Diffusion of Responsibility at the National Level

From the Pateman reading, according to theorists like Rousseau, Mill, and Cole, the participatory theory of democracy states that civic participation at lower community-level spheres such as the workplace encourages face-to-face deliberation and other democratic practices that can be carried on and continued in the national political arena. Proponents of this theory believe that participation according to this logic has an educative function - it allows the public to gain democratic skills and because of this educative impact, the system will always have stability seeing that people will understand that participation/deliberation is key in decision making for the public interest (and the public interest includes one's own self-interest; we cannot be successful without the cooperation and consideration of everyone else).

What is difficult for me to accept and understand is how small community-leveled participation can still exist at its active and maximum extent at a larger national level. The theorists presume that because participants are now educated in knowing that participation is key to a working democratic system that this knowledge will always be impressed in them no matter the size of the political arena. But what citizens might also learn through participation at the community level is that there are others who share their perspectives and even with potential competing views, a consensus can still be made. In light of this, citizens may believe then that at the national level there will be an even larger number of those with similar perspectives who can represent their shared ideals and therefore, we as individuals may not feel the same obligation to participate as heavily as we did in smaller spheres. It seems to be impractical for more large-scale democracies to have this face-to-face deliberation because people cannot help but consider others as tools of convenience. There is a diffusion of responsibility when the arena becomes bigger. People will assume that there are plenty of others who will compensate for their lack of participation, and they will leave it to those who may naturally be more interested and engaged in the matter. Even if one has learned that our individual contribution is necessary at the lower level, it does not automatically become instilled in one's mind when the arena is larger. In a smaller community, participation may feel necessary because it is easier to assign responsibility when there are not as many people; people may tend to loser motivation to actively participate once in a larger democratic sphere because responsibility is not explicitly distributed as easily,and one can hide behind their lack of participation behind others' active engagement. I am not suggesting that the participatory theory is wrong, only that is may be more difficult in practice than the theorists illustrate on paper, and that meaningful contributions to decision making can still occur at the national level but maybe not by every individual.