When Parents Govern: Countering Interest and Ideology in a Polarized World

• In Event: Civic Counteraction: Listening, Speaking, and Deciding in Polarized Times

Abstract

Political Scientists have long argued that a primary problem in mass democracy is that as ordinary citizens participate more in the political process, they become more polarized. This paper argues, alternatively, that this predicament with citizen engagement is not a problem of the amount of participation, but the kind of participation. Through an ethnographic study of over one hundred citizens, I find that, unintuitively, active parent participation in school decision making councils leads to regular decisions that advance the interests of student populations to which their own children do not belong. What is more, in certain cases, parents advance decisions which counter their own ideological position. Given these surprising findings, the dual effort of the paper is to elucidate the phenomena of counter decision making and elaborate a theory of nested accountability, which provides an initial framework for why counter interest and counter ideological decisions repeatedly occur on school community councils.

Author

• Jacob Garrett, Sciences Po