Participatory Ideology. Beresford, Peter
and kill Black citizens rather than protect them? What kind of institutions are the US police and show business that physical and sexual violence and inequality seem to have become normalised and institutionalised within them? And in the UK, what kind of National Health Service has developed that, instead of saving lives, precipitately discharged many older and disabled people to domiciliary and residential care causing an estimated 30,000 plus deaths from COVID-19 (Savage, 2020)? What sort of values, what kind of organisational and political ideologies have been at the heart of this and why? Hopefully this book will begin to address and help us answer such questions.
A personal journey
I spent much of the first 2020 lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic drafting this book. I have to say it was a great comfort to me to have this simple, if demanding, routine at a time of personal, national and global health emergency. And then on 25 May, George Floyd, an African American, was killed during arrest by a white policeman kneeling on his neck for almost eight minutes. These are events 2020 is likely to be remembered for. Both are likely to have massive and enduring consequences internationally. Both connect closely with the focus of this book.
After George Floyd’s killing, protests against police violence towards Black people spread across the world under the banner of Black Lives Matter. COVID-19 prompted very different political and public health responses in different countries, some much more effective than others. Thus the responses in New Zealand, Taiwan and South Korea have been held up as examples of policymakers behaving speedily and efficiently to reduce the risk of infection, with their populations generally complementing this by acting sensibly and responsibly. It has been a different story in the UK, Brazil and the US, where the death rate has been disproportionately high and the policy response slow and ineffective (Saad-Filho, 2020; Cowper, 2020). Why such radical differences between different societies; what does this tell us about their institutions, their politics, their ideologies?
I have spent much of my working and thinking life concerned with the issue of participation. As I have often written when asked for a brief biography, I have a longstanding interest and involvement in issues of participation as a service user, researcher, educator, activist and writer. I have spent many years trying to make sense of participation – involvement, user involvement, citizen involvement – and the many other names it goes by. I have explored its policy, practice, theory, philosophy, knowledge base – and indeed attitudes underpinning it. It has been a long unfinished journey, one that can never be expected to be completed, learning from my own experience, the efforts of other people, working with them, mining the knowledge we have, critiquing and investigating it with others to reveal more.
I also began to realise, as the years went by, that it wasn’t just me who was interested in people having more say in their life and world. More and more people similarly seemed to have a preoccupation with participation and making things more participatory. I saw this massive expansion of enthusiasm happening in relation to politics, policy, culture, services and research, and to the individual and their personal life. I saw it particularly coming from people and groups facing marginalisation. While it wasn’t often the focus of prevailing political accounts of society, which seemed instead to reflect and focus on the shift to the political Right from the mid 1970s, there was certainly a significant if hidden history where participation was much more central (Beresford, 2019b).
Again, for me personally, perhaps most important was being able to think more about the intentions and objectives underlying participation. Why did people want it? Why did some others seem reluctant to let them have it? Did we all have the same vision for it? These are questions, I came to realise, about the ideology of participation; that is to say, the ideas and values that operate in societies. This was an issue which I increasingly found tended to be ignored in mainstream discussions about participation, but which seemed likely to be of central importance. Why we do something shapes how we do it, what it is, what it does and how helpful it is likely to be. The same, of course, is true of participation.
Then I had a small flash of insight! I was getting a clearer idea of the underlying motivations and purposes of participation, but this concept – ideology – I was really only scratching its surface. I needed to find out more about it. Participation, ideology – these are big ideas, like ‘society’ or ‘the family’. We are unlikely to prosper if our examination of them is superficial – and so I tried to learn more.
Suddenly something else occurred to me, with some helpful outside prompting – my second moment of insight! If I needed to consider participation in relation to ideology, given the significance of ideology for participation, then surely dealing with such big ideas, similarly I needed – we all needed – to consider ideology in relation to participation. It might have been a short step from realising I had to understand participation in relation to ideology to recognise that similarly I needed to understand more about ideology in relation to participation. But why hadn’t I thought of this before?
I thought that lots of other people must have had the same idea. But as I tried to find out more, I realised that this wasn’t the case. So I tried to think it through more for myself, writing an initial draft of this book. And the first time I did this, kind reviewers pointed out that I needed to know a lot more about ideology before I started pontificating about participation in relation to it. And this is what I have been trying to do, during lockdown and since, in what I am now offering. I hope I have been able to do this more helpfully now – in this exploration of two of what I believe are the most important ideas and influences on our lives. That is the theory and practice – the praxis – of participation and ideology, and the nature of their relationship.
It was probably Carole Pateman, the feminist academic, who first seriously raised the question of ‘the place of “participation” in a modern theory of democracy’ (Pateman, 1970, p 1). This was at a time, the late 1960s, when students and workers had not just become more interested in participation as an academic issue, they were also demanding it in their educational studies and workplaces – and far beyond – through large-scale international political movements and protests.
This book is not meant to be any kind of last word on the subject of participation and ideology. Rather the hope is to open discussion on the issue and encourage it to develop much further. I hope readers will see the book as such, recognise that it is offered with humility, and make their own contributions to take this debate forward. I believe it is especially important at this highly ideological time in world affairs, when major – often worrying and threatening – changes in political ideology emphasise the importance of all of us having some better understanding of ideology than we might as yet have gained.
Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
James Baldwin, 1924–87, writer, poet and activist, quoted in Li, 2020
This book is concerned with ideology, different ideological perspectives, our relationship with them, and how we may change that for the better. It is particularly concerned with political ideologies. These are two words that for many people may be more likely to feel alien and difficult than comfortable and familiar. Yet political ideologies affect all our lives, in many cases very deeply. While we may not realise it, it is difficult for any of us to escape ideologies for even a minute. They may seem like a distant, abstract idea, but they can enter every aspect of our lives, impacting in life and death ways. The big thing about ideologies is that we may not realise we are being influenced by them or even that we have them.
The book’s aims
A key aim in this book, therefore, is to make connections between two ideas which seem to have increasing significance for us all: participation and ideology. While they seem to be closely interrelated and to have major implications for each other, so far efforts to explore the relationship of the two seem to have been limited. The purpose of this book is to change that. Both these concepts are important for politics and public/social policy. However, while some attempt has been made over recent years to look at the ideological underpinnings of public participation (for example, Simmons et al, 2009), the same has not been true of participation in relation to ideology.