F. Gamson Zelda F. Gamson is senior associate, New England Resource Center for Higher Education. There is quite a literature on this question. At its base, the public realm is a place and a process whereby citizens become engaged in public life. This engagement can be passive, as in voting for officials who are expected to represent the interests of the citizenry, or it can be active, as in participating in decisions that affect citizens' lives. The forms of expression in the public realm can include formal decision making, rational arguments presented by knowledgeable people, debate, discussion, and storytelling.
Participants can be experts and ordinary citizens, activists, and nonactivists.
Issues up for discussion can include questions of general public concern or they can be of concern to certain groups or a certain locale. Some social scientists see a decline in participation in civic organizations, marked by a decline in membership in voluntary groups. Others have pointed out that while membership in the traditional organizations may have indeed declined a new kind of citizenship is on the rise. There are counterparts to these innovations in other countries among nongovernmental organizations, many of them founded and headed by women. Modern Tocquevillians do see a breakdown in civic life that cannot be captured by statistics about volunteer activities and local participation.