Springfield's Plight
Politicians talk a lot about accountability and transparency during election campaigns, but after being elected they rarely are capable of giving concrete meaning to these laudable ideas. I do not believe, as is fashionable, that they use these ideas as cynical punch lines. Rather, they simply do not understand what it would really take to make these claims meaningful. Politicians operate in our candidate centered electoral system as islands. They promise to do and be many things without acknowledging, or even appreciating, the collective action necessary to make good on their campaign promises.
Why aren’t our elected officials held accountable for their actions and decisions? Why can’t citizens accurately judge their performance in office? The answer is quite simple really. Citizens cannot judge what they do not understand. What citizens do not understand is the basic workings of local government. Citizens of all educational levels lack basic information about how the city government works. Instead, we make superficial judgments about our elected officials character and conduct that are quite often divorced from the actual context within which they are operating.
Many respond to this situation by claiming that there are plenty of resources people can exploit to develop an understanding of city government and that it is not the responsibility of elected officials to educate citizens. According to this logic most citizens choose to be ignorant of institutions and processes. It’s easier to judge politics and politicians by focusing on personal issues that everyone believes they understand. For example, everybody thinks themselves capable of judging the integrity, honesty, and intelligence of politicians - so that’s what we focus on. We see the city’s financial problems as the result of the incompetence or corruption of our leaders without the slightest knowledge of the particular management practices or economic forces that contributed to the situation. It’s the former mayor’s fault. It’s the fault of the City Council. Lacking the information about the what and how, citizens are left to focus on the who.
What’s wrong with that? We elect these people to do a job and if they don’t produce results we should condemn them, right? Why should we waste our time thinking about the city’s governance? That’s what we pay them for. These common rationalizations for ignorance lie at the root of our city’s current problems. They produce an unproductive approach by the governed and the governors. Leadership is the providing services for fees (or votes). Our elected officials should be charged with a duty to educate citizens. They should spend most of their rhetorical energy translating the complexities of governance into language and information citizens can use to rule themselves. Making information “available” is far from sufficient. We don’t pay people to rule. We pay them to make it possible for us to rule ourselves.
Democratic governance at any level is much more about politics than it is about management. Even at the local level, where it is often said that there is no liberal or conservative way to sweep the streets, politics does – and should – dictate outcomes. This is an unpopular opinion, however. Much more acceptable is the fiction that politics ought to stop after elections and that governance should be dictated by objective measures of success and failure. We should reward officials who get it right and punish those who get it wrong. This is what one of our new “overseers” indicated in the Springfield paper recently when he proudly claimed that he is not a politician and that this fact makes him MORE qualified to make decisions about Springfield’s future. His claim, no doubt, elicited many affirmative nods among the city’s residents as they read his words in the paper. The irony is that this notion with which we are comfortable and confident directly contradicts the notion (maybe even the possibility) of self governance.
Politics is a term with many definitions, but at its root it is the collective process by which WE make decisions binding on the whole community. Because ours is a democratic politics, we acknowledge and even celebrate the role and power of ordinary citizens in the determination of political outcomes. Political scientist Harold Laswell popularized the idea that politics is about “who get what, when, and how.” Do we really want to be left out of this process in our own city? Do we really want to leave it to “experts” to decide?
The problem is that most of us only understand local government and politics at the rhetorical level. That is, we only know what politicians and activists tell us. This means that we hear politicians celebrate the participatory nature of democracy while at the same time promising the efficient execution of the people’s business. We are so used to hearing these types of claims together that many of us are not even aware of the blatant contradiction involved. The future of Springfield can only be determined by the citizens of Springfield if they are affirmatively and aggressively brought into the process.
Transparency can’t continue to be just a campaign buzzword. It must become a reality. Over the next three years our city will be run by an unelected control board. Most of the policy making decisions will not be made by our elected officials. Stripped of this formal power over policy, our leader can and should refocus their efforts on citizen empowerment. They should lay plans for a restructuring of our government that will empower citizens with knowledge. Because the control board will centralize formal power in the hands of the Romney Administration in Boston, Springfield leaders should lay the groundwork for a massive de-centralization of political power here in Springfield. They should invest serious energy in efforts to institutionalize and routinize the wide dissemination of public information to Springfield’s citizens. Instead of programs and promises Springfield’s citizens need the knowledge (read power) to govern themselves.