<figure><figcaption> Kevin Elliott( politicalscience.yale.edu)</figcaption></figure>

Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. It seems like we've all become busier than we were in the past, from schoolchildren up through retirees. Given that, all the information that's available on the internet, some of it unreliable, how much can we reasonably expect from our fellow citizens to engage the political system and how can we make that engagement easier, more rational and more fair? My guest today is Kevin Elliott. He's a lecturer in ethics, politics and economics at Yale University and he's the author of a new book that tries to tackle those questions. It's titled, “Democracy for Busy People”. Professor Elliott, welcome to the program.

Kevin Elliott: It’s a pleasure to be here.

GR: Well, it's great to have you, and thanks for making the time. So, first of all, before I ask you a question, I'm going to start by putting on another hat, rather than radio host and that, my hat is political scientist and not only a political scientist, but a political scientist who studies and teaches democratic theory. I just want to applaud you personally for taking on this challenge, it's a big one. So thank you for that. My first question may sound obvious, but still, I wanted to ask you anyway. Why did you decide to write this book when you did? And how did you get the idea for it?

KE: Yeah. So you know, when I was looking around, reading in democratic theory, reading in political theory and trying to kind of pick my way through the world that it depicts, the political world that it conveys. I saw an absence of one particular person and this was people like my mother. My mother was a single working parent without a college degree. And insofar as there was a place for people like her in these texts about democracy that I was reading, it was either that she was absent, that is to say that there was no place for her at all, or the place was silent and sort of out of the picture. And so one of the reasons that I wrote the book and I asked the questions that are tackled in the book is precisely to try to make sense of like, where can we locate, within a healthy flourishing democracy, people who maybe don't have a large amount of time, maybe are not particularly familiar with politics and with the kind of ins and outs of all of the, you know, what bills being heard today on the floor of the, you know, people like that. Is there a place for them? If so, what might it look like? So that was one of the big things that was sort of motivating me. This just like absence of people like my mother, of whom it turns out when we look sort of empirically, there are a lot of these people around, as it turns out, millions and millions.

GR: Absolutely, yeah, that's really interesting. So your book is broken into two main parts as far as I gathered from reading in it. And the first one is, what we can reasonably ask and expect from citizens. And the other is about changes we might make to the system to, just as you said, find a place for people like your mother, how can we make changes to the system to make active citizenship more equitable and more accessible? So let me start with the first of those, what we can and should expect from ourselves and our fellow citizens. You write about floors of expectation, and you also write about when we're asking too much. Let me start with the floor. What's the minimum? What's the minimum here for citizens?

KE: Yeah. So let me just clarify one thing about the floor. So the idea here is like, when people do a thing, you know, we typically have a sense of like, what's the minimum level? What's the minimum standard, right? What's passable, what's acceptable, right? And we commonly will mark out that there's like a difference between doing something really excellently, doing something acceptably and then doing something unacceptably like sort of like pass, fail, excel, right? Something like that. A lot of our ideas about democratic citizenship and about what we want sort of out of democracy, kind of elide that middle category it seems to me. We often will just kind of think that like, a good citizen really has this incredibly demanding set of tasks, right? That a really good citizen, being a good citizen is very, very hard and so it's very easy for us to fail. So one of the things that I've tried to do is articulate this like, a minimum, a minimally acceptable standard that will allow us to recognize when someone is being a responsible citizen without being necessarily, while leaving I should say, lots of space for someone to excel to do further, to do more than that, and then sort of demonstrate their like civic virtue or what have you. So on my account, the minimum starts with paying attention to politics, political interest. Ideally, this would be in a critical mode. So we're like observing what's happening in politics and then we're also thinking about it, we're reflecting about it, we're turning it over. Maybe we're talking about it with people that we know, again, in a critical way, in a questioning way. And then on top of that, we also want to make sure that we have the skills, the minimum set of skills that will enable us to step into politics if we recognize, step in actively into politics if we recognize that we are needed, that there's some major issue that is sort of, you know, in play. And it seems to me that when we put those two things together, we have a kind of a surveillance capacity, we're watching. And then we're also able to step in and participate actively. We put those together and you get what I call, “stand by citizenship” and that's the kind of minimum that I articulate.

GR: Okay. Now, we could probably have an hour long conversation about this next question, but briefly if you could, so that does get in to one thing that, you know, you and I know there are both long debates about, which is okay, but do people then have to participate, is it voluntary? Is it, must you at least vote? Or can you just decide to say, I'm going to watch, I'm going to pay attention, but you know what, I'm good with my life, I'm just going to let the thing go.

KE: Right. And so the book is a little bit, I don't take a very hard line on this. I tend to think that you will need to participate actively, sometimes. I do advocate mandatory voting in in the book. I do think that that is a kind of, a sort of a reasonable part of a package of the minimum, in part because voting is habitual and it's the kind of thing that we can come back to periodically. And it's a way to sort of upkeep our civic skills because I know where my polling place is, I have an incentive to touch base with the kind of what's going on in the news, what's going on in the political world. But I don't really take a very hard line on like, you must be engaged in this kind of way. I do think there is a kind of, shall we say, not being fully active that is consistent with good citizenship. One of the examples I give is like, if you sort of observe the political world and you find that people like you are very well represented, basically, like people have heard from people like you very, very thoroughly, maybe it's okay if you take a step back and don't necessarily need to be, you know, heard even more, right? Like, oh, I'm just going to echo what he said and what the seven people before him said. You know, maybe that's sort of okay.

GR: Yeah, it's like a horrible business meeting where eight people say exactly the same thing, but they're all going to say it. (laughter)

KE: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like yeah, we know, we know what this view is.

GR: I'm Grant Reeher. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Yale Professor Kevin Elliott, and we've been discussing his new book, “Democracy for Busy People”. Well, let me delve deeper into this in terms of when things might be problematic in terms of our expectations, how much can we expect then? You said you want citizens to, you know, be analytical, be critical when they're taking in this world, this political world. But there's a, as I said at the outset, there's just gobs of information out there. Not all of it is reliable and some of it is deliberately misleading or false. How much can we expect individual citizens to be their own quality control agents in the information they consume?

KE: Yeah, the information environment, changes in the information environment are definitely an enormous challenge. And not just, of course, to the kind of picture that I'm painting here of democratic citizenship. And, you know, I don't have a sort of holistic response to these challenges. These are things that lots of colleagues, lots of people in media and in political science and in other corners of academia have been struggling with for a long time. So there's a lot to be said for sort of, cultivating a rich media diet. That is to say, you know, not relying on any one source. There's also a role to be played here, and this is one of the sort of themes I hope that comes out of my book that, there's a role to be played by basically wider political, the wider political system. So here I think about sort of media regulators, Congress, political parties, that is to say other actors than the individual citizen. So one of the most important insights, or I should say one of the most important points that I make, hopefully it's an insight for readers, is that it's a little bit of a mistake to think that it