Civic engagement
Civic engagement or civic participation is any individual or group activity addressing issues of public concern. Civic engagement includes communities working together or individuals working alone in both political and non-political actions to protect public values or make a change in a community. The goal of civic engagement is to address public concerns and improve the quality of community life.
Civic engagement is "a process in which people take collective action to address issues of public concern" and is "instrumental to democracy". Underrepresentation in government can lead to the concerns of minority, low-income, and younger populations being overlooked. In turn, issues for higher voting groups are addressed more frequently, causing more bills to be passed to fix these problems.
Forms
Civic engagement can take many forms—from individual volunteerism, community engagement efforts, organizational involvement, and electoral participation. These engagements may include directly addressing a problem through personal work, community based, or work through the institutions of representative democracy. Many individuals feel a sense of personal responsibility to actively engage in their community. "Youth civic engagement" has similar aims to develop the community environment and cultivate relationships, although youth civic engagement emphasizes empowering young people. A study published by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement at Tufts University categorized civic engagement into three categories: civic, electoral, and political voice. Scholars of youth engagement online have called for a broader interpretation of civic engagement that focuses on the purpose behind current institutions and activities and includes emerging institutions and activities that achieve the same purposes. A journal published by the Journal of Transformative Education suggests the gap in participation forms between different generations. These civic engagement researchers suggest that the reduction of civic life into small sets of explicitly electoral behaviors may be insufficient to describe the full spectrum of public involvement in civic life.Civic engagement reform arose at the beginning of the 21st century after Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone brought to light changes in civic participation patterns. Putnam argued that despite rapid increases in higher education opportunities that may foster civic engagement, Americans were dropping out of political and organized community life. A number of studies suggested that while more youth are volunteering, fewer are voting or becoming politically engaged.
Role of volunteerism in transforming governance
The State of the World's Volunteerism Report 2015, the first global review of the power of volunteer voices to help improve the way people are governed, draws on evidence from countries as diverse as Brazil, Kenya, Lebanon and Bangladesh. The United Nations report shows how ordinary people are volunteering their time, energies and skills to improve the way they are governed and engaged at local, national and global levels. Better governance at every level is a pre-requisite for the success of the new set of targets for future international development, the Sustainable Development Goals, which has been agreed upon by the United Nations in September 2015.At the global level, for instance, a diverse group of 37 online volunteers from across the globe engaged in 4 months of intense collaboration with the United Nations Department of Economic Affairs to process 386 research surveys carried out across 193 UN Member States for the 2014 UN E-Government Survey. The diversity of nationalities and languages of the online volunteers—more than 65 languages, 15 nationalities, of which half are from developing countries—mirrors the mission of the survey.
Benefits and challenges
Civic engagement, in general, can foster community participation and government involvement, according to ICMA: Leaders at the Core of Better Communities.The specific benefits of civic engagement are:
- Achieving greater buy-in to decisions with fewer backlashes such as lawsuits, special elections, or a council recall.
- Engendering trust between citizens and government, which improves public behavior at council meetings.
- Attaining successful outcomes on complex issues, which helps elected officials avoid choosing between equally unappealing solutions.
- Developing more creative ideas and better solutions.
- Implementing ideas, programs, and policies faster and more easily.
- Creating involved citizens than demanding customers.
- Building a community within a city.
- Making jobs easier and more relaxing.
- Civic engagement often takes longer to show results than direct government action. In the long run, public reactions to government policy or legal decisions can lead to faster change than government involvement in lawsuits or ballot initiatives.
- For civic engagement to succeed, a layer of transparency and trust between the government and its citizens is needed.
Research has shown that civic engagement tends to have structural barriers that shape who can participate. The structural barriers are socioeconomic inequality, limited access to education, geographic separation, and support of institutions. These barriers impact civic opportunities and people's capacity to gain civic knowledge and skills. Researchers talk about the disparities within civic engagement based on broader social and institutional circumstances. Minority communities tend to have less political representation, resources, and have less opportunities for engagement. This contributes back to the gap which includes race, age, and economic status.
Opportunity Gaps
Joseph Kahne and Ellen Middaugh describe an opportunity gap in civic engagement. Students with higher economic status tend to be more educated in civic engagement and how to make political decisions. On the other hand, students with lower resources and lower economic status tend to have limited access to civic engagement learning. Better educational access to civic information tends to increase voting participation and political participation in the long term.
Local civic engagement
Within local communities, there are many opportunities for citizens to participate in civic engagement. Volunteering for community projects is often associated with strengthened community development. Community engagement could be found at food pantries, community clean-up programs, and the like, bolstering efforts for a strong community bond.Community collaboration
Community collaboration includes democratic spaces where people are open to discussing concerns for particular issues regarding public interest and means to make the changes necessary. These spaces are often resource centers, such as neighborhood associations or school boards where citizens can obtain information regarding the community. Colleges and universities are also offering more opportunities and expecting more students to engage in community volunteer work.According to a case study conducted in a U.S college in September 2014, there are pivotal leadership qualities that contribute to the development of civic engagement. The study mentions 3 main themes: active, adaptive, and resilient leadership, learning for leadership and engagement for the greater good as the main reasons for the success of The Democracy Commitment in the college. TDC is a national initiative that intends to help U.S community colleges educate their students for democracy.
Political participation is another key element that is practiced with regularity. Involvement in public council meeting sessions for discussions informs citizens of necessities and changes that need to be made. Casting an informed vote at the local level can change many things that affect day-to-day life.
Online engagement allows citizens to be involved in their local government that they would not have otherwise by allowing them to voice themselves from the comfort of their own homes. Online engagement involves things such as online voting and public discussion forums that give citizens the opportunity to voice their opinions on topics and offer solutions as well as find others with common interests and create the possibility of forming advocacy groups pertaining to particular interests. The use of the internet has allowed people to have access to information easily and has resulted in a better-informed public as well as creating a new sense of community for citizens.
In the role of state government
People who serve state governments learn what the community needs through listening to citizens and thus make nuanced decisions. According to Miriam Porter, "turmoil, suspicion, and reduction of public trust" occur with the lack of communication. Civic engagement is closely linked to various state institutions. Values, knowledge, liberties, skills, ideas, attitudes, and beliefs the population holds are essential to civic engagement in terms of the representation of vast cultural, social, and economic identities.Civic engagement applied within the state requires local civic engagement. Citizens are the basis of representative democracy. Application of this principle can be found within programs and laws that states have implemented based on a variety of areas concerning that particular state. Health, education, equality, immigration are a few examples of entities that civic engagement can shape within a state.