October 12, 1998
Media Contact: Dolores Davies, (619) 534-5994 or [email protected]
UCSD SOCIOLOGIST TRACES EVOLUTION OF 'GOOD CITIZEN' FROM COLONIAL DAYS TO PRESENT
With less than 30 days until election day, the time is ripe to ponder, once again, the arguably sorry state of American citizenship. In 1996, less than half of all eligible Americans bothered to vote. Each year, fewer and fewer Americans take the time to stay abreast of governmental and public affairs issues, and few even think they should. Does this mean, as many political pundits and social commentators have suggested, that our form of representative democracy is failing us?
Not according to Michael Schudson, a professor of communication and sociology at the University of California, San Diego, and author of the new book The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life, (The Free Press). Although citizenship has changed dramatically over the years, Schudson says, it hasn't necessarily declined, we just need to look at the picture differently. Voter turnout and political knowledge are in themselves no longer accurate measures of good citizenship. While these factors may have been the prime determinants of good citizenship in the past, over the last century, the political domain has grown exponentially, offering citizens numerous venues for expressing their political preferences, the ballot box being just one of many options.
"When the nation was founded, being a citizen meant little more than for the property-owning white male voter to delegate his authority to a local gentleman," said Schudson. "In colonial times, the emphasis in the public realm was on consensus and deference. Your vote was more a sign of personal loyalty than individual expression. At the polling place, voters would actually proclaim their vote orally when the clerk called their names. "
This politics of assent, says Schudson, gave way early in the 19th century to a politics of affiliation. Parties conducted elaborate campaigns of torchlight processions and pole raisings, and on election day, party workers supplied voters with pre-printed tickets to slip in the ballot box before heading over to the neighborhood tavern for a few dollars' reward from the party. While most Americans thought of this as party loyalty, Progressive Era reformers viewed it as corruption, and ushered in a politics of information.
After the 1920s, campaigns became more informative and educational. Civil service reforms and the secret ballot sanitized politics, and the ideal of the "informed citizen" came to dominate the political imagination. While parties were forced to clean up their act and voters were no longer buttonholed or bribed by paid election day workers, voter turnout took a nosedive.
According to Schudson's book, although voter turnout never recovered, citizenship has grown more inclusive, especially since the 1960s. A politics of rights has made schools, workplaces, and homes new sites of citizenship, and the courts stand alongside the ballot box as an avenue of political participation.
"People today have a wide array of options for expressing their political preferences - they can get involved in their community or homeowners group, they can donate money to a cause or candidate of their choice, they can circulate a petition to get an initiative on the ballot - the choices today are practically endless," said Schudson. "There are so many ways to be politically active today that voting has become just one of many ways today's citizens can express their opinions. This mind-boggling array of choices did not exist until later in this century."
Along with this greatly expanded public sphere, however, has come an information overload, making it almost impossible to be the ideal "informed citizen." Schudson argues that we should stop expecting people to know and do everything. A model of citizenship for our own time, he suggests in his book, must rest on citizens who are monitors of political danger, not walking encyclopedias of governmental news.
Today's "monitorial citizen" scans the informational environment for signs of danger or urgency and may be mobilized to act on one or more of these trigger issues in many different ways. According to Schudson, monitorial citizens tend to be defensive rather then proactive, and they are perhaps better informed than citizens of the past. Although they may not have more virtue than citizens of the past, they have no less either.
"As we re-think citizenship today, we should take advantage of the turn toward rights and the inclusiveness of contemporary democracy instead of mourning a golden age that was much less lustrous than we sometimes imagine," Schudson explained.
For example, the mythic New England town and the colonial town meeting have been idealized as the way democracy should function. The reality, however, was a far cry from the myth, said Schudson. While town meetings may have been democratic for those who were allowed to participate, they were anything but representative of the community at large. These meetings were only open to property-owning, church-going white males, who set the agenda and led the discussion. Open discussion of differences at town meetings was not encouraged, but rather was avoided at all costs, as the objective of these meetings was not representation but order.
In addition to the mythic New England town meeting, Schudson dispels the widely held view of the Lincoln-Douglas debates as the high point of American politics in the 19th century.
"While it is true that the debates attracted multitudes," said Schudson, "they were probably more of a grand entertainment than a high-minded, issue-oriented discourse that informed voters. Instead of bemoaning our failure to reproduce debates like these today, we should strip away the myths and view the Lincoln-Douglas debates as they really were -- the best show in town."
Schudson, an authority on political communication and the news media, has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His major works include the following books: The Power of News, Watergate in American Memory, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers, and Advertising: The Uneasy Persuasion.
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