Democracy as a Practice: Recovering the Political in Civic Engagement

• In Event: Civic Engagement Models and Practices

Abstract

The field of civic engagement is directly linked to the health and depth of democracy in a state, and yet much of the work in the field, especially in higher education, relegates democracy and therefore politics, to voter engagement and elections only, devaluing the normative and social aspects of democracy by default. This paper argues that while voting and elections are a necessary part of civic engagement, focusing on the institutional aspects of democracy alone does not help to create a robust and engaged democracy in the polity. Instead, we should conceptualize and foster the notion of democracy both as a daily practice. However, in order to do that we must recover the intrinsically political nature of civic engagement.

Based on my research on contentious politics and the quality of democracy in South Asia, my decades of teaching in political science, as well as three years within the field of civic engagement, this paper argues that civic engagement strategies and teaching on democracy, civics, and governance at the college level, should provide a comprehensive and holistic understanding of politics and democracy not as a once a year obligation, which is only accessible to citizens, but as a skill that both citizens and non-citizens should practice on a day to day basis. In order to do this, we need to reconceptualize civic engagement in a few ways. First, we need to recover the political nature of civic engagement. Second, we must proactively expand the scope of civic engagement to include citizens and non-citizens, and finally, we must foster a sense of democracy as a daily practice, not a yearly event. While it is likely that many active civic engagement programs already do some aspects of these things, budgetary, political and other constraints on civic engagement programs often create an environment where we must de-emphasize the political nature of engagement, which in turn often perpetuates negative feelings about politics, and therefore democracy as a whole, which paradoxically can get young people to disengage from democracy, even as they take on careers of public service. Thus, I argue that we need to re-invigorate the political nature of civic engagement, in other words linking all aspects of civic engagement to politics and power relations, while simultaneously emphasizing the day-to-day nature of politics and democracy. In doing so, civic engagement practitioners in higher education are more likely to inculcate democratic norms in their students and communities.

Author

• Simanti Lahiri, Rutgers University–Camden