Participation vs. quality of participation

A thought on the value of participation vs. quality of participation – this is where we need the idea of the common weal. Currently much success in civic education is measured in levels of participation – in a conversation with my advisor, she brought up some soon-to-be-published research that has been done by some folks in Madison. I am not remembering exactly what the research found, but it essentially pointed to the possibility that, though civic and political participation could be increasing among young people, it is occurring in ways that attenuate rather than encourage dialogue across ideological differences. People might participate, but they do so in an ideological rigid way. This leads to the question of what we really want from a program of civic education. Do we want participation in any form or do we want participation of a specific kind? For me, the answer is most certainly the latter, but this pushes us back to an old dilemma – how can a liberal state legitimately regulate the way in which people participate? Can the state demand discourse across ideological differences or is it bound to allow ideological 'siloing'. I believe there is a legitimate argument and it comes from the borders of liberal and republican thought. I have been focusing on Pettit of late and I see his work and the work of some liberals (e.g. Macedo) as working closer together than more traditional liberal and republican arguments have.

Pettit focuses on freedom as non-domination, which means freedom from the possibility of arbitrary interference by others. This means that non-arbitrary interference is not a violation of freedom. Concerning non-arbitrary interference, he says “an act of interference will be non-arbitrary to the extent that it is forced to track the interests and ideas of the person suffering the interference” (p. 55). Now he recognizes that these interests may be in conflict, so the requirement is to track the “relevant” interests - “those that are shared in common with others” (p. 55). Now here is likely where the good liberals will raise their hackles, for who decides what is a relevant interest – this is where unacceptable state regulation can slip in. Putting that concern aside for a moment, there really is something here – to defend a civic education that goes beyond a simple emphasis on participation we must show that it is a part of this set of relevant interests. I'll leave working that out until later, but I do want to make one suggestion that this need for ideological interaction might sit even deeper in the republican mechanism as a required element in the procedural structure required to determine what interests are shared in common with others – we must be able to interact with other ideological positions in order to better understand those positions and determine the relevant interests of the polity.