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August 2, 2004
This is an interesting thesis. The reviewer of Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public by Matthew A. Crenson & Benjamin Ginsberg states it simply. He says that the authors state 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."
And Australia we might add.
Robert Heineman is the reviewer writing in Independnet Review. He elaborates the above thesis by saying that 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.
Similarly in Australia. Citizens have been marginalized as political actors and become consumers. What has developed is interest-group liberalism in which government becomes little more than a broker for competing interests, whilst the interest groups function without public support. These interest groups focus on the techniques of policy influence in Canberra and the state capitals rather than on broad political appeal. Consequently, the dynamic of insider-group politics has engendered a public policy bereft of publics.
It is difficult to gist of the rest of Downsizing Democracy. It would appear that non-elected public officials---meaning the federal bureaucracy?--- has become exceptionally adept at disaggregating the political public into personalized interests. These governmental forces--the bureaucracy?---seek greater distance from a democratic base.
In Australia it is not likely that a countervailing political power will develop in the form of political parties who move toward mobilization of wider publics, or act to support more institutionally responsible government. The political parties themselves have increasingly moved away from their democratic base. And they have little incentive to make the federal government more democratic. They find the corporate style of governance suitable and they are unwilling to embrace democratic reform
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