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Books on the topic 'Elitist democratic theory'
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1
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.
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Genieys, William. C. Wright Mills,. Edited by Martin Lodge, Edward C. Page, and Steven J. Balla. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199646135.013.15.
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This chapter examinesThe Power Elite, a radical work by C. Wright Mills that challenges the foundations of US liberal democracy and analyses the conditions under which democratic pluralism in the country can be reversed. Focusing on the theory of divided and united elites in relation to the system of checks and balances, Mills argues that the emergence of a power elite in the United States after 1945 necessitates a reevaluation of the foundations of democratic pluralism due to the significant changes in the competition for power and alternation in office at different levels of government. He also contends that members of only three elite groups had access to positions of national power: the “corporate rich,” the “warlords,” and the members of the “political directorate.” This chapter considers the rise and the fall of the elite model by assessing the four strands of Mills’s thought, one of which concerns the formation of state elites as the “true” power elite.
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Landwehr, Claudia. Depoliticization, Repoliticization, and Deliberative Systems. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198748977.003.0003.
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Deliberative democracy is increasingly criticized as inherently elitist and technocratic, and it is blamed not only for the rise of depoliticized institutions, but also for the rise of anti-political and even populist attitudes in citizens. The chapter analyses the discussion about the depoliticizing implications and effects of deliberation and argues that, contrary to these critics, deliberation must be viewed as a genuinely political mode of interaction. A systemic perspective on deliberation allows us to critically assess the deliberative and democratic qualities of political systems and to see when and where they fail to deliver on their promises. Applied with critical intentions, the deliberative system perspective can be used to identify depoliticized policy areas and undemocratic decision-making processes. Moreover, it can feed into processes of meta-deliberation that allow for a democratization of institutional design.
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Guiso, Luigi, and Paolo Pinotti. Democratization and Civic Capital. Edited by Gianni Toniolo. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199936694.013.0011.
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This chapter documents a sharp reversal in electoral participation between the North and the South of Italy after the 1912 enfranchisement which extended voting rights from a limited élite to (almost) all adult males. When voting was restricted to the élite, electoral turnout was higher in the South but falls significantly below that in the North after the enfranchisement. This gap has never been bridged over the following century and participation remains lower in the South despite the enrichment of democratic institutions and extension of voting rights to women during the post-war democratic republic. This pattern is consistent with a simple theoretical framework in which individuals' voting in political elections is affected by private benefits and civic duty. Only elites can grab private benefits from participation in politics, and civic culture differs across communities. Extension of voting rights to non-elites results in a significant transfer of power to their political organizations only among populations with a high sense of civic duties. Together with the gap in participation between North and South our findings suggest that democratization can benefit non-elites only when the latter have already a high sense of civic capital and is unlikely to induce norms of civic behavior.
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Trencsényi, Balázs, Michal Kopeček, Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič, Maria Falina, Mónika Baár, and Maciej Janowski. The Second World War. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198737155.003.0007.
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The Second World War catalyzed a profound reconfiguration of the political discourse in East Central Europe. A considerable part of the region experienced consecutive occupation regimes, which triggered strategies of playing out the occupiers against each other. A central tenet of any legitimization of collaboration was the idea that the liberal democratic world order had disintegrated and a new totalitarian Zeitgeist had emerged in its stead. In turn, the resistance movements were organized either by communists or by members of the prewar elites. The former had a hard time coping with the Nazi–Soviet friendship in 1939–41, and later had to show their relative independence from the Soviet Union in order to gain legitimacy in their societies. The resistance led by the members of the old elites, in turn, had to prove that they were able to modify their old ideas for a new situation. The chapter also reviews the first reactions to the genocidal policies during the war.
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Valdini, Melody E. The Inclusion Calculation. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190936198.001.0001.
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Power-holders and gate-keepers in political parties and governments continue to be primarily men. How are they responding to the increasing numbers of women who are seeking leadership roles in politics? Are they angels who embrace equality and fling open the doors to power? Are they devils who block women at every turn? Are they powerless against the increasing tide of feminism and inadvertently succumbing to the push for power from women? Most likely, these male elites are primarily concerned with maintaining their own power, which drives their reaction to women’s political inclusion. The Inclusion Calculation examines women’s inclusion from the perspective of men in power and offers a novel approach to understanding differences in women’s descriptive representation. The book argues that with declining legitimacy it is valuable for male elites to “strategically feminize,” associating themselves or their party with women, because citizens will interpret the increased presence of women as meaning that the party or government is becoming more honest, cooperative, and democratic. Using a combination of case studies from Latin America, Europe, and Africa, as well as large-N analyses, the book provides evidence that male elites are more likely to increase the number of women candidates on party lists or adopt a gender quota when “feminizing” is advantageous to the political careers of men. Women’s exclusion from government, then, is not a product of their own lack of effort or ability but rather a rational action of men in power to keep their power.
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Baum, Lawrence, and Neal Devins. The Company They Keep. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197539156.001.0001.
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Today’s ideological division on the U.S. Supreme Court is also a partisan division: all the Court’s liberals were appointed by Democratic presidents, all its conservatives by Republican presidents. That pattern never existed in the Court until 2010, and this book focuses on how it came about and why it’s likely to continue. Its explanation lies in the growing level of political polarization over the last several decades. One effect of polarization is that potential nominees will reflect the dominant ideology of the president’s political party. Correspondingly, the sharpened ideological division between the two political parties has given presidents stronger incentives to give high priority to ideological considerations. In addition to these well-known effects of polarization, The Company They Keep explores what social psychologists have taught us about people’s motivations. Justices take cues primarily from the people who are closest to them and whose approval they care most about: political, social, and professional elites. In an era of strong partisan polarization, elite social networks are largely bifurcated by partisan and ideological elites, and justices such as Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg live in milieus populated by like-minded elites that reinforce their liberalism or conservatism during their tenure on the Supreme Court. By highlighting and documenting this development, the book provides a new perspective on the Court and its justices.
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Jones, Kent. Populism and Trade. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190086350.001.0001.
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Populism and Trade traces the role of populist trade policy in the increase of global protectionism and the erosion of international trade institutions. Populist anti-trade rhetoric played a major part in US President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, in which he portrayed current trade agreements as elitist measures to undermine US manufacturing jobs, economic security, and the interests of the American people. Upon taking office he proceeded to implement trade restrictions that were unprecedented in the era of GATT-WTO rules. His use of national security criteria for unilateral tariffs on steel and aluminum and his trade war with China represented an abandonment of WTO trade rules and practices. In the United Kingdom, the 2016 Brexit referendum resulted in a vote to leave the European Union, thereby ending the UK trade integration arrangement that had begun in 1973. The referendum campaign drew on UK criticism of EU intrusion on UK sovereignty in presenting the issue in populist terms of elitist control from Brussels set against the interests of the victimized British people. The book develops a conceptual framework of protectionism that links behavioral factors with perceived external threats and voting behavior based on emotion. It also offers a review of trade policies of other populist governments and an assessment of their economic and institutional cost. A concluding chapter provides recommendations for addressing the populist challenge, focusing on adjustment policies, reforms of global trade institutions, and the need to protect domestic democratic processes.
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Dowding, Keith. Social and Political Power. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.198.
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Power is a complex topic that is viewed in entirely different ways by different writers. Power can be seen as a property of agents, with some agents having more power than others. It can be seen as a property of social systems, where structures hold power. It can also be seen in terms of specific actions by people to coerce or dominate, or it can be regarded as a subliminal force that leads people to think and behave in one way rather than another. It can be analyzed descriptively to try to explain how it is distributed, and critically to argue for changing structures to provide a more egalitarian and fairer distribution.Power studies flourished in the great community power studies of the 1950s and 1960s. Some of these works suggested that democratic nations were controlled by powerful elites who ruled in their own interests; some that power was more widely distributed and elites could not simply rule for themselves; others that in capitalist societies, despite some counterexamples, elites generally ruled in favor of developers and capitalists. Later studies examined how people’s interests are defined in terms of the structural positions in which they find themselves, and how the very ways in which we think and express ourselves affect our individual powers.
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Inclán, María. Opportunities for Success. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190869465.003.0004.
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This chapter first identifies democratization processes in which insurgents have successfully achieved their goals. It then compares those scenarios to one in which insurgents failed to better distinguish the conditions that might work as opportunities for them to succeed. These conditions are (1) being able to negotiate directly with the authorities, (2) having their interests included within democratizing pacts, and (3) counting with allies among elite actors negotiating peace and democratizing reforms. By applying these expectations to the case of the Zapatista movement, the chapter argues that when peace negotiations between insurgents and authorities occur separately from democratizing pacts among political elites, concessions to insurgent interests can be limited. Although insurgents might have allies in power and among those negotiating the new, more democratic order, if they are excluded from democratizing negotiations, their demands can easily be ignored.
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Epstein, William. The Masses are the Ruling Classes. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190467067.001.0001.
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The Masses Are the Ruling Classes handles a neglected theme: social policy in the United States is determined by mass consent. Contemporary explanations of decision making in the United States typically attribute power over policy making to a variety of hidden forces and illegitimate elites, holding the masses innocent of their own problems. Yet the enormous openness of the society and nearly universal suffrage sustain democratic consent as more plausible than the alternatives (conspiracy, propaganda, usurpation, autonomous government, and imperfect pluralism). Despite the multitude of problems that the nation faces, its citizens are not oppressed. The core problem that blocks the maturation of American society is not democratic participation, but its content; popular preferences are romantic rather than pragmatic. None of these programs achieve their ends of poverty reduction or behavioral change. Rather, they persist as testimonials to America’s romantic preferences. Thus, if the American people are largely responsible for social policy, then they are also responsible for the problems that beset the nation, notably enormous economic and social inequality. If the masses rule policy choice, then the persistence of material and social deprivation that lies easily within the economic capacities of the nation to address suggests that the nation abides its inequalities and suffering. The commitment of American society to policy romanticism and its rejection of pragmatism blocks its social development.
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Fishkin, James S. Democracy When the People Are Thinking. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198820291.001.0001.
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Democracy requires a connection to the “will of the people.” What does that mean in a world of “fake news,” relentless advocacy, dialogue mostly among the like-minded, and massive spending to manipulate public opinion? What kind of opinion can the public have under such conditions? What would democracy be like if the people were really thinking in depth about the policies they must live with? This book argues that “deliberative democracy” is not utopian. It is a practical solution to many of democracy’s ills. It can supplement existing institutions with practical reforms. It can apply at all levels of government and for many different kinds of policy choices. This book speaks to a recurring dilemma: listen to the people and get the angry voices of populism or rely on widely distrusted elites and get policies that seem out of touch with the public’s concerns. Instead, there are methods for getting a representative and thoughtful public voice that is really worth listening to. Democracy is under siege in most countries. Democratic institutions have low approval and face a resurgent threat from authoritarian regimes. Deliberative democracy can provide an antidote. It can reinvigorate our democratic politics. This book draws on the author’s research with many collaborators on “Deliberative Polling”—a process he has conducted in twenty-seven countries on six continents. It contributes both to political theory and to the empirical study of public opinion and participation, and should interest anyone concerned about the future of democracy and how it can be revitalized.
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Maxwell, Lida. Insurgent Truth. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190920029.001.0001.
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Insurgent Truth argues for the importance of outsider truth-telling to democratic politics and reads Chelsea Manning as an important contemporary outsider truth-teller. Outsider truth-tellers such as Manning tell or enact unsettling truths from a position of social illegibility. Often dismissed as in-credible by their societies, this book argues that their acts and writings reveal problems with dominant models of truth and truth-telling in politics, which often look to truth to offer a prepolitical stable common ground and align credibility with gendered, classed, and raced traits. Focusing on how outsider truth-tellers reveal this supposedly prepolitical common ground to reflect the power and reality of elites, Insurgent Truth argues that outsider truth-telling enacts an important, if risky democratic role in three ways: 1) revealing oppression and violence that the dominant class would otherwise not see; 2) revealing, in their truth-telling, the possibility of another way of living; and 3) disclosing an alternative form of stability via outsider solidarity. Insurgent Truth develops this argument through reading Chelsea Manning’s actions in conjunction with a cohort of other outsider truth-tellers: especially Virginia Woolf, Bayard Rustin, Audre Lorde, and Anna Julia Cooper.
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Bedock, Camille. Reforming Democracy. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198779582.001.0001.
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When, why, and how are democratic institutions reformed? This is the broad question guiding this research, rooted in a context of declining political support in Western Europe. This book deals with the context, the motives, and the mechanisms explaining the incidence of institutional engineering in consolidated Western European democracies between 1990 and 2015. It is centred on the choice of elites to use—or not to use—institutional engineering as a response to the challenges they face. The book answers two key questions about institutional change. First, how much change to the core democratic rules can be observed over the course of the last twenty-five years, where did change take place, and at what point in time? Second, why are some reform attempts successful while others are not? The use of a wide comparison of Western European democracies over time is the central contribution of the book in tackling these two issues. This enables a development of the concept of bundles of reforms, a key analytical tool to understand institutional change in a longitudinal and comparative perspective.
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Hindmarsh, D. Bruce. The Spirit of Early Evangelicalism. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190616694.001.0001.
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The Spirit of Early Evangelicalism sheds new light on the nature of evangelical religion by locating its rise with reference to those consequential changes in Anglo-American society we now routinely acknowledge with the terms Modernity, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. Bringing together a wide range of sources, the book makes meaningful connections between the Protestant evangelical awakening and the history of science, law, art, and literature in the eighteenth century. There was a profound turn toward nature and the authority of natural knowledge in each of these discourses and a more democratic public sphere available for debating contemporary concerns. In this modern context, evangelicals forcefully pressed their agenda for “true religion,” believing it was still possible to experience “the life of God in the soul of man.” The results were dramatic and disruptive. This book provides a fresh perspective, and presents new research, on the religious thought of leading figures such as John Wesley and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards, but it also traces the significance of evangelical spirituality for elites and non-elites across multiple genres including not only theology, but also natural and moral philosophy, poetry, painting, literature, and music. Viewing devotion, culture, and ideas together, it is possible to see the advent of evangelicalism as a significant new episode in the history of Christian spirituality.
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Porta, Donatella della, Massimiliano Andretta, Tiago Fernandes, Eduardo Romanos, and Markos Vogiatzoglou. Transition Times in Memory. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190860936.003.0002.
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The second chapter covers the main characteristics of transition time in the four countries: Italy, Greece, Spain, and Portugal. After developing the theoretical model on paths of transition, with a focus on social movement participation, the chapter looks at social movements and protest events as turning points during transition, covering in particular the specific movement actors, their organizational models, and their repertoires of action and frames. The chapter focuses on two dimensions: the role of mobilization in the transition period, which implies the analysis of how elites and masses interact, ally, or fight with each other in the process, and the outcome of transitions as continuity versus rupture of the democratic regime vis-à-vis the old one. It concludes by elaborating some hypotheses on how different modes of transition may produce different types and uses of (transition) memories.
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McClintock, Cynthia. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190879754.003.0001.
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During the third wave, like most democratizing countries worldwide, Latin American countries replaced plurality rules for presidential election with runoff rules. To date, most scholars fear the proliferation of political parties under runoff and favor plurality. I argue, however, that Latin American leaders were correct to adopt runoff. Runoff established a virtuous circle: amid lower barriers to entry, opposition parties and new parties held greater respect for the democratic process and this respect was in turn important to elites’ toleration of their entry. By contrast, plurality often facilitated political exclusion by long-standing dominant parties and exacerbated cynicism and polarization. Although the larger number of parties under runoff was problematic, and measures for the amelioration of the problem are important, the number of parties was considerable under plurality; runoff enabled democracies to cope, increasing the legitimacy of their elected presidents.
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Corni, Gustavo. State and Society. Edited by R. J. B. Bosworth. Oxford University Press, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199594788.013.0016.
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This article compares the state and society ruled by Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy. In regard to fascism's accession to power in Italy, another factor separated it from the Nazi path. There were some similarities between the two cases: a constitutional monarchy with a crumbling parliamentary system on the one hand, and a parliamentary and democratic republic with its own deepening crisis on the other. Yet, the institutional weakness of the Weimar state was so great and its lack of legitimacy so pervasive that it did not take a great effort on Hitler's part to shake himself free. Notwithstanding some similarities, most blatantly the tactical alliance with sectors of the old ruling elites, there was a profound difference in the acquisition of power between the two regimes. Hitler could always rely on an ample popular consent, hardened by the Nazis' promise of economic recovery.
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Bovens, Mark, and Anchrit Wille. Remedying Diploma Democracy. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198790631.003.0009.
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How can we remedy some of the negative effects of diploma democracy? First, we discuss the rise of nationalist parties. They have forced the mainstream political parties to pay more attention to the negative effects of immigration, globalization, and European unification. Next we discuss strategies to mitigate the dominance of the well-educated in politics. We start with remedies that address differences in political skills and knowledge. Then we discuss the deliberative arenas. Many democratic reforms contain an implicit bias towards the well-educated. A more realistic citizenship model is required. This can be achieved by bringing the ballot back in, for example, by merging deliberative and more direct forms of democracy through deliberative polling, corrective referendums, and more compulsory voting. The chapter ends with a discussion of ways to make the political elites more inclusive and responsive, such as descriptive representation, sortition, and plebiscitary elements.
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Ahmed, Amel. American Political Development in the Mirror of Europe. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190846374.003.0006.
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Area-specific knowledge is indispensable for studying political development, but this can also lead to “blindspots” when conducting historical research if one’s horizons are limited to conventionally defined “areas.” Focusing on the 19th century, the author argues that the compartmentalization of the study of European and American political development has restricted our understanding of both. Particularly in struggles over democratization, pre-democratic elites in both regions saw their fates as linked and adopted similar strategies. In fact, one such strategy—the manipulation of electoral systems to limit working-class influence—was a mainstay of European politics, but first emerged in the American context. This finding illustrates the benefits of a comparative area studies (CAS) framework. A context-sensitive comparison of European and American political development offers a new perspective on the question of institutional endogeneity in Europe, while offering a new take on the question of “why no workers’ parties in the United States?”
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Young, Dannagal Goldthwaite. Irony and Outrage. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190913083.001.0001.
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This book explores the aesthetics, underlying logics, and histories of two seemingly distinct genres—liberal political satire and conservative opinion talk—making the case that they should be thought of as the logical extensions of the psychology of the left and right, respectively. One genre is guided by ambiguity, play, deliberation, and openness, while the other is guided by certainty, vigilance, instinct, and boundaries. While the audiences for Sean Hannity and John Oliver come from opposing political ideologies, both are high in political interest, knowledge, and engagement, and both lack faith in some of the United States’ core democratic institutions. This book illustrates how the roles these two genres play for their viewers are strikingly similar: galvanizing the opinion of the left or the right, mobilizing citizens around certain causes, and expressing a frustration with traditional news coverage while offering alternative sources of information and meaning. However, the book proposes that these genres differ in a crucial way: in their capacity to be exploited by special interests and political elites. The book concludes that due to the symbiotic relationship between conservative outrage and the psychological and physiological characteristics of the right, conservative outrage is uniquely positioned as a mechanism for successful elite propaganda and mobilization—in a way that liberal satire is not.
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McCormick, John P. Reading Machiavelli. Princeton University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691183503.001.0001.
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To what extent was Machiavelli a “Machiavellian”? Was he an amoral adviser of tyranny or a stalwart partisan of liberty? A neutral technician of power politics or a devout Italian patriot? A reviver of pagan virtue or initiator of modern nihilism? This book answers these questions through original interpretations of Niccolò Machiavelli's three major political works—The Prince, Discourses, and Florentine Histories—and demonstrates that a radically democratic populism seeded the Florentine's scandalous writings. The book challenges the misguided understandings of Machiavelli set forth by prominent thinkers, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and representatives of the Straussian and Cambridge schools. It emphasizes the fundamental, often unacknowledged elements of a vibrant Machiavellian politics: the utility of vigorous class conflict between elites and common citizens for virtuous democratic republics, the necessity of political and economic equality for genuine civic liberty, and the indispensability of religious tropes for the exercise of effective popular judgment. Interrogating the established reception of Machiavelli's work by such readers as Rousseau, Leo Strauss, Quentin Skinner, and J.G.A. Pocock, the book exposes what was effectively an elite conspiracy to suppress the Florentine's contentious, egalitarian politics. In recovering the too-long-concealed quality of Machiavelli's populism, this book acts as a Machiavellian critique of Machiavelli scholarship. Advancing fresh renderings of works by Machiavelli while demonstrating how they have been misread previously, the book presents a new outlook for how politics should be conceptualized and practiced.
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Yadav, Vineeta. Religious Parties and the Politics of Civil Liberties. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197545362.001.0001.
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Religious parties are increasingly common in all parts of the world. Their rise in Muslim-majority countries has been particularly prominent, as they increasingly participate in elections, win legislative seats, and join governments. Since they are often founded on orthodox principles that are inconsistent with liberal democracy, the consequences of their rise and success for the prospects of liberal democratic values and practices have inspired much heated debate and discussion. This book considers a question that has been central in these debates: will the rise and success of religious parties lead to declines in the civil liberties of their citizens? This book addresses this question by focusing on a relationship that is central for understanding the politics of religious parties—their relationship with religious lobbies. It identifies the religious organizations that are actively involved in lobbying on these issues in Muslim-majority countries and outlines the policy preferences and institutional interests that motivate them. It then identifies the political and economic conditions that shape how their relationship with religious parties evolves and, when religious lobbies are able to or unable constrain the actions of religious parties. The book explains when the rise of religious parties leads to a significant decline in civil liberties and when it does not. To test its claims, it leverages original data on religious parties, religious party governments, and religious lobbies for all Muslim-majority countries for almost 40 years and uses original surveys of political elites in Turkey and Pakistan for a thorough and original analysis.
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Jorio, Rosa De. Remembering the Colonial Past. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252040276.003.0003.
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This chapter examines the state memorialization of the colonial past via narratives, practices, and visual culture. First, it briefly describes some of the ways in which French colonization was represented during the period of the one-party state (1960–1991), using them as a benchmark against which to gauge changes in those representations by the democratic and neoliberal state that followed. Second, it examines the state memorialization of French colonization since 1991, focusing on the Koulouba monument complex in Bamako, the largest series of monuments dedicated to Mali's colonial history. It details the emergence of a new narrative of colonization that suggests contacts, hybridity, and cross-feeding—a representation reflecting some of the experiences and narratives of Mali's cosmopolitan political and cultural elites. Third, it analyze Ségouvian citizens' perspectives on the government's memorialization project in light of their experience with state encroachment on their city's patrimony. This final section centers on the confrontation between the state and peripheral urban communities over the management of the colonial heritage and explores some of its political and cultural implications, including the embryonic development of a few private heritage initiatives in Ségou.
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Penney, Joel. The Citizen Marketer. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190658052.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
From hashtag activism to the flood of political memes on social media, the landscape of political communication is being transformed by the grassroots circulation of opinion on digital platforms and beyond. The Citizen Marketer offers a new framework for understanding this phenomenon by exploring how everyday people assist in the promotion of political media messages in hopes of persuading their peers and shaping the public mind. The analysis is grounded in the firsthand testimony of citizens who have engaged in popular activities such as changing their profile picture to a protest symbol, tweeting links to news articles to raise strategic awareness about select issues, and publicly displaying everything from slogan T-shirts to viral videos that promote a favored electoral candidate. In contrast to the “slacktivism” critique often leveled at these media-based forms of political activity, The Citizen Marketer argues that they enable citizens to take on the potentially influential role of viral political marketers as they participate in the networked dissemination of ideas. Furthermore, the discussion critically examines the promises of the citizen marketer approach for expanding democratic participation and elevating the voices of marginalized groups, as well as the risks that these practices pose for polarization and partisanship, the trivialization of issues, and control and manipulation by elites. By investigating the logics and motivations behind the citizen marketer, as well as how this approach has developed in response to key social, cultural, and technological changes, the book charts the evolution of activism in the age of mediatized politics, promotional culture, and viral circulation.
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Germann, Julian. Unwitting Architect. Stanford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.11126/stanford/9781503609846.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
The global rise of neoliberalism since the 1970s is widely seen as a dynamic originating in the United States and the United Kingdom, and only belatedly and partially repeated by Germany. From this Anglocentric perspective, Germany's emergence at the forefront of neoliberal reforms in the eurozone is perplexing, and tends to be attributed to the same forces conventionally associated with the Anglo-American pioneers. This book challenges this ruling narrative. It recasts the genesis of neoliberalism as a process driven by a plenitude of actors, ideas, and interests. And it lays bare the pragmatic reasoning and counterintuitive choices of German crisis managers obscured by this master story. This book argues that German officials did not intentionally set out to promote neoliberal change. Instead they were more intent on preserving Germany's export markets and competitiveness in order to stabilize the domestic compact between capital and labor. Nevertheless, the series of measures German policy elites took to manage the end of golden-age capitalism promoted neoliberal transformation in crucial respects: it destabilized the Bretton Woods system; it undermined socialist and social democratic responses to the crisis in Europe; it frustrated an internationally coordinated Keynesian reflation of the world economy; and ultimately it helped push the US into the Volcker interest-rate shock that inaugurated the attack on welfare and labor under Reagan and Thatcher. From this vantage point, the book illuminates the very different rationale behind the painful reforms German state managers have demanded of their indebted eurozone partners.
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Boonshoft, Mark. Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic. University of North Carolina Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469661360.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
Following the American Revolution, it was a cliché that the new republic's future depended on widespread, informed citizenship. However, instead of immediately creating the common schools--accessible, elementary education--that seemed necessary to create such a citizenry, the Federalists in power founded one of the most ubiquitous but forgotten institutions of early American life: academies, privately run but state-chartered secondary schools that offered European-style education primarily for elites. By 1800, academies had become the most widely incorporated institutions besides churches and transportation projects in nearly every state.In this book, Mark Boonshoft shows how many Americans saw the academy as a caricature of aristocratic European education and how their political reaction against the academy led to a first era of school reform in the United States, helping transform education from a tool of elite privilege into a key component of self-government and citizenship. And yet the very anti-aristocratic critique that propelled democratic education was conspicuously silent on the persistence of racial and gender inequality in public schooling. By tracing the history of academies in the revolutionary era, Boonshoft offers a new understanding of political power and the origins of public education and segregation in the United States.
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Fairbrother, Malcolm. Free Traders. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190635459.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
This book is about the political events and decisions in the 1980s and 1990s that established the global economy we have today. Different social scientists and other commentators have described the foundations of globalization very differently. Some have linked the rise of free trade and multinational enterprises to the democratic expression of ordinary people’s hopes and desires; others have said they were a top-down project requiring, if anything, the circumvention of democracy. This book shows that politicians did not decide to embrace globalization because of the preferences of the mass public. Instead, using comparative-historical case studies of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, this book shows that politicians’ decisions reflected the agendas and outlooks of various kinds of elites. On the basis of more than a hundred interviews, and analyses of materials from archives in all three countries, the book tells the story of how the three countries negotiated and ratified two agreements that substantially opened and integrated their economies: the 1989 Canada-US and trilateral 1994 North American Free Trade Agreements. Contrary to what many people believe, these agreements (like free trade elsewhere) were based less on mainstream, neoclassical economics than on the informal, self-serving economic ideas of businesspeople. This folk economics shaped the contents of the agreements, and helped bind together the elite coalitions whose support made them politically possible. These same ideas, however, have reinforced some harmful economic misunderstandings, and have even contributed to the recent backlash against globalization in some countries.
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Alonso, Paul. Satiric TV in the Americas. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190636500.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
In the post-truth era, postmodern satiric media have emerged as prominent critical voices playing an unprecedented role at the heart of public debate, filling the gaps left not only by traditional media but also by weak social institutions and discredited political elites. Satiric TV in the Americas analyzes some of the most representative and influential satiric TV shows on the continent (focusing on cases in Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Mexico, Chile, and the United States) in order to understand their critical role in challenging the status quo, traditional journalism, and the prevalent local media culture. It illuminates the phenomenon of satire as resistance and negotiation in public discourse, the role of entertainment media as a site where sociopolitical tensions are played out, and the changing notions of journalism in today’s democratic societies. Introducing the notion of “critical metatainment”—a postmodern, carnivalesque result of and a transgressive, self-referential reaction to the process of tabloidization and the cult of celebrity in the media spectacle era—Satiric TV in the Americas is the first book to map, contextualize, and analyze relevant cases to understand the relation between political information, social and cultural dissent, critical humor, and entertainment in the region. Evaluating contemporary satiric media as distinctively postmodern, multilayered, and complex discursive objects that emerge from the collapse of modernity and its arbitrary dichotomies, Satiric TV in the Americas also shows that, as satiric formats travel to a particular national context, they are appropriated in different ways and adapted to local circumstances, thus having distinctive implications.
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Bashevkin, Sylvia. Women as Foreign Policy Leaders. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190875374.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
What is known about women’s participation as decision-makers in international affairs? Is it fair to assume, as many observers do, that female elites will mirror the relatively pacifist preferences of women in the general public as well as the claims of progressive feminist movements? By focusing on women’s presence in senior national security positions in the American political executive, Women as Foreign Policy Leaders offers among the first systematic responses to these questions. It examines four high-profile appointees in the United States since 1980: Jeane Kirkpatrick during the Reagan years, Madeleine Albright in the Clinton era, Condoleezza Rice during the George W. Bush presidencies, and Hillary Rodham Clinton in the first Obama mandate. Women as Foreign Policy Leaders documents the difference these four women made in a domain long dominated by men. In probing the actions taken by four appointees on matters of political conflict and gender equality, the book demonstrates that female decision-makers made diverse and transformative contributions during a series of Republican and Democratic presidential administrations. The track records of these four women reveal not just a consistent willingness to pursue muscular, aggressive approaches to international relations, but also widely divergent views about feminism. Women as Foreign Policy Leaders shows how Kirkpatrick, Albright, Rice, and Clinton staked out their presence on the international scene and provided a crucial antidote to the silencing of women’s voices in global politics.