Reimagining civic participation in Australia: national civilian service
We stand to benefit enormously as individuals and as a society from more civic participation in Australia, but we first need to reimagine what it means
TLDR; Australia should introduce a program of paid civilian national service, starting with a small and lottery-based voluntary pilot for school-leavers
Civic participation need not be confined to your Year 6 excursion to Canberra, eating a democracy sausage or even volunteering as it currently works in Australia. It’s also not a partisan, populist or nationalist concept. It’s about connecting with fellow citizens in a way that recognises shared membership of a political community and a desire to make that community better for the mutual benefit of all members. We stand to benefit enormously as individuals and as a society from more civic participation in Australia. Great thinkers throughout history have spoken about the connection between civic identity and human flourishing, and there’s good empirical evidence to support it. Just like Putnam wrote of America, and as Andrew Leigh has written about extensively in the Australian context, we’re really bowling alone: even the most traditional measures of civic participation are declining dramatically and we’re suffering for it. But the solutions currently on the table don’t deliver the kind of connection between citizens, as citizens, that civic participation is all about.
As one illustration of what this more expansive vision of civic participation might look like, Australia could introduce a program of paid civilian national service for school-leavers, at first as a small and voluntary pilot program, with participants selected by lottery but having the right to refuse to participate. Criteria for selecting projects and ultimately successful projects would be respectively co-designed and selected by young Australians, also selected by lottery, and experts. They would be paid a modest living allowance and once recruited, matched to projects that relate to their skills and interests. AmeriCorps serves as a somewhat similar international example (minus the lottery element).
A similar call but for mandatory national service in Australia and focussing on different arguments (including the benefits for pandemic recovery) was made recently in the SMH by Julie Szego. The argument is made perennially in other jurisdictions and it’s most certainly not a new idea. I seek to explore the idea with a focus on the need to reinvigorate our civic identity in Australia.
PART ONE: WE NEED MORE AND REIMAGINED CIVIC PARTICIPATION
Reclaiming the idea of “civic participation”: more than your Year 6 excursion to Canberra, democracy sausages and volunteering as we know it
I reckon the term “civic participation” has been unhelpfully narrowed and/or hijacked in a few ways. And that reimagining it more expansively could be positively transformative for Australian individuals and society.
For me, the word “civic” conjures the classic Year 6 trip to Canberra. Even if, like me, you enjoy Canberra (which some haters have characterised as a glitch but I wear this preference as a badge of honour) and very much enjoyed the Year 6 excursion, I do wonder whether Aristotle might be a little miffed to think that his vision of civic participation had been reduced to a short stroll around a couple of museums and for the Sydney-siders, a stop at Sutton Forest Maccas.
On a more serious note, civic participation might for some evoke a nationalism of an ugly variety, oppression of marginalised groups, populism or the tyranny of the majority. Sometimes civic participation might be bound up with these things, but it needn’t and shouldn’t be.
Or you might think about voting, eating your democracy sausage or local volunteering. These are absolutely valuable acts of civic participation, but it can also be much more than this.
Civic participation is about connecting with fellow citizens in a way that recognises shared membership of a political community, and a desire to make this better for the mutual benefit of all members. It brings together folks from genuinely diverse backgrounds along every other dimension of identity, and it involves making decisions about what that shared political community should like and/or actions to change the way it looks, and a commitment to the greater good. It could be so much more than what the term typically calls to mind now.
You might say (as Aristotle did) that civic participation invokes and reinforces our civic identity. It’s an identity that philosophers have long described and in many cases, vaunted as central to human flourishing (more on this below). We variously cultivate identities in relation to family, work, ethnicity, sexuality, gender and nationality. But are we cultivating a civic identity? Do we think of ourselves in terms of how we shape and contribute to our political community?
We stand to benefit enormously as individuals and as a society from more civic participation in Australia
Individual wellbeing
Throughout history, great thinkers have ventured that civic participation is connected fundamentally to human wellbeing. As others have explained more authoritatively, “there is a long history in philosophy of imagining that the full development of human potential must be understood as embedded in civic, political life….Participation in government and working with others to promote flourishing, Aristotle thought, allowed citizens to achieve full development.” Benjamin Barber suggested that civic participation is consistent with our definition of ourselves “in relation to our community and experience of liberty as citizens in our communities,” and is a critical constraint on “neoliberal alienation”. He argued that “modernity…leaves us asocial, in a state of “anomie”, alienated from our fellow citizens and our own identity as public democratic citizens.” Many other celebrated political scientists could be added to this list of those who theorize a connection between civic participation and human flourishing. Of the Australian context, Andrew Leigh and Nick Terrell write in Reconnected that “social capital isn’t just the work of worthy do-gooders. At its best, social capital can be a thing of beauty – transcending the everyday to remind us of our common humanity.”
With respect to empirical evidence, it's difficult to make broad-brush claims about the connection between civic participation and human wellbeing; empirical evaluation can only be linked to specific initiatives. But we can cite many examples of civic participation for which there is evidence of such a connection, and which tend to support the theory, and I’ll mention two. The “warm glow” effect of volunteering is often validated in academic studies in a range of contexts. Of course, causal claims about the benefit of volunteering “should be viewed…with scepticism…but a modicum of randomised evidence suggests there may be a modicum of truth in the causal claims.” Another is participation in deliberative processes with other citizens selected via democratic lottery. Evaluations consistently find that participants tend to walk away with a great enthusiasm for civic participation and ultimately, enjoyment of their experience. It’s worth noting one other really interesting and important feature of research in this domain: it takes experiencing civic participation to realise its value; people often become far more enthusiastic about the idea once they’ve been involved, as one experiment I learned about from Leigh and Terrell demonstrates. So just asking people before the fact about whether they want to be more involved or even trying to theorize from isolated experiments might not be particularly instructive.
Stronger democracy
Many participatory democrats would argue further and perhaps even more significantly that through various mechanisms, participation begets participation. Citizen participation has long been thought to serve an “educative function,” producing “better” and more “public-spirited” citizens. Public-spiritedness can be cultivated through, for example, coming to view the community interest as serving one’s own interest, or “enlarging” the set of those whose interests an individual takes as their own. There is good empirical evidence for this hypothesis in relation to the two examples of civic participation we cited above: deliberative processes, and volunteering. Some studies have suggested that in terms of strength, the order of instrumental and altruistic motivations to volunteer is reversed after the volunteering has taken place: at first motivated primarily by instrumental motivations, for example “to get experience and help their career prospects,” after having volunteered, young people are more likely to identify “the thought that I would be helping others” as their predominant motivation for volunteering in the future.
Leigh and Terrell argue that “living in a more connected way isn’t just pleasurable, it enables us to tackle larger challenges. Problems such as climate change, inequality, inactivity and loneliness threaten our future. Solving them will require collective action.” Indeed, we can view civic participation as a “critical process through which people develop and use knowledge, skill and voice to cultivate positive change.”
This is just one of many arguments that have been made as to why civic participation can strengthen our democracy (not least of which the argument that it can reduce socioeconomic inequality).
The status quo in Australia: we’re bowling alone and the options on the table right now aren’t enough to fix things
The facts
Just like Robert Putnam wrote of folks in the US, we’re “bowling alone” in Australia, not only when we think about civic participation expansively but also when we think about it in terms of perhaps more traditional acts of civic participation like voting and local volunteering.
Leigh and Terrell’s Reconnected, the sequel to Disconnected, provides a compelling account of the phenomenon as it’s playing out in Australia. To pull out some of the most striking statistics and add/update a few, mostly using the General Social Survey (from 2019, given the effect of lockdowns in 2020):
Australians are less likely to join groups: from 2006 to 2019, the share of people involved in social groups such as heritage organisations, ethnic clubs or hobby groups fell from 63 percent to 50 percent
Average membership rate across twelve major Australian community groups has halved since 1990
Sixty percent of Australians agree that “people just aren’t interested in joining things anymore”
The rate of volunteering through an organisation for persons aged 18 and over has declined from ~36% in 2010 to ~29% in 2019
The share of adults involved in civic and political groups – a broad category that includes political parties, unions, consumer bodies, environmental groups and animal rights campaigns – decreased from almost one in five (18.6%) in 2006 to less than one in ten in 2019 (9.4%)
In 1984, Australian adults averaged nine trusted friends. In 2005, it was down to seven. By 2018, this had fallen to five. On key measures, Australians today have about half as many close friends as in the 1980s
Across multiple surveys, the mental health of teenagers appears to have worsened considerably. Unlike much of the other evidence reviewed, the shift is quite recent. “Although we cannot be sure about the causal link, the timing of this change coincides with a sharp rise in the prevalence of smartphones and tablets among young Australians”
Three out of five Australians say that we’d like to get to know our neighbours better, but we don’t seem sure where to start
Over four-fifths of Australians believe that declining membership rates in community organisations is an undesirable trend
More recently, Andrew Leigh, now as Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury has argued that Australia is facing a “civic crisis”.
The current solutions
There are limitless ways in which individuals, civil society and the private sector might contribute to civic renewal. Australians are already leading some incredibly innovative and inspiring solutions. To name just some of the initiatives (including recent ones that sprung from or reinvented themselves during the pandemic): the work of The Kindness Pandemic and The Letterbox Project to spread messages of kindness especially focussing on the most marginalised and lonely members of our community; the work of thousands of local sporting clubs to promote inclusive communities; Neighbourhood Connect’s support for neighbourhood groups and community connectors; Orange Sky’s platform for everyday Australians to connect through a regular laundry and shower service, Airbnb’s Open Homes platform to give people a temporary place to stay during emergencies and newDemocracy’s and MosaicLab’s convention of numerous local participatory processes.
But our “civic crisis” requires a coordinated response; individual actors can only do so much and a systematic response isn’t going to materialise out of thin air. This is a fundamentally public problem that the government should address.
Here’s a crude categorisation of some of the potential types of action the government is already planning to take in response to the crisis:
Grant-making: Governments at all levels already invest very significantly in grants to community organisations across a multitude of initiatives designed to strengthen communities in one way or another. Just a few recent or current examples at the federal level include the “Strong and Resilient Communities – Inclusive Communities” Grant, “Fostering Integration Grants”, “Economic Pathways to Refugee Integration Grants to Social Enterprises”, “Information, Linkages and Capacity Building Economic and Community Participation Program” and the “Economic and Community Participation Grant” and The Australian Volunteers Program.
Regulation: Other solutions focus on creating a favourable regulatory environment for community-building activities. For example, Australia could provide greater regulatory support for cooperatives and collectives or seek to remove “red tape” around volunteering activity.
Action to address enabling socioeconomic conditions: Leigh and Terrell emphasise the critical role of creating more equal substantive socioeconomic opportunities as a necessary condition for enabling change. They argue that “there are many threads that government could tie together to help communities reconnect…like any other kind of capital, social capital isn’t evenly shared, and the less you start out with, the harder it can be to accumulate what you need. To surmount the obstacles of isolation and loneliness, Australia will need new policy solutions that range across housing, healthcare, education, homelessness, digital infrastructure, business practice, urban planning and transport.”
Rhetoric and recognition: Governments can celebrate and call for action by individual actors to address the civic crisis.
What are these solutions missing?
I want to come back to the expansive idea of civic participation I pitched at the start of this post. There are a couple of critical elements of this idea that I think we rarely see reflected together in the current set of tools and initiatives on the table:
Connecting as members of a political community:
Not just from the local community, but from across different parts of Australia; in many cases (for understandable logistical reasons), opportunities and initiatives relating to civic participation see participants interacting with others from a relatively local community
Not just connecting with the usual suspects; there’s an obvious self-selection in people who already volunteer, for example
Participating to affirm or shape what our Australian society stands for: in the cases of volunteering through civil society organisations, in many cases, you might say that volunteers put their hand up to affirm what they stand for personally, not (or at the very least not directly) as an affirmation of what their society stands for. As E.J. Dionne has written, “citizenship cannot be reduced to service. And service-good works whether of faith communities, the private sector, or “communities of character” cannot replace the responsibilities of government. Service can become a form of cheap grace, a generalized call on citizens to do kind things as an alternative to a genuine summons for national sacrifice or a fair appointment of burdens among the more and less powerful, the more and less wealthy.”
PART TWO: AN EXAMPLE OF “MORE” AND “REIMAGINED” CIVIC PARTICIPATION
What?
Before we get to the “why?”, the quick “what”: we start with a pilot Australian (and lottery-based but voluntary) version of AmeriCorps: a year-long, stipended volunteer work program.
You might envisage ultimately transitioning to making the program compulsory for school-leavers, but conscious of the enormity of this undertaking and the implementation risks, the critical need to build public buy-in and trust, and the need to carefully evaluate the design to maximise the benefits for all parties, I’d propose starting with a much smaller, voluntary pilot program. It would do the following:
Start with a small number of places, and offer them to randomly selected school-leavers, who could decline the opportunity if they wished to. A more conventional method might entail opening up to voluntary applications and if they exceed the number of places, awarding places by lottery rather than competitive application
Provide a living stipend to participants; other benefits could also be provided to support fair participation (for example, in the US, AmeriCorps also provides childcare to volunteers and members)
Co-design the program with a steering committee of school-leavers, selected by lottery, and experts, tasked with advising on criteria for selecting beneficiary community organisations (which might include, for example, that the program provides professional and personal development opportunities to the young people seeking to apply, one of the major promised benefits of AmeriCorps)
Invite applications from community organisations across Australia to host participants, based on the criteria designed by the steering committee
Empower a different but similarly constituted selection committee to select successful host organisations and projects
Once selected, facilitate matching of participants to organisations and initiatives based on skills and interests
Evaluate the program in partnership with academia and key stakeholders in the volunteering sector before attempting to scale up in any way
Why?
A program of this nature ticks the reimagined civic participation boxes noted above:
Connecting Australians as members of a political community:
Not just from the local community, but from across different parts of Australia; school-leavers would get the opportunity to get connect not just with others from their local community but with Australians from diverse backgrounds across the country
Not just connecting with the usual suspects: while only a compulsory program would truly avoid this program, lottery would dramatically reduce the risk of providing opportunities only to those who have benefited from other social advantages and further narrowing the pool or incentivising only the “civic-minded”
Participating to affirm or shape what our Australian society stands for:
Volunteer programs are selected by a democratically composed steering committee of young people who decide they should be resourced; programs reflect what they feel Australian society should support
The program is government-administered; participation reflects a commitment to what Australian society stands for
Why not?
A few quick responses to some of the counterarguments you might raise:
Elitism: There are couple of ways in which you might cast this proposal as elitist. First, you might say that it ignores the humble, quiet service that people are doing every day for their families and communities (some estimates suggest that “informal volunteering” in Australia accounts for more than half of all voluntary activity). This proposal doesn’t in any way undermine these acts of service. You might also say that it privileges people who can afford to take a year of low pay. But if we’re talking about school-leavers, the greatest opportunity cost is arguably for the future highest earners.
Partisanship: As Julie Szego writes, “it’s a measure of how cynical and individualistic we’ve become that the call for national service is reflexively cast as conservative or “right wing” or the natural province of eccentrics.” Of calls for national service in the United States, it has been written that “this is neither a new nor a partisan idea. The call to serve and inspire is written into the preamble of the United States Constitution.”
Cost: AmeriCorps has been found to be highly cost-efficient. A 2020 study by economists at ICF found that AmeriCorps and Senior Corps programs offer a significant return on investment: every $1 in federal taxes invested returns over $17 to society, program members and the government. With respect to budgetary cost, let’s say for argument’s sake that you started with an ambitious 10,000 places (less than half of the relative proportion of Americans who volunteer for AmeriCorps). With a living allowance of $20,000 per annum (roughly comparable to the AmeriCorps allowance), that’s $200M annually in the most substantial stipend costs.
Demand: In the US, three to five times as many young people apply to serve in volunteer programs as there are openings. Many of the barriers to volunteering in Australia and elsewhere relate to feeling welcome and finding meaningful opportunities to volunteer. But in this program, each partner organisation or project would host many participants, and significant investment would be made in making participants feel welcome and socially connected to peers and the organisation and identifying the right opportunities.
Low unemployment rate: Relatedly, you might argue that demand won’t be strong enough while Australia’s youth unemployment rate is at multi-decade lows, or that you’d be diverting young people who would be at risk of unemployment in a weaker economy from well-paid and secure employment. But this assumes that most of the demand and actual participation comes from young people who would otherwise be unemployed. That’s not the case in the US.
Capacity and resourcing: We have many Australian governmental matching programs, not least Australian Aid (a similar program focussed on international volunteering, which raises far more complexity in many respects) to use as templates. We have better technology than ever to support effective matching.
Quality of service: Of course, individuals and organisations would need to satisfy threshold criteria to qualify, and a lot would need to be invested in identifying suitable projects and the matching process. Quality certainly isn’t guaranteed, but there’s also no reason why the program couldn’t be carefully designed to produce good outcomes. As always, it would be critical to invest in careful program design upfront, drawing on the best available research and practitioner expertise (through peak bodies like Volunteering Australia and associated networks). Ultimately, starting with a small-scale pilot and iterating on the program design is one critical aspect of designing a quality program.
With a small and carefully designed pilot, we don’t have much to lose but we have so much to gain.