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The book examines the experience of living in a society that has more information available to the public than ever before. It focuses on the interpretations, emotions, and practices of dealing with this abundance in everyday life. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and survey research conducted in Argentina, the book inquiries into the role of cultural and structural factors that mediate between the availability of information and the actual consequences for individuals, media, politics, and society. Providing the first book-length account of the topic in the Global South, it concludes that the experience of information abundance is tied to an overall unsettling of society, a reconstitution of how we understand and perform our relationships with others, and a twin depreciation of facts and appreciation of fictions.

How can the seeds of accountability ever grow in authoritarian environments? Embedding accountability into the state is an inherently uneven, partial, and contested process. Campaigns for public accountability often win limited concessions at best, but they can leave cracks in the system that serve as handholds for subsequent efforts to open up the state to public scrutiny. This book explores how civil society ‘thickens’ by comparing two decades of rural citizens' struggles to hold the Mexican state accountable, exploring both change and continuity before, during, and after national electoral turning points. The book addresses how much power-sharing really happens in policy innovations that include participatory social and environmental councils, citizen oversight of elections and the secret ballot, decentralized social investment funds, participation reforms in World Bank projects, community-managed food programs, as well as new social oversight and public information access reforms. Meanwhile, efforts to exercise voice unfold at the same time as rural citizens consider their exit options, as millions migrate to the US, where many have since come together in a new migrant civil society. This book concludes that new analytical frameworks are needed to understand ‘transitions to accountability’. This involves unpacking the interaction between participation, transparency, and accountability.

Many elections fail. The most overt malpractices used by rulers include imprisoning dissidents, harassing adversaries, coercing voters, vote-rigging counts, and finally, if losing, blatantly disregarding the people's choice. Administrative irregularities are also common, such as inaccurate electoral registers, ballot miscounts, and security defects. Flawed contests have triggered public protests and international criticism. It is time to take stock of these problems. This book addresses three related themes: what standards and evidence determine when elections fail? What strengthens effective, impartial, and independent electoral authorities? And, do failed contests undermine political legitimacy? International experts bring new concepts, theories, and evidence to illuminate these issues, drawing upon a range of cases in established democracies such as Britain and the United States, newer democracies in Central and Latin America, and diverse regimes in Africa and the Middle East. The book illuminates major themes in studies of democracy and democratization, comparative politics, elections and voting behavior, political sociology, international development, public opinion and political behavior, political institutions, and public policy.

What should progressive social movements after Occupy be aiming for? What is the underlying economic vision and what are the ultimate economic goals? This book provides an answer to these questions. The book investigates the fundamental aspects of the contemporary economy by providing a perspective that integrates both normative and empirical concerns. Part One asks whether workplaces should be democratized and examines the empirical record of worker cooperatives. Part Two investigates the democratic potential of markets and examines the extent to which actual market systems, particularly the Nordic variety, have been democratized in practice. Part Three asks whether finance and investment institutions should be democratized and analyzes the empirical record of various experiments in this regard, including capital controls, public banks, and participatory budgeting. The book thus weaves together the different strands of economic democracy into a comprehensive whole. It culminates in an illustration of a truly democratic society in the form of market socialism. Yet while the book is hopeful it is not utopian. It invites us to pay close attention to the inherent costs and benefits of economic reforms. The ultimate argument is that although economic democracy is far from perfect, it represents a significant and substantial advance over contemporary American neoliberalism as well as European social democracy.

This book looks at change in party fortunes in presidential elections since 1972, documenting the magnitude, direction, and consequences of changes in party support in the states. It finds that the Democrats do not have a “lock” on the Electoral College, but that their position has improved dramatically over the past forty years in a number of formerly competitive or Republican-leaning states in the Northeast, Southeast, and Southwest. Republican candidates have made many fewer gains, mostly improving their position in “misplaced,” formerly Democratic states, such as Kentucky and West Virginia, or in already deeply Republican states in the Plains and Mountain West. The book looks at the ways that changes in the racial and ethnic composition of the state electorates, internal (state to state) and external (foreign born) migratory patterns, and changes in other key demographic and political characteristics drive these changes. Additionally, it explores the ways in which increasing partisan polarization at the national level has altered group-based party linkages and contributed to changes in party support at the state level. These factors, along with an increasingly inefficient distribution of Republican votes, have converted what was once a Republican edge in electoral votes to an advantage for Democratic presidential candidates.

The book explores the impact of uncertainty in the national campaign context on nonvoting in presidential and midterm House elections from 1920 through 2012. While previous studies have focused on individuals' motivations to vote and candidates' mobilization efforts, this book considers how uncertain national circumstances in the months before the election affect whether people vote or not. Uncertainty is defined as decision makers being unable to accurately predict future conditions, possible options, or final outcomes based on the current situation. Within the national campaign context, uncertainty arises from economic volatility, technological advances in mass communication, dramatic national events including wars, and changes in suffrage requirements. The book examines this uncertainty across four historical periods: the government expansion period (1920–1944), the post-war period (1946–1972), the government reassessment period (1974–1990), the internet technology period (1992–2012). The book considers the nature of politics during these periods with key occurrences including the economic swings of the Roaring 20s, the Great Depression, the post-World War II boom, and the Great Recession, voting rights for women, African-Americans, and young people, and the effects of radio, television, cable television, and the Internet on nonvoting. It concludes that the higher the degree of uncertainty in the national scene, the more likely eligible voters will go to the polls. Conversely, the lower the degree of uncertainty, as the national scene remains stable, the less likely eligible voters will participate. As one example, throughout all four historical periods, economic change decreases nonvoting, while economic stability increases nonvoting.

Some of the most remarkable impacts of digital media on political activism lie not in the new types of speech it provides to disorganized masses, but in the new types of listening it fosters among organized pressure groups. Beneath the easily visible waves of e-petitions, “likes,” hashtags, and viral videos lie a powerful undercurrent of activated public opinion. In this book, David Karpf offers a rich, detailed assessment of how political organizations carefully monitor this online activity and use it to develop new tactics and strategies that help them succeed in the evolving hybrid media system. Karpf discusses the power and potential of this new “analytic activism,” exploring the organizational logics and media logics that determine how digital inputs shape the choices that political campaigners make. He provides the first careful analysis of how organizations like Change.org and Upworthy.com influence the types of political narratives that dominate our Facebook newsfeeds and Twitter timelines. He investigates how MoveOn.org and its “netroots” peers use analytics to listen more effectively to their members and supporters. He also identifies two boundaries of analytic activism—the analytics floor and analytics frontier—which define the scope of this new style of organized citizen engagement. The book concludes by examining the limitations of analytic activism, raising a cautionary flag about the ways that putting too much faith in digital listening can lead to a weakening of civil society as a whole.

This book, comprising papers contributed to a conference entitled Constitutional Design 2000 and held at the University of Notre Dame in December 1999, brings together the views of the leading academic specialists on the theory of effective democratization, and of the institutional design tasks involved.

From classical stories of divine lawgivers to contemporary ones of Founding Fathers and constitutional beginnings, foundings have long been synonymous with singular, extraordinary moments of political origin and creation. In constitutional democracies, this common view is particularly attractive, with original founding events, actors, and ideals invoked time and again in everyday politics as well as in times of crisis to remake the state and unify citizens. Beyond Origins challenges this view of foundings, explaining how it is ultimately dangerous, misguided, and unsustainable. Engaging with cases of founding through a series of “travels” across political traditions and historical time, this book evaluates the uses and abuses of this view to expose in its links among foundings, origins, and authority a troubling political foundationalism. It argues that by ascribing to foundings a universally binding, unifying, and transcendent authority, the common view works to obscure the fraught political struggles involved in actual foundings and refoundings. In the wake of this challenge, the book develops an alternate approach. Centered on a political view of foundings, this framework recasts foundations as far from authoritatively settled or grounded and redefines foundings as contentious, uncertain, and incomplete. It looks to actors whose complicated relations to pure origins both reveal and capitalize on the underauthorized and contingent nature of foundations to enact foundational change. By examining such actors—from Haitian revolutionaries to Latin American presidents and social movements—the book prods a reconsideration of foundings on different terms: as a contestatory, ongoing dimension of political life.

The two subjects of this book are biopolitics (unfashionable since the late 1990s) and posthumanism (falling out of fashion since the mid-2000s). Taking the inauspicious intersection of these two passé scholarly analytic modes as its starting point, the book makes a case for their value, nonetheless, in explaining the increasing cen¬trality of nostalgia to democratic politics. Nostalgia, far from being a too human evasion of political responsibility, appears here, on the contrary, as the product of a slow-motion collision between nonhuman biopolitical reproduction and nonhu¬man biopolitical thought. As a reproductive thought process, nostalgia is thus both central to ongoing democratic engagement and irrelevant to the human experience. Embedded in a wide-ranging reading of feminist theories of cognition, reproduction, and the posthuman as well as literary and historical studies of nostalgia as an illness, an experience, and a problem for engaged politics, and drawing together two seem¬ingly unrelated case studies of nostalgic, thoughtful, reproductive activity—first, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing in French on embryonic material and, second, nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing in Turkish on Alphabet reform—the book demonstrates the unexpected reach of a new, if nostalgic, reproductive his¬tory and politics of the nonhuman.

Contributors to the volume explore various questions concerning the opportunities and constraints for governance associated with the startling growth in digital technologies in the Global South. In areas of limited statehood, places where the reach of the state is limited and weak, can mobile phones, geographical information systems, and other digital technologies help fill the governance vacuum? In general, Livingston and Walter-Drop conclude with the contributors that where missing governance is information-based (bits), digital technology has a tremendous impact. Yet a major constraint is found in its ability to fill the governance vacuum concerning the provision of material collective goods (atoms).

This book examines the ways that partisan and nonpartisan online, broadcast, and print news outlets constructed the Tea Party through branding discourse and used it to address modern conflicts over race, class, gender, journalism, and politics. From the beginning of President Barack Obama’s presidency, the Tea Party was a major player in a tale of political fractiousness, populist dissent, racial progress, and surprising electoral success, and changed the tone, tenor, and shape of the political landscape through the support and promotion of the press. Despite a long history of conservative movements in US politics, the Tea Party distinctively placed the news media at its center as both an organizer and active participant. Through a discursive, narrative, and rhetorical analysis of the news reporting about the Tea Party movement, this book documents the contemporary slippages between news platforms, journalistic practice, and the norms that guide the fourth estate.

Has male dominance in political life been broken? Will gender balance in elected assemblies soon be reached? This book analyses the longitudinal development of women’s political representation in eight old democracies, in which women were enfranchised before and around World War I: Denmark, Iceland, Germany, the Netherlands, New Jersey (USA), New South Wales (Australia), Sweden, and the United Kingdom. These countries/states have all followed an incremental track model of change in women’s position in political life, but have followed different trajectories. This slow development stands in contrast to recent examples of fast-track development in many countries from the Global South, not least as a result of the adoption of gender quotas. Furthermore, the book discusses in four separate chapters the common historical development in old democracies, the different trajectories and sequences, the framing of women politicians, and the impact of party and party system change. In this book an innovative model of male dominance is developed and defined in terms of both degree and scope. Four stages are identified: male monopoly, small minority, large minority, and gender balance. The book then reconceptualizes male dominance by also looking at horizontal and vertical sex segregation in politics, at male-coded norms in the political workplace, and at discourses of women as politicians. According to the time-lag theory, gender balance in politics will gradually be achieved. But this theory is challenged by recent stagnation and falls in women’s representation in some of the old democracies. A new concept of conditional irreversibility is developed in the final discussion about whether we are heading for gender balance in politics.

Did transitional justice support the processes of political and social trust building and facilitate democratization in the post-communist transitions in Central and Eastern Europe? More specifically, how did the structure and implementation of transitional justice affect outcomes? This book examines the conditions under which lustration and related transitional justice measures affected political and social trust building and democratization across twelve countries in Central and Eastern Europe and parts of the Former Soviet Union between 1989 and 2012. Contrary to blanket claims about the benefits or problems with the use of lustration and public disclosure measures, I argue that these transitional justice measures had a differentiated impact on political and social trust building, supporting some aspects of political trust while undermining other aspects of social trust. Using an original transitional justice typology, this book combines quantitative analyses of twelve post-communist countries and comparative case studies of four transitional justice programs—Hungary’s, Romania’s, Poland’s, and Bulgaria’s—to explicate transitional justice and trust-building dynamics. The book shows that the impact of transitional justice measures was conditional on their structure, scope, timing, and implementation, with particular attention to regime complicity challenges, historical memory issues, and communist legacies. More expansive and compulsory institutional change mechanisms registered the largest effects, with more limited and non-compulsoryemployment change mechanisms having a diminished effect, and more informal and largely symbolic measures having the most attenuated effect. These differentiated and conditional effects were also evident with respect to transition goals like supporting democratic consolidation, improving government effectiveness, and reducing corruption.

Sesame Street has a global reach, with more than thirty co-productions that are viewed in over 150 countries. In recent years, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has provided funding to the New York-based Sesame Workshop to create international versions of Sesame Street. Many of these programs teach children to respect diversity and tolerate others, which some hope will ultimately help to build peace in conflict-affected societies. In fact, the U.S. government has funded local versions of the show in several countries enmeshed in conflict, including Afghanistan, Kosovo, Pakistan, Jordan, and Nigeria. Can Big Bird Fight Terrorism? takes an in-depth look at the Nigerian version, Sesame Square, which began airing in 2011. In addition to teaching preschool-level academic skills, Sesame Square seeks to promote peaceful coexistence-a daunting task in Nigeria, where escalating ethno-religious tensions and terrorism threaten to fracture the nation. After a year of interviewing Sesame creators, observing their production processes, conducting episode analysis, and talking to local educators who use the program in classrooms, Naomi Moland found that this child-focused use of soft power raised complex questions about how multicultural ideals translate into different settings. In Nigeria, where segregation, state fragility, and escalating conflict raise the stakes of peacebuilding efforts, multicultural education may be ineffective at best, and possibly even divisive. This book offers rare insights into the complexities, challenges, and dilemmas inherent in soft power attempts to teach the ideals of diversity and tolerance in countries suffering from internal conflicts.

In Candidate Matters: A Study of Ethnic Parties, Campaigns, and Elections in Latin America, Karleen Jones West argues that the characteristics of individual candidates campaigning in their districts shapes party behavior. She does so through a detailed examination of the Pachakutik indigenous party in Ecuador, as well as with the analysis of public opinion in fifteen Latin American countries. Ethnic parties that are initially programmatic can become personalistic and clientelistic vehicles because vote-buying is an effective strategy in rural indigenous areas, and because candidates with strong reputations and access to resources can create winning campaigns that buy votes and capitalize on candidates’ personal appeal. When candidates’ legislative campaigns are personalistic and clientelistic in their districts, niche parties are unable to maintain unified programmatic support. By combining in-depth fieldwork on legislative campaigns in Ecuador with the statistical analysis of electoral results and public opinion, this book demonstrates how important candidates and their districts are for how niche parties compete, win, and become influential in developing democracies. In the process, the author shows that, under certain conditions, niche parties—such as ethnic parties—are not that different from their mainstream counterparts.

Centripetal democracy is the idea that legitimate democratic institutions set in motion forms of citizen practice and representative behaviour that serve as powerful drivers of political identity formation. Partisan modes of political representation in the context of multifaceted electoral and direct democratic voting opportunities are emphasized on this model. There is, however, a strain of thought predominant in political theory that doubts the democratic capacities of political systems constituted by multiple public spheres. This view is referred to as the lingua franca thesis on sustainable democratic systems (LFT). Inadequate democratic institutions and acute demands to divide the political system (through devolution or secession), are predicted by this thesis. By combining an original normative democratic theory with a comparative analysis of how Belgium and Switzerland have variously managed to sustain themselves as multilingual democracies, this book identifies the main institutional features of a democratically legitimate European Union (EU) and the conditions required to bring it about. Part I presents a novel theory of democratic legitimacy and political identity formation on which subsequent analyses are based. Part II defines the EU as a demoi-cracy and provides a thorough democratic assessment of this political system. Part III explains why Belgium has largely succumbed to the centrifugal logic predicted by the LFT, while Switzerland apparently defies this logic. Part IV presents a model of centripetal democracy for the EU, one that would greatly reduce its democratic deficit and help to ensure that this political system does not succumb to the centrifugal forces expected by the LFT.

Democratic citizens around the world appeal to religious arguments, ideals, identities, and institutions in their political activism. And yet predominant theoretical accounts of liberal democracy provide precious little applicable guidance to citizens who must make judgments about religion’s proper role in their politics. Chains of Persuasion: A Framework for Religion in Democracy provides a new moral framework to guide citizens’ evaluations of religious politics. Rejecting claims that religion must be relegated to the private sphere or that all attempts to evaluate its political roles are oppressive, the book argues that democratic ideals are robust enough to assess the full range of ways religion influences democratic political life. The analysis weaves together insights from critical theories of religion, philosophical debates about public reason, deliberative and instrumental justifications of democracy, and democratic virtue theory to argue that citizens must understand democracy as a way of life—with crucial implications for civic society beyond formal political institutions—in order to properly evaluate the ways in which religion can both enhance and undermine democracy. The analysis concludes by criticizing American public discussions of two prominent religious minorities: Mormons and Muslims. If citizens are to make judgments consistent with democratic norms, they must pay more attention to the nature of religions’ authority claims instead of merely evaluating the values religions proclaim.

Get your head out of your @*&. Snowflake. You’re an idiot. Stupid liberal. Ignorant conservative. It can feel good to use a disparaging name and dismiss a divergent belief or opinion but it turns people off from genuine engagement. At best, feelings are hurt and family and friends decide to avoid political discussions altogether. Often social groups break apart. How can deliberative democracy survive if we can’t even speak to people with whom we disagree? The conventional wisdom to avoid talking about politics has to change. We need to talk to each other about American politics more, especially to those with whom we disagree. We just need to do it better. The antecedents of bitter political disagreements are well documented but less attention is paid to ways to improve things. Public opinion doesn’t change quickly on average but it does change: how people think and feel about LGBT rights, for example, saw a meteoric change over the last few decades. Supportive people from many different social and identity groups had conversations in ways that got people out of their echo chambers to see issues in new ways. The unprecedented attitude change toward marriage equality and LGBT rights is a compelling public opinion phenomenon and a roadmap for how to talk about other contentious issues. Relying on research spanning academic disciplines, A Change is Gonna Come identifies and explains where conversations fail and how we can start to dig out of our opinion silos to make reasonable changes in everyday, interpersonal political conversations.