EIGHTEEN PROPOSITIONS FOR CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT
Address to W.K. Kellogg Foundation Devolution Initiative
Ann Arbor, Michigan, June 1998

Daniel Yankelovich

I want to talk today about citizen engagement: why it's a necessary part of devolution, why it's difficult to implement, and what skills are needed to do it well.

I've prepared a list of eighteen propositions as a framework for thinking about citizen engagement as an inherent part of devolution. I will illustrate these points with some findings from a recent Public Agenda study of public attitudes toward welfare.

Before focusing on the propositions, let me share a recent experience with you. Every year the Canadian government issues a document, charmingly and archaically titled, "The Speech from the Throne," which sets the agenda and priorities for the coming year. Last year the top Canadian priorities were children, health, welfare and education, issues not very different from our own.

I was asked to consult with officials of the central government who were concerned that citizens from the provinces of Canada -- the equivalent of our states -- were dissatisfied with the nature and extent of their involvement with shaping and implementing national policies on these issues.

The authors of one of the government briefing papers stated that part-way through their analysis they decided to change the title of their report from "Public Participation" to "Citizen Engagement." At first glance, the change struck me as trivial, but as I delved more deeply into the briefing paper, I realized that the authors' intent was not at all trivial: they were, in fact, urging that the public play a much more active role in shaping policy.

In the existing Canadian system, the central government proposes policies to provincial leaders and elicits their feedback. This so-called "public participation" process doesn't engage average citizens in any way. The new "citizen engagement" process would engage citizens directly and make provisions for significant changes in policy. For issues as important to the lives of Canadian citizens as children, education, health and welfare, it is almost inconceivable that with genuine citizen engagement the government's policy formulations would remain unchanged. Indeed, if its policy options did not change, this would be a good indication that the citizen engagement process had failed.

Thus, the shift from traditional Canadian "public participation" to "citizen engagement" is much more fundamental than the semantics suggest. It is also more difficult to implement, because the government must confront and overcome three sets of obstacles.

The first is instant negativism: the bureaucratic criticism that citizen engagement is too expensive, too time-consuming, too arduous, and besides, the public "really isn't interested in getting involved."

The second obstacle is the enormity of the communication gap between citizens and government. Government officials and the public do not speak the same language and often do not share the same values. The public is almost always poorly informed, it puts values ahead of facts, and it typically finds itself at an earlier stage of thinking about issues than experts and officials who have been deeply immersed in them. Under these conditions, ordinary methods of public education and discussion do little to narrow the gap between citizens and officials. Special skills are needed for this kind of citizen engagement, skills that are in short supply.

The third obstacle is massive leadership resistance. Officials in positions of leadership acknowledge the desirability of citizen engagement, but they really don't want to do it. Deep down, most leaders can't conceive of how average citizens can contribute to shaping policies on complex issues. For most of them, citizen engagement looks like an empty ritual and a waste of time.

These are formidable obstacles. The Canadian government is struggling with them, but I suspect they are too great to overcome. Although the desirability of citizen engagement may be obvious in theory, it is exceedingly difficult to implement in practice.

Let me now turn to my 18 propositions, starting with some fundamental premises.

Premises

Proposition 1. The purpose of citizen engagement to bring policy into better alignment with public values. A starting point for thinking about citizen engagement in the United States is the dramatic shift over the past three decades from trust in the national government to mistrust. In the history of public opinion polling, this shift is one of the most dramatic ever registered. In the early sixties, three-quarters of the public -- 76% -- felt that the government could be trusted "to do the right thing most of the time." By the mid-nineties, this figure had completely reversed: now 76% of the public do not trust the government "to do the right thing most of the time."

Among other institutions, The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard has been concerned with this steady erosion of trust and has studied it with some care. Harvard’s analysts have concluded that among the various causes of this mistrust are:

(i) unrealistically high public expectations (people expect more from government and are therefore easily disappointed),

(ii) a lack of responsiveness to public concerns on the part of government, and

(iii) differences between the priorities and agendas of the government and those of the public.

I want to illustrate these points with two important issues – health care and welfare.

The 1993 Clinton Health Care Plan failed in large part because of differences between public and governmental values and priorities. The Clintons' priority was to extend health care insurance to the 38 million who did not have it. The public's priorities were quite different. Our studies showed a high level of public satisfaction with both the quality of health care and its accessibility. People were deeply concerned about only one issue -- rising costs.

The goals of the Administration and the concerns of the public were not irreconcilable. A large majority (71%) of the public supported insurance coverage for people who didn't have it, but were worried about costs. Once people began to realize how costly this program would be, public support eroded. I am convinced that if there had been a genuine process of public engagement, the government’s and the public’s priorities could have been reconciled. There would have been give-and-take on both sides, and a viable health care plan would be in place today.

Welfare is an even more telling example of the mismatch between public and government priorities, adding to the public’s mistrust of government. By the 1990s, the government’s welfare policy had become an affront to America’s most fundamental social values – our sense of fairness, the importance of work, the importance of autonomy and independence, commitment to family, responsibility, self-discipline and not "getting something for nothing." Americans felt that the welfare system violated all of these values, and in addition had proven unresponsive for decades both to changing circumstances and to citizen resentment. This lack of responsiveness created a frenzy of public anger, frustration and mistrust.

The lack of government responsiveness is a major contributor to the growing sense that social policies lack legitimacy.

Proposition 2. The public insists on a stronger voice. One of the most powerful trends in American society is the demand that people have more of a say in the decisions that affect their lives. In the sixties, a new set of values which I have labeled "expressive individualism" began to transform our society. These values include quality of life, women’s rights, lifestyle choices, multiculturalism, and the insistence on having a stronger voice in policy formulation.

Most of our institutions operate from the top down, which does not give people an effective say in the decisions that affect their lives, contributing greatly to public frustration.

Proposition 3. Citizen engagement is essential to the success of devolution. Devolution is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating and implementing sound public policy. Without citizen engagement, devolution risks becoming a mere shuffling of bureaucracies.

There are many ways that officials deceive themselves into thinking they have created genuine citizen engagement. You can have public involvement in various forms without real citizen engagement, for example, media debates, public education campaigns, town meetings, and the Canadian forums of consultation. If you always end up with the same policies you proposed initially, this is a sure sign that real citizen engagement has not taken place.

Without real citizen engagement, devolution loses its main advantage: the ability to implement policy locally and adapt to local circumstances, and therefore the chance to build the community and civil society for which Americans hunger. Some would argue that you can gain this advantage by working exclusively with local leaders who are close to the public. This is not the case. The gap between local leaders and the public may not be quite as great as the gap between national leaders and the public, but it is still very large. The great fault line in our democracy today is not national versus local or liberal versus conservative. It is average Americans versus elite leaders and experts.

Proposition 4. Citizen engagement should be reserved for select policies. Citizen engagement ought to be reserved for major issues where value choices are decisive, such as schools, health care, and welfare. It is too time-consuming and arduous to use routinely. If citizen engagement is used for every policy, it will get ritualized, and will become ineffective. If you concentrate on a small number of select policies, you have a fighting chance at success.

Proposition 5. Citizen engagement is not to be confused with special interest politics. The citizen engagement process should exclude lobbyists, special interest spokespeople, and advocates for others.

The evolution of the welfare debate demonstrates why these groups need to be excluded. The debate on welfare policy has been carried out in the classic American tradition of special interest politics, by spokespeople for liberal and conservative positions who do not represent the values either of average citizens or of welfare recipients. This is one reason welfare policy resisted change for so many decades, and was permitted to generate such powerful public mistrust and lack of credibility.

In Public Agenda surveys of the public and welfare recipients, we found that the responses of the two groups, even on very controversial questions, were quite comparable. For example, 73% of the general public felt that welfare recipients abuse the welfare system, but so did two-thirds -- 67% -- of welfare recipients themselves. The statement that "you're financially better off to stay on welfare" was endorsed by 70% of the public and 71% of welfare recipients.

Proposition 6. Citizen engagement is not a form of negotiation. Public engagement should not be considered a substitute for the hard negotiations needed to resolve conflicts. But the chances for successful negotiations greatly improve when they are preceded by dialogue that permits people to voice their deeply felt convictions. Citizen engagement brings out the communal rather than the selfish side of people. It is a way, to quote President Lyndon Johnson’s crude formula, of "keeping people inside the tent pissing out rather than outside the tent pissing in."

When you have pre-negotiation dialogue with the public on issues like welfare, people often soften and become willing to add costs for policies that make sense to them. There is no lack of compassion in the country, but people get their backs up when they feel that their values are being violated. Citizen engagement on an issue such as welfare leads to a much greater acceptance of its complexity and people become willing to add costs in exchange for policies consonant with their values.

Proposition 7. Citizen engagement is not a rational deliberative process. Citizen engagement is only partly cognitive and deliberative. For the most part, it is a stormy process that requires people to confront their own ambivalences and inconsistencies. They are forced to deal with inner value conflicts, and they are faced with consequences they may prefer to avoid. The word "deliberative" conjures up the image of calm, unemotional, objective interactions; in reality, the citizen engagement process stirs up strong emotions.

Skills

Now, let me turn to the fundamental skills needed for citizen engagement.

Proposition 8. How and why to vary format. Citizen engagement formats–length, frequency and intensity – should vary as a function of the complexity of the issue, the depth of mistrust and misunderstanding, and the severity of the conflict of values. Leaders who are involved in the process must be able to assess how each of these factors affects the citizen engagement process.

In the public policy arena, leaders will often let an issue fester for decades and then get very impatient if everything is not resolved after a single meeting with the public. But the public needs as much time as leaders do to work through the complex process of engagement. Elites devote significant amounts of time and trouble to important policy issues, but then expect that a few ads and a few meetings are all the public needs to deal with the same issues. This doesn't work. The public also needs large amounts of time to work through the issues.

At the very minimum, leaders need to conduct two meetings with every important public group. If you haven't discussed an issue with the community for a long time, you need the first meeting just so that people can ventilate their frustration. Such meetings are painful for leaders, and most of them want to give up immediately. But usually, when you get the same people together for a second meeting, the tone is different. After they've had a chance to blow off steam in the first meeting, people become remarkably reasonable in the second.

Proposition 9. How to prepare "citizen choices." Citizen engagement requires elaborate preparatory work. The first step is to define policy issues from a citizen rather than an official perspective. The second preparatory step is to identify value choices, as distinct from technical or administrative options, and to set forth the pros and cons of each choice in a compelling way. Citizen engagement is most effective when participants are presented with concrete choices that bundle together facts, values, and potential consequences.

During the past twenty years, the Public Agenda, along with the Kettering Foundation, has experimented with this process of formulating choices from a public point of view. We have found that you can shorten the task and lessen the frustration if your preparatory work formulates public choices clearly.

Let me give you an example. The public always insists upon reciprocity (except for disabled and helpless people). If you are able to reciprocate a benefit the government gives you, the public wants and expects you to do so. If, for example, leaders are involved in public engagement with citizens on welfare the discussion will inevitably revolve around policies that involve reciprocity, such as alternatives to working outside the home for mothers of very young children, (perhaps taking care of other children), and eventual repayment of benefits received.

Proposition 10. How to insure "representative thinking." People learn from each other by being exposed to, and paying careful heed to, a diversity of viewpoints. Setting the stage so that people will listen sympathetically to viewpoints with which they do not agree is an indispensable skill of citizen engagement. In the first phase of the President's national debate on race, for example, the chairman excluded everybody who was opposed to affirmative action. As a result, the public meetings failed to move beyond the stage of preaching to the converted; in this context, the kind of engagement where diversity of opinion is so important was not possible. In a dialogue on welfare, for example, it should be mandatory to include welfare recipients as well as the general public and also include people with extreme views in a dialogue on welfare. We often find that people with extreme views become much more supple and giving if they have a chance to be present, to express their point of view and to be heard with respect.

Proposition 11. Provide for a working-through experience. The process of citizen engagement has to give the public plenty of time to work through the emotional duress associated with troublesome issues.

The public has not yet worked through some crucial issues surrounding welfare. They still need to confront a number of realities: that there are not enough jobs to go around; that for some people work is not a viable solution; and that sending a check is probably the cheapest way of dealing with the welfare issue. People have to confront the fact that if they are going to keep faith with their values, genuine welfare reform may cost them more, not less.

The product of public engagement is true public judgment,. This judgment comes only after people have had a chance to engage with the issue, and work through all the pros and cons.

Proposition 12. The core skills of dialogue. Three fundamental skills are needed to produce true citizen engagement. These are:

1. empathic listening, or the ability to listen and put yourself in the shoes of the other person;
2. a willingness to treat all participants as equals irrespective of what their positions may be outside the dialogue setting; and
3. the ability to force assumptions to the surface, where they can be examined openly and without prejudgment.

Unfortunately, although these are skills that people need in every aspect of their lives, they are in short supply in our society, both among officials and citizens.

Will

I have just written a book titled The Magic of Dialogue, which is an elaboration of how to acquire these kinds of skills and the political will to use them.

The political will to acquire the skills of dialogue and citizen engagement is currently lacking. Here are the leading resistances that stand in the way.

Proposition 13. Discomfort with skill requirements. Leaders, almost by definition, are not comfortable when they are not in control. If they lack self-confidence in their own mastery of the skills needed for citizen engagement, they will shy away from them. Therefore, there is a need to make the requisite skills explicit and accessible.

Proposition 14. Discomfort with power sharing. Becoming comfortable with power sharing is essential for successful citizen engagement. Permitting the public to participate in policy formulation can be seen as a form of power sharing which most people in leadership positions are loath to do.

Proposition 15. Outmoded definitions of leadership. Some leaders believe that citizen engagement conflicts with the idea of representative democracy, that it undermines the role of leaders and reduces them to "discussion group facilitators." They feel that elected representatives should be the ones who make the decisions, not ill-informed voters. Leadership in the traditional sense of representative democracy is indispensable to policymaking, but the definition of leadership for today's and tomorrow's public policies has to be broadened to include the skills of dialogue and citizen engagement which allow the public a stronger voice.

Proposition 16. The misleading claim that the "the public isn't interested." The public is interested. Some leaders hold an image of citizens as apathetic and unengaged. In practice, apathy disappears the moment citizens realize that leaders truly value their input. Once people are genuinely invited to participate, the problem is one of too much public interest, not public apathy.

Proposition 17. Other false stereotypes. Leaders should not fall prey to the false stereotype that citizens will always put their own narrow interests first, thereby compromising the government's flexibility. This is far more likely to happen without citizen engagement than with it, because with citizen engagement, you are eliciting and encouraging the communal and civic instincts of the individual.

Proposition 18. The misleading claim that a poorly-informed public cannot contribute to policy. The deepest of our leadership resistances is the conviction that, because the public is poorly informed, it cannot contribute to policy. Leaders assume that the public’s ability to contribute is correlated with its level of factual knowledge. This is a flawed bit of conventional wisdom. The most important policy issues depend on resolving conflicts of goals and values; factual information and technical expertise is either secondary or can be readily provided.

Conclusions

All of you are struggling with the difficulties of the devolution process, of which citizen engagement is only one aspect. Devolution is so complex that I'm sure many of you sometimes wonder whether it's worth the effort and whether it can truly succeed.

From my perspective as someone who looks at our democracy from the point of view of the public, I deeply believe it is worth the effort and can succeed, but only if genuine citizen engagement is an inherent part of it.

As we reach the Millennium, the pregnant phrase, "The consent of the governed," is gradually changing its meaning in America's political culture. Democracy is a living system that adapts constantly to changing circumstances. At the present stage in our history, it is growing ever clearer that the opportunity every two to four years for citizens to vote for public officials remote from their lives is a radically insufficient way to ensure the consent of the governed.

With the initiative system in states like California, citizens are seeking to plug the gap by experimenting with direct democracy, a cure that in many ways is subject to more abuses and distortions than the problem it seeks to remedy. Devolution, in concert with citizen engagement, is a superior method of ensuring the consent of the governed.

In the country today, the American people mistrust their national government, regard politics with suspicion bordering on cynicism, yearn for more control over their own lives, and hunger for a sense of community that will give them closer bonds with the larger society. Devolution and citizen engagement is a way to achieve these objectives.

It is true that citizen engagement is difficult to implement. But it is also true that the stakes are enormous: they are nothing less than the future health and vitality of our democracy. When more of our leaders appreciate this truth, it should strengthen their will to acquire the skills needed to conduct genuine citizen engagement. I wish you all good luck in this historic endeavor! Thank you.