Do-It-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry

by Caroline W. Lee

Citizen participation has undergone a radical shift since anxieties about "bowling alone" seized the nation in the 1990s. Many pundits and observers have cheered America's twenty-first century civic renaissance-an explosion of participatory innovations in public life. Invitations to "have your say!" and "join the discussion!" have proliferated. But has the widespread enthusiasm for maximizing citizen democracy led to real change? In Do-It-Yourself Democracy, sociologist Caroline W. Lee examines how participatory innovations have reshaped American civic life over the past two decades. Lee looks at the public engagement industry that emerged to serve government, corporate, and nonprofit clients seeking to gain a handle on the increasingly noisy demands of their constituents and stakeholders. The beneficiaries of new forms of democratic empowerment are not only humble citizens, but also the engagement experts who host the forums. Does it matter if the folks deepening democracy are making money at it? How do they make sense of the contradictions inherent in their roles? In investigating public engagement practitioners' everyday anxieties and larger worldviews, we see reflected the strange meaning of power in contemporary institutions. New technologies and deliberative practices have democratized the ways in which organizations operate, but Lee argues that they have also been marketed and sold as tools to facilitate cost-cutting, profitability, and other management goals - and that public deliberation has burdened everyday people with new responsibilities without delivering on its promises of empowerment.

304 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 21, 2014

Reviews

[Judd Street · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Do-It-Yourself Democracy" is a masterfully written anthropological/sociological text on the rise of the public engagement industry within political processes. For the sake of this review, public engagement refers to structured events (be they virtual or in person) wherein members of the public (usually a 'representative' set) are asked to inform decision-making processes (e.g., weigh in on which of several options they prefer, or prioritize different issues or goals). In this book, Lee explores the world of the 'facilitator;' those people who step in to run these public engagement events.

The book arcs from slightly more positive to slightly more sceptical. In the first half, we're introduced to the 'coolness' of these events; often large-scale, carefully produced sessions with glossy materials, snappy videos, and fancy vote-by-app technologies. The events offer the potential for soliciting public input, and the role of the facilitator is to spur this on. The facilitators, in turn, have a huge number of different tools at their disposal, such as a wide variety of different activities and conversational formats to draw out these public opinions.

A running theme through the book is the idea of 'authenticity.' These events are powerful because they foster and self-legitimate through appeals to 'authentic dialogue,' alongside lots of other allusions to things like the 'town hall' meeting and ancient Athenian democracy. Indeed, Lee does an excellent job of revealing the new-agey tendencies of these facilitators, often bringing even pseudo spiritual and careful curated experiences together to create a particular ebb and flow of 'togetherness' and 'process' in their work.

Towards the second half of the book, we see a bit more critical of a lens from Lee. Here, Lee begins to explore two big limitations of these processes. First, these processes are often highly neoliberal, enabling their sponsors (not the facilitators, but those in power who have initiated the process) to enlist participants into budget-cutting exercises that privilege economic rationales. Second, these processes are often crafted in a way that, if not outright suppresses dissent, at the very least seeks to minimize and subdue it through this emphasis on process and guidance towards positive (if abstract and intangible) outcomes. For instance, participants quoted by Lee often point to the way that these sessions create false dichotomies, some of which participants are able to diffuse and others of which create tacit buy-in despite being untrue and fought by participants.

What Lee does so well in this book is explore the themes above with really exceptional first-hand accounts and insights. While the tensions she identifies aren't necessarily novel for a reader who has studied these events, they are meticulously documented with thoughtful examples. Indeed, I'd recommend this book on the basis alone of being an exemplar of contemporary anthropological/sociological work: it's a really lovely example of someone who has immersed deeply in a community and is able to share the inner workings of that weird world in a compelling way. (The book also contains the best note on methods and sources I've ever seen - just fantastic.)

But, this does come with a double edged sword. One can't help but feel that, at times, Lee struggles to deal with the tension between maintaining access and good graces with this community and pushing the critiques she identifies all the way. This manifests in two ways in the book. First, there are a variety of sentences and paragraphs scattered throughout that 'hedge' in quite significant ways. I found this challenging as a reader, because it made it challenging to follow her arguments and narrative structures at times. It felt like Lee was, in these occasional moments, more concerned with avoiding taking a stand than with guiding the reader through a clear progression in the analysis.

Second, if the public engagement industry had to dress up for Halloween, it would show up as an infomercial for itself. This is an industry which is incredibly self promotional; an industry which is the pure definition of moving goalposts in 'evaluating' its own success. To cut through this PR blitz requires, at times, a little more direct critique than Lee often offered. At times, the critiques got to the cusp of really important points, only to then be tempered in a way that avoided landing the blow.

To be clear here, this isn't that I think Lee was 'too neutral' in the analysis. Indeed, I think Lee did an excellent job of sitting in that space between being a participant and an analyzer of the community. But, there's a critical difference between being 'neutral' or 'in the middle' and being fair but incisive, and the book could have used just a hair more teeth towards incisive critique. It's not about taking a side; it's about being pushing a little further with the scalpel in contouring both the benefits and the drawbacks.

With that said, though, this remains a five-star book. It's an excellent contribution to the literature on studying public engagement. It's well written and generally engaging to read. And, it's an exemplar of a mixed-methods anthropological work that I'll be recommending to many students.