The Harvard Family Research Project separated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to become the Global Family Research Project as of January 1, 2017. It is no longer affiliated with Harvard University.
Volume IV, Number 3 & 4, 1998
Issue Topic: Learning Organizations
Promising Practices
Civic Participation and the Citizens Research Method
Serene Fang of Harvard Family Research Project explains the Citizen Research method to better inform and engage citizens in understanding and influencing policymaking.
Before his now-famous 1995 essay, Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert Putnam published a book titled Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, in which he compared local Italian governments in the North to those in the South after Italy transferred power and responsibility for many of its services from a centralized government to newly-created regional governments. Putnam contended that local governments in the North tended to be more successful and efficient than local governments in the South because citizens in the North possessed a long historical and cultural tradition of participating in associational life that citizens in the South lacked.
At a time when our own government is engaged in a “devolution revolution,” passing down many of its social welfare functions from the federal to state and local levels, Putnam now makes the case that Americans are behaving less like Northern Italians and more like the civically isolated Southern Italians. He argues that Americans’ participation in conventional voluntary associations (the PTA, Elks Clubs, bowling leagues) has been declining for the last 40 years, and that this trend has contributed to an overall weakening of the civic engagement and social capital of local communities. The widespread interest in his theory may be an indication of how others have also noted that our engagement with our communities, and indeed, with democracy itself, is no longer what it should be.
For Further ReadingBriand, M. K. Building deliberative communities. A report prepared for the Pew Partnership for Civic Change. Crosby, N. (1996). Creating an authentic voice of the people. Paper presented at the Midwest Political Science Association, April 1996. Lemann, N. (1996). Kicking in groups. The Atlantic Monthly, 277(4). Putnam, R. D. (1996). The strange disappearance of civic America. The American Prospect, 24. Putnam, R. D. (1995). Bowling alone. Journal of Democracy, 6(1). Sclove, R. E. (1994). Technology, society, and democracy: New problems and opportunities. A report prepared for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. |
Harvard Family Research Project has been exploring methods for addressing citizen engagement in policies that affect local communities. One such method is the Citizens Research process. Citizens Research is a variation of the Citizens Jury process developed by Ned Crosby at the Jefferson Center in Minnesota. Both share characteristics of other recently developed processes such as Richard Sclove’s Citizens’ Panel, Michael Briand’s Community Convention, and the Danish Consensus Conference. All of these techniques seek to increase the opportunity for deliberative democracy to have an effect on the policy-making process, especially for policymaking done at the local level. Specifically, these methods share the following characteristics:
• Citizens from a community are selected through a random survey and arrayed in a group that is representative of the community in terms of demographic characteristics and relevant attitudes.
• The group is charged with a specific task regarding an issue or policy problem
• Over a series of meetings, the group is educated about the issue by experts and witnesses representing a range of views.
• The group is given adequate time to debate and deliberate together after which they are asked to make a collective recommendation.
• Recommendations are shared with the public.
For Additional InformationThe Citizens Jury Method The Citizens Research Method The Citizens’ Panel Method The Community Convention Method The Civic Practices Network maintains a website on deliberative democracy which provides an introduction to basic concepts, links to additional sources, and a suggested reading list. |
A key source of legitimacy for this method lies in the extent to which the group represents the larger community. In Crosby’s words, the selection process creates “an authentic voice of the people” for the community that is selected. Another key strength lies in the citizens’ experience of informed and collective deliberation.
For evaluation purposes, this method focuses attention on an important aspect of program assessment. While other methods may be employed to answer the question of whether goals are being attained in a program’s design, implementation, and effectiveness (and if not, why not), this method provides information as to whether the program itself reflects the public will of the community in which it is situated.
Some people have argued that big government contributed to the weakening of American civic engagement because it fostered the perception that a large and professionalized bureaucracy takes away the opportunity, perhaps even the need, for civic initiative. The Citizens Research or Citizens Jury process can serve as a bridge for engaging a community with few other forums for public discussion, in issues that will increasingly be decided not at the level of federal government, but at the theoretically more responsive level of local government.
Serene Fang, Research Assistant, HFRP