Academic literature on the topic 'Elitist democratic theory'
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Journal articles on the topic "Elitist democratic theory"
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diZerega, Gus. "Elites and Democratic Theory: Insights From the Self-Organizing Model." Review of Politics 53, no. 2 (1991): 340–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0034670500014650.
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The role of elites within liberal democracy is a perennial issue. One reason why is an inappropriate theoretical conception of democracy. They are self-organizing systems rather than instrumental organizations. As such they have more in common systemically with science and the market than with democratic organizations or undemocratic states. Examining the role of elites within science and the market sheds light on how they work within democracies. Such an examination shows them to be both necessary and dangerous. Traditional “elitist” analyses of democracy suffer from confusions which the self-organizing model clears up. It also offers improvements on traditional “pluralist” conceptions.
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Tancher, Viktor V. "Neo-Elitist Theory in Light of Democratic Transformation and Ukrainian Realities." Sociological Research 39, no. 6 (November 2000): 5–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.2753/sor1061-015439065.
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Garner, Robert. "Animal rights and the deliberative turn in democratic theory." European Journal of Political Theory 18, no. 3 (February 25, 2016): 309–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1474885116630937.
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Deliberative democracy has been castigated by those who regard it as exclusive and elitist because of its failure to take into account a range of structural inequalities existing within contemporary liberal democracies. As a result, it is suggested, deliberative arenas will merely reproduce these inequalities, advantaging the already powerful extolling mainstream worldviews excluding the interests of the less powerful and those expounding alternative worldviews. Moreover, the tactics employed by those excluded social movements seeking to right an injustice are typically those – involving various forms of protest and direct action – which are incompatible with the key characteristics of deliberatively democracy. This paper seeks to examine the case against deliberative democracy through the prism of animal rights. It will be argued that the critique of deliberative democracy, at least in the case of animal rights, is largely misplaced because it underestimates the rationalistic basis of animal rights philosophy, misunderstands the aspirational character of deliberative theory and mistakenly attributes problems that are not restricted to deliberation but result from interest group politics in general. It is further argued that this debate about the apparent incompatibility between the ideals of deliberative democracy and non-deliberative activism disguises the potential that deliberative democracy has for advocates of animal rights and, by extension, other social movements too.
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Shklar, Judith N. "Redeeming American Political Theory." American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (March 1991): 3–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1962875.
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American political theory has been accused of being uniformly liberal; but its history is diverse and is worth studying to understand the development of political science and the institutions it reflects (representative government, federalism, judicial review, and slavery). While modern social science expresses a slow democratization of values, it has been compatible with many ideologies. This can be seen in Jefferson's anthropology, Madison's theory of collective rationality, and Hamilton's empirical political economy. Jacksonian democracy encouraged social history, while its opponents devised an elitist political sociology. Southern defenders of slavery were the earliest to develop a deterministic and authoritarian sociology, but after the Civil War Northern thinkers emulated them with Social Darwinism and quests for causal laws to grasp constant change in industrial society. Though social critics abounded, democratic empirical theory emerged in the universities only in the generation of Merriam and Dewey, who founded contemporary political science.
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Crane, Sam. "The Problem of Power in Confucian Political Thought." Comparative Political Theory 1, no. 1 (June 16, 2021): 117–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/26669773-01010008.
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Abstract In this brief reflection on Shaun O’Dwyer’s book, Confucianism’s Prospects, I accept his central arguments regarding the implausibility of “Confucian democracy,” and I suggest a further reason for the inapplicability of Confucianism as a perfectionist doctrine for modern pluralistic East Asian societies. Beyond the elitist paternalism that is the focus of O’Dwyer’s analysis, I suggest that Confucianism’s theory of power, as illustrated by reference to the Mencius and the Analects, is insufficient to the task of constituting and reproducing modern democratic practice. Thus, for democracy to develop in East Asia, it must be grounded in liberalism.
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Richmond, Sheldon. "Knowing as a Subversive Activity: A Conversation with Steve Fuller’s Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game." Philosophy of the Social Sciences 49, no. 1 (December 17, 2018): 69–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0048393118814763.
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Fuller carries social constructionism to its bitter end in his theory of the “post-truth condition”—endemic to current life and to the entirety of Western Philosophy. According to Fuller, the gates to the elitist power/knowledge-games have been crashed by the democratic mob. Fuller implicitly extends Popper’s radicalism in the philosophy of science to political and social philosophy. Rather than Popper’s piecemeal social engineering for the purpose of minimizing human suffering, Fuller promotes revolutionary social change in the face of catastrophes. Fuller pushes for a “proactionary” approach because the current vast social change refutes the fragility-assumption of Popper’s “risk-adverse” sociopolitical philosophy.
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Woessner, Martin. "New Detours in American Intellectual History." American Literary History 32, no. 1 (December 9, 2019): 209–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajz050.
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Abstract US intellectual history is at something of a crossroads. Situated between the longstanding methodological debates of its disciplinary past and current aspirations for a more diverse, democratic, and inclusive future, the recent works surveyed in this essay suggest a field in transition. Once dismissed as elitist—as being exclusively interested in the lives and writings of dead, white males, for example—intellectual history now encompasses an ever-widening range of topics and concerns. It is far more interdisciplinary, far more transnational, and far more interested in popular culture than it has ever been before, but whether the new pathways currently being charted by a new generation of scholars will allow intellectuals to continue to thrive in an increasingly restructured and underfunded academic setting remains to be seen.
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Cohen, Monica F. "IMITATION FICTION: PIRATE CITINGS IN ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S TREASURE ISLAND." Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 1 (March 2013): 153–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150312000289.
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When Charles Dickens tried to lobby for American support of an international copyright agreement during his wildly popular 1842 tour of the United States, the English author was famously shocked to find himself lambasted as an elitist who dared expect payment for what Americans believed they had the right to read for free (McGill 109–40; Claybaugh 71; Pettitt 152). Dickens encountered in the practice of literary piracy, or what was called in the United States, the culture of reprinting, a deep fissure in capitalist democratic culture between individual ownership and public access, an ideological divide that forms the backdrop for the creation and circulation of nineteenth-century print. If the legal privatization of intellectual property hovered in the imagination of so many Victorian writers, it formed the happy ending of a long nineteenth-century struggle over literary piracy, a contention of goods that shaped the Victorian stage as we well as the transatlantic literary marketplace.
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Rehmann, Jan. "Power ≠ Power: Against the Mix-Up of Nietzsche and Spinoza." Critical Sociology 45, no. 2 (December 21, 2016): 239–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0896920516683233.
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The reception of Nietzsche’s philosophy is still predominated by a widespread “hermeneutics of innocence” (Losurdo) that dissimulates Nietzsche’s elitist perspectives. This article challenges a core element of this hermeneutics, the conflation of Spinoza and Nietzsche. The assumption of a continuity of their power concepts overlooks that the late Nietzsche took a sharp anti-Spinozian turn and introduced his “will to power” against Spinoza’s “conatus.” Whereas Spinoza’s potentia agendi designates a collective and cooperative capacity to act, which can be reconceptualized with the help of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, Nietzsche’s “will to power” naturalizes the principle of domination. An ethics inspired by Nietzsche can never get rid of its inherent “pathos of distance,” which manifests itself even in its most “leftist” forms as a celebration of social distinctions against ordinary people. Recourse to Spinoza can help redefine life affirmation in a democratic-socialist way and thus provides an ethics for a hegemony from below.
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SOLOMON, RAKESH H. "From Orientalist to Postcolonial Representations: A Critique of Indian Theatre Historiography from 1827 to the Present." Theatre Research International 29, no. 2 (July 2004): 111–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883304000276.
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This essay offers a comparative critique of all major Indian theatre histories written during the modern era. It reveals three distinct representations of Indian theatre and argues that each was a manifestation of a discrete historiographic approach, shaped by its particular historical and cultural moment. Theatre histories of the Orientalist period offer a narrow and elitist construction of Indian theatre as synonymous with a single defunct genre, the ancient Sanskrit theatre. Histories of the high nationalist phase make a token acknowledgement of the Sanskrit and traditional genres but define Indian theatre as comprising primarily of the modern genre. Postcolonial histories construct a democratic and comprehensive Indian theatre – embracing the Sanskrit, traditional, and modern genre – but with an unpersuasively high significance assigned to the modern genre's post-Independence phase. Such different representations of Indian theatre show how theatre historiography in the modern period, like theatre historiography in any era, regularly refashioned itself under the pressure of changing historical, political, and cultural conditions.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "Elitist democratic theory"
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Seong, Haeyoung. "A Study of Political Leadership in Democratic Theory." Thesis, North Texas State University, 1988. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500950/.
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This thesis offers an alternative of political leadership through a literature review of democratic theory as categorized into three models: classical, elitist, and egalitarian. The three models considered an ethical, an institutional, and an economic institutional postulate of political elites and their relationships. Still, the democratic elitist model emerging as the dominant model has been challenged by the egalitarian model enforcing economic institutional elites to be accountable to mass interest. As a competing idea, the egalitarian democratic model has been analyzed for its desirability over the democratic elitist model. This study is worthwhile in instigating an underscored concern surrounding economic institutional elites in the scope of accountable political elites, and in calling forth a further study on the preferred alternative, democratization of economic institutional elites.
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Martin, James Paul. "When repression and elitism are democratic : the 'Republican' theory of representation and its twilight /." Digital version accessible at:, 1999. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/main.
Full textBooks on the topic "Elitist democratic theory"
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Political elites in modern societies: Empirical research and democratic theory. Ann Arbor, Mich: University of Michigan Press, 1989.
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Wells, Tamas. Narrating Democracy in Myanmar. NL Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/9789463726153.
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This book analyses what Myanmar’s struggle for democracy has signified to Burmese activists and democratic leaders, and to their international allies. In doing so, it explores how understanding contested meanings of democracy helps make sense of the country’s tortuous path since Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won historic elections in 2015. Using Burmese and English language sources, Narrating Democracy in Myanmar reveals how the country’s ongoing struggles for democracy exist not only in opposition to Burmese military elites, but also within networks of local activists and democratic leaders, and international aid workers.
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Bachrach, Peter. The Theory of Democratic Elitism. University Press of America, 2002.
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Kersey, Timothy. Constrained Elitism and Contemporary Democratic Theory. Taylor & Francis Group, 2018.
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Kersey, Timothy. Constrained Elitism and Contemporary Democratic Theory. Routledge, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315855639.
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Peffley, Mark, and Robert Rohrschneider. Elite Beliefs and the Theory of Democratic Elitism. Oxford University Press, 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199270125.003.0004.
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Nugent, Elizabeth R. After Repression. Princeton University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691203058.001.0001.
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In the wake of the Arab Spring, newly empowered factions in Tunisia and Egypt vowed to work together to establish democracy. In Tunisia, political elites passed a new constitution, held parliamentary elections, and demonstrated the strength of their democracy with a peaceful transfer of power. Yet in Egypt, unity crumbled due to polarization among elites. Presenting a new theory of polarization under authoritarianism, the book reveals how polarization and the legacies of repression led to these substantially divergent political outcomes. The book documents polarization among the opposition in Tunisia and Egypt prior to the Arab Spring, tracing how different kinds of repression influenced the bonds between opposition groups. It demonstrates how widespread repression created shared political identities and decreased polarization — such as in Tunisia — while targeted repression like that carried out against the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt led opposition groups to build distinct identities that increased polarization among them. This helps explain why elites in Tunisia were able to compromise, cooperate, and continue on the path to democratic consolidation while deeply polarized elites in Egypt contributed to the rapid reentrenchment of authoritarianism. Providing vital new insights into the ways repression shapes polarization, the book helps to explain what happened in the turbulent days following the Arab Spring and illuminates the obstacles to democratic transitions around the world.
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Corbett, Jack, and Wouter Veenendaal. Democratization and Economic Development. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198796718.003.0002.
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Chapter 2 interrogates modernization theory and the belief that economic growth is key to explaining why democratic regimes rise and fall. Many small states in Africa, the Caribbean, and most significantly the Pacific are poor but retain high Freedom House scores. Conversely, some small states, in Europe in particular, but also Brunei in Asia, tend to be both richer and poorly scored. This demonstrates that while economic performance is clearly relevant to the survival of regimes, the key link is not how wealthy a country is but how elites both utilize their economic resources and narrate the story of their performance. In poorer states, elites keep public expectations low while rewarding loyal followers via practices of clientelism and patronage. In wealthy states, elites link high living standards with regime stability and centralized authority. Thus, the personalization of politics can have unexpected benefits for democratization, especially in small, poorer countries.
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Garner, Robert. 3. Democracy and Political Obligation. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/hepl/9780198704386.003.0004.
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This chapter examines the claim that democracy is the ideal form of political obligation. It first traces the historical evolution of the term ‘democracy’ before discussing the debate between advocates of the protective theory and the participatory theory of democracy, asking whether it is possible to reconcile elitism with democracy and whether participatory democracy is politically realistic. It then describes the new directions that democratic theory has taken in recent years, focusing on four theories: associative democracy, cosmopolitan democracy, deliberative democracy, and ecological democracy. It also explains why democracy is viewed as the major grounding for political obligation, with emphasis on the problem of majority rule and what to do with the minority consequences of majoritarianism.
Book chapters on the topic "Elitist democratic theory"
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Landemore, Hélène. "Democracy as the Rule of the Dumb Many?" In Democratic Reason. Princeton University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691155654.003.0002.
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This chapter illustrates the deeply entrenched prejudice of political philosophers, including some democratic theorists, against “the rule of the dumb many.” It offers a critical literature survey showing how most traditional approaches to democracy either deny or circumvent the question of the people's competence to rule, with the exception of a tiny but growing literature on “epistemic democracy.” In fact, with the exception of the latter, the question of the cognitive competence of average citizens and the related question of the performance of democratic institutions either raises profound skepticism or is avoided altogether in contemporary democratic theory, both positive and normative. As a result, many theories and justifications of democracy tend to be competence insensitive, either denying that citizens' political incompetence is a problem or circumventing what they do see as a problem through an “elitist” definition of democracy as rule by the elected enlightened.
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McCormick, John P. "Rousseau’s Repudiation of Machiavelli’s Democratic Roman Republic." In Reading Machiavelli, 109–43. Princeton University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691183503.003.0005.
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This chapter contends that Jean-Jacques Rousseau's analysis and appropriation of the Roman Republic deliberately undermines Machiavelli's efforts to reconstruct and promote institutions that both maximize the participation of poor citizens in popular governments and facilitate their efforts to control or contain economic and political elites. Rousseau's radical revision of Machiavelli's appropriation of the ancient Roman Republic historically served to foreclose the possibility of an alternative, popularly participatory, and anti-elitist strand of modern republicanism that in subsequent centuries would have better served democratic theory and practice. Through the promulgation of sociologically anonymous principles like generality and popular sovereignty, and by confining elite accountability to elections alone, Rousseau's institutional analyses and proposals allow wealthier citizens and magistrates to dominate the politics of popular governments in surreptitious and unassailable ways.
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Disch, Lisa. "Introduction: the end of representative politics?" In The Constructivist Turn in Political Representation, 1–18. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474442602.003.0001.
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What should political theorists make of M15 and the Occupy movements? Of the rise of alternative parties such as Podemos and Syriza? And support for alternatives to parties such as the Five Star Movement and the Pirate Party movement? These insurgencies are not motivated simply by economic circumstances but are unique for giving voice to a new and distinctively democratic citizen anger directed at the limits of representative politics. Some herald this activity as the “end of representative politics.” We argue that it is a protest against just one version—mandate representation—that is elitist in its conception and practice. Similar to this activism in the street, the “constructivist turn” in political theory also pushes against the limits and rejects the elitism of mandate representation. Its proponents argue that representatives can and should do more than speak for constituencies of voters: they revitalize democracy by sparking new political subjects into action—both within and beyond the confines of parliamentary politics.
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Tait, Joshua. "Mencius Moldbug and Neoreaction." In Key Thinkers of the Radical Right, 187–203. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190877583.003.0012.
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This chapter discusses the life and work of Mencius Moldbug (Curtis Yarvin), an American programmer and blogger. His blog, Unqualified Reservations (2007–13) became the basis of the small but instructive “neoreactionary” movement. With its origins in programmer culture and radical libertarianism, Moldbug’s thought is antiprogressive, antiegalitarian, and antidemocratic. He advocates a monarchic government for an otherwise “open” society. Drawing on Austrian school economics, “elitist” theory, and the reactionary tradition, most prominently Thomas Carlyle, Moldbug argues that progressive elites produce a “universalist” culture to reinforce their power. According to Moldbug, the universalist-democratic regime is inefficient, divorced from reality, and doomed to collapse into chaos. Moldbug and neoreaction were harbingers and archetypes of web-based antiegalitarian movements that mobilized irony and epistemological critiques against the Left. They indicate a growing antidemocratic animus on the American Right, especially among radical libertarians, and the importance of digital activism for right-wing activism in the twenty-first century.
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Berelson, Bernard, Paul Lazarsfeld, and William Mcphee. "Democratic Practice and Democratic Theory." In Political Elites in a Democracy, 27–48. Routledge, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315126654-3.
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Galston, William A. "Democratic Leadership." In Anti-Pluralism. Yale University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300228922.003.0008.
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This chapter examines the tension between leadership and democratic psychology. Throughout history, democracies have struggled against both populism and elitism, often in the form of individuals who present themselves as potential leaders. Some of this tension is productive, but much is not. Taken too far, the passions and emotions characteristic of democracy can end by weakening it. Political communities need good leaders, but not all forms of political organization are equally hospitable to the leadership they need. There is a perennial worry that democracy and leadership are fundamentally at odds. Leadership comes into conflict not with the principle of democracy but with its psychology, and one aspect of this psychology is populism. On the other hand, the experience of democratic life can produce a stance diametrically opposed to populist resentment—namely, elitist arrogance.
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Hood, Clifton. "The Antielitist Elite." In In Pursuit of Privilege. Columbia University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.7312/columbia/9780231172165.003.0008.
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The cultural transformations of the 1960s and 1970s created problems and opportunities for elites. In these decades the upper- and middle classes went from being seen as the wellspring of social virtue in Victorian culture to being perceived as repressed, stuffy, and out of touch; after all, they were the prime beneficiaries of a status quo that was now found wanting. From lording it over commoners in the eighteenth century, to loathing the dangerous classes in the nineteenth century, many elite New Yorkers came around to romanticizing African-Americans and other lower-class groups as exemplars of human spirit and social justice. These actions were in many cases genuine, yet in espousing civil rights causes and tackling discrimination and poverty, in exposing the falseness and superficiality of genteel society, upper-class New Yorkers also established their own heightened sensitivity as anti-elitists and their own legitimacy. Corporate elites thus championed achievement and diversity as the foundation of a more democratic, anti-elitist elite.
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"Appendix to Chapter Three. Surveys of Israeli Business Elites." In The Real World of Democratic Theory, 275–76. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9781400836833.275.
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Law, Wing Sang. "The Spectrum of Frames and Disputes in the Umbrella Movement." In Take Back Our Future, 74–99. Cornell University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501740916.003.0004.
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This chapter highlights the importance of how the key campaign groups of the Umbrella Movement contested each other through their efforts of “framing” the movement in different ways so as to realize their competing visions of social mobilization. The Umbrella Movement was basically not a battleground between old and new conceptions of identity; rather, the subject matter was, throughout the process, democratic reform. Having said that, no one can take the Umbrella Movement out of the bigger context of ideological contestation happening over the years and how these contestations affected the prodemocracy cause. The Umbrella Movement was indeed overshadowed by an intense struggle for symbolic power, which might not help to organize the movement in a conventional sense. In other words, underneath the common quest for genuine direct election, a battle of anti-elitism was played out according to the populist logic that allowed its adherents to always play taboo breakers, going against political correctness. Disputes over framing and strategies went hand-in-hand with a subterranean campaign against the elites alleged to be gaining personal benefits by being part of the social movement industry or political establishment. The elites were reframed to be worse enemies than the regime in power instead of someone holding different judgments about tactics and action choices. Such an anti-elitist battle deepened the “culture of distrust” in Hong Kong.
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Finocchiaro, Maurice A. "Rethinking Gramsci’s Political Philosophy." In The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, 68–73. Philosophy Documentation Center, 1998. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/wcp20-paideia199841737.
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This paper is a clarification and partial justification of a novel approach to the interpretation of Gramsci. My approach aims to avoid reductionism, intellectualism, and one-sidedness, as well as the traditional practice of conflating his political thought with his active political life. I focus on the political theory of the Prison Notebooks and compare it with that of Gaetano Mosca. I regard Mosca as a classic exponent of democratic elitism, according to which elitism and democracy are not opposed to each other but are rather mutually interdependent. Placing Gramsci in the same tradition, my documentation involves four key points. First, the Notebooks contain an explicit discussion of Mosca's ideas such that when Gramsci objects to a theoretical concept or principle, he often presupposes a common methodological orientation, and when he objects to a particular method or approach, he often presupposes a common theoretical view. Second, Gramsci accepts and gives as much importance to Mosca's fundamental principle that in all societies organized elites rule over the popular masses. Third, Gramsci accepts Mosca's distinctive theory of democracy defined as a relationship betwen elites and masses such that the elites are open to the influx of members from the masses. Finally, there is an emblematic practical political convergence btween the two: in 1925, both opposed a Fascist bill against Freemasonry. Although their rhetoric was different, their speeches exhibit astonishing substantive, conceptual and logical similarties.
Reports on the topic "Elitist democratic theory"
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Brummel, Lars. Referendums, for Populists Only? Why Populist Parties Favour Referendums and How Other Parties Respond. Association Inter-University Centre Dubrovnik, December 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.53099/ntkd4302.
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Populists are generally known as supporters of referendums and several populist parties have promoted direct democracy in recent years. To deepen our understanding of the populism referendum link, this study analyses how populist parties in Austria, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands defend a greater use of referendums and how their non-populist counterparts respond to this populist call for referendums. An analysis of election manifestos shows that populist parties justify their referendum support by characterizing referendums as a purely democratic ideal, by presenting it as an alternative to decision-making by ‘bad’ political elites or by promoting referendums as a tool to realise their preferred policy decisions. Populist referendum support is thus related to people-centrism and ant-elitism, as elements of a populist ideology, but also to strategic considerations. These lines of argument are used by both populists on the right and the left, but anti-elitism is particularly prominent in manifestos of radical rightwing populist parties. Populists are not the only supporters of direct democracy – however, there is no evidence that non-populist parties did become more favourable towards referendums to adapt to the populist call for a greater referendum use.