Toward the Civil City Council

Aggregating

As the local legislature, the council is the key political institution of the municipality representing and aggregating diverse community interests. The major function of aggregation is to assemble diverse interests into political coalitions that may be short-lived. This function allows the “will of the people” to emerge from the processes of brokering interests, aggregating coalitions, and exchanging political power in the plural democratic system (March and Olsen 1989, 118–119). Council members have short time frames because they are oriented toward municipal election cycles and so aggregations of interests are only temporary. Instead of using analytical judgments about public problems, the leaders use political criteria to quell interest group conflicts so that diverse interests can be melded into policy coalitions. By aggregating, councils respond to citizens primarily as customers whose interests must be satisfied, brokered, or neutralized in the shorter term. This sort of governance often leads to stalemates in decision making and produces symbolic political actions that reinforce the status quo (March and Olsen 1995). Meanwhile, the symbolic political actions of councils reassure the inactive majority of citizens so that they remain quiescent and are not an electoral threat.

Integrating

As the municipal corporation’s governing body, the council is the trustee of community traditions and long-term institutional goals, integrating diverse interests to safeguard these. The major function of integration is goal setting and decision making from a community perspective bounded by enduring regime (constitutional) values in order to address difficult, far-reaching, or persistent public problems. To integrate interests, councils search for common cause rather than common ground between competing groups. Thus, political conflict is not eliminated but civilized through the integrative function (March and Olsen 1995, 30). Civility in conflict is facilitated through face-to-face encounters between councils and citizens. The primary outcomes of integrative governance are to protect, sustain, and develop the municipality based on a foundation of community (public) trust.

Under this normative framework, councils secure the collaboration of civic-minded citizens by allowing them to participate in governance decisions as the municipal ownership group. By engaging citizen networks embedded in civil society, councils can take advantage of and add to the preexisting social capital. By doing so, councils can take on the role of the Civil City Council.

The Civil City Council: Integrative Leadership Skills

City councils that perform the integrative function well reduce the municipal governance deficit by avoiding polarization. To release this integrative potential and become the Civil City Council, councilors should cultivate the following five leadership skills appropriate for the citizen–city interface under modern conditions.

Training and Empowering Citizens in Interpretive Communities

One way of integrating interests and reducing conflict is to foster what is basically collaborative governance: governance wherein citizens are empowered and taught effective means of participation that avoid polarization. City councils need to cultivate collaborative governance through their actions.

The Civil City Council trains, socializes, and empowers civic-minded citizens to pursue the integrative purposes of the municipality. In practice, not all citizens are interested in participating, and councilors must sponsor training so that active citizens are not performing integrative governance tasks “cold.” For example, the city of Raleigh developed the Citizens Leadership Academy. Besides giving residents an opportunity to interact with city leaders, this Academy offers basic training on leadership processes, effective communication, and neighborhood asset tools. As citizens and councils learn from each other in a safe emotional environment, they reinforce “confidence in their mutual good spirit and capabilities for reason”; consequently, they “civilize” politics without losing their individuality (March and Olsen 1995, 60, 75, 180–181).

Another example is the Heights Community Congress (HCC) of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, a nonprofit civil rights organization established in 1972. The HCC was established by concerned citizens to eliminate disparities in home mortgages, housing purchases, and rental properties. The Cleveland Heights City Council has supported the HCC mission by funding fair housing tests, diversity training programs, and housing counseling classes for residents. Through the HCC, the Cleveland Heights Council has gained governance knowledge from the experiences of residents, and the municipality has ameliorated the persistent problem of racism. The long-term partnership between HCC and the council has enabled Cleveland Heights to achieve full integration in housing and create desirable diverse neighborhoods. Cleveland Heights used the HCC-council partnership to facilitate political integration into the municipality based on enduring constitutional values. By doing so, the Cleveland Heights council went beyond specific episodes of citizen participation. Besides sustaining the widest form of democratic citizenship, the council changed the underlying political culture and institutionalized significant governance innovations (Andrew and Goldsmith 1998; González and Healey 2005).

Balancing Institutional Autonomy and Accountability

To achieve genuine integration of interests, citizens play a role not only in formulating policy but in using tools based on agreed-upon standards to evaluate outcomes. This approach will reduce polarization and increase civility among councilors and citizens because it gives them the same benchmarks by which to assess progress toward integrative goals. Councils can operationalize integrative standards of accountability by securing the advantages of a post audit of political actions. They should train citizens to evaluate the effects of governance actions rather than just relying on their prior approval through their input in policy formulation. Reliance on the prior approval of untrained citizens treats them as customers in aggregative politics, overloads their capability to function effectively, and makes “public actions slow, indecisive, and uncreative” (March and Olsen 1995, 60). By shifting the focus of trained citizens from a pre audit to a post audit of governance decisions, councils receive clarification about their municipality’s institutional effectiveness and how they might exercise discretion to do what is proper and just for the democratic political community. ¹

By virtue of the municipal charter, councils possess institutional autonomy. However, evaluating council accountability is complicated because assigning blame or giving credit in public life is difficult. The difficulty arises because multiple institutional actors are involved in municipal governance, and policy outcomes are frequently evaluated on the basis of poorly specified and changing political standards. With many people involved in typical governance networks, everyone and no one is accountable because there is no single authority. Thus, council effectiveness is measured by “accountability to democratic stakeholders and for democratic outcomes” (Agranoff and McGuire 2003, 189–191). In short, the Civil City Council must be skilled in balancing institutional autonomy and accountability by training themselves and citizens to carry out this deliberative role.

Transforming Dangerous Political Identities

The Civil City Council skillfully uses discretion to be unresponsive to “conspicuously inauthentic or evil” political identities and interest groups that threaten democratic traditions (March and Olsen 1995, 45–46). Responsiveness to dangerous identities and interests makes a municipality “less democratic rather than more and frequently succeeds only in supporting the status quo” (March and Olsen 1995, 88). For example, controversy arose over the building of the Islamic Cultural Center near the former site of the World Trade Center in New York City when the center acquired the dangerous identity of “the Ground Zero Mosque.” Although this center was neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero, the political symbolism of the Ground Zero Mosque led to an association of terrorism with the religion of Islam. The symbolic politics were fraught with fears, emotions, and irrelevancies. Prudently, the New York City council speaker and the mayor supported the conversion of an old and vacant department store property near Ground Zero into the Islamic Center even though the Quinnipiac University Poll (2010) showed that the majority of New Yorkers opposed its construction (52–31 percent). Ultimately, the Landmarks Preservation Commission (which included a resident from each of New York’s five boroughs) unanimously approved the demolition of the vacant property so that the center could be built (Goldman 2010). The justification was framed in terms of the First Amendment freedoms of religion and assembly. By reframing the controversy in constitutional (regime) terms, city leaders eased tensions and facilitated the achievement of an emotional consensus (Edelman 1985). This emotional consensus, in turn, allowed for the reconstruction of the controversy and achievement of a political resolution. The Islamic Center opened without incident in 2011.

As councils strive to transform dangerous identities, they need protection from the pressures, emotions, and threats inherent in aggregative (i.e., constituencies and electoral) politics and “the absolutism of true believers, fundamentalists, moralists, bigots, and the sin police” (March and Olsen 1995, 89, 135). Given the hostilities surrounding the political reconstruction of dangerous identities, safeguarding councils from immediate removal may be necessary. Councils that know how to reconstruct, rather than banish, dangerous political identities, sustain and extend the democratic political community. ² The capacity to transform dangerous identities is a “precious” outcome of integrative governance (March and Olsen 1995, 89).

Using the Public Service Ethos

The Civil City Council builds on the ethos of democracy and the public service. As community trustee and institutional steward, councils must place the duty to serve the public interest at the center of its operating culture. This standard is one that council members must voluntarily accept when they enter office (Svara 2007). Drawn from Lewis and Gilman (2005, 75), the following principles help councils operationalize this ethos: (1) protecting the interests of future generations; (2) sustaining opportunities for future generations to secure a comparable quality of life; (3) giving priority to immediate risks over long-term hypothetical risks; and (4) avoiding the risk of irreversible harm or catastrophe.

However, most municipalities lack an established civil service (Stone 2006). Therefore, councils may also derive the public service ethos from the federal government’s higher civil service. The American higher civil service is constituted as an integrative political institution because it eases the institutional tension that exists between the demand for change and the need for continuity in government (Pfiffner 2007). The institutional knowledge and operating rules of the higher civil service insulate democratic systems from “turnover paralysis” (March and Olsen 1995, 240). To make evident the public service ethos, councils must respect the office of top-level professional administrators, such as the city manager, and integrate them as partners in municipal governance. At the same time, councils must protect professional administrators who loyally “argue back” rather than dismiss their advice or them as “disloyal” (Pfiffner 2007). Protecting professional administrators is necessary because the civil service is, according to Long (1962, 71–72, 67), “. . . a medium for registering the diverse will that makes up the people’s will and for transmuting them into responsible [municipal actions].” By adhering to the higher civil service ethos, councils operationalize the complementarity of politics and administration as articulated by Svara (2006, 2001) and Nalbandian (1999).

Learning the Lessons of History

The Civil City Council should be skilled in interpreting the lessons learned from the municipality’s history. Political institutions need to retain knowledge about democratic governance but have difficulty in doing so (March and Olsen 1995; Spicer 2010). The loss of institutional memory in the municipality occurs because of the frequent turnover in local elected officials and the competitive nature of aggregative politics. These difficulties may create the “ancien regime” problem for the municipality: Newly elected local officials may be ambivalent about accepting political guidance from their predecessors; exiting officials may be reluctant to assist their successors (March and Olsen 1995, 211). Thus, at orientation, new councilors should learn the municipality’s institutional history from the council clerk or city manager, local historians, and governance experts in the public administration community. By taking an historically based institutional perspective, council members compensate for a tendency to view city history based on the external environment they found on assuming office. The lessons of municipal history give councilors a panoramic perspective of the citizenry’s political, social, and economic life over time.

Besides orientations, new councilors will need on-the-job municipal training because, by design, the qualifications to serve on most councils are modest. Also, local voters do not necessarily elect council candidates on the basis of their governance knowledge or skills (Nalbandian 1994). Nonetheless, municipalities can institutionalize crucial council training by following the example of Mayfield Village, Ohio. Its charter empowers the council to require newly elected members to attend council-approved training seminars at the Village’s cost. ³ Ideally, the municipal education of councils should extend beyond orientations and training seminars for new members. Given that municipalities cannot succeed without capable councilors, training whole councils on an ongoing basis is best.