Recent research linking the economic dynamics of political, social, and democratic relationships suggests that civic infrastructure should enable social connections. While democratic innovations give diverse people opportunities to participate, they rarely enable people across socioeconomic worlds to exercise civic agency over the long term.
Economic geography studies ask what happens when people feel left behind by society and why that feeling becomes powerful in communities. The further question is: how can democratic participation meaningfully address it? Studies approach these questions from different directions, yet they commonly point to a dimension of democratic inequality that receives less attention. People are unequal in income, opportunity, and political influence, but they also inhabit diverse social worlds, with different experiences of economic decline and political marginalization.
In “Social capital I: measurement and associations with economic mobility,” Raj Chetty et al. use data on billions of Facebook friendships to examine social capital across the United States. Their central finding is that not all social capital is alike. A community can have strong bonding social capital, with dense networks of friends, families, neighbors, churches, and other local relationships, while having relatively little bridging social capital that connects people across socioeconomic boundaries. The authors focus on economic connectedness, defined as friendships between people of different socioeconomic statuses. They find that places where lower-income and higher-income people are friends have higher rates of upward economic mobility. This finding reshapes how we think about communities, because people’s connections matter: a community can be cohesive even while socially separated from other parts of society.
In “Geography of Grievance: Industrial Hubs Magnify Political Discontent,” Sung Eun Kim and Krzysztof Pelc suggest that this distinction may also matter politically. They examine why economic shocks produce stronger political reactions in some places, focusing on industrial hubs. In these communities, workplaces overlap with other relationships (coworkers are also neighbors, relatives, church members, union members, and coaches). When an industry declines, stories of layoffs, insecurity, and diminished prospects circulate through local networks, turning economic distress into a collective social experience. Networks that provide solidarity and support may intensify a shared experience of decline among “people like us”.
That becomes interesting alongside Vanessa Schwaiger’s research in “Left behind and an undemocratic mind? The link between perceived marginalization and democratic orientations.” Schwaiger distinguishes among economic, political, and cultural forms of perceived marginalization. People who feel politically marginalized and believe politicians do not listen to people like them can be deeply dissatisfied with representative institutions without rejecting democracy itself. They may want more opportunities for citizens to exercise direct influence. More concerning is cultural marginalization, the perception that people like me and the values we hold are no longer recognized or respected. Schwaiger finds this form of marginalization more consistently associated with authoritarian and majoritarian political orientations.
The phrase “people like me or us” deserves our attention because feeling marginalized is partly about one’s relationship to the larger society. If people feel they aren’t respected or don’t have influence, the research suggests their relationships with institutions and networks beyond their own circle are limited. When communities face economic disruption, creating opportunities to identify barriers, jointly control resources, and implement solutions could strengthen economic opportunity and the civic and social infrastructure that connects people in a democratic society.
This should influence how we think about democratic innovation, notably around how shared decision-making and implementation might support cross-class relationships. For example, Citizens’ assemblies address this problem through a civic lottery, bringing together diverse demographics and lived experiences. For weeks or months, they learn together, hear about one another’s lives, disagree, negotiate, and work to solve a common problem. For a brief period, this curated space helps people reorganize their social worlds. This is relevant given that the political grievance noted above has a relational component, and citizens’ assemblies intervene by temporarily creating relationships across backgrounds. Yet we usually ask whether an assembly was representative, whether the deliberation was high-quality, and whether the government implements recommendations, which overlooks something important: people exercising consequential civic agency not only within but also beyond a time-bound process.
This might mean reconsidering what implementation looks like. Imagine a citizens’ assembly that does not end with deliberation and recommendations where participants tell the government what to prioritize and implement. Rather, what if the participants have the resources and joint responsibility for producing and supporting an outcome. The rationale is related but different here. Some democratic decisions might require governmental policy implementation and service delivery, but some might not. A usual response would be that this would empower the assembly to feel it has direct influence over the outcome. The goal might be to simultaneously build democratic processes around shared implementation to ensure that collective interactions within communities continue to span socioeconomic worlds instead of primarily informing a government how to make laws on important issues.
There is also an important warning to consider. Patricia García-Espín’s “Class Inequalities and Participatory Democracy: Assessing the Impact of Social Inclusion Tools in Citizens’ Assemblies” shows that simply creating opportunities for participation does not ensure equality. Working-class and economically disadvantaged citizens are often underrepresented, and participatory institutions can reproduce the very inequalities they were meant to overcome. Deliberate recruitment, compensation, accessible scheduling, facilitation, and other institutional choices can be essential to meaningful inclusion. Nonetheless, democracy innovation needs to go beyond intentional outreach. While an inclusive approach can draw in diverse people it doesn’t necessarily foster consequential relationships over extended periods that lead to cross-class solidarity, practical assistance, and resilience. That’s a missing piece to possibly addressing an enduring crisis of public distrust, both in democratic institutions and across civil society.
How could investment in shared community decision-making and implementation build relationships and civic capacity across economic divides? A community foundation could establish a fund that provides grants to socioeconomically diverse groups of residents to address concrete problems in their communities. We would then evaluate civic health in terms of cross-class civic agency. A school district could do something similar by giving socioeconomically representative groups of parents authority over funds to expand student opportunity. A library could provide a cross-section of residents with resources to design and implement new community services. The model might be especially compelling in communities undergoing economic transition. Rather than treating residents simply as recipients of retraining, compensation, or redevelopment policy, institutions could give socioeconomically diverse groups of residents meaningful authority over part of the community’s response.
The democratic innovation field has focused on giving citizens greater voice, yet the research above suggests we need to go beyond that. The democratic shocks we are experiencing are economically rooted and magnified by place, identity, and community networks. The boundaries between different social worlds, and the importance of relationships that civically cross them, need to be a more explicit objective of democratic institutions and processes.
