
Management for Unlawful Activities on Property." Chicago City Council
Journal (July 31, 1996): 27730-27735.
[14] According to Cathlene Walsh, Chicago
Department of Buildings. Personal interview with author.
[15] For a liberal view that opposes
politically decentralized structures on moral grounds, see George Kateb's
(1991) article on the "Moral Distinctiveness of Representative Democracy."
[16] See the discussion of limited practical
reason in 6.1 above.
[17] This notion and phrase of "the community
is a process" comes from Mary Parker Follett's (1919) essay of the same name.