Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public.

• Author: Heineman, Robert
• Position: Book Review

* Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public

By Matthew A. Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv, 294. $29.95 cloth, $18.95 paperback.

Writing in well-documented, analytical style, Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg, professors of political science at Johns Hopkins University, expose the thoroughly corrosive impact of beltway politics on democratic processes and citizen power. The authors begin with the thesis that for more than two centuries ordinary citizens have served as the "backbone of the western state" (p. x), but, they contend, emerging political relationships at the national level of U.S. government are rapidly bringing the era of the citizen to a close. Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, the authors assert, policy elites became disengaged from the political public because a mass base was no longer needed for influencing and manipulating public policy. By documenting the evolving disregard for citizen judgment and influence in national policy circles, this book confirms that the creeping sense of political impotence spreading across the United States is not without foundation.

Crenson and Ginsberg argue that as government has burgeoned, Americans have been transformed from citizens who are effective political participants into customers who are recipients of government services. Citizens have been marginalized as political actors. Their leaders no longer need concern themselves about collective mobilization of opinion because, intentionally or unintentionally, they have disaggregated the citizenry into a personalized democracy. The national government today can raise an army, collect taxes, and implement policy without widespread public support. The withholding tax has made the voluntary component of tax collection much less important, and the professional military has limited the need for citizen soldiers. More generally, the proliferation of special interests in the nation's capital has provided bureaucrats with a ready substitute for public approval and support. In the authors' words, "The era of the modern citizen, which began with a bang, is quietly slipping away" (p. 21).

Paradoxically, many of the attempts to make U.S. government more democratically responsive have in fact made it less so. In particular, the authors point to the reforms of the Progressive Era--such as the party primary, the recall, and the...