OSC Scientific Seminar 2020-2021

Friday, 16th October 2020, 11:30 am / 1 pm (Zoom videoconference)

Pragmatic citizenship: How school community councils make better citizens

Jake Garrett

PhD Student Visiting, University of Utah

Scholars have long argued that political participation leads to civic capacity development. Yet few empirical studies examine how and the extent to which individual citizens are educated in distinct participatory contexts. Focusing on parent members of School Community Councils, this article fills the void by investigating the psychological and behavioral response to what has been repeatedly deemed the most likely participatory condition for civic education – active political decision making. Analyses of field observations, meeting minutes, and semi-structured interview data demonstrate that decision making experience does not simply lead to a stronger sense of political efficacy, as previous research might suggest. Rather, informal institutional distinctions must be made between hierarchical and distributed authority structures and between different degrees of decision making responsibility. Results show that active parent members experience few opportunities for civic capacity development when participating on decision-making councils with strong hierarchical authority structures. Alternatively, parent members participating on councils with distributed authority structures report feeling responsible for decisions and regularly experience psychological dissonance between their own desires and the consensus based decisions that are made on the council. Findings suggest that parent members who express dissonance regularly reconsider their own positions and take various actions (information gathering, strategic talking, meeting actions, speech withholding) as they seek to resolve dissonance. Dissonance serves as a motivational catalyst for experiential civic learning as parent members recognize differences among various interested parties and coordinate interests toward decision outcomes.

Registration is mandatory to join the ZOOM meeting