Downsizing democracy: how America sidelined its citizens and privatized its public
Year: 2003
Type: book-review
Abstract: FOR MORE THAN two centuries, ordinary citizens were important actors on the Western political stage.Their vanguard entered political life with a bang in the eighteenth century, firing the shot heard round the world and responding with alacrity to the levee en masse.Over the ensuing decades, tens of millions more served loyally as voters, citizen soldiers, taxpayers, jurors, and the citizen administrators now disparaged as patronage employees.In these and other ways, citizens were the backbone of the Western state, providing it with the administrative, coercive, and extractive capabilities that allowed the West to conquer much of the world.In return for their service, citizens received a variety of benefits including legal rights, pensions, and, perhaps most notably, the right to vote.The history of suffrage is often written so as to suggest that the opportunity to participate in national politics was wrung from unwilling rulers after bitter popular struggles.This tacit exchange of service for benefits, though, drew citizens further and more fully into political life.Citizen administrators became the mainstays of vigorous political party organizations.Expansion of the government's revenue base to include tens of millions of ordinary citizens also expanded the power of the representative and political institutions that encouraged popular compliance and negotiated conflicts of interest.Reliance upon citizen soldiers continually expanded the boundaries of participation as those asked to fight Downsizing DemocracyChapter 1From Popular to Personal Democracy IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, America was exceptional for the vitality of its democratic institutions-especially its political parties.The country may have been slow to abolish slavery, but it was first to achieve universal white manhood suffrage; and by midcentury, when European states were taking their first hesitant steps toward mass democracy, America's dynamic party organizations were routinely mobilizing 70 to 80 percent of the electorate in presidential campaigns.Outside the South, even midterm congressional contests typically pushed turnout past 60 percent. 1 Today, American politics is no longer exceptional for its feats of grassroots mobilization.In the midterm elections of 1998, for example, merely a third of the registered voters went to the polls.In the 2000 national election, barely half of all voters-but all nine Supreme Court justicescast presidential ballots.Candidates are spending more than ever to turn out their supporters.They are employing the tools of mass communications to project their voices and images across a vast electronic electorate.But the citizen response has grown progressively weaker.Behind the receding waves of electoral mobilization, a new kind of American exceptionalism is emerging, one marked by rates of voter participation significantly lower than those that prevail today in the same European nations that once stood by and watched while the United States built the world's premier popular democracy.
Source: Choice Reviews Online
Authors: Ginsberg, Benjamin, Crenson, Matthew A.
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2149371892