Civil Society, Realized: Equipping the Mass Public to Express Choice and Negotiate Power

Date01 January 2022
Published date01 January 2022
DOI10.1177/00027162221077471
AuthorJae Yeon Kim,Hahrie Han
Subject MatterParties, Movements, and Democracy: Peril and Promise
ANNALS, AAPSS, 699, January 2022 175
DOI: 10.1177/00027162221077471
Civil Society,
Realized:
Equipping the
Mass Public to
Express Choice
and Negotiate
Power
By
HAHRIE HAN
and
JAE YEON KIM
1077471ANN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYCIVIL SOCIETY, REALIZED
research-article2022
We examine the ways in which change in civil society
has contributed to the erosion of democracy in the
United States. Democracy demands that people com-
mit to pluralistic self-determination, which means that
people must be willing to seek power and also share it.
We argue that civil society plays two important roles in
sustaining people’s willingness to do both: first, civil
society cultivates a capacity for expressing choice; and
second, it teaches capacities and provides opportunities
for people to negotiate power. We show that in recent
decades, civil society’s emphasis has moved more
toward expressing choice and away from the creation of
venues for negotiating power. We conclude with rec-
ommendations for researchers, civil society leaders,
funders, and policy-makers who are interested in com-
mitting to forms of civil society that take power seri-
ously.
Keywords: civil society; democracy; collective action;
participation; power
Sometimes, the things that are the most impor-
tant are the most invisible. Civil society1
is like the invisible seam that knits pieces of
American democracy together, linking political
institutions to people, and people to each other.
Seams are often obscured from public view, but
they are essential for binding different parts of a
system to each other. For many decades, these
seams of American democracy have been fray-
ing. When the seams become threadbare and
worn, the entire system begins to come apart.
Part of the reason civil society has become so
hollow in recent years is society’s failure to rec-
ognize that not all forms of civic engagement are
the same. In a society (like the United States)
that is aspiring for pluralistic self-governance,
Hahrie Han is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation
Professor of Political Science and director of the SNF
Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
Jae Yeon Kim is an assistant professor at the KDI School
of Public Policy and Management.
Correspondence: hahrie@jhu.edu

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