Barriers to Civic Engagement

Civic engagement is critical to maintaining a high quality of life in mature democracies as well as raising the standard of living in young democracies. However, across the globe from technology-advanced communities to developing countries, civic engagement is under pressure, not flourishing or even declining.

In communities that don’t have large or diversified civic engagement, leaders in the government and the media are prone to think that the views of an outspoken minority are representative of the opinions of the quiet majority. This can lead to weak government decisions and cause a majority of the population to be disgruntled and lack confidence in the government.

Barriers to civic engagement vary in each community, but at both the local and national levels these impediments often include the following.

Citizens are

• busy with full-time responsibilities such as working and parenting;
• intimidated by uncivil verbal reprisals or even violence, especially where the rule-of-law is weak;
• cynical or indifferent due to past feedback not having an impact or even getting acknowledged by decision makers;
• polite and consequently reticent to stand-out as complainers, argumentative, or rabble-rousers;
• unaware of issues or the opportunity to participate.

These impediments to civic engagement are exacerbated by government decision makers typically not having the time, money or staff resources to (1) interact with most members of their communities, or (2) synthesize large amounts of individual feedback into cogent insights.

Over the past few years there has been stunning growth in the use of the web as a platform for general comments, specific feedback, as well as networking and collaboration. These uses of the web are not fads; they are highly valued and lasting growth trends.

However, many web sites that provide discussion forums are controlled by companies (i.e. newspapers), groups or individuals with a political bias. And correspondingly, these political biases control the agenda if not the discourse of those forums. In many cases, outspoken individuals dominate these forums, and the exchanges can be very uncivil.

Moreover, most governments don't augment their official public comments process at meetings with a parallel public comments process on the web – despite the increasingly common use of the web for comments, and the problems with the traditional meeting-based public comments process (as listed above). Most governments haven't implemented these services because they don't have the in-house technical skills or outsourcing funds to conceive and develop a custom solution; and a third party solution that can be customized for each government (yet is common enough to spread the costs across many governments) hasn't been available – till the advent of Peak Democracy.