What Do Courageous Citizens Do With/About Government? Part 2
Newsletter # 459 - June 4, 2026
Heidi Burgess and Guy Burgess
This is the second in a series of newsletters on ways that courageous citizens can take fuller advantage of the many longstanding and new opportunities that exist for citizens to participate in democratic decision-making processes. It is also the fourth newsletter in our "Courageous Citizenship" series. Our first Courageous Citizenship newsletter explained and expanded upon Braver Angels' term "Courageous Citizenship" and explained why we think the concept is so important. In the second newsletter, we explained more about the courage that citizens need to be effective, and gave the example shared earlier by Harry Boyte about how this was done so well in the past by participants in Martin Luther King's civil rights movement.
The third newsletter in this series talked about the obstacles to courageous citizenship and about ways those obstacles can be overcome. Here we get more specific, talking about past, present, and future approaches to citizen participation with, in, and around government.
Ways to Influence or Change Government Procedures or Decisions
As we argued in the previous newsletter, we firmly believe that we shouldn't throw out or "burn down" government in its entirety, but it clearly must be improved at all levels. And insiders seldom have the incentive to do that. That's where citizens come in.
If a group of citizens isn't happy with something that is going on (or isn't going on that should be), they can appeal to the government to fix it. And they can keep pressing until their voices are recognized and responded to. They won't always get their way — particularly when other stakeholders want different things. But everyone should be able to have a voice — to have their ideas, interests, and needs considered fairly.
There are many ways to pursue that voice. At the local level, individual citizens or advocacy groups can appeal to particular local government agencies or leaders to make changes to policies or procedures or facilities. This is often done by writing letters to officials, or speaking briefly in public hearings or town halls or school board meetings. But there are more and less effective ways of doing that.
Years ago (1993) Spencer Havlick, a long-standing member of the Boulder City Council gave a talk at one of our seminars explaining how to do this effectively. We described his talk in a newsletter we sent out in August of 2020.
When he was approached by an angry citizen demanding action to protect his or her "backyard," Havlick would explain that he didn't think that it would be appropriate for him to go to the Council and advocate for policies that would only serve the narrow interests of one particular citizen.
Instead, he would challenge the citizen to open a conversation with other members of the community who, in one way or another, had related concerns or were either positively or negatively affected by the issue. If this group could come up with some broadly (though not necessarily universally) supported approach for protecting and, hopefully, advancing the interests of all affected parties, then he would enthusiastically take the proposal to City Council with his strong backing. He suggested such conversations on an ad-hoc basis for awhile, and then became instrumental in the formation of the Boulder Neighborhood Alliance which tried to institutionalize such multi-person, multi-neighborhood problem-solving.
The neighborhood alliance idea was a bit ahead of its time, and it didn't succeed immediately. But there have been several iterations since, and it very much aligns with the movement toward "civic hubs" that are becoming increasingly common now.
Heidi did her dissertation back in 1978 on methods of public participation in government. Public hearings were by far the most commonly used method at that time, but they were seen both by government representatives and citizens as the least useful approach. Other mechanisms, such as polling, advisory committees, and oversight committees were generally seen as more effective, again by both citizens and government. But they took much more time, money, and for those and other reasons, were used much less frequently.
It is also important to recognize that public participation is a two-way street. Just as it is important to help government leaders understand public interests and concerns, it is important for the public to better understand the reasoning behind government proposals and actions. There are lots of good reasons for doing unpopular things and a democracy that works has able to do those things (and explain to the public why the sacrifices are truly necessary). This, of course, also requires a public that's willing to listen, and not merely discount everything that government says as "worthless lies."
Current Approaches to Public Participation
When I went to research public participation options for this article, I found that public hearings are still widely used, and still widely disliked, as people only get a short time to speak, they tend to grandstand for an audience, making as strong a case for their side as possible, and offering no chance for effective exchange of ideas between speakers or between speakers and government listeners. So public hearings tend to exacerbate polarization, not reduce it.
Sometimes citizens get more deeply involved, by serving on citizens' advisory or oversight panels. Or they can participate in deliberative processes in which ordinary citizens come together to learn the details about a particular civic issue, and then deliberate together on how best to solve it. Some of these deliberative approaches are done with anyone who wants to participate. See, for example, some of the deliberations Martin Carcasson talked about in his discussion with us in June of 2024.
Other approaches, such as citizen assemblies, select people at random in an effort to get a group of people who accurately represent the community as a whole. These people then spend a lot of time (many meetings over weeks or months) learning the ins and outs of a particular issue from all relevant points of view. Through skilled facilitation, they work to develop a consensus set of recommendations that can then be given to the authorities who will, hopefully, enact the assembly's recommendations. However, getting the assembly process and outcomes firmly integrated into other political decision making procedures is still a work in progress. Advisory committees do something similar, only they tend to focus on bringing together representatives of all of the different stakeholder groups, rather than random citizens, and they may not come up with consensus proposals, just comments on city proposals.
Deliberative polling is another approach that uses a random sample (or sometimes polls the entire population as Jay Rothman did Antioch, Ohio). Respondents are given balanced background materials, and are sometimes encouraged to participate in formal structured discussions at which they can question experts, each other, and have their opinions measured before and after the process. Or, as Jay did in Antioch, he asked people to explain the reasoning behind their answers — and got lots more highly nuanced information that tends to be much more useful than a typical yes-no or a "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree" poll would give.
Another approach to public participation in government is participatory budgeting. This strategy involves citizens having direct involvement in budgeting decisions. The process was first used in Brazil, but now, according to the New York City Council, which uses it, there are hundreds of cities using it around the world. In New York, the city holds community meetings in October and November in which residents brainstorm ideas and recruit volunteers to be "Budget Delegates" for the current cycle. In December through February citizens work with city agencies and staff to create real proposals. Budget Delegates select a few projects that they think best meet the needs of their communities. The proposals are put out for a districtwide vote in April, and winning projects are included in the Fiscal Year budget that is released in June. In May and June, staff and stakeholders evaluate the process and oversee implementation of funded projects.
Although participatory budgeting is most often done at the local level, Lorelei Kelly explained in her March 2024 interview with us that Congress does this too, in a sense, through what are called Congressional "Community Grants."
A considerable amount of money now is going out as determined by communities. [Congress] Members work with their community to apply for money in the appropriations process. But the issues and the projects themselves come from the communities. It's the closest thing we're going to get to participatory budgeting in the United States. ... Anybody who's listening to this, if you do a search on your member's name and community grants, you'll see what's being funded in your district right now.
Technology is providing additional ways for people to become involved in their government, sometimes called "digital participation" or "e-participation. For example Google's "Jigsaw" project is using Gemini AI to measure public attitudes about democracy. This technology was first used in Bowling Green, Kentucky where it enabled one of America's largest ever town halls. (Also see this write up about the Bowling Green process.) Jigsaw is now broadening its work across the United States in its "We the People Initiative," which is convening a national conversation exploring the concepts of freedom and equality. (See also https://wethepeople-250.org/).
We have invited thousands of Americans from every corner of the country to share their beliefs, opinions, and experiences on these topics.
Our goal is to help create a living, breathing portrait of what it means to be American today. To fully capture this conversation, we will use the latest Gemini AI models to analyze, distill and present the many perspectives shared, fostering a deeper understanding of Americans’ opinions on these topics.
Another example of digital participation is The South Carolina Forum. This forum, which is open to all South Carolina citizens, used an online platform to determine what citizens thought were the most pressing issues that they wanted state leaders and residents to work on in the coming legislative session. They collected over 1,200 different issues and almost 22,000 reactions to those issues on their digital platform. Then using AI, they identified 25 issues with the strongest cross-demographic consensus. In a second round they asked participants to vote on the top 25 issues, and came up with six that would be further explored in face-to-face and online conversations to consider "possible solutions that could attract broad cross-partisan support among legislators and constituents." The results of these conversations will then be presented at a lottery-based civic assembly with 100 delegates who will "evaluate and finalize supermajority-backed proposals for state legislators." This is Spence Havlick's neighborhood associations on steroids!
Although it doesn't yet exist, Gideon Lichfield described other ways that technology could enable us all to become involved in government decision making and other civic activities easily. Although his ideas are not yet reality, the rate of advancement of AI is making all that he proposes quite feasible quite soon. Instead of just lamenting how dangerous AI is and how we should stop it, we might also consider how it could actually help us strengthen democracy in ways that simply weren't possible before the age of AI.
As we argued in Newsletter 108, AI is especially good at doing the two big things that are at the core of all conflict resolution, peacebuilding, and democracy building efforts: listening in an attentive and nuanced way to a very large number of voices, and distilling those voices into workable statements of community views. These statements can then be used to identify areas of common ground and hence opportunities for mutually beneficial collaborative action (and to clarify any remaining points of disagreement).
Alternatively, people can try to fix problems on their own (without AI and without government involvement). But most likely, they will run into roadblocks when they need to get permission or approval or data or money from the government. Given that, it is better to think of government as collaborators, not as adversaries or competitors. AI can also be used as a collaborator, not as a replacement for real people's work.
If government isn't initially interested in addressing an issue in collaboration with citizens, the citizens can form a "civic hub" or "neighborhood alliance," or "study group," or whatever they want to call it, and together do their research, come up with a good understanding of the problem, research potential solutions, and then approach the local government, not as an individual complainant, but as a cohesive group that has "done their homework." This is likely, as Spence Havlick suggested, to be much more persuasive to local governmental leaders. And such efforts will be even more persuasive if the local government leaders are treated respectfully as potential collaborators, not as "enemies," or "roadblocks" to be overcome. While such efforts are likely to encounter opposition from some parts of the government, they are also likely to find strong sources of support. So one key is to look for, and cultivate, such support.
So, again, as we said before, citizenship is much more than voting. It is getting involved in the public sphere and working collaboratively, across partisan divides, to make our towns, states, and country as good as they can be. That is what we think of when we think of "courageous citizens."
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About the MBI Newsletters
Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.
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