The Language of Engagement
The field generally known as “civic engagement” — a broad range of organizations that aim to create conditions where people are meaningfully involved in the decisions that affect them — has struggled with finding language to describe its work.
On May 16, Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE) released an important benchmark research report that begins to address this challenge. As the nation’s public discourse and day-to-day life have become increasingly polarized and fragmented, PACE, a group of foundations who are concerned with ensuring a strong and robust public life in the U.S., wanted to better understand how everyday Americans saw the language of civic discourse as partisan (or not), resonant (or not), and engaging (or not).
The findings of this report are in some ways sobering — and at the same time suggest an opportunity.
The work began in late 2018, when PACE mounted a research effort to better understand perceptions of the language the civic engagement field uses to describe its work. When we say “civic engagement,” “democracy,” and related terms like “advocacy,” “liberty,” and “justice,” what do most Americans hear? And what do these words mean to them? The research team included Topos Partnership, communications experts who led a series of focus groups, and Dr. Parissa Ballard, a researcher at Wake Forest School of Medicine, who developed and distributed a detailed online survey.
The data describes a citizenry that is not engaged by the language of engagement. Commonly used civic engagement rhetoric, filled with words such as “civility,” “engage,” and “civic,” sounds, in the words of one of the focus group participants, “like someone else’s language.”
The report also illuminates a mindset on the part of many that starts very close to home — and struggles to move beyond. The people in this study speak of personal involvement, helping other individuals, and being a good neighbor. And while these individual-level interactions and a moral imperative to service were strong for most Americans, these ideas did not naturally translate to a connection to broader community. This is of concern as our nation grapples with deepening social and ideological divides, partisanship, and disconnection. How might people connect in a meaningful way with a broader collective? If Americans do not do so readily, there is work to be done.
The findings of this report are in some ways sobering — and at the same time suggest an opportunity.
It may be that today’s political climate is so toxic, and opportunities for meaningful civic participation so few, that Americans naturally have a hard time imagining a different circumstance. They have not seen anything different. Indeed, most participants struggle to describe what a healthy democracy might look like. They default to what they can see — volunteer work, helping neighbors. But this limited scope of vision makes it difficult to talk about ways to move forward. Indeed, according to Topos, “It seems Americans have no strong, clear sense of what a healthy, civically engaged democracy or society entails. This appears to be an important reason why they have so little shared vocabulary in this domain.”
For those in the field who are trying to foster a greater sense of individual and collective agency and to explore ways that people can generate greater power, this lack of shared vision poses a number of challenges. How might we talk about collective civic power in a way that feels accessible to people, and not as a jargon imposed by well-meaning yet distant professionals? Or, as PACE wonders in the report, “[I]f part of our job is to generate a sense of belonging and belief in something larger than ourselves, how do we make the case?”
As one of the members of the working group that developed the study, I wonder about this too. If democracy is collective self-rule, this lack of connection to a shared ideal must be addressed.
Despite the challenges, this research suggests an opportunity. While people do not use the words often, when they hear the words “democracy,” “patriotism,” and “citizen,” they feel the words represent important ideas. In particular, the term democracy is one important area of shared value. “[Democracy] was one of the most universally positive terms we studied, and seems widely to be regarded as a shared American value. . . . We heard broad sentiment about democracy being about people ‘having a say,’ which was widely regarded as a positive thing.”
For the most part, the ideas behind civic discourse are highly regarded, and the core language is not seen as co-opted by one partisan side or the other. The challenge for organizations looking for ways to awaken citizens to the power they hold is to find ways to connect to ideas that already reside in people. They do not have to be convinced; they simply must be reached.
In a public discourse marked by hyperpartisanship, this is something to build upon.
PACE’s language project report and accompanying research memos are available on PACE’s website. Please visit www.pacefunders.org/language to learn more.
