Enlisting Citizens: Building Political Legitimacy
✍ Scribed by Matt Leighninger
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2002
- Weight
- 90 KB
- Volume
- 91
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0027-9013
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In the first few months of 2002, the Bush administration launched several major initiatives aimed at restoring the health of civic life in the United States. These new ventures, which include the USA Freedom Corps and the Citizen Corps, are intended to increase volunteerism and community service and promote a more active concept of citizenship. The choice of the term corps recalls earlier undertakings such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Peace Corps. Like these programs, the president' s new initiatives are federally orchestrated efforts to build and strengthen communities. Yet recent examples of grassroots organizing demonstrate a different vision for mobilizing a citizenry to greater involvement.
At the local level across the country, a burgeoning civic participation movement is much less centralized and uniform than the efforts inaugurated by the Bush administration. The leadership of these diverse projects ranges from community activists to school board members, human relations commissioners, and public officials, among others. Though their programs reflect the same democratic principles and use many of the same strategies, each effort is locally directed and specific to the situation in that community.
Recent projects in Oklahoma, Minnesota, and New York evince a powerful new tactic deployed by the democratic organizers who orchestrated them: the ability to mobilize citizens by confirming their political legitimacy and providing them with a sense of political efficacy. Political legitimacy recognizes that citizens have public privileges and responsibilities. Political efficacy means that their opinions and actions carry weight with public officials and fellow citizens. The projects discussed here involved thousands of people, enlisted hundreds of volunteers, and led to policy changes at the state and local levels, but their most important contribution may have been that citizens gained the sense that they matter. It is to be hoped this realization will lead them to embrace the active and comprehensive vision of citizenship that the Bush administration is trying to stimulate through its recent initiatives.