Culture Governance

Culture governance refers to a specific, top-down steering mechanism designed to improve elite control over the outputs of highly complex systems, like the modern democratic welfare state. Where once effective governance was a matter of a hierarchical, bureaucratic state exercising control, the demands placed on postindustrial governments require that their constituents perceive themselves as stakeholders to assure the continued functioning of the system. Consequently, leaders and managers create associations that span the traditional divide between state and civil society to draw in the knowledge and participation of citizens and groups at all levels in order to shape it into forms most disposed to their continued control. Strategies like “The Third Way” and “EU Good Governance” are examples of attempts at culture governance.

The rise of culture governance is a response to the challenges to modern political systems posed by the effects of globalization. Transnational and subnational political entities pull from above and below, respectively, eroding state sovereignty. The increasing integration of national economies into a world market has undermined the capacity of these systems to carry out expected responsibilities like public spending, welfare, and other social services. The rapid and free flow of people and ideas undermines traditional conceptions of identity based on nationality or location. Within this environment, there is a growing recognition that given their complex and highly differentiated nature, modern political systems can no longer govern in a coherent and effective manner only by means of commands, directives, warnings, or patriotic appeals. Instead, they must actively empower, mold, and incorporate the ideas and values of citizens and civil society into the governing process. By expanding the role of self and cogovernance among the populace, systems can more effectively deliver expected services and increase the legitimacy of their decision making.

While more cooperative and inclusive than traditional, hierarchical authority, culture governance is still an elite-directed steering tool. Citizens are empowered and courted, but for the sake of the system, not their own. Consequently, culture governance poses a unique challenge to the foundations of representative government. Culture governors seek to connect with the polity down to the individual level through new, dedicated networks to make it amenable to their policy directions. By bypassing established mechanisms like national parties and big interest groups, elites undermine the authority of traditional political institutions. Moreover, the efforts to preprogram public reasoning, even at the most basic level, imperil the necessarily spontaneous and freewheeling nature of political association at the grassroots level. As such, culture governance threatens to supplant the politics of the ordinary by coopting even the most mundane political discourse with an underlying imperative to maintain and improve the existing system.