If you’ve watched HBO’s Succession, it’s clear how cutthroat the changing of the guard is. In the world of democratic politics, succession is key to a legitimate changeover of leadership. A component of our modern concept of representative democracy has traditionally been understood as the peaceful transfer of power from one set of elected officials to another.
In one sense, failing to sunset control means that power is too concentrated, and this has implications, not least because we face a democratic crisis amid the increasing consolidation of authoritarianism, but perhaps less notoriously, it can be a driver of public apathy toward local civic organizations as well.
In the research conducted at the Center for Democracy Innovation on a Better Public Meetings project, a recurring theme that arises when discussing how to enhance civic participation in (hyper) local civic organizations is how to encourage new people to take up the mantle of leading. Burnout is a frequent challenge in communities across the country.
To put it provocatively, the central crisis facing democracy at a hyper-local organizational level is not participation, but succession. The SNF Agora Institute has mapped 500,000 social and fraternal organizations, and these are only the groups that have a 501 (c) (3) status, which suggests there are even more that aren’t formalized, and this puts the number of people engaging at a local and hyperlocal level in the millions. To be clear, more participation is necessary, but it’s not sufficient to address the democratic malaise and build deep social capital. Modern civic organizations are designed to mobilize people episodically; whether they do a good or bad job is often what we prioritize, but the bigger picture is that they are not well designed to sustain stewardship across the life stages of an organization.
We might say that there are four phases of a civic stewardship ladder:
- Activation (entry): people show up for a cause.
- Ownership (agency): people take responsibility for work or decisions.
- Maintenance (stewardship): people sustain systems of participation – the boards, budgets, websites, facilitation, conflict, community repair.
- Transition (handoff): scheduling the ascension of knowledge and authority onto new people.
Numbers 3 and 4 are significant and vexing. You might do great at organizing, getting people out for an issue, and they might even see it through by helping mobilize around a cause they see as necessary, but beyond that, there’s a steep drop-off in continuing to be engaged and, even harder yet, taking a step back for other people to lead. Indeed, organizations struggle with institutional hoarding and extractive rather than reproductive participation.
In countless situations, people who have taken the helm as community leaders remain central figures in civic mobilization. This can, in fact, be cynical, because in some places people refuse to share decision-making and visioning authority with others. It might be an exaggeration to say local civic groups maneuvering to retain or change board presidents are on par with what takes place in HBO’s Succession (maybe not, though). In fact, staying in leadership might be necessary because leaders are hard to develop, and there might not be anyone putting their hands up to fill the vacant role. Whatever the case, the reality is that extended control is problematic over time, regardless of whether the latter has a better rationale. We need ‘new blood’ to take over civic responsibilities. And some of that, too, needs to reflect younger and more diverse people.
So, what is happening in this world where volunteering struggles to go beyond acts of service toward being the glue that binds and brings people together, continually looking toward the future, always trying to raise the next leader to take the mantle of leadership?
We know that there is unequal capacity because groups can’t maintain basics like websites and boards, we know there can be institutional friction with different types of relationships internally, we know that trust-building is slow, and that resources, labor and time impact a willingness and desire to put in effort where organizations don’t know how to retain those efforts for more extended periods of time.
We might think of this challenge as a set of managerial conditions to meet, succession-enabling factors such as creating more minor roles to ease people in, having good documentation for people to learn the ‘ropes’, efforts to rotate through termed leadership, and training via paired leadership and shadowing to create overlaps among people to transition into roles. Making this normal as part of a civic organization’s culture is one step, but arguably, it doesn’t get to the heart of the needed change.
We don’t just need better protocols and rules that mandate or enforce transitional leadership, even if they are required. Democratic succession requires groups that align responsibility with joy, rhythm, and intergenerational belonging, so that ordinary people can maintain and transfer duty and power without being consumed by it.
Making civic experiences enjoyable is a key ingredient to encouraging people to show up. If civic groups aren’t welcoming, if they shut down contrasting ideas and thoughts on different directions, then they might never return. The last thing the frayed civic landscape needs is more disengagement, which means a conscious effort is required to continually integrate people into spaces that also have their own continuity and even identity.
This is a delicate balance that can often straddle NIMBY and YIMBY personas. But this dilemma of old versus new misses the point that civic participation is also about relationships, so the emphasis should be on knowing when to step back from purely position-based problem-solving to focus on community-building and generating activities.
To move past this, making civic ‘work’ social, not only managerial and technical, means that responsibility and duty don’t necessarily disrupt people’s lives, but integrate their families and friends. We need parents to participate without childcare barriers, for youth to absorb civic norms organically, and for adults to more frequently model handoff democratically.
At the Center for Democracy Innovation, we’re exploring the possibilities of embedding community councils and boards in practices of everyday life, stay tuned for updates in this space.
