Citizenship: The American Experience.

• Author: Lemmie, Valerie

Local governments in liberal western democracies across the globe are placing increasing emphasis on strategies and practices that engage the public in more democratic and complementary ways to address wicked community problems. (1) Many of these strategies are informed by research findings from the Kettering Foundation. This body of research recognizes that if our democracy is to work as it should, citizens and government must work together, each bringing their respective assets and resources to the table to coproduce solutions to shared community problems that neither can fix alone. Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom, who is noted for coining the term "coproduction," explained it as "a process through which inputs from individuals who are not 'in' the same organization are transformed into goods and services." (2) But there are two words in this description that require clarification: They are "democracy" and "citizen."

Many Americans learn about democracy's origin in the city-states of ancient Greece in their western civilization course in high school. As practiced during this era, democracy was representative government in which citizens served in the public interest, whether elected or chosen by sortition (lot), Greek democracy was citizen-centered. It was a political system in which the citizenry (the demos) had the power (kratos) of self-rule. Greek democracy required consent of the governed and the active participation of citizens in the governance process, including holding officials accountable and coproducing public goods and services with government.

OUR REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY

America's Founding Fathers created a representative democracy in the spirit of the ancient Greek city-states. American democracy is representative government in which citizens vote for their political leaders, who serve with the consent of the governed. While citizenship is now often understood as voting, jury service, and following the law, the role of citizens in our democracy was not always so narrowly defined. Citizens routinely performed public work. Tocqueville, in his early 19th-century tour of the United States, commented in New England town hall meetings on the level of associational life and the active participation of citizens in the governance process. Other examples of the work citizens performed include founding and operating the first public schools. The first soldiers and public servants were also citizen volunteers. Citizens...