The United States harbors the hope that participation can improve policy. In January 1865, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton discussed with General William Sherman how to resettle tens of thousands of freed people on the abandoned plantations of the Sea Islands, near Savannah. They included 20 African American religious and civic leaders in their deliberations that produced the short-lived 40-acres policy. Stanton suggested that the process of this decision, as well as its content, would “electrify the nation.” David Lilienthal suggested that the Tennessee Valley Authority was a brand new method of government in the manner in which it included the “grass roots” in the process of electrification. The War on Poverty brought with it an emphasis on maximum feasible participation that Daniel Moynihan explained was part third rail and part poorly devised policy.

Archon Fung writes in this tradition. He finds hope for reinventing urban democracy harbored in the 1990s initiatives of the Chicago Board of Education and the Chicago Police Department. His book offers six cases, in varying degrees of detail, to suggest a new and better means of formulating and conducting policy—accountable autonomy—to address vexing urban problems—effective public schools and safe streets—of the United States.

In its examination of these cases and their background, the book masterfully dissects terms and rebuts claims of the unfeasibility or inadequacy of public participation in policy. In the discussion of autonomy, for example, we learn that it may entail independence of central authority or the capacity of local actors to achieve their own ends. Accountable autonomy stresses the latter and springs from civic engagement, pragmatism, and deliberative democracy. The book's central and controversial argument is the salutatory effect of participation brought about in a top-down manner. The book invokes central authority, in a reconstructed relationship with local groups, as an aid in overcoming problems of inequality, parochialism, and group-think. Not just any central authority, however. Empowered participation and accountable autonomy are possible only where departments have transformed themselves “in substantially participatory-democratic directions” (p. 4).

Yet, as a good scholar, the author includes enough information to raise questions about his assertions. Strong grassroots organizations seem to explain why agencies became more participatory and democratic. But the book offers ample evidence that the police department maintains the upper hand. It ends its contract with a community group, which effectively trained local residents for meetings and interaction with police officers, and decides to do that work itself. The associational strength of the public schools' environment, on the other hand, remains strong; the school board balances an array of interest groups. They have little apparent accountability to the parents of school children, however.

The book is a bit more cognizant about other unresolved dilemmas. However much the agencies may have been transformed, they still waver between participatory and insular management styles (p. 28). Discussions about top-down and bottom-up accountability come out in favor of the former despite contrasting this form of management with a hierarchical style. In two instances, school and police officials point out that local residents are accountable for the plans they made with officials. The book also endorses “structured deliberation.” Agency officials, who need or want something from local residents, may coax them to be “free” (p. 79). Thus, the book implicitly invokes, to a degree, Rousseau's solution to those who will not follow the general will on their own. Most importantly, however, associational strength appears as a key variable in accountable autonomy because “sophisticated nongovernmental organizations leveraged popular discontent to advance a reform agenda that focused on neighborhood involvement” (p. 27). Yet, the book makes them a backdrop to the central/peripheral relationship, rather than a central mechanism of bottom-up accountability.

The author takes pains to defend the possibility of empowered and other forms of participation. Again, he seeks to provide hope and is very precise and detailed in his examination of the likely arguments of five theoretical frameworks against empowered participation. Happily, rational choice is beaten back, although not entirely. On other fronts, the selective nature of the argument's evidence undermines the intended defense. The central concerns that inequality might undermine deliberative democratic practice are reduced to the rate of women's participation. Most troubling of all, the concerns that power may impede genuine deliberative democracy and participation are ignored. Indeed, power has one index entry, and that has to do with a motive for participation, a backdoor to rational choice.

Political empowerment necessarily entails a transfer of resources and changed status. Whatever their shortcomings, one can find increased civil rights and improved public services for previously marginalized groups in the programs of Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society. In this book's cases, however, we find ambivalence about a transfer of political power. It binds “empowered deliberation” to the “competencies of the institution that confers power and hosts deliberation” (p. 76).

Clearly, the cases entail innovative participatory methods, and clearly, at one time they achieved some change in terms of resources. But the book stops at inputs and it is not at all clear what people got out of them and what difference they made. Citywide data offer inadequate measures that empowered autonomy made a difference in the schools and neighborhoods of the six cases. The author offers little evidence, such as before and after measures of student performance or crimes and the longevity of the reforms, that accountable autonomy makes a difference.

Empowered Participation suggests a modest hope for addressing part of the social structure of the underclass nature of some portions of Chicago, which William J. Wilson told us about. Any help is of course welcome, and we learn what agencies can do, especially when under pressure from organized community groups. In this sense, the book offers some evidence for the hope it seeks to inspire.