DOCUMENT RESUME ED 368 596 AUTHOR TITLE Leaders ...luncheon conversation to cover all these people. Such a defini-tion, however, would risk becoming a Fourth of July celebrative t

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Morse, Suzanne W.; And OthersPublic Leadership Education: The Role of CitizenLeaders. Volume VI.Charles F. Kettering Foundation, Dayton, Ohio.92

56p.

Charles K. Kettering Foundation, 200 Commons Road,Dayton, OH 45459-2799.Reports Descriptive (141)

MF01/PC03 Plus Postage.*Citizen Participation; Citizen Role; *CitizenshipEducation; *Citizenship Responsibility; Democracy;Higher Education; *Leaders; *Leadership; LeadershipResponsibility; *Leadership Training

This document is devoted to the topic of citizenleaders. The first article, "Defining a Citizen Leader" (Richard A.Couto), Provides a pragmatic definition of citizenship by describingcitizen leaders with whom Couto has worked. "The Making of theCitizen Leader" (Cheryl Mabey) describes ways to educate forleadership while showing that traditional models may not work for thefuture. This article contends that people must broaden their notionsof what leaders do and where they lead. In "Public Leadership andPublic Politics" (Michael Briand), there is a call for a differentdefinition of politics as a basis for educating leaders. In order tosolve public problems, communities rather than individuals must cometo grips with them. The fourth article, "The Political Language ofSocial Leaders" (Manfred Stanley), discusses how citizen leaders viewtheir roles. In describing a selected group of civic leaders in onetown, the article identifies those qualities present in individualswho assume community leadership. "Citizenship and Leadership" (DanielKemmis) argues that the only hope for thwarting democratic decline isa revitalization of citizenship. Kemmis contends that revitalizedcitizen leadership requires specific skills, behavior patterns, and aplace to learn and practice them. "Citizen Leadership andService-Learning" (Cecil D. Bradfield and R. Ann Myers) argues thatto learn the citizenship skills required for a democracy, servicemust be integrated into the college curriculum. "Citizen Leaders fora New Politics" (Peter Bearse) calls for a new kind of publicpolitics in which citizen leaders play a central role. (DK)

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Director of Pmgrams Suzanne W. MorseManaging Editor flse TebbettsCopy Editor Betty FreckerCover Art Long & AssociatesArt Director/Production George CavanaughFormaning Parker AdvertisingPublisher Robert E. Daley

Public Leadefship Education is published by theCharles F. Kettering Foundation, 200 Commons Road,Dayton, Ohio 45459-2799.

The Kettering Foundation is a nonprofit operatingfoundation, chartered in1927, that does not make grantsbut welcomes partnerships withotherin.stitutions (or groupsof institutions) and individuals who are actively workingon problems of governing, educating, and science. Tbeinterpretations and conclusions contained in this publica-tion, unless expressly stated to the contrary, represent theviews of the author or authors and not necessarily those ofthe Foundation, its tnistees,orofficers. The articles may bephotocopied.

Copyright 0 1992 by the Kettering Foundation

3

PUBLIC LEADERSHIP EDUCATIONThe Role of Citizen Leaders

Published by the Kettering Foundationin partnership with

The Council on Public Policy Education

4

CONTENTS

Introduction 1

by Suzanne W. Morse

Defining a Citizen Leader 3

by Richard A. Couto

The Making of the Citizen Leader 10

by Cheryl Mabey

Public Leadership and Public Politics 17

by isilichael Briand

The Political Language of Social Leaders 26by Manfred Stanley

Citizenship and Leadership 33

by Daniel Kemmis

Citizen Leadership and Service-Leaming 39by Cecil D. Bradfield and R. Ann Myers

Citizen Leaders for a New Politics 44by Peter Bearse

5

Our country is at a pivotal point in itshistory. We are entering the twenty-firstcentury with hopes of international peaceand the promise of a changing world order.With the cataclysmic changes brought on bythe ending of communism in the former So-viet Union and Eastern Europe, we, asAmericans, have found ourselves rethinkingthe goals for our own democratic society.Many of the problems we had thought to havesolved by now towering deficits, domesticpoverty, environmental decay requireurgent attention. We must reach out tonumbers of new Americans. We mustrechannel our energies for defense into thepromises of peace. These old problems andnew challenges raise the inevitable questionsof how and who. The "how" will be debatedand discussed at length. The "who" is easierto answer. The "who" is all of us. Each of ushas a stake in the civic entetprise, and we willall be called on to provide leadership. Thereare not enough officials, elected or appointed,to even begin to get the job done.

In an informal poll taken a few years agoon the most influential citizen of the

Introduction

by Suzanne W. Morse

milenium,Thumas Jefferson emerged as theclear winner. He was and is the exemplar ofwhat civic leadership is all about. The cel-ebration of his 250th birthday in 1993 pro-vides the opportunity to focus once again onthe legacy of citizen leadership that he left.His own words say it best:

These are the hard times in which agenius would wish to live. . . . Greatnecessity calls for great leadeis.

This sixth edition of Public LeadershipEducation io devoted to the topic of citizenleaders. The authors have both defined citi-zen leadership and given a prescription fordeveloping a new kind of leader in the future.

Richard Couto provides a pragmatic defi-nition of citizen leadership by describingcitizen leaders he has worked with. Coutoillustrate' both the difficulty and the rewardsthat come with civic participation. CherylMabey's description of ways to educate forleadership shows that traditional models maynot work for the future. She contends that wemust broaden our notion of what leaders do

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and where they lead. In the third essay,Michael Briand calls for a different defini-tion of politi cs as a basis fo r educating leaders.He writes that in order to solve public prob-lems, communities as a whole rather thanindividuals must come to grips with them.How citizen leaders view their roles is thesubject of Manfred Stanley's article. Writingabout a selected group of civic leaders inCentertown, New York, Stanley identifiesthose qualities present in individuals whoassume community leadership.

Daniel Kemmis argues that the only hopefor thwarting democratic decline is a revital-ization of citizenship. He contends that revi-talized citizen leadership requires specificskills, behavior patterns, and a place to learnand practice them. In the fifth essay, CecilBradfield and Ann Myers argue that i f studentsare to learn the citizenship skills required fora democracy, they must learn to work forsomething larger than themselves. Using acase study, they build a persuasive argument

for the integration of service into the collegecurriculum. Finally, Peter Bearse calls for anew kind of public politics in which citizenleaders play a central role and withoutwhich, they cannot exist for long.

The rallying cry of the 1992 election seasonwas for a different way of doing politics andfor the reconnection of people to politics.While term limits, campaign finance reforms,and a change of faces may help, it seems thatthe solution is more fundamental than theserelatively quick fixes. People want back in;they want to have a say in how things aredecided. This response challenges us to thinkthrough how we are preparing people tofulfill their positions as citizens. Never in ourcountry's history has it been more importantthat we call on the talents and resources of allpeople to solve our problems.

Suzanne Morse is director of programs at theKettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio.

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7

Defining a Citizen Leader

by Richard A. Couto

There I was trying to impress members ofthe search committee during lunch and sit-ting across the table from James MacGregorBurns, Pulitzer Prize-winning patriarch ofleadership studies. It was difficult to eat andtalk without embarrassment, so I did littleeating. I talked a lot. I heard myself counterpoints made by one search committee mem-ber about a recent coal miners' strike inVirginia an impolitic step. Late in ourluncheon conversation, Bums lamented thedearth of leadership in contemporaryAmerica. I took issue with his point as well,suggesting that the amount and quality ofleadership varied depending on where youlooked. Leadership at the local communitylevel, I asserted, is abundant and of extraor-dinarily high quality. Suddenly, I realizedthat I felt more about leadership than I thoughtabout it. I had lived it more than I had studiedit. I had worked 20 years with an array ofleaders in low-income communities of themral South, Appalachia, and several urbanareas. Like them, I had spent far less timethinking about the "why's" and "how's- ofleadership than on the "what's to be done"questions of leadership. I had what Michael

Polanyi calls "personal knowledge" ratherthan scholarship. This realization gave mepause, but only momentarily. Undeterred, Iforged on.

Burns and I eventually agreed on the dis-appointing dearth of political and nationalleadership and ascribed it, in large measure,to the fragmentation of America's politicalstnictuits. We also agreed that possibly wehave more and better leadership at the locallevel of American life than we give ourselvescredit for. Fortunately, I got the job. Burnsand I became colleagues and eventually trav-eled thmugh parts of Appalachia to meetsome of the community leaders I had had inmind when I spoke.

This trip, my new job, and that luncheonconversation challenged me to examine whatI had taken for granted: What is citizen lead-ership? And why is it important? As I learnedmore about leadership, I recognized that Iwas dealing with only one form of citizenleadership. Legislators, labor union officers,social service agency heads, directors of non-profit organizations, civic and business lead-ers, elected and appointed political officialsare all citizens and they are also leaders to one

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8

degree or another. Iwas tempted to stretcha definition from thatluncheon conversationto cover all thesepeople. Such a defini-tion, however, wouldrisk becoming a Fourthof July celebrative t.

elaboration of the virtuesof American life, and certainlywould obscure the distinguishing chaxac-teristics of the citizen leaders with whomI have worked. What sets these largelyignored leaders apart?

The citizen leaders I have in mind I

facilitate organized action to improveconditions of people in low-incomecommunities and to address other basic needsof society at the local level. Their goal is toraise the floor beneath all members of soci-ety, rather than to enable a few to touch itsvaulted ceiling. Sometimes citizen leaderswork for change, protesting proposed toxicwaste dumping near their homes, for ex-.ample. In all cases, they exhibit the leader-ship which occurs when people take sustainedaction to bring about change that will permitthem continued or increased well-being. Theyrecognize the existent - of community, a setofmlationships among people forged by somespecial bond. Sometimes that bond includesresidence in a particular place. It alwaysincludes the common human condition withall of its aspirations and potentials.

There are obvious similarities betweenthis form of citizen leadership and broaderconcepts of leadership. It entails follower-leader relationships and collaboration, ex-

\ changes, and interchanges. The citizen\ leaders about whom I write are trans-I forming leaders who engage others in

r efforts to reach higher levels of humanawareness and relationships.

With time, citizen leadersalso become transactional

leaders and some of them ac-quire the administrative com-petencies needed to managean organization. Bums hasreferred to "cobblestoneleadership" and the "sec-ond and third tier" ofleadership. These citizen

\ leaders embody thoseconcepts as well.

On the other hand, as Ilearned more about leadership,

I understood the differences be-tween the citizen leadership I knew and otherconcepts of leadership. For example, in myfirst class on leadership studies, I asked mystudents to draw pictures of leadership. Inresponse, students drew an array of images ofmoney, power, prestige, and superiorityleaders were in front of or above others. Fewscholars would define leadership in suchtcrms, yet my students probably reflectedaccurately the lessons they had acquired frompopular culture.

Citizen leaders contrast markedly withsuch popular conceptions of power and, to alesser extent, with academic conceptions aswell. For one thing, citizen leaders usually donot choose leadership. They do not even seekit. They leave their private lives reluctantlyfor these public roles. Often they intend totake some public action, to achieve their

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9BEST COPY AURAE

purpose quickly, and then to return to privatematters. Customarily, their first action is toapproach the people in charge to get some-thing done about a specific problem. It is onlywhen they are rebuffed or rebuked that citi-zen leaders go farther, eventually enteringinto a chain of events and actions that leads tothe achievement of their original purpose.Somewhere in that chain, the people I have inmind acquire the truly distinguishing charac-teristic of leadership: the gift of trust be-stowed by others with whom they work.Their groups may establish a formal organi-zation "Concerned citizens of . . . " is afrequently uscd name and citizen leaderswill be elected or delegated to act on behal f ofthe group. Whatever their titles, citizen lead-ers have a deeper sense of responsibility andhigIrr sense of authority that comes from thetrust others have bestowed informally uponthem to act on behalf of the group.

Citizen leadership brings new responsi-bilities, new contacts, media exposure, andother trappings ofleadership that, more oftenthan not, citizen leaders would prefer to shed.They would like to return to their "normal"lives. Ten years ago, Larry Wilson and hiswife, Sheila, backed into leadership positionsin the controversy over pollution of YellowCreek near their eastern Kentucky home.Today, they direct a regional environmentalprogram of the Highlander Research andEducation Center. He attended the UnitedNations Earth Summit in Brazil in the sum-mer of 1992. At the same time, she visitedother citizen leaders in Northern Ireland whohad traveled to Appalachia earlier to observeher work. Larry Wilson calls local environ-mental citizen leaders "reluctant warriors,"


who pay for their leadership:

These people have to raise families inthe contaminated areas, punch a timeclock within an organization that isfrequently opposed to their environ-mental activities, be sensitive to rock-ing the political boat, [and] maintainsocial ties in a community divided bythe issue they are working on.

The Wilsons' full-time work creates analter ego that separates them from other localcitizen leaders to whom they feel kindred. AsUgly Wilson put it, "I wake up in a differentworld every morning." His expanded role ofcitizen leader requires him to accept that newworld, but to adjust it to a world he does notwant to leave behind.

Citizen leaders usually do notchoose ... or seek ... leadership.They leave their private lives reluc-tantly for these public roles. Oftenthey intend to take some public action,to achieve their purpose quickly, andthen to return to private matters.

The loss of what is familiar prompts citi-zen leader William Saunders to maintainadamantly that he did not and would notchoose the role. His work on the Sea Islandsof South Carolina, and his direction of the100-day hospital workers' strike in Charles-ton in 1969, earned him a place in the film,

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You Got to Move, which dramatizes citizenleadership. Saunders now runs a radio stationin Charleston, South Carolina, and continuesto be an important part of the civil rightsmovement and antipoverty programs in thearea. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., Saundersunderstands citizen leadership as a burden, across that few would take up willingly. Afterall, he points out, the transforming aspect ofcitizen leadership transforms the personallives of leaders as well as the conditions theyintend to change:

It's not the kind of life you choose. Youget caught up in it. But you wouldn'tchoose to be misunderstood. A preachernear here gave a sermon,"Being PickedOut to bc PickedOn." That's aheavy subject. To see things clearlyahead of your time carries a heavyprice. You're friendless. There'sno one you can talk with straightacross the board, not even yourfamily. Ten years later, they maysee what you arc saying, but by thattime, you've gone on.

Citizen leadership is leadership withfar fewer perks and far less glamour thanthat which marks those in the threadbarepolitical and national leadership we lament.At the same time, citizen leadership comeswith the same or greater personal costs asother forms of leadership.

Despite their reluctance, citizen leadersact from fairly simple motives. One does nothear long, complicated analyses of AbrahamMaslow's hierarchy of needs. Instead, citi-

zen leaders speak in simple terms about thebasic dignity of every human being. They actfrom the conviction that we, as a society, areresponsible for redressing the conditions thatundermine and understate the human dignityof any of its members. While others mayaccept the needs and deprivation of somegroups without a sense of moral msponsibil-ity, citizen leaders cannot. They are com-pelled to pass on to the next generation asociety less tolerant of human and environ-mental degradation. For citizen leaders, withbonds to specific low-income communities,success has a single, clear measure: Will our

children hav a reasonable choice to live.with dignity in their community as

adults? Eventually, their assertion ofsocial responsibil-ity for the humancondition be-comes exceed-ingly trouble-

. some. It meansentering thevalue of "com-munity" intoeconomic calcu-

lations in which community has no monetaryvalue. It means giving voice and stature togroups of people without political influence.Citizen leadership means making a political,economic, and social system accountable forwhom it serves and fails to serve.

Citizen leadurs express the simplicity oftheir motives in anger mixed with humor anddetermination to persuade those who impedethem to recognize the human dipity of indi-viduals and the worth of community. EulaHall helped establish a health center in Mud

BEST WY AVAILABLE

Creek in eastern Kentucky. She still works at,e center to assure residents of the area

access to medical care providers and to therights and benefits to which they arc entitled.She exemplifies the sophisticated compe-tencies citizen leaders acquire to conduct

While others may accept the needs anddeprivation of some groups without asense of moral responsibility, citizenleaders cannot.

their work. She has an outstanding record ofvictories in black lung hearings, forexample.Press her for her reasons for a 30-year careerin full-time citizen leadership and she echoesFannie Lou Hamer: "You just get sick andtireA of seeing people get pushcd around."

Citizen leaders are not showered with tra-ditional forms of recognition. Colleges anduniversities, for example, often ignore themor delay recognizing their achievements.Citizen leaders am likely to be pressing themedical school's hospital on its policy forindigent care. They are likely to be protestingconditions in the rental property of auniversity's landlord, or protesting the inad-equacy of pollution controls at the plant of amajor university contributor. It serves theintemst of many institutions to ignore thereality citizeni-aders work to make us awareof. Colleges interested in instructing studentsabout the workings of the American econom yare more likely to encourage them to speak topeople in corporate offices than in picketlines.


Recognition does eorne to citizen leaders.First, and fewest, are the awards that recog-nize them for addressing an issue of injusticeor inequality. In general, these awards comefrom organizations and institutions, includ-ing some foundations, that understand them-selves as part of a process of basic socialchange. Larry Wilson was designated anenvironmental hero by Mother Jones. Sec-ond, and most frequent, are the awards thatrecognize citizen leaders for individual cour-age within a contcxt of need but separatefrom the political and social issues that un-derlie that need. These awards make citizenleaders into heroes and heroines by empha-sizing their personal traits. People magazine,for example, depicted Eula Hall as a crusaderwhen it included her among 25 "AmazingAmericans!"

Eventually, some citizen leaders are rec-ognized by institutions that previouslyshunned them. This form of award measuresthe acceptance of positions that citizen lead-ers took and the transformation of societyand some of its institutions. Bill Saunders,for example, served as chairman of theDemocratic Party of Charleston County. Theleadership path that led him to this positionbegan with a protest against racial barriersthat prevented him and others from votingand joining a political party. Often this recog-nition comes long after the controversy hassubsided, after the citizen leader has passedon the mantle of leadership to others, or evenafter he or she has died.

As I thought about why citizen leadershipis important. I came back to our luncheonconsensus about the dearth of national andpolitical leadership. Citizen leadership pro-

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tests and mitigates the shortcomings of ournational and political leadership. In the ab-sence of strong formal political leadership,leadership slips over into the hands of thosewith economic and social power. We notonly recognize this dispersion of politicalpower, we praise it. We teach pluralism as apolitical system which provides a highprobability that an active and legitimate groupcan make itself heard effectively in the pro-cess of decision making. Our first inclinationis to include citizen leadership in that pan-theon, but that would miss the importance ofthe form of citizen leadership with which Iam concerned.

Citizen leadership demands that the politi-cal system expand its notion of "legitimate"groups beyond economic and social elites. Itconstantly presses the static boundaries ofour political system to broaden, to incorpo-rate new issues, and to involve new groups.For citizen leaders, politics is the publicexpression of society's sense of communityand of the common interests of its members.Invariably, citizen leaders are criticized earlyon in their efforts precisely because of theirefforts to wake sleeping dogs and to expandthe public agenda. Any political systemthrows up barriers to resist change. If there isone thing that citizen leaders are about, it istaking down those barriers. The greater thechange, the more likely the resistance. Citi-zen le-ders soon understand that their formof leadership is intolerable for some. All thepeople mentioned in this essay have storiesof being shot at and threatened with physicalharm and arson.

Eventually, most citizen leaders learn towork within "the system," but it is a system

changed by their presence. Eula Hall invitedthe representative of her congressional dis-trict to the ground-breaking ceremony for thenew clinic in Mud Creek. Twenty years be-fore, that would have been inconceivable.

Citizen leadership demands that thepolitical system expand its notion of"legidmate" groups beyond economicand social elites.

But, in the intervening time, Hall's aspira-tions and leadership had acquired legitimacy.Likewise, any listing of the political elite ofCharleston and, perhaps, South Carolina to-day will include Bill Saunders. Larry Wilsonand the Concerned Citizens of Yellow Creekinitiated forums to discuss issues with candi-dates for local political positions.

In a sense, citizen leadership is a parallelgovernment, a shadow government, or a gov-ernment in exile depending on the degree ofchange entailed in its demands. As a "parallelgovernment," citizen leaders carry outchanges before political leaders are preparedto do the same. Addressing the needs of thehomeless is the most recent case in point. Incases where needed changes exceed the ca-pacity of citizen leaders, they may becomea "shadow government," the loyal oppositionof those with political power, to demandpublic action for public problems heretoforeignored or considered "illegitimate." Thedemand for public responses to the AIDScrisis illustrates the point on a national scale.

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13

When the demand for change exceeds thecapacity of public officials to act, citizenleaders also become a "government in exile"waiting for the day that issues, long denied,become crises demanding action.

Through protest, demands for fairer por-tions of public resources for some groups,and a vision of a transformed state of societyin which the bonds of community are moreapparent, citizen leaders pursue and establishchange. In some measure, the dearth of po-litical leadership that we lament reflects theinability or unwillingness of elected and ap-pointed leaders to express the degree of corn-


passion, concern, and community that ani-mates citizen leadership. In part, this failureis structural and needs to be fixed. In anothersense, however, it represents a valuable gapworth preserving. As long as our citizenleaders exceed the quality of our elected andappointed leaders, the latter have someone tofollow what could be more central to avital democracy?

Richard Couto is professor of LeadershipStudies at the Jepson School of the U niversityof Richmond.

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1 o

The Making of the Citizen Leader

A current snapshot of contemporaryAmerican politics reveals largely cynical,spectator-citizens waiting for the right typeof leader(s) to resolve for them the criticalproblems in their neighborhoods, communi-ties, states, and country. But the distancebetween citizens and leaders is greater thanever. Leaders appear detached or stripped ofcommunal identity; citizens forfeit personalparticipation choosing instead to pass onunrealistic expectations to public leaders.

The picture is disquieting but far fromhopeless. The heterogeneity of Americansprovides a powerful resource to revitalizepolitical life and to foster a public languageinvolving freedom and responsibility, indi-vidualism and community, present needs andfuture plans. The potential for change is real.What must be done is to challenge commonlyheld assumptions a)out the dichotomy be-tween leadership and citizenship. We need amuch more inclusive definition of leadershipin order to tap the potential to influencepublic life inherent in each of us. The crucialchange needed on the political landscape inan America approaching the twenty-first

by Cheryl Mabey

century is the development of citizen leaders.

Traditional Leadership ModeLsAt a time when sound bites are the preva-

lent mode of political discourse, images ofleadership and citizenship may conform toan increasingly narrow defmition. Researchfindings bear this out. Such diverse groups aspolitically active college women participatingin the NEW Leadership Program at RutgersUniversity, and high school student leadersin Los Angeles, California, were asked todraw pictures describing what the word"leadership" meant to them. Two commonelements emerged. First, the picture of theleader was always larger, more prominentthan any other image on the page. Second, theleader was at a podium or on a stage, separatefrom a group passively listening to this larger,more important figure. Some drawings wentso far as to include a line designating a spacefor the leader separate from that of the manyfollowers.

This graphic illustration of the relation-ship between leaders and followers comple-ments many prevailing theories about leader-

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! 5

ship. The leader is the one responsible forsolving problems and for effectively com-municating the answer(s) to the populace orgroup. The focal point in most leadershiptheories is on the leader.

The "trait theory" of leadership ascribescertain personality traits or attributes exclu-sively to leaders. Although research has failedto validate that leaders and followers possessdifferent personality traits or U at leadersshare certain traits in common, a popularconception of leadership equates leadershipwith the personality of the leader. Journalistsassessing potential presidential candidatesdaily demonstrate the durability of the traittheory. Not only does this approach createunrealistic expectations of potential leadersas superhumans nearing perfection, but itdistorts the richly complex relationship be-tween leading and following into a mislead-ingly simplistic focus on an individual. Lead-ership involves considerably more than aleader.

The "organizational theory" of leadershipalso narrows leadership to the position whichany leader occupies within an organization.This fusion of leadership with office ignoresthe distinction between authority and leader-ship. The theory further assumes that a feware leaders and most are followers, failing torecognize the multiplicity of informal as wellas formal leadership roles even within themost complex organizational structures. Per-haps it is the overlapping nature of thesetheories which results in the notion of leaderseparate from the group.

According to the "vision theory," a cur-rently popular view of leadership, it is the jobof the leader to imagine the future direction in


which a company or country needs to go, andto communicate that vision effectively toothers. Ideas, solutions to problems, personalmeaning, and goals are the purview of lead-ers. The act of leading becomes the act ofpersuading others to adopt the leader's ideasthrough effective communication or market-ing. All too often, expectations are raised thatsocietal ills could be alleviated if only bemrindividuals emerged in leadership positions.

Another prevalent leadership theory de-riving from social sciences and management

the "situational theory" acknowledgesthat leadership necessitates varying degrees

of interaction between the group anda leader. In fact, this theory urgesleaders to focus first upon the situa-

tion, the readiness of the group, toperform and work together. This

transactive view of leadershi psuggests that effective lead-

ers adapt their leadershipstyle to provide what

the groupneeds and inreturn thegroup "fol-low s" theleader. Cer-tainly, the

situationalleadership

\ approachinvolves

more corn-plex interaction

than the other threetheories of leadership,but it measures leaders

,

s

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in terms of their ability to influence a grouprather than to act in concert with it.

A fifth theory cf leadership,labeled as the"power theory" and commonly associatedwith Machiavelli, can be considered as old ashuman nature. Leaders are the movers andshakers who get things done. Power in itsdifferent guises is a resource to be usedprudently by the leader. A contemporarytwist of the "power theory" is that the leaderempowers others to use power. On the sur-face, Machiavelli and empowerment mayappear paradoxical, but if the dominant para-digm is primarily leader-focused, "empow-erment of others" can be viewed as simplyanother way of increasing the leader's powerbase.

These limited views of leadership aredangerous for two reasons: the group becomesoverly dependent upon the leader to solve itsproblems, resulting in complacency or pas-sivity among followers; and, the expectationsthat the leader can solve problems or createmeaning are too high, resulting in the ultimatefailure of society's leaders.

Today's leadership crisis may not lie inthe caliber of our current leaders, but rather inour failure to mobilize group resources tosolve the group's problems. In an analogy tothe physician-patient relationship, RonaldHeifetz of Harvard University identifies threesituations that illustrate the shortcomings ofa problem-solving model reliant on the leaderalone.

In a Type I situation, the patient has aninfection which the physician can treat withan antibiotic. The problem is relatively simpleand the physician (leader) has the resourcesto treat the disease.

In a Type II situation, the patient has achronic disease, such as high blood pressure.The physician may treat it partially throughmedication, but the patient shares in his orher own care by monitoring diet, exercise,

Today's leadership crisis may not liein the caliber of our current leaders,but rather in our failure to mobilizegroup resources to solve the group'sproblems.

stress, or other life-style factors. Both thephysician and patient share in the responsi-bility for solving this problem.

In a Type III situation, the patient has amedically untreatable disease, such as anadvanced stage of cancer. The options fortreatment are negligible and the physicianrecognizes that the patient assumes the re-sponsibility for facing the future. The phy-sician may be a support, but the locus ofpower in handling such a crisis is the patient'salone.

The conventional paradigm of equatingleadership with the leader's ability to solveproblems overlooks the continuum of crisesconfronting society. Expecting the leader toinitiate and carry out solutions in a straight-forward Type I problem may be realistic. Inthe majority of instances, however, the issuesfacing leaders are more complex, necessi-tating collective problem-solving strategiesof the group and its leaders. The challenge isto develop a broader concept of leadership

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which emphasizes this dynamic relationship.

Redefming American CitizenshipDivergent meanings of citizenship have

evolved throughout American history. Therepublican tradition, derived in part fromGreek and Roman political thought, positedthat civic participation was the foundation ofa free society. Virtue, communal values, anda sense of mutual obligation formed thecornerstone which both ThomasJefferson and James Madisonviewed as necessary to secureliberty or happiness.

The liberal tradition inher-ited from the Enlightenmentdetached the concept of"citizen" from any com-munal ties or responsi-bilities. In the dominantliberal view, the citizenis seen mainly as a bearerof rights, such as thefreedom to speak, to vote,or to worship. As HarryBoyte traces these ap-proaches to citizenshipbook, ConirnonWealth: ACitizenPolitics, he points out that: "such anindividualist conception of politics neglectsthe moral wellsprings of public life, the val-ues like responsibility, fairness, and concernfor others that were widespread at the nation'sfounding."

Even the Progressive movement of thetwentieth century did not recapture the con-cept of an engaged citizenry. For mostprogressives, citizens acted by proxy andthrough the state with no broad popular in-


volvement. The concept of "I), iblic" becamespecialized the preserve of representa-tives, guided by the advice uf experts, bu-reaucrats, and professionals.

The "managerial" era of the late twentiethcentury witnessed a transferal of the power tomake key decisions about the public good, toexperts, technical specialists, and profes-sionals. Citizenship was defined in weak and

attenuated ways, and citizens increasinglybecame spectators rather than participantsin the political process.

Today, the operative paradigms forleadership and citizenship have stressedthat the few exercise power over themany, and have reinforced passive rather

than active behavior from average citi-zens. Individual or special interests

supersede consideration for thegeneral welfare or common good.

Broad-based and effective citi-zen leaders in our times are pos-

rff in his

Return to

sible if and only if citizensdevelop the abilities to gain access toinformation of all kinds and the skills

to put such information to effective use. Atthe same time, citizens committed to publiclife, community, and leadership will need torecognize and understand certain restrainingforces in the world as it is.

American culture is predicated on an ego-centric view of society: that is, a societymade up of individuals freely able to contractto meet their individual needs. Thc unit ofAmerican society is the individual. Otherculture's basic units are groups or clans.Where a nation such as Kenya may aspire to"getting there together" or honor the"harambee" spirit, the American tradition is

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embedded in individual achievement thatleaves a trail for others to follow. One ob-stacle for expanding leadership skills and

The skills and capabilities so neces-sary for citizen leaders begin with apositive invitation to become one.

opportunities to all citizens is our culturalbias in favor of individual action. In thisview, groups are often suspect. Groups arevoluntary associations, which individualschoose to affiliate with when their own inter-ests are served.

Another obstacle to active citizenry is theexaltation of "the expert" in our culture. Evencitizens knowledgeable about and commit-ted to public life face an age of information ofdizzying proportions. For the average stu-dent unacquainted with the institutions andprocesses of government or uninterested incontemporary issues, there is truth in thebelief that others know more. If there is asocietal problem, too often resources areexpended in trying to find a technological fixeven if the problem is political or social innature. Many problems do not need expertsto solve them. Neighborhoods or communi-ties throughout the U.S. possess the resourcesto solve their own problems. Yet, the persis-tent belief that "professionals" or "experts"know more and should tell others what to doparalyze many community initiatives.

A further obstacle to developing a broaderbase of citizen leaders is the identification of

leaders with certain positions. An office-holder is automatically defined as a leaderwhether or not he or she leads anyone.Nonofficeholders are labeled outsiders oractivists. Public space must be created forlegitimizing informal citizen leaders and for-mal leaders to come together to discuss andoffer alternative solutions to societal prob-lems.

Somehow a language and a message mustbe forged outlining the positive expectationsof citizenship. Millions of dollars have beenspent on shaping negative campaigns, tellingcitizens why a particular candidate shouldnot be elected. Youth are bombarded bynegative messages: "Say No to Drugs,""Don't get pregnant!" "Don't drop out ofschool!" "Stay away from gangs!" Nowhereis there a positive creed for what societyexpects from its adult citizens or its youth.The skills and capabilities so necessary forcitizen leaders begin with a positive inviia-tion to become one.

"Couch citizens" must become activecitizen leaders. The assumption is that eachperson is responsible for contributing to thecommon good in different areas. Participationat any level is an exercise of leadership,joining others to use power for constructiveends. Unlike the prevalent notion of solitaryleaders finding answers and announcing so-lutions through mass media, the challengefor the twenty-first century is to preparecitizens to act together in a more interactive,dynamic process. The narrow comm and-and-control leadership style no longer works.

Making Citizen LeadersCitizen leadership requires distinctive

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19

skills and capabilities that require develop-ment. Socialization in homes and schoolsmust include the recognition that every citi-zen will lead. Civic participation is not anelective but a given. Each person matters.The axiom of Mount St. Mary's CollegeWomen's Leadership Program is that everystudent has the opportunity to enroll andparticipate in this program because thequestion is not ifone will lead but rather howeffective a leader one becomes. Such a mes-sage is important to this population of women,the majority of whom are women of color aridfirst-generation college students.

Public life cannot be made synonymouswith American government structures orprocesses. Public life and political con-versations begin in the kitchens, neigh-borhoods, streets, cities, and organizationswhere we live and work. Caring passionatelyfor something is the key to political participa-tion. "Private" life impinges on "public" life.Likewise, public policy can limit or expandpersonal choices. Developing a cid zen leaderbegins with encouraging opportunities for"doing something" with others and for giv-ing "voice" to one's impressions and reac-tions. One of the objectives of Project PublicLife based at the University of Minnesota'sHumphrey Institute of Public Affairs is toteach a new kind of politics citizen politics

in which citizens are powerful actors inpublic problem solving. In the workbook,Making the Rules: A Guidebook for YoungPeople Who Intend to Make a Difference,readers are urged to develop "a big picture ofpolitics, one that includes public life anactive, diverse, challenging arena in whichwe act on what matters to us."

The Making ol the Citizen Leader

Citizen leaders must obtain knowledge.Not only do citizen leaders need to becomecompetent or knowledgeable about what theyadvocate, but they need to understand howthe system operates. Too often, citizenshiptraining is limited to formal knowledge aboutthe institutions of government without everaddressing practical issues of access to civicknowledge. Community leadership programs,like the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF)network, provide a model curriculum in pub-lic life. Policy issues are joined to theories ofaction that include concepts such as power,mediating institutions, public life, judgment,imagination, and self-interest. Such conceptsare tied, in turn, to discussion of democraticand religious values, and the traditions thatinform and frame them justice, concern

Public life cannot be made synony-mous with American governmentstructures or processes. Public lifeand political conversations beginin the kitchens,neighborhoods, streets,cities, and organizations where we liveand work.

for the poor, the dignity of the person, diver-sity, participation, and cultural heritage.Strategies for change and community orga-nizing techniques arise from the explicit as-sumption that neighborhood trainees have animportant measure of responsibility for thepublic good of their community.

Action marks the citizen leader. Knowing

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is insufficient without action. Communityservice opportunities even a school'scommunity service requirement exposeothers to a real world beyond their private

Time spent working with groups instudent activities or volunteering mayoutdistance many more solitary, cog-nitive tasks in developing future citi-zen leaders.

lives. The Constitutional Rights Foundation,through its Youth in Community Service(YCS) program in southern California highschools, provides students with opportuni-ties to learn and become involved with com-munity problems. Linking action with reflec-tion is a powerful learning model. "Skills foraction" need to be recognized and nurturedby parents and educators alike. Time spentworking with groups in student activities orvolunteering may outdistance many moresolitary, cognitive tasks in developing futurecitizen leaders.

While most learning involves worldngindependently, educators are recognizing theimportance of cooperative learning. Studygroups, group projects, or small group dis-cussions utilize a more collective view ofwork. Often ignored, though, is the necessityfor teaching the social skills required forcooperativeness. If the dominant mode ofplaying, studying, and working is that of theindependent competitor, different folkwaysof team-building and win-win problem solv-

ing need to be introduced and practiced.Outdoor leadership education such as pro-grams sponsored by Outward Bound or theWilderness Institute provide expt entiallaboratories in trust, team-building, and col-lective problem solving.

While otheis have addressed the impor-tance of developing judgment, problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, a fre-quently overlooked skill for citizen leaders islearning to ask effective questions and tolisten well. Given the scarcity of resources,concentrating on thz. "right set of questions"may be more critical than analyzing the "rightanswers" to questions of lesser importance.We will need to develop educational andcivic programs or opportunities which de-velop the capacity for brainstorming andrecognizing possibilities, rather than for lim-iting choices or critiquing ideas.

As recent events in Eastern Europe orsouthern California have demonstrated, citi-zen leaders do not possess the magical pana-cea for viblic life. They are bound by theirdefinitions of leadership, history, and cul-ture. The making of citizen leaders occurs toofrequently in the cauldrcri of conflict andcrisis rather than by design or invitation.Still, politics, as former Czech PresidentVaclav Havel has reminded the world, is notonly the art of the possible: "It can also be theart of the impossible, that is, the art of makingboth ourselves and the world better."

Cheryl Mabey is director of the Women'sLeadership Program and an associate pro-fessor at Mount St. Mary's College, LosAngeles, California.

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40 1

Public Leadership and Public Politics

by Michael Briand

Of the second-rate leaders people speakrespecully saying,

"He has done this, he has done that."Of the first-rate leaders,

they do not say this. They say,"We have done it all ourselves."

Lao Tzc

In 1831, the young French scholar Alexisde Tocqueville came to the United States tostudy democracy in America. The book hewrote on his return to France, Democracy inAmerica, has become a classic. In manyways, it is still the most astute, most insight-fill analysis of public life in America commu-nities ever achieved.

In the United States of the 1830s,Tocqueville wrote, "Nothing [was] morestriking . . . than the absence of . . . thegovernment...." He found this situation bothunderstandable and admirable. In his view,no government could "administer the affairsof each locality better than the citizens coulddo it for themselves . . . when the people areas enlightened, as awake to their interests,

and as accustomed to reflect on them as theAmericans are. . . . "

In the United States, Tocqueville went onto observe, "when a private individual medi-tates an undertaking . . . directly connected. . . with the welfare of society, he neverthinks of soliciting the co-operation of thegovernment. . . . He courts the assistance ofother individuals. . . ."

But times change. Much as we might wantto believe the flattering portrait Tocquevillepainted a century and a half ago, our currentexperience makes clear that it no longer holdstrue. In 1991, a study conducted for theKettering Foundation entitled Citizens andPolitics: A View from Main Street America,reported that members of the public arefrustrated by and angry about our inability tosolve problems in our country today. Andthey blame the current crop of official leadersfor failing sometimes willfully to re-spond to the public's concerns. The publicdistrnsts its official leaders. Americans be-lieve politicians don't listen to citizens, but tothe advocates for special interests. They feelthey aren't consulted, that thei r point of view

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is crowded out. In their minds, elected offi-cials are neither responsive nor accountableto the public.

Let's go back to Tocqueville for a mo-ment. How does the situation in our societyand communities today differ from what heobserved in the 1830s? Read the statementsbelow one more time and pay attention to thehighlighted phrases:

"Nothing [was] more striking . . . thanthe absence of ... the government...." No government could "administerthe affairs of each locality better thanthe citizens could do it for themselves. . . A private individual . . . neverthinks of sol kiting the cooperation ofthe government. . . . He courts theassistance of other individuals...."

"Absence o f gov emm ent," "Citizens coulddo it for themselves," "A private individualnever thinks of soliciting the cooperation ofgovernment he courts the assistance ofother individuals." Clearly, in the 1830s,Americans were rather more self-reliant whenit came to public matters than they are today.They didn't wait around for the experts ortheir official leaders to solve their problemsfor them. Instead, they talked with each otherabout what to do and then they did it. In thetowns and villages of the early nineteenthcentury, government wasn't just for the people

it was of them and by them as well.Americans were truly self-governing.

Granted, American communities of thelate twentieth century are much bigger, morecomplex, and confronted with more far-reaching, deeply rooted, and complicated

problems than those faced by the communi-ties Tocqueville observed. Yet for all theobvious and important differences betweencommunities then and now, it's worth askingourselves whether the problem isn't so muchhow our communities have changed as howour view of democratic self-government haschanged.

Maybe the problem is that we've defaultedon our duty as citizens to take responsibilityfor solving our own problems. Maybe weshould stop looking for leaders who willshow us the way forward and instead startlooking to ourselves for answers. Perhaps thequestion we should ask ourselves is not,"How do we get effective leaders?" but "Howdo we, as a community, begin to address aproblem we want to solve?"

A Misleading MetaphorWhen you stop and think about it, public

life in our communities today looks a lot likethe world of the private economy we're allfamiliar with from our work lives. Althoughthe ideal of community life remains one inwhich people treat each other as friends andneighbors almost like members of anextended family the hard fact is that weapproach each other impersonally evenwarily keeping most of our fellow citizensat ann's length. This is revealing, becausethis is the way we behave in commercialtransactions. In the public life of our com-munities today, just as in an economic mar-ket, people are too preoccupied with thecompetition to realize their particular inter-ests and desires. They try to satisfy these by"buying" the goods and services they wantfrom the "producer" of these goods and ser-

- 18 -

vices in this case, government. Citizensare "consumers" of what government canprovide.

So public life is reduced to the question of"who gets what, when, and how." The "com-munity" is nothing more than a loose col-lection of individuals and groups, each withopinions, preferences, and positions that haveto be accommodated. The assumption is thatthere is no common orpublic good or interestapart from what emerges from a fair com-petition among particular interests. As in aneconomic market, the best result is the onethat comes closest to satisfying everyindividual's and group's desires. The as-sumption that there are only particular desiresand interests of individuals and groups, inturn, leads us to rely on decision-makingprocedures such as majority rule, whichmerely adds up people's preferences andbases policy on what the majority wantsmodified, of course, by such concessions asthose in the minority can compel it to make.

Hence, the emphasis on the power to in-fluence policymakers who have the authorityto make decisions. If the community is like amarket, then the people who occupy whatought to be positions of community leader-ship end up having to act like brokers oragents. The demands we place on electedofficials turn them into experts at "workingthe system." Their "leadership" consists ofusing governmental authority to serve "thecustomers." An effective "leader" is some-one who can "deliver the goods." A popular"leader" is someone who can respond to thedesires of as many individuals and groups aspossible without upsetting others. In reality,"leadership" amounts to a talent for selling


people the line that their wishes will be ful-filled, even though (it goes without saying)everyone has to compromise, and some mayeven have to lose.

Clearly, in the 1830s, Americans wererather more self-reliant when it cameto public matters than they are today.They didn't wait around for the ex-perts or their official leaders to solvetheir problems for them.

We like to dress up our idea of a "realleader," prettify it so we forget the uglyreality beneath our decorous descriptions.We say to ourselves, "a leader is a personwho knows what needs to be done and setsabout doing it. He takes charge, looks for asolution, and gets busy persuading others tosupport it. He knows what the problem is,what causes it, and what will solve it. We cantrust him, have faith in his character and goodintentions. We can rest assured that he'sready to 'play hard ball' with opponents who,out of ignorance or malevolence, have thetemerity to resist his reasonable proposals."At his democratic best, a "real leader" tries toempower folks. Trouble is, he often ends uptrying to "overpower" them. He 's never shorton "facts," opinions, options, and plans. He'sa skillful, political strategist, he's a spell-binding "communicator," and he's ready tosolve our problems now!

Of course, there never seems to be enoughpeople with these abilities to go around. The

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supply of "real leaders" can't keep up withour needs and expectations.

Back to Tocqueville. Perhaps we don't getthe sort of leadership and leaders wereally need because we've forgotten some-thing important about politics: in a democ-racy, government is supposed to be not onlyfor the people, but if them and by them aswell. This is not to suggest that we should, orcan, do away with government. Quite thecontrary; government is indispensable. But,it is to suggest that we ask ourselves whethergovernment can operate effectively in theabsence of a form of community life that,unlike the market (per)version that prevailscurrently, places the responsibility for soundpublic decision making squarely on theshoulders of citizens. If such an alternativeview is called for, our understanding of thenature of leadership, and of who our leadersare, must change as well.

Direction and ChoiceLeadership implies that someone -- a

leader is leading us somewhere. Butsomewhere is not just anywhere we don'twant to be led in circles, for example, ordown the garden path. Where, specifically,do we want to go? In a democracy, a directionfor a community can be set only by themembers of the community itself. We definesuch a direction by deciding which circum-stances or condi tions constitute problems forus and by deciding how to go about solvingthose problems. Because problems such ascrime, economic stagnation, ineffective edu-cation, and the like cannot be solved by anyone person o rgroup, they require a community

a public response. Even when a "market

solution" for a social problem is appropriate,no individual or group acting unilaterall y caneffect such a solution. Only the communitycan authorize and implement a market-basedresponse. When markets are permitted to

The community must take responsi-bility for facing up to the fact thatevery social problem poses a hardchoke, that no matter what we do,there will be undesirable consequencesas well as desirable ones.

operate, they do so because, explicitly orimplicitly, we agree that they should.

Moreover, actions taken in response toproblems that touch many or all of us inevi-tably have consequences that affect somepeople adversely. Proposals to take actionthus prompt opposition and lead to disputes.As in any dispute, a public dispute can beresolved only by the parties involved inthis case, by the members of the communitywho are in disagreement.

Whether a problem is a problem, howserious it is, how susceptible to solution it is,who bears primary responsibility for solvingit, and what should be done about it arequestions over which people can reasonablydisagree. Because every course of actioncarries positive as well as negative conse-quences, and because typically there is noclear, universally accepted answer to thequestion of what to do, solving a socialproblem invariably presents us with a di-

- 20 -

lemma, a hard choice.In this situation, any solution that stands a

chance of being both effective and supportedwidely must emerge from a decision-makingprocess that enables everyone affected by theproblem and the attempt to solve it to feel thatthe decision is acceptable to him, that he cango along with it. For reasons of both fairnessand effectiveness, this decision-makingprocess requires a collective judgment thatincorporates the perspectives and concernsof everyone, and that draws on everyone'sexperience and abilities. In short, no one cantake care of the community's business noone can set a direction for the communityexcept the community itself.

It follows that, in a sense, the communitymust lead itself Comm tmity leaders will thusbe those who, in their thinking and actions,reflect the community's will. But no indi-vidual can read the community's mind, andno individual can execute its will, becausethat "mind" and that "will" literally do notexist until the members of the community,through collective thought and action, createthem. At most, community leadership con-sists of helping the community find out foritself what it wants and helping citizensarticulate the community voice. The pur-pose of leadership is to serve as a catalyst.Leadership is the ingredi-ent that makes the demo- 7--erotic recipe work, theleaven that helps thecommunity's bread rise instead ofcollapsing into an unpalatable andgooey mess.

What, then, does the community haveto do for itself, and how do its members


provide leadership? At a minimum, the com-munity must take responsibility for facing upto the fact that every social problem poses ahard choice, that no matter what we do, therewill be undesirable consequences as well asdesirable ones. There will be undesirableconsequences because we value a variety ofthings, and these things often come into con-flict. Which should we value more: clean airand our health, or the convenience and free-dom that driving our own cars afford? Towhich should we give priority: the air thatwould be polluted by burning our trash, or theground water that would be contaminated by

burying it? Which should we save:the jobs that a new factory would

provide, or the given belt thatshields our homes from the

.4'47,..."_harshness of asphalt andskyscrapers? This is

alwhat mak es sociproblems nom-

Th.nously dificult nuts to

crack. Whengood things come

into con-flict, it

- 21 -

7

e-'

sometimes proves impossible to obtain orenjoy one without having to do with less of,or go without, one of the others. The result isa dilemma a hard choice.

The hard work and it is hard workof making tough chokes demands

frank, open, realistic, but civil talkamong citizens.

It's impossible for anyone, when faced witha hard choice, to know for sure which ofseveral good things should be given priority.In such situations, it's bad enough that aperson feels torn between equally appealing(or unappealing) alternatives. The choice isdoubly difficult because typically there'snowhere to turn for a definitive answer.There's no principle, no nrle of thumb, nowise and benevolent authority who will tell aperson what's best to do. One has to use one'sown judgment in effect, make up the rulesas one goes.

If it's hard for an individual to resolveconflicts between good outcomes, think howtough it is for a community to reach a sounddec ision. In the absence of established guide-lines for setting priorities, and given thevariability of constitution and experienceamong individuals, it's not surprising thatpeople di ffer considerably in their judgmentsabout what good things ought to be favored ininstances of conflict. So conflict between thethings people value conflict everyone ex-periences within himself frequently un-

derlies differences between persons. True,people can end up in disputes for all sorts ofreasonspersonality conflicts, injuries doneby one to another, miscommunication, andso forth. But, an important source of conflictbetween persons (and hence between groupsof persons) is the universal experience ofconflict between things people value, an ex-perience that occurs within each of us.

Community problems are thus politicalproblems problems that in their very na-ture elicit diverse and, often, conflicting re-sponses. Calling such problems "political"doesn't mean that they necessarily have to beaddressed by government. Nor does it meanthat what we usually think of as "politics"self-interested competition for advantagecauses these problems. What it means is thatthe problems we face in our communitiesreflect the fact that human responses to lifeare inherently diverse. It's this inherent di-versity, and the conflict that flows naturallyfrom it, that renders problems political.

If our response to the problems life throwsat us is inescapably political, then the form ofdecision making we require in order to dealwith those problems must itself be political.In short, we need politics. Specifically, weneed the sort of community politics that en-ables and encourages us, as individuals andas a community to think about what we value,to recognize the consequences that will attendthe various courses of action we might pur-sue, to decide what relative priorities we wishto establish, and to devise solutions that ev-eryone can go along with. It is for the purposeof creating and sustaining this sort of politicsthat we require genuine community leader-ship.

- 22 -

Community LeadershipThe "market" assumptions that have in-

sinuated themselves into our efforts to ad-dress community problems prevent us fromdealing with conflicts between the things wevalue. They keep us from reaching solutionsto the problems we face collectively. Why?Because they obscure the fact that, in addi-tion to particular interests, we have a sharedinterest in obtaining those public goods thatonly we, acting together, can produce. Be-cause only citizens acting together can pro-duce such goods, neutral decision-makingprinciples, such as majority rule, do not suf-fice. Such rules can deal only mechanicallywith the competing interests and desires

A community leader sets out not totake charge, but to prompt people toreflect and ask themselves the rightquestions. He or she realizes that thesolution is not outside the public, butwithin it.

people have. They can aggregate thcm addthem up but they can't integrate themthey can't reconcile the things that are impor-tant to people without compelling them to"win" or compromise. Only people can in-tegrate conflicting interests.

Community problem solving requires aform of political interaction that is lessadversarial than the sort that characterizesthe market version of politics. The hard work

and it is hard work of making tough


choices demands frank, open, realistic, butcivil talk among citizens. Only talk of thissort will build an integrated community per-spective out of fragmented partial perspec-tives and, hence, create a basis for decisionsthat everyone can live with.

What conception of community leader-ship follows from this contention? Clearly,when public problems racial tensions,drug abuse, poverty, crime, economic stag-nation, environment pollution arise, sim-ply having the authority or power to influencepublic decisions doesn't guarantee that solu-tions will be effective or widely supported.Problems such as these require 6tizens towork together to do the hait work ofmaking choices based on a shared perspec-tive. This suggests that community leader-ship is the ability to get people to worktogether to solve public problems. Specifi-cally, it is the ability to help members of thecommunity:

define their problems from a shared,public perspective;recognize the costs and consequencesof different courses of action;"work through" conflicting reactionsto those consequences; andmake the hard choices that everyissue poses.

The purpose of leadership, in this view, isto improve the community's ability to un-derstand the hard choices it must make and towork together toward a public judgment. Acommunity leader sets out not to take charge,but to prompt people to reflect and askthemselves the right questions. He or she

- 23 -

realizes that the solution is not outside thepublic, but within it; what should be donebecomes clear only as members of the com-munity deliberate together.

A true community leader concentrates noton "empowering" others, but on alerting themto the capacities they already have. He or shedoesn't assume the problem is already de-fined, but solicits a variety of perspectivesand seeks to integrate them into a new, genuinecommunity perspective on the problem. Sucha person depersonalizes politics; such a per-son encourages people not to trust him/heror each other but only to work together tosolve the problem everyone confronts. Hedoesn't play "hard ball," but works withallies and opponents alike.

A community leader doesn't come armedwith facts, opinions, options, and plans, butwith the know-how required for public delib-eration. He or she faces up to hard choicesrather than avoiding them, and calls the atten-tion of his or her fellow citizens to theinescapability of those choices. He or sheenables them to "work through" their ownconflicting feelings about what should bedone and helps them weigh their prioritiesfairly against those of their fellows. He/sheencourages everyone to begin thinking to-gether about which consequences are accept-able and which are not, and aoout whichcourses of action everyone can live with. He/she does not seek authority for himself/her-self, but tries to disperse it among his/herfellow citizens. He/she works not for short-term gains and immediate results, but for thelong-term goal of changing the way the com-munity conducts its business.

Learning How to LeadCommunity problem solving is a practical

activity. It's an art, and like other arts, it restson knowing how to do something. To learnthe dispositions and skills to acquire theknow-how needed to practice communityproblem solving, people must act The feel-ing of empowerment that enables people totake effective action comes only with expe-rience in dealing with real problems in actualsituations.

A true community leader concentratesnot on "empowering" others, but onalerting them to the capacities theyalready have.

If community problem solving can belearned only by acting with other members ofthe community, then community leadersmustbegin and end as ordinary citizens. Ifwould-be problem solvers don't learn thedispositions and skills that every citizen mustacquire through experience, they will be inno position to assist others in developing theknow-how that community problem solvingrequires. A community leader is nothing more,then, than a citizen who has developed thisknow-how well enough to foster, throughexample, its development in his fellows.

Indeed, a community leader will nevercease being a citizen. Having learned hiscivic dispositions and skills as a member ofthe public, he will understand that a person

24 -

who is not immersed in the community can-not lead it. A community leader is one whohelps the community find its voice and set itsdirection. Without being well integrated intothat body of citizens, a would-be leader can-not know what the community thinks andwhat it wishes to do.

We Have Met Our Leaders, and TheyAre Us

Is there reason to hope that we can trans-form the public life of our communitiesrender it more like the conception of commu-nity problem solving described above andless like the market conception that currentlydominates our public world? The 1991Kettering Foundation report, Citizens andPolitics, suggests there is. Although Ameri-cans express irritation and dismay aboutpublic life, many remain actively involved inaddressing the problems that concern them.When they have a real chance to have an

Public Leadeiship and Public Politics

effect on these problems, citizens take thelead in addressing them.

This isn't surprising. As political analystWilliam Schneider has observed, mostAmericans are pragmatists. They believe thatwhat works is right. And at some level theyunderstand that, in the end, only citizens canmake a democracy work. As a recent politicalcartoon put it, "We the People of the UnitedStates . . . are still in charge of making itwork." The point is, the leaders we seek areamong us already we are the leadem ourdemocracy requires. When at last we assumeour rightful position at the head of the publicthat we ourselves constitute, we will provethe wisdom of Lao Tze: We will have first-rate leaders and we will have done it allourselves.

Michael Briand is a program officer at theKettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio.

25 -

0)0

N1111111111111111111=11111W

The Political Language ofSocial Leaders

This essay reports on some of the results of43 interviews held with active citizens ofCentertown, a small city in upstate New YorkculTently taking steps to recover from ageneral economic decline. The method ofselecting subjects for our interviews was notbased on any statistical sampling procedure.Subjects were largely well-educated businessand professional people who took an activepart in the affairs of their community. Aminimum criterion for selection was serviceon the boards of at least two volunteer asso-ciations. The group was 80 percent male andmore than two-thirds were over the age of 50.

Women were clearly underrepresented inthis informally selected gimp. We cannot,of course, know whether a less gender-skewedsample would have changed the conclusionswe reached, but whether the views of highlyactive business and professional women, age50 and over, would differ markedly fromthose of their male counterparts is at leastopen to question. It should also be noted thatthe interviews reported here took place beforethe major economic upheavals which havetaken place in this country, and in the world,

by Manfred Stanley

in the last few years. Recent trends mightwell have changed the perspectives of ourinterviewees, though this would not neces-sarily have led us to fundamentally alteredconclusions.

Our purpose in interviewing this loosecross section of Centertown's active citizenswas to hold a conversation with them abouttheir understanding of their work and theircommunity. We were looking forcontinuitiesand discontinuities between this communityand others like it. What is reported here by nomeans exhausts the material from these in-terviews. The focus in this essay is on thoseinterview outcomes most relevant for anyon:interested in the organization of civic forumsin a town such as this.

The Nature of Leadership and the Roleof Political Parties

The concept of leadership that emergesfrom these interviews can be characterizedby three generalizations.

First, real leaders are those who initiateaction not primarily out of self-interest, butout of a statesmanlike concern for the good of

- 26 -

the whole. What moves this generalizationbeyond banality is the complex attitudespresent in citizens' minds about what self-interest means. Self-interest does not endwith the idea of making money or fulfillingmaterial ambitions. Self-interest is also takento mean something psychologically corruptan overriding desire to make oneself lookgood at the expense of others that takes theform of misusing language, distorting infor-mation, and wrongly interpreting events. Aterm that is often used in this connection ispartisanship. The citizens we interviewedconsider partisanship to be a politics of ma-nipulation: manipulation of status, o f illusions,and of emotions. Real leaders are expected tobe free of partisanship, though not of partyaffiliation. Attitudes toward the press becomeinvolved here as we shall see later. For now,let me add that in opposing a politics ofpartisanship, active citizens often defend apolitics of market forces; that is to say, theypraise leaders who try to arrange for condi-tions of productivity, effective competition,and stability for investment. Market forcesare regarded as real in a way that other thingsoften are not. Hence the concept of parti-sanship seems reserved for issues regardedas not fully real.

The second generalization we found re-garding the good leader is that he or she is onewho knows when people have some degreeof freedom to act with initiative, as opposedto a situation in which things are out ofcontrol and must simply be adapted to. Again,it sounds obvious. But what people mean by"out of control" is rather less obvious. Wefind two distinct ideas about this term in ourinterviews. First, something is out of control

The Political Language a Social Leaders

when its origins are perceived as outside ofthe community. The two prime examplesgiven were foreign affairs and the evolutionof the capitalist economy itself. Virtuallynowhere in our interviews is there a sign thatanyone thinks he or she can do much ofanything about matters such as the threat ofnuclear war, or the long-term external condi-tions that led to plant closings in Centertown.The sec;ond sense of how something can beout of control is when it becomes "public" inthe stigmatized sense of partisan emotionsand abstractions. National politics are oftenperceived as hopelessly out of control in boththese senses. This suggests an ambivalentattitude toward citizenship.

As citizens, many seem to believe thatthere is little they can do about world labor-market trends and the role of multinationalcorporations in setting those trends. Nor canthey affect large-scale poverty or the actionsof Third World countries. There seems littlepoint in discussing the details of defensecontract policy, Strategic Defense Initiative,

National politics are often perceivedas hopelessly out of control.

arms control, or the character of weaponssystems. What is open to us, the intervieweesseem to say, is how we locally adapt to theseforces and the attitudes we bring to theseefforts. This is reflected especially in com-ments about language. Many respondents arevery conscious of how language (even spe-

- 27 -

cific words) mediate emotions like hope,apathy, despair, or aspiration. Yet the sharpdistinction between local issues and those"over the horizon" makes for a kind ofeconomy of effort among citizen leaders.Practical people are perceived as those who

There seemed little spontaneous in-terest in the divisions presently exist-ing within the two national parties.

work within the confines of the communityto make it more competitive. There were noreferences to a standard of leadership basedon helping people understand how collectiveefforts to change national and internationalpolicies could alter local realities. It wasn'tthat people rejected this notion of leadership.It just never came up. Perhaps that is whatnational elections are considemd to be about.Yet the statistics of American voting, ofwhich many o f our respondents seemed aware,show that our present national voting rate isone of the lowest both in the Western worldand in our own national history. At any rate,the theme of things out of control is a real oneamong Centertown social leaders. It affectspeople's sense of the boundaries of citizen-ship itself. The boundaries seem for manyquite constrained.

The third generalization to be drawn fromour interviews on the subject of leadership isthat the best leaders are those who work inprivate. The concept of "private" here israther subtle. It does not mean the opposite of

public. People do not wish to lead or be led insecret from locked rooms and coded files.Rather, in this context, people seem to meanby private a form of public life. Aristotlereferred to the importance of citizens"knowing each other's character." This wasone of the criteria for what he meant by "civicfriendship." The idea that citizens need toknow each other's character in order to ex-ercise self-government with justice was usedin arguments by Anti-Federalists againstratification of the new U.S. Constitution in1787. They felt that the Constitution createda form of governme nt too remote from localcommunities, thereby destroying the principlethat only those who know each other well cansafely represent each other. Without thehostility to our Constitution, it is exactly thisattitude that prevails among the social lead-ers we interviewed in Centertown.

In this context, a word on the perception ofpolitical parties is in order. The interviewscontainevidence forthe view that Centertown,as a place with its own characteristics andhistory, makes a difference in the contours ofpublic opinion and its effect on the characterof the local branches of the two major politi-cal parties. There is general consensus thatCentertown would be regarded by most peopleas more conservative than some other places,most notably New York City. Intervieweeslargely agree that local Republicans andDemocrats do not differ in truly major way. ;there is rather less agreement over whetherthese parties differ much on the nationallevel. These responses are not accompaniedby much thinking on the historic ideologicaldivisions within our national political cul-ture. Basically, the stereotypes come across

28 -

The Political Language of Social Leaden

in the interviews that Democrats want tospend money so that government can solvesocial problems, while Republicans want toleave things to market forces. Them seemedlittle spontaneous interest in the divisionspresently existing within the two nationalparties.

Perspectives on Information and ItsSources

The interviews attempted to explorepeople's sources of information about publicaffairs. What emerged as well were someinsights for us on how these communityleaders conceive of information and its uses.

Interviewees seek their information froma variety of sources that are fairly predictablefor this category of people: the New YorkTimes, the popular news journals, work-re-lated magazines and newsletters, local news-papers and, of course, television and radio.What is perhaps more interesting and signifi-cant for our interest in forums is that thereseem to be two separate spheres of informa-tion sources in people's minds general(i.e., national and international), and local

with rather little translation between thetwo spheres. In general, there is an ab-sence of effort in theseinterviews to use big-picture information tointerpret public is-sues on the locallevel. For example,there is no reference (de-spite opportunities in theinterview schedule) tointeractions between lo-cal economic history and

ecfl

nationalfmtemational public policy issueshaving to do with multinational corporationssuch as the freedom of companies to usecompeting labor forces in cheap labor coun-tries to undercut union power in the UnitedStates. Issues of protectionism and so-calledindustrial policy were not alluded to as in anyway relevant to local issues. Similarly, issuesof nuclear war and defense policy, with theirconnection to expenditures competing withother public needs, were barely raised.

It is not that people were uninformed aboutsuch matters (although little was said aboutthem). It is that there was little if any effort tomake connections between these "macro"issues and the "micro" life of th?, community.The result seems to be a sort of phenomeno-logical division between active and passive(or direct and indirect) citizenship. Active,direct citizenship is possible on the localscene, through one's networks of occupa-

tional and social life and the op-portunities these afford for theexercise of political/social re-sponsibility. On the level ofnational and international af-fairs, one seems condemnedto more passive citizenship,indirectly exercised throughone's right to vote for na-tional candidates and theirvaguely announced poli-cies. There being a general

feeling of help-lessness about

such larger issues,big-picture news seems ac-

quired as part of one's duty as acommunity leader to be oriented

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BEST Fa MaAttE

to the world at large. But it appears not to bepart of the self-expectation of these leaders toanalyze their attitudes toward and knowl-edge of national or international affairs forthe sake of translating them into civic actionon the local level or to try to make the localcommunity more aware of how its history isaffected by what Americans do on the na-tional and international level. Rather, thelatter seems over the horizon, as it were,beyond the power of local people to affect.

It is in this context that interviewee atti-tudes toward the press seem most interestingto think about. The interviews reveal mixedfeelings toward the press, sometimes withina single person. The press comes across as agood source of news, but also as specializingin unreliable information. This notion ofunreliability is not simply an abstraction in-toned to punish the bearer of bad tidings.Rather, unreliable news means newsunvalidated by intimate contact with sourcesand contexts of information. The press ap-pears to be viewed as catering to "outsiders"

The press appears to be viewed ascatering to "outsiders" remote fromthe inner councils of the responsiblecitizenry; to masses hungry for enter-tainment and gossip; to partisanslooking for ideological ammunition.

remote from the inner councils of the respon-sible citizenry; to masses hungry for enter-tainment and gossip; to partisans looking for

ideological ammunition. Because the eco-nomics of journalism requires all these audi-ences, the press is said to induce a need for"hard" definitions of things, a need for "tak-ing sides," a need for "abstract" versions ofwhat happens in the world. Our respondentsmostly had a view of events not as hard-edged news, but as nuanced, multidimen-sional and fluid phenomena, hard to classify,but possible to talk about among trustedintimates.

Political Language in CentertownThe notion of ambivalent or multivalent

meanings is part of the conventional wisdomregarding all discourse. People always meanmore than one thing by the words they use. Inthe analysis of these interview results, wefocus on four master concepts, three out ofthe vocabulary of politics and one, "reality,"because it seems to us that there are two basicnotions of reality that people brought intothese interviews.

The first is "popular sovereignty," uponwhich our system of government is suppos-edly based. Our interviews reveal two versionsof that concept. One is egalitarian with theemphasis on populist standards of politicalparticipation. This view is barely, if at all,represented in our interviews. The otherversion is a more hierarchical view of popularsovereignty according to which representa-tives worthy of the tenn "statespersons" ex-ercise the duties of responsible leadership forthe rest of us. This view is heavily repre-sented in the interviews.

The term "public" is naturally central toany conception of politics. We find in ourinterviews at least two different notions of

30 -

what it means for something to "go public."One is a praiseworthy meaning, the other astigmatized one; both are present in people'svocabularies. The praiseworthy version ofpublic, for most of our respondents, refers tothe citizen-insieers who are fit to representand lead the res:t of us. The other sense ofpublic is what one i tempted to refer to withthat old aristocratic tenn, the "mob." No onetoday would dream of using such a word ininterviews (although the word "masses" isnot unknown). But the tone is there. What ismeant by this stigmatized sense of public is"outsiders" to the responsible councils ofauthority. It does not seem to be restricted tothe poor who, indeed, appear to play barelyany role in this dramaturgy. The outsiderpublic often is middle class: people whoprofit economically or psychologically from"partisanship." They are uninformed, not inthe sense of being bereft of infonnation, butin having the wrong sort. They don't knowwhat the insiders know or, if they do, theyknow it in abstract and distorted forms. To bean insider, according to most of ourinterviews,is to know things in a subtle way, concretely,nonabstractly, in ways that defy easy parti-sanship. The outsider public, in some im-portant sense, even if organized, is a public ofstrangers.

This brings us to the concept of "politics"itself. We have spoken above of the conceptof partisanship as a politizs of status rituals,illusions, and emotions. Other than the gen-eral rhetoric of responsible behavior, ourrespondents were not as clear about whatthey meant by the opposite of partisanship.The interviews as a whole, however, lead usto posit a type of politics as the opposite of

The Political Language of Social Leaders

partisanship for which we borrow the Ger-man term realpolitik. The term connotes anamoral, hardheaded, coldly pragmatic ap-proach to politics undiluted by sentiment. Ina very broad sense, so as to include the

To be an insider, according to most ofour interviews, is to know things in asubtle way, concretely, nonabstractly,in ways that defy easy partisanship.The outsider public, in some impor-tant sense, even fforganized, is a publicof strangers.

concept of unending economic competitionas a sort of state-of-nature condition, the termis militaristic in orientation. Understood inthis way, we believe the interviews present uswith Centertown leaders as predominantlyholding to this concept of politics, especiallythose among them who are of the businesselite. Political responsibility is enacted in thedomain of market forces. For it is here inwhich people's livelihoods are at stake, inwhich the destiny of community is to befound, in which freedom and initiative caneffectively be dramatized.

It seems a bit grandiose to end with refer-ence to a term like social "reality." However,our interviews supply evidence from whichmay be inferred the presence of two differentconceptions of social reality among ourinterviewees. Sometimes these coexist withinthe same person, depending on what is beingtalked about. One conception of reality seems

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3 G

based on the assumption that reality is objec-tive, that is, that social life has a nature of itsown. We fmd this assumption most present incomments pertaining to the vicissitudes ofthe national and international economy as awhole; it is also obliquely present in commentsthat presuppose a human nature against whoseirrational manifestations and impulses re-sponsible leaders must mobilize their wis-dom, patience, and rationality.

The other conception of social reality seemsto be subjective. This means that peoplesometimes speak as if social reality is anoutcome of the interplay of individual atti-tudes as reflected in collective vocabulariesof hope, apathy, and political definition. Thisnotion of reality seems present when peopleexpress strong feelings about the uses oflanguage per se. These feelings reflect theview that how things are named somehowconstitutes an important part of their reality,as in the concept of the self-fulfilling proph-ecy.This subjective notion of reality is presentwhen people worry about whether the tenn"problem" or "opportunity" is used with ref-erence to community issues. It likewise ac-companies concern with the role of thepress in the formation of public conscious-ness.

Overall, our findings reflect orientationslong identified in the community sociologyliterature as characteristic of the social lead-ers of American communities. All the contra-dictions we have identified are as old as thegreat constitutional ratification debate be-tween Federalists and Anti-Federalists in theeighteenth century. This does not mean,however, that these insights have been incor-porated systematically into forum pedagogiesthroughout the long American history of thisinstitution. For them to be so requires that weconceive of forum members less as consum-ers bringing "value" preferences to the policymarket, than as social/historical beings whosecognitive and emotional representations ofhow the world works are, in part, products oftheir location in the overall structure of so-ciety.

Manfred Stanley is professor of sociologyand director of the Center for the Study ofCitizenship at Syracuse University' s Max-well School of Citizenship and Public Af-fairs. The interviews reported here are partof a larger multiyear research and civiceducation project in Centertown.

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1--;%..) I

Citizenship and Leadership

by Daniel Kemmis

As chair of the National League of Cities'Leadership Training Council, I, along withmy fellow council members, have struggledmightily with the question of how leadershipmight be taught. We recognize that there arecertain basic skills of administration, such asbudgeting and planning that any municipalofficial should possess and that any compre-hensive system of leadership training shouldtherefore provide. But, it seems to me that ifthe National League of Cities is going to putitself to the trouble of creating a LeadershipTraining Council, it should offer more thannuts and bolts. It should, in fact, be offeringleadership to the field of leadership training

a kind of leadership to the second power.What would such an undertaking look like inthe context of training municipal leaders?What meaning might it have in a broadercontext: the education of citizen leaders?

Most leadeiship is marked by a sense oftimeliness, an appreciation, either trained orinstinctive, for what the times require or willsustain. Our times have been marked bypolitical turbulence. We have all borne fasci-nated witness to the great democratic up-

heavals which have transformed politicallandscapes in Eastern Europeksia, and Af-rica. If America can take some credit forshaping these world-shaking events, it restson our long-standing claim as the globalbeacon of democracy. As many see it, ourrole now is to teach others what we knowabout democracy. But there is somethingdisconcerting about this presumption whenthe statistics on voter turnout and publicconfidence in government prove that ourown democratic culture is showing everyevidence of decline. That evidence has beenbrilliantly marshaled in such recent works asE. J. Dionne, Jr.'s Why Americans HatePolitics, and Richard Harwood's widely ac-claimed report to the Kettering Foundationon the state of our political culture.

I am absolutely convinced that no amountof procedural reform, whether in the form oftenn limits, campaign finance reform, pro-portional representation, or "motor vote,"accessibility will have the slightest effect onthis democratic decline. The one change thatwill reverse this negative momentum will bethe revitalization of citizenship. It is only

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38

here that truly effective leadership is nowpossible.

It is a measure of how far democracy hasdeclined that this word, "citizenship" hasitself become flat and uninteresting, so thatwe can hardly imagine what a revitalizationof citizenship might mean. In the era of thenation-state, with democracy wrenched fromthe human-scale locus which was its nativehome, we have also abstracted citizenshipfrom its roots and, in the process, stripped itof its capacity to sustain a true practice ofdemocracy. I don't believe we can reclaimeither the word or the practice until we remindourselves of its primal meaning. In otherwords, to go forward, we may be well servedby looking briefly backward.

A citizen was initially a city dweller, onewhose shape and identity were drawn fromthe city, as a lion is shaped and given identityby the jungle; a citizen was a denizen of thecity a "city-zen." A democratic citizenwas one who was given thc opportunity andthe responsibility to help shape and giveidentity to the city which, in turn, had shapedand identified that citizen. Never has thismutual shaping of city and citizen been moreaptly described than by Pericles of Athens, inhis Funeral Oration.

Pericles' assigned duty was to praise theAthenian soldiers who had fallen in an earlybattle of the Peloponnesian War, but he sur-prised his listeners by starting with a descrip-tion of the city itself. His purpose was notonly to show what the fallen soldiers hadsacrificed for, but to argue that their verycapacity for sacrifice, the form their couragetook, had been shaped by the city and thatindeed this was true of other virtues, whether

they be tolerance or justice or the remarkableaesthetic qualities, which were just then pro-ducing the great works on the Acropolis.Whatever Athenians justly claimed as marks

It is a measure of how far democracyhas declined that this word, "citizen-ship" has itself become flat and un-interesting, so that we can hardlyimagine what a revitalization of citi-zenship might mean.

of individual distinction, Pericles argued,they owed to the city. But what set Athensapart from the other Greek cities was that thereverse of this was also true: that what Athenshad achieved was not the work of the privi-leged few, but of the multitude of citizenswho, in taking responsibility for the commongood, had made Athens at once the birthplaceof democracy and what Pericles called an"everlasting memorial of the good."

Political correctness demands that we re-mind ourselves how far Athenian democracyfell short of contemporary standards, giventhe many classes of people excluded fromAthenian citizenship. We could not, today,call such an exclusive system a true democ-racy. But, we will never get beyond our ownmisplaced smugness about our role as the"beacon of democracy" until we confront theinescapable fact that Pericles would havefound our democracy at least as deficient aswe find his. His complaint would not beabout the lack of breadth in our democracy,

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but the lack of depth. Above all, he would beamazed to hear people call themselves demo-crats who define the duties of citizenship assuperficially as we now do.

Many Americans customarily refer tothemselves as "taxpayers," a designationwhich now regularly holds the place which ina true democracy would be occupied by"citizens." Taxpayers bear a dual rela-tionship to government, neither half ofwhich has anything at all to do withdemocracy. Taxpayers pay tributeto the government, and they re-ceive services from it. So doesevery subject of a totalitarian re-gime. What taxpayers do notdo, and what people who callthemselves taxpayers ratherthan citizens have long sincestopped even imagining them-selves doing, is governing.

If we do use the word "citi-zen," it is almost certain either to ,---'be part of the phrase "concerned


nuity. But, it is said that democracy estab-lished its historic foothold there primarilybecause, in spite of these differences, mostAthenians "cared more about Athens thanthey cared about winning."

This is precisely where the cutting edge ofdemocracy in America lies today. Whenever

people are given a realistic op-portunity to prove in effective

practice that they care moreabout their own city's goodthan they care about a nar-row factional victory, theyrespond to that challengewith an energy and enthusi-asm which proves that citi-zenship, however profaned,has never expired. The role

of leadership is to tap;' this vast slumbering

human potential.\ This brings us di-

/ rectly into the domainof leadership education.

At all levels, but crucially atthe fundamental level of thecity-state or city-region, citi-zenship will emerge as the most

important political office, carry-ing responsibilities no less serious

than those of any elected office.Like any important and responsible posi-

tion, this office of citizenship requires a spe-cific set of skills. Many of them are skills forwhich our current practice of politics pre-pares us very poorly. Above all, the capacityto work constructively with people of differ-ent social or economic classes, or those fromdifferent ideological backgrounds, is not

citizen" (as if citizenship were es-sentially a form of grievance) or partof the hopelessly confused phrase Y"private citizen" the civic equiva-lent of dry water. Standing by itself, as itrarely does, the word "citizen" evokes all theweariness and unhappiness we associate withpublic life. Most of us would not enthusiasti-cally call ourselves "citizens."

To reclaim some of the primal energy ofcitizenship, consider again the remarkableachievement of Athenian democracy. TheAthenians were deeply divided along classand ideological lines, and they pursued theirdifferent agendas with great energy and inge-

- 35 -

f,',75f..91 Aqua(; ,...ft? ti d

4 0

something which decades of interest grouppolitics have prepared us to do well. Citizenswho would practice the politics of collabora-tive problem solving must patiently teachthemselves skills of problem framing, oflistening, and of speaking so that they may beheard.

The kind of politics that an expandedpractice of citizenship makes possiblerequires new skills from politicians aswell.

But, it is not only citizens who must learnnew behavior patterns. The kind of politicsthat an expanded practice of citizenship makespossible requires new skills from politiciansas well. It is not that power ceases to be aconsideration for politicians. I am convincedthat some form of entrepreneurship of poweris and may always be the essence of politics.But the garnering, risking, reaping, and rein-vesting-of power in a setting defined primar-ily by competing interest groups, becomes adifferent game altogether as mom and morecitizen leaders take upon themselves the taskof "caring more about Athens than they careabout winning."

Citizens trained in this kind of thinking arelikely to see political power as receiving itslegitimacy from its capacity to enhance thecommon good. The entrepreneurship of powerthen comes into focus as a stewardship whichthe politician exercises on behalf of the pub-lic. As citizens take on more responsibility

for the common good, the politicians fmdthemselves sharing the stewardship of powerwith a broader circle of attentive actors and,simultaneously, drawing power from thatvery sharing. Here the education of the poli-tician becomes crucial, as an essentially zero-sum view of power (whatever power youhave is power I don't have) is challenged byan understanding that the sharing of powernot only increases the community's capacityto do what it chooses to do, but also makeseach political actor more potent.

What is crucial is that politicians andcitizens must learn together. Citizen leaders,for example, need to understand how helpfulpolitical leaders can be in convening diversegroups and interests to work together on acommon problem or opportunity. The wisestof these citizen leaders must be brought torecognize that in so doing, a politician mayrisk his or her limited stock of political capital,not least because in convening a diversity ofinterests, the politician is implicitly chal-lenging the axiom upon which interest grouppolitics operates: that my supporters are rightand their adversaries are wrong. This shift ofone's political weight from a known interestgroup base to a much more diverse base ofcitizens is a dangerous step for a politician totake; the capital put at risk will only paydividends if the citizen leaders actually suc-ceed at collaboration. The political leader,therefore, has a stake in the education ofcitizen leaders in those basic skills whichmake collaboration likely to succeed.

This, then, secms to be the arena withinwhich leadership education might occur inthis decade. What usefPl generalizationsmight we make about such education?

- 36

First, as with most difficult prac-tices, there is no sub-stitute for the role of rir-effective mentoringAcross the coun-try, wise politicaland citizen lead-ers are advancing the practiceof citizen-based democracy.A key to effective educationis to take the time to identify effective rolemodels, and then create opportunities forthem to mentor others.

Second, the teaching, in most cases if notall, should involve both citizen leaders andpolitical leaders, because they share so inte-grally the responsibility for nurturing de-mocracy.

Third, we need to be clear about how muchwe don't know about this work, or to put itmore positively, how much new knowledgeis replacing received wisdom. This meansthat the task of education should contain anexplicit component of structured interchangebetween political and citizen practitionersand the communitarian or republican theo-rists. The potential for mutual instructionbetween these two groups has barely beentouched. Leaders in leadership training wouldinsist upon cultivating this fertile intersec-tion.

Fourth, the time has come to pay as muchattention to teaching politics as we now payto teaching ethics. It should be a core require-ment in our colleges. I do not mean politicalscience, in which I was trained, only to learnthat politics is far more art than science, andI certainly do not mean public administra-tion, invaluable as that discipline has be-


come. I meanpolitics as a

genuinely hu-manistic discipline,

worthy of democracy.Aristotle was no democrat,

but his understanding that ethicswas only effective if pursued asa preface to politics should be an

article of faith for any trulydemocratic people. Whenbetter to give politics this

role in education than now,when the revitalization of citi zenship requiresus to redefine politics as if it were somethingin which ordinary people could be proudlyengaged, but in which they must first beeffectively educated?

Fifth, and finally, in both theory and prac-tice, we need to bring back into focus thefundamental relationship between the cityand the citizen. We might sometimes want tosubstitute another word like "community"for "city" in this equation, but whatever wordwe choose must carry a concrete, human-scale significance which avoids the deadlytrap of thinking that citizenship, and there-fore democracy, is a purely formal matterwhich can be enacted in any size of polity.Democracy has no meaning except its humanmeaning; a formal democracy which is nothumanly engaging is a perversion of the veryidea of democracy. Far too much of what wecall democracy, especially at the nationallevel, has become this kind of perversion.Meanwhile, within cities and towns, and in-creasingly within city-regions, people arelearning again the hard-earned pleasures ofdoing productive civic work together. As

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Frfl4.2

they slowly but steadily heal the places theyinhabit, repairing a riverside here, a neigh-borhood park there, city and citizen fmdthemselves growing stronger together, andmore and more people understand from theirown experience what Pericles meant whenhe referred to citizens as those "worthy oftheir city."

Pericles is himself an inexhaustible edu-cation in leadership, and nowhere is histeaching more applicable to us than in hisunderstanding that the city was the best pos-sible teacher of citizenship. Pericles' praiseof his city approached its climax in his dec-laration that Athens had become "an educa-tion to Greece." The city could only claimthis role because it had learned that it could bean education to itself.

Here, to an extent that we in our time canbarely grasp, lay the seed-crystal of Atheniandemocracy. Athens realigned history not, aswe imagine, by the institution of a new formof government, but rather through the bril-liant and daring intuition that if the responsi-bility to care for the city was broadly shared,

people would respond, as bodies or mindsalways do, to the challenge of good trainingby becoming stronger, more agile, and moreself-confident. Faced with the appalling wasteof human potential which the manifold fail-ures of our society have wrought, the rule ofleadership is to see that the forward path goesnot by way of new programs or proceduralreforms, but by putting once again within thereach and care of citizens the responsibilityto do well together by the places they callhome.

Daniel Kemmis is mayor of Missoula, Mon-tana, and fonner Speaker of the MontanaHouse of Representatives. Mayor Kemmis isthe chairman of the National League of Cit-ies' Leadership Training Council. He is theauthor of Community and the Politics ofPlace, and is currently at work on a secondbook, The Good City and the Good Life.

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Citizen Leadership andService-Learning

by Cecil D. Bradfield and R. Ann Myers

One of the iror ies of our time is that whilewe have increased our emphasis on leader-ship education, examples of public leader-ship are scarce. Citizens often seek in vain forevidence of leadership on the part of candi-dates for public office, business and com-munity leaders, even religious leaders. Ourcommunities lack citizen leaders who arewilling to put the common good before theirown rights or interests. At our colleges anduniversities, we offer students opportunitiesfor leadership in organizations, course work,and institutional decision making, but manyleave the campus feeling inadequate to thetask of citizen leadership.

What are the attributes needed for citizenleadership? Citizen leaders must have thedesire to engage the community in a positiveand empowering manner. They must acquireunderstanding of programs, agencies, com-munities, and society. They must learn theskills needed to work with others towardcommunity-building and empowerment ofindividuals within them. Academic institu-tions are charged with educating students sothese attributes become second nature aftergraduation.

This essay profiles the development of aprogram of service-learning designed to con-tribute to the holistic education and citizenleadership preparation of students at JamesMadison University in Harrisonburg, Vir-ginia. It will show how the Center for Service-Learning (CSL) affects the overall culture ofthe institution to create an environmentcompatible with the development of citizenleaders. While service-learning is certainlynot the only means for developing citizenleadership, it is an intentional venture toengage the students and faculty in commu-nity-building.

The Institutional EnvironmentJames Madison University is a compre-

hensive coeducational institution. Foundedin 1908 as a state school for women, it nowhas an undergraduate enrollment of 11,400.The university consists of six colleges andoffers 60 undergraduate and 31 advanceddegree programs.

In 1985, JMU began a thorough review ofthe curriculum. In addition to looking at therelationship of the curriculum to the develop-ment of cognitive skills, considerable atten-

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4 4

tion was given to the noncognitive or affec-tive development of students. The reviewalso critically examined the kinds of learningstudents were experiencing outside the class-room. It was in this context that the proposalfor a Center for Service-Learning emerged.

The center began as a jointventure betweenthe Division of Student Affairs and the Di-vision of Academic Affairs. From the be-ginning, there was a clear interest in develop-ing openings for relating the curricular andcocurricular programs of the university to thecommunity. CSL's current mission statementreflects this viewpoint:

The Center will promote and facilitateopportunities which encourage studentand faculty engagement in the largercommunity. It will promote social re-sponsibility, provide curricular andcocurricular opportunities, and fostermutually beneficial relationships whichare consistent with the public servicemission of the university (adoptedMarch, 1992).

A Desire to Engage the CommunityCitizen leaders must have a desire to en-

gage the community. Much has been writtenabout the "me" generation of the past decade.A great deal has been said about young peoplewhose narrow definition of success relateslargely to income and the ability to buyhappiness. At James Madison we are seeinga shift in this orientation as about 45 percentof our incoming freshmen have specificcommunity service experience. Special CSLrecruiting efforts highlight the importance ofcommunity involvement as part of a total

university experience. Freshmen attend a CSLinformation session that is part of a seriesdevoted to giving new students an overview

About halfthe students who engage inservice-learning as part of a courserequirement, return to the activity thenext semester. . . . More often thannot, they participate actively in theircommunities after they leave school.

of cocurricular and extracurricular opportu-nities at the university.

All freshmen enroll in a Freshmen Semi-nar designed to "promote the ethic of lifelonglearning; to develop the skills of analysis,problem solving, critical thinking, informeddiscussion, and writing to establish a com-mon ground of understanding and valuesthrough knowledge of our cultural heritage."

During 1991-1992, 16 sessions of theseminar had service-learning segments. Mostoften, these involved a minimum number ofhours of commitment to one of 68 CSL-approved community agencies. Student ex-periences became part of the seminar discus-sions. In addition, the students engaged injournaling and reflection. Several videotapedreflection sessions served as an introductionto the experience. While a number of stu-dents reported an initial reluctance to engagein the service-learning project, most rated theexperience positively by the end of the se-mester.

Focus groups are being formed for faculty

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Citizenship Leadership and Service-Learning

to reflect on and improve the quality of theservice-learning experience in the FreshmanSeminar. Another aim for these sessions is toencourage faculty to visit and participate inthe placements with theirstudents and thereby en-gage in co-servicelearning.

About half the stu-dents who engage in ser-vice-learning as part of acourse requirement returnto the activity the next se-mester although it is not re-quired. During the 1992-1993academic year we will survey ser-vice-learning alumni to obtain in-formation about their current com-munity involvement and the way inwhich past service-learning activitiesrelate to that involvement.

Many readers are doubtless aware of thecontinuing debate over purity of motive forinvolvement in community service. The CSLoperates on the assumption that it is moreproductive to focus efforts on competentstructuring of the service-learning programand the outcomes rather than on motivation.If the service-learning organization providesa sound motivational and peer support struc-ture, and emphasizes faculty and placementdevelopment, then students will have a posi-tive outcome. More often than not, they par-ticipate actively in their communities afterthey leave school.

connecting service with the curriculum. Fromits beginning, the CSL has promoted curricu-lum development as the model for a service-learning program. The CSL promotes faculty

development as well and appoints a facultymember who is responsible for this effort. Acarefully selected community placement,

when connected toproblem-solving andcritical-thinking skillsdeveloped in theclassroom, creates apowerful learning op-portunity. Such oppor-

tunities enhance com-munity understanding

and the development ofcitizen leadership as

students can ob-serve and work

with communitymentors in leader-

ship positions. AllCSL placements havecommunity mentors

who understand the rationale for a service-learning program from the university per-spective and are trained to work with stu-dents.

The CSL has developed several modelsfor integrating community service with thecurriculum, including dedicated courses andseminars, and required or optional compo-nents within courses. A seminar in Appala-chia takes students to Clay County, Ken-tucky, for a three-week work camp and semi-nar. Faculty leaders and students woik to-gether in a variety of comm uni ty placements.A course entitled Volunteerism in American

Designing the CurriculumA significant development in the commu-

nity service movement is the emphasis on

BEST t1,4i

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Society requires students to engage exten-sively in community volunteer work.

The more common academic model is onein which service-learning is a part of a regularcoutse. This occurs in a wide variety ofmajors. A CSL-sponsored workshop helpsfaculty redesign courses to make communityservice an integral part of the offering. Stu-dents learn more and rate the service-learn-ing experience more highly when they per-

It is time for the service-learningmovement to go beyond values clarifi-cation, self-satisfaction, career en-hancement, and community under-standing to community-building andempowerment.

ceive it as an integrated part of the course orseminar rather than as an add-on.

A Participatory Action Research (PAR)module for courses encourages students toconduct an organizational analysis whileengaging in service-learning. PAR providesstudents with a set of structured questionsthat helps them reflect on their communityservice experience. Pedagogically, it allowsfor a good balance between structured learn-ing and active, self-generated learning. ThePAR module has been used in an honorssection of Introductory Sociology, an issuesseminar entitled Homeless in America, andan interdisciplinary Pre-Field Workshop. Itwill soon be available to colleagues at JMU,and eventually to other institutions.

Community-Building andEmpowemient

The CSL has moved from engaging stu-dents in community service projects, to help-ing them build on skills developed in theclassroom, to cultivating lifelong skills forcommunity-building. The next step in thisprocess is to be more intentional in teachingstudents how these skills are translated intoaction for community-building. In short, it istime for the service-learning movement to gobeyond values clarification, self-satisfaction,career enhancement, and community under-standing to community-building and em-powerment.

Empowennent was the theme in a recentHomeless in America seminar in which stu-dents engaged in 30 hours of service-learning.All placements involved the issue of housingand homelessness. Students were not sur-prised to find that the homeless consideredthemselves disempowered. But, unexpect-edly, students themselves felt disempoweredin addressing the homeless issue. This rev-elation encouraged them to consider variousoptions for dealing with the L:ue. They be-came committed to the achievement of ad-equate housing for all citizens throughcommunity action. As a result of conscious-ness-raising from that involvement, onestudent and several of her friends formed avery successful campus organization calledH.O.U.S.E. This organization organizesstudent activities and advocacy with thehomeless.

CSL encourages faculty members to buildcooperative learning around their students'placement experiences. In addition to work-ing together at the placement site, students

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17

Citizenship Leadership and Sewice-Leaming

reflect on the experience and "report back" totheir classes on what they have learned. Theybecome teachers to their peers. An under-standing of cooperative group processes isimportant for citizen leaden who will workwith others for the common good.

During the 1991-1992 year, the CSLpromoted campuswide activities aimed atunderstanding and developing citizenshipeducation and leadership. The endeavors weregiven focus by a visiting scholar who metwith several classes, conducted workshopsfor faculty, and made a campuswide presen-tation. An ad hoc group will form next yeartoinventory the various ways citizenship edu-cation is already taking place on campus, andto explore new ways to encourage informedand caring community-building.

Recent surveys show that students whoengage in service-learning perceive that theyare developing or enhancing their leadershipskills. James Madison University is nowdeveloping a Center for Leadership Educa-tion modeled after the Center for Service-Learning as a cooperative venture between

the divisions of Academic and Student Af-fairs.

The 1990s will be a challenging era forhigher education. Americans are looking tohigher education for answers in addressingpressing societal needs. We have only begunto understand what that will mean to theacademy. Institutions are being asked to givelife to their public service missions, and toengage in real community-building. Service-learning is a part of that response and in somecases may lead institutions to rediscover theirrole in community-building. In this process,the academy will take more seriously itsmandate to create an atmosphere which pro-motes the development of citizen leaders.

Cecil Bradfield is professor of sociology andcoordinator of the Center for Service-Learning at James Madison University, ,Harrisonbur g ,Virginia. R. Ann Myers headsthe SocialWork Department at James Madi-son U niversity . Bradfield and Myers are co-founders of the Center for Service-Learning.

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4 8

Citizen Leaders for a New Politics

Nornen est nurnen. To name is to know. Ifwe attempt to coin a new name "citizenleader" how shall we know this mostrecent entry into the political arena? Will ithelp us to understand the nature of a newpolitics in which the citizen leader is a chiefpractitionee?

Citizen leaders are, first, citizens accord-ing to the classical, root meaning of the word

public citizens, not the apocryphal "privatecitizens," of present-day parlance. And, wecan know them by their actions. In variousguises, we see them almost daily. They areamong our friends and neigh'iors. One guiseis Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror."Whether leading demonstrations for peace,the homeless, or"Farm Aid," delivering pilesof petitions for the Perot campaign, or orga-nizing Earth Day observances or churchsuppers, they are public citizens, attending topublic business, creating and re-creatingcommunity. This is the "public," at the grassroots or local levels where most of us can seeand feel the fruits of our activities with oth-ers, a degree of empowennent outside thehome.

by Peter Bearse

If the "Man in the Mirror" is the model forcitizen leader, is he, like most of us, politi-cally alienated? If we can answer this ques-tion, then we may be able to define a newpolitics. The true citizen leader cannot bedefined out of context. We need to paint apicture in which citizen leaders appear asprimary political actors. What's wrong withthe picture now? We don't see them in it.Defining a citizen leader is primarily a matterof drawing a new political picture, not tryingto insert a new entry into Webster' s Dictio-nary. It is a matter of political dynamics, notsemantics. A picture in which a figure comesto life necessarily has both foreground andbackground. A i.ew politics requires citizenleaders to be clearly in the picture; and viceversa. Without a new politics, the citizenleader, like a fish out of water, cannot existfor long.

Current diagnoses of American politicspay scant attention to local politics and gov-ernment. American political culture, how-ever, is profoundly local. Because of this, thecorruption of local politics and decline oflocal democracy has infected al' our politics.

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The latter point is both contrary to conven-tional wisdom and basic to this essay. Mythhas it that American democracy is alive andwell because it is rooted in local democracy,

Without a new politics, the citizenleader, like a fish out of water, cannotexist for long.

which is alive and well. Sickness unto deathmay be a more apt description. Local politicsis a low-level caricature of what Americanstate and national politics have become: per-sonality, interest group, "what's in it forme,""now generation," "one hand greases theother," "go-along/get-along," "empty suit,"politics. Local politics is basically incestu-ous. Local government is oligarchic ratherthan democratic.

Perhaps this has always been so and mayeven continue to be so into the indef.-mitefuture. Why worry? In an era of national andinternational politics, local politics might beviewed as having little, if any, significance.The problem is that the decline of partypolitics, along with greed, corruption, andshortsightedness has made a shambles oflocal politics. Some of its worst features havebeen transported to higher levels, where theycannot be detected in the "smoke and mirrots"of state and national politics.

Can we reulistically expect to improve ournational politics without attending to the re-form of politics and government at the locallevel? This key question does not appear to

Citizen Leaders lor a New Politics

have been asked by recent commentatorsconcerned for the quality of our political life.It is as if an implicit contrary assumption islurking in the background.

One can only wonder why. Do the leadersand participants in focus groups, communityforums, and other experiments in democracyreally believe the myth of American democ-racy that it rests on local involvement inpolitics, and that local politics is alive andwell? Lewis Lapham's articles in Harper' sand the Kettering Review clearly imply thatthe myth is dead. Voting statistics do notsupport it. Voter turnouts increase with eachlevel of government. The myth that localgovernment is closer to the people, wherepeople are more likely to pay attention andget involved, no longer has any basis in fact.

Models"Fact" notwithstanding, what about the

ideal? The motivating power of an ideal canbe the most important political fact of all. Theideal of local democracy is the politics ofparticipation a more intimate, people-to-people engagement with issues and each otherin order to idcntify shared problems andconstruct shared solutions. The town meet-ing is the model. Such engagement is a formof empowerment that some consider morepowerful than voting. The ideal is not an endbut a means, a process. We need to learn tovalue differences over sameness, innovationover conformity. In the words of theologianStanley Hauerwas, it is "necessary for me torecognize the difference of my neighbor notas a threat but as essential for my very life."

The ideal provides a sharp contrast withreality. The latter is exemplified by public

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political culture of cooperation in whichpeople are asked to approach an issue asproblem solvers, not adversaries. As Kemm isstates: "People who have worked togetherseem to listen to one another without settingup mental opposition." Thus, a practical,\latter-day political version of barn raisingwould be problem-solving community fo-

rums in which participants are asked tocomplete a piece of work with othersbetween meetings.

Town meetings and barn raising, how-\, ever, are small-town models. What about

cities? There the model takes another

hearings on local issues. These featureadversarial groups on either side of the aislewho address their remarks to mayor andcouncil, not to each other. Political realityalso has a characteristic geometry a rect-angle rather than a circle. Chairs in serriedrows face a reputed "leader" at the frontrather than enabling potential citizen leadersto face one another.

Another model is "barn raising." Thispractice, once familiar in America's heart-land, is still carried on by the Amish. DanielKemmis, former Speaker of the MontanaHouse of Representatives, has provided anaccount of the political-economic signifi-cance of barn raising which amply justifiesits selection as a model: "The Volbrechts hadto be at the barn raising. . . . In another time,Albert (Volbrecht) and Lilly (Kemmis) wouldhave nothing to do with one another. But onthose Montana plains . . . avoiding peopleyou did not like was not an option." What thebarn raising model indicates is the need for a

form, that of the old-style local partycommittee. Members would reflect a di-

verse cross section of a polity. They wouldintimately know their neighbors. They couldcanvass their neighbors door-to-door at leasttwice a year, working to get them to partici-pate in the political process by which repre-sentative democracy functions throughvoter registration, provision of informationto voters, and "get out the vote" (GOTV)efforts. This is a grass roots political organi-zation model, not a grass roots problem-solving model. It, too, lives on, as a recent TVnews vignette about Chicago precinct work-ers canvassing for Clinton showed.

There are also modest degrees of powerand recognition in this model, as local com-mittees have the responsibility for screeninglocal candidates, and party leaders valueGOTV performance. The people who exem-plify this model are not the stereotypicalward heelers made famous by "Plunkett ofTammany Hall." They are good- hearted,community- spirited people, dedicated todemocratic politics. If the major political

AVAILABLE

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51

parties had continued to water the grass rootsof American democracy represented by suchpeople, they might still be vital institutions.As things stand, parties have become ve-hicles of a political star system, rather thanissues. Contributions to party funds havebeen devoted to financing individual cam-paigns rather than to keeping local politicalinfrastructure in good repair.

The fourth model is the "Man in the Mir-ror." This can also be labeled a model of the"politics of good intentions" or of "goodcauses." People become concerned about anissue or problem, such as the homeless,abortion, the environment, orchild care. Theydiscover like-minded people. They organize.They develop position papers. They demon-strate. They lobby. They find they can beeffective as organized groups, both doinggood and having some influence in the hallsof power.

So, again, where, and who, is the citizenleader? Do we have one model, or four, ormore? Or are we looking for a four-in-one, ormore-in-one?

Each of the four models exhibits someshortcomings relative to the ideal. As noted,the town meeting model, though it appears tobe a participative ideal, does not work forlarge numbers. The electronic version toutedby Ross Perot, for example, is misleading.Though it may facilitate some voter/leaderinteraction, it fails to facilitate or even ac-knowledge voter-voter interaction.

Similarly, barn raising is a small commu-nity model. It is still relevant, of course, inhelping to revitalize local democracy.

The local political party committee modelcan serve to reinvigorate local democracy,


and also to revitalize sagging political par-ties, but it is, by definition, localized.

The shortcomings of the "Man in theMirror" model illustrate the old adage: "Theroad to hell is paved with good intentions."Its major drawback is the tendency of theadvocates of good causes to eschew politics.John Dewey pointed to this as a basicweakness of the American polity 65 yearsago when he wrote about "the problem ofdefining the relationship which nonpoliticalgroups bear to political union." On the otherhand, still another familiar maxim warns usthat "if good people stand aside, knaves andfools take over." A study of citizens andpolitics sponsored by the Kettering Founda-tion implies that such "good people" may becitizen leaders. Nothing could be further nemthe tmth. Yes, they are well intentioned. Yes,they have demonstrated through their actionswhat the political system has failed to provide:that you can make a difference. All that iswell and good but what it achieves is largelyprivate satisfaction.

If the major political parties had con-tinued to water the grass roots ofAmerican democracy represented bysuch people, they might still be vitalinstitutions.

Paradoxically, there are contrary conse-quences. Because "good people" have stoodapart from the political process except aslobbyists for their own good cause, they have

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aggravated the faults of the existing systema fragmented system of interest group

politics. Because they tend to commune withlike-minded souls, they widen gaps betweengroups rather than bridging those gaps. Theirbehavior can be judged as Notre Dame Pro-fessor Stanley Hauerw as judged the behaviorof another good group practicing Chris-tians in saying: "attempts . . . to avoidpolitical involvement because of the 'dirty'nature of politics are rightly condemned asirresponsible. To withdraw from the politicalin order to remain pure is an irresponsible actof despair." Thus, "Man in the Mirror" hasbecome part of the political problem ratherthan a source of the solution.

In addition to the shortcomings specific toeach model, there is one they share. What'smissing from each of the pictures? Eachseems to depict a disembodied process,somewhat like the textbook picture of a mar-ket economy. Wnat's missing from the latteris the entrepreneur, defmed by economists asan "innovator," "gap filler" and "resourcemobilizer" in the marketplace. What's miss-ing here is a similarly motivating force apolitical leader, catalyst, starter-upper, en-trepreneur, or citizen leader.

Defining the Citizen LeaderThe entrepreneurial analogy is apt. It helps

us to see the figure of "citizen leader" emerg-ing with sharperdefinition into the foregroundof the political picture as both sustainerand sustainee of apolitical process which theleader would serve to redefine and renew.The citizen leader would be a political entre-preneur. As an "innovator," he/she wouldpromote experiments in public life to demon-

straw new ways of involving people in thepolitical process. As a "gap filler," he/shewould bridge the gaps revealed by the exist-ing models. As "resource mobilizer," he/shewould bring people and groups together andbring them back into the political process.

Because "good people" have stoodapartfrom the political process exceptas lobbyists for their own good cause,they have aggravated the faults of theexisting systemafragmented systemof interest group politics.

The innovator's role is the most criticaland the most trying. The citizen leader needsto find new ways of involving people in thepolitical process. First and foremost, the in-novator needs courage: the courage to standup and speak out publicly when something isnot right; the courage to go against the grainof conventional wisdom or public opinionwhen something basic is at stake. The inno-vator is sometimes a "whistleblower," not a"go-along/get-along" person; not part of the"silent majority."

Fortunately, courage, entrepreneurship,and innovation are not contingent uponeducation, income, or expert background.For example, Peter Asaro, an elected mem-ber of the School Committee of the City ofGloucester, (Massachusetts), is its only blue-collar member. Yet, more than most others,he stands up and speaks out when he thinkssomething is amiss. Does one example make

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53

a case? Statistically, no, but with respect togenuine (public-spirited) political entrepre-neurship, yes. Other such examples ofpoliticalcourage and integrity could be identified. Fora while, the grass roots leadership needed fora new politics may be counted in small num-bers, but it will arise from all walks of li fe, notthrough correlations with socioeconomicstatus.

It is not sufficient to say what the figure of"citizen leader" is; we also need to say whatit is not. A citizen leader seeks to change therules of the game, to empower nonpowerfulothers to have an effective voice or role insolving public problems, not to demonstratehow clever he/she can be in exploiting theserules on behalf of a cause, interest group, orpolitical caceer. A citizen leader is a publicentrepreneur who is a community politicalorganizer, a leader who works to reform thepolitical system, not a career politician wholatches onto the language of change simplyfor the sake of getting elected. DianeFeinstein's "status quo must go" campaignslogan, for exam ple, does not suffice to makeher either a citizen- or a political-leader.

PrescriptionHow is the citizen leader to be created,

nurtured, and sustained? The prospect of anew politics may encourage some to stepforward, to take the risks that citizen leader-ship entails, grow into the new role, andthereby add to a growing supply of citizenleaders.

The key players in the production of citi-zen leaders have already been identifiedpolitical parties, the "Man in the Mirror," andthe American people. The play is simple in


concept, but long and hard to achieve inpractice. It is basically John Dewey's sug-gestion of 65 years ago put the 3 playerstogether on the same stage and experimentwith various ways of getting them to act sothat an American "public" is gradually cre-ated.

The dynamics of the play are easilyimaginable, but highly uncertain. One sce-nario might run as follows:

Political parties, perhaps under threatof a new independents' party, com-pete to see which of them will domore to empower the averageAmerican and to attract the "Man inthe Mirror";The latter, faced with diminishingreturns of cause-oriental, single-is-sue politics and attracted by newparty activities, joins party commit-tees in order to help revitalize poli-tics at the grass roots;Local party committees and newlypolitical cause advocates join forcesto experiment with variants of the"town meeting" and "barn raising"models in order to involve morepeople more effectively in the po-litical process and experiment withnew approaches to problem solvingon contentious issues; and,Growing grass roots political prob-lem-solving activity and the revital-ization o f politi cal parties at the locallevel lead to the gradual creation ofan American political community

a "community of discourse." Thispublic would demand a new kind of

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5 4

political leader (our "citizen leader")in the halls of power, a supply ofwhich would have been generatedby the aforementioned kinds of ac-tivities. This, in turn, would effectcandidate recruitment and selection,especially as potential candidatestransform parties at the local leveland demonstrate their potential.

The promise of a new politics will arousesome. They will see in it the chance to rebuildthe American political community; the chanceto renew the Great American Experiment byinitiating miniexperiments in local democ-racy; the chance to heal rifts in the Americanbody politic by bringing diverse interestgroups together to forge common goals, ashared public interest, even while recogniz-ing the distinctive contributions which vari-ous groups and individuals bring to the table;the chance to get vital new blood coursingthrough the arteries of our political system;even the chance to rise to Tocqueville's chal-lenge to create a new "science of politics," ahumane science based on observation of theconsequences of alternative arrangements,rather than the social, political, and psycho-logical pretensions to "science" which areused to rationalize current arrangements andmanipulate public opinion.

More generally, the promise includes achance to redefine what liberty and freedom

mean, a chance, as Dewey put it, for "agreater liberty to share in other associations,so that more individual potentialities will bereleased and personal experience enriched."It provides the opportunity to tap the ethicaland moral springs which run deep in theAmerican tradition, to define values-in-ac-tion for political conduct. All in all, it offersthe chance of creating citizen political lead-ers who will go on to become citizen legisla-tors, governors, or even president. It is only achance, but one we can and must take. "Thecure for the ailments of democracy is moredemocracy," Dewey wrote. The quicker themajor political parties and their pretenders topolitical leadership recognize that the revi-talization of local democracy the nurtureof citizen political leaders from the grassroots is their number-one domestic issue,the faste r the renewal of American democracywill come about

Dr.. P eter Bearse is an economist andfounder-president of Development Strategies Corpo-ration, a consulting firm that formulateseconomic development strategies and pro-grams for clients in the U.S. and abroad. Hehas held elective office in Princeton, NewJersey and Gloucester, Massachusetts, andran for Congress in 1984.

The health of

a democratic society

may be measured by

the quality of

functions peiformed

by private citizens. . . .

Alexis de Tocquevile

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Documents

DOCUMENT RESUME ED 368 596 AUTHOR TITLE Leaders ...luncheon conversation to cover all these people. Such a defini-tion, however, would risk becoming a Fourth of July celebrative t