Citizen Engagement and Civil Society

A presentation for Canadian Politics15 NOV 2012Milan Ilnyckyj

Structure• Emma will be covering:

– David Cameron and Richard Simeon, eds., Language matters: How Canadian Voluntary Associations Manage French and English, (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009), Chs. 1, 9.

– Richard Johnston and Stuart Soroka, “Social Capital in a Mullticultural Society: The Case of Canada,” in Paul Dekker and Eric M. Uslaner, eds., Social Capital and Participation in Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2001), 30-44. Available as an e-book from the UofT system.

– Eric M. Uslaner, “Religion and Civic Engagement in Canada and the United States,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 41 (June, 2002), 239-54.

• I will focus on:– Elizabeth Gidengil, Andre Blais, Neil Nevitte, and Richard Nadeau, Citizens.

(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004). (Canadian Democratic Audit series), chapters 1, 7. – Miriam Smith, A Civil Society? Collective Actors in Canadian Political Life

(Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2005), chapters 1-3.

• I will make some opening remarks, discuss Smith on neoliberalism and group politics, group and movement politics, and the historical trajectories of influence; discuss Gidengil et al.; and then conclude and suggest some questions for discussion

One central challenge of democracy

• Citizens have only a very limited channel through which to express their preferences: choosing among a set list of candidates for established political positions, like MPs

• Impossible to determine with certainty what any particular vote meant:– Support for the party– Support for the candidate– Support for the leader– Opposition to a different party, candidate, or leader

Participation in civil society allows for more nuanced and extensive political participation

• Citizens can work to make issues that concern them more politically visible– Lobby elected officials– Work to change party platforms– Seek media attention and use it to shift public opinion– Engage in direct action

• Requires the willingness of individuals to undertake individual effort for common benefit – collective action problem

There is a long history of success through such channels

• Smith– Temperance movement began in 1820s– Social purity and first wave feminism also early

• Suffragettes• Civil rights movement• Feminist movement• Environmental movement• Non-violent resistance to colonialism

Miriam Smith, A Civil Society? Collective Actors in Canadian Political Life

• Models for understanding group and movement politics– What purpose do the models serve? What are they meant

to let us do?– Pluralism / neopluralism, Marxism / neo-Marxism– Reality of multiple and sometimes divided loyalties– Debate over the degree of individual autonomy, compared

with constraint from structural forces– What explains more? Group memberships? Economic

divisions?– How autonomous is the state? –Key question that

differentiates theoretical perspectives

Social movements as false flag operations

• Canadian Manufacturers Association– Pro-tariff on manufacturs– Supported John A. MacDonald’s protectionist

trade policy– “a profitable exchange of legitimacy and

credibility between the organized interest group and the state”

– More recently: Crysotile Institute

• “Organized interest cast their claims in terms of the public good, attempting… to mask their own interest behind the veil of national interest”

• Raises the question of whether all organizations eventually end up representing their own institutional interests

Defining ‘social movements’

• Smith (34):– Manuel Castells (1997): “purposive collective

actions whose outcome, in victory as in defeat, transforms the values and institutions of society”

– Post-1960s social movements challenged the traditional boundary between state and society, aimed at society rather than the state, and employed more radical strategies

The Rand Formula (1945)

• Requires all employees in the bargaining unit of a workforce to pay union dues, whether they explicitly join the union or not

• Legitimate means of overcoming the collective action problem and avoiding free riding?

• Institutional mechanism for unions to entrench their influece and secure their financial welfare?

Tension between individual liberty and the collective good

• Consider the ‘social purity’ movement discussed by Smith – “sexual and moral regulation (prostitution, illegitimacy, divorce, obscene literature)

• Uncomfortable parallels with today’s ‘morality police’ in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia – thugs who beat up ‘immodestly’ dressed women

• At the same time, social movements have curbed aspects of individual liberty that do demonstrable harm to society: for instance, by establishing the ‘polluter pays’ principle

Elizabeth Gidengil et al., Citizens

• Three benchmarks: responsiveness, inclusiveness, and participation

• How engaged are Canadians in political life? Which groups are more or less engaged?

• Explanations for voter apathy – failures of political parties and the media?– failure of institutions to be representative?– oppression and economic deprivation?– the aforementioned difficulty of expressing

preferences through voting

Demographic explanations

• New generation with ‘post materialist’ values, poorly aligned with emphasis of political parties

• Expanded access to higher education; female participation in the workforce and politics; improved access to news and information; shifting composition of the population by country of birth

Geographic explanations

• Variation between provinces• Rural / urban divide, and trend toward

urbanization• Relative level of engagement with different

levels of government

Forms of political participation

• Gidengil (13) – doesn’t just consist of voting– Petitions, boycotts, demonstrations

• Partly a response to the growth in the importance of non-state centres of power: particularly growing corporate power

• Ultimately, there isn’t that much content in this opening chapter – more a promise of data and analysis to come

• Does sketch out some of the explanations that people have sought to use to explain variations in political behaviour

Conclusions and questions for discussion

• There are different ways of approaching the study of social movements– Try to produce a ‘neutral’ account of historical

changes in political life– Try to understand the success of laudable past

movements, and how we can improve the odds of success for today’s progressive movements

– Try to uncover deeper explanations for how the state and global society function, such as through Marxist analysis

Questions

1. How much independent agency does the state have and where does it reside?• Bureaucracy, parliament, the courts…• Smith (30)

2. Paradox of liberal individualism – individuals can only make choices within the range of options available, getting more options requires coordinated effort

3. Sometimes, normative demands call on the state to step back (shut down the RCMP ‘fruit machine’) while at others they call on the state to step forward (ban workplace smoking, regulate GHGs)

Questions

4. What is the core feature of democracy? The enactment of policies that reflect the popular will? The persistent availability of meaningful choice between possible representatives? The protection of the rights of individuals?– This is linked to some degree to Gidengil’s concern

about the implications of assessing citizen ‘competence’

– Argues that studying competence can ‘enhance’ democracy – but according to what standard?