Participation Culture And Democracy

The underlying question of this collection of essays focuses on the very core of our democratic culture. It asks how one can actively take part in its political, legal, educational, informational, social, cultural and economic mechanisms. Advanced technologies have given rise to a vast array of tools enabling a culture of participation. New forms of civic engagement have emerged, as well as a new conceptualization of active citizenship. These developments encouraged the authors of this collection to address legal, social, political, philosophical, and media aspects of the emancipatory potential of participatory democracy. They focus on specific case studies stretching across various places and spheres, from the Canadian media legislature, community organizing in low-income neighbourhoods of the USA, the Knesset of Israel, the Roma minority in Poland, and legal texts of Austria, to the online sphere of art and digital democracy. The key advantage of this book thus lies in its multifaceted consideration of seemingly disparate, yet highly intertwined and ubiquitous, concepts of democratic societies around the globe.

The Participatory Cultures Handbook will help students and scholars navigate this rapidly changing media and cultural terrain. Composed of newly commissioned essays from contributors across disciplines, this handbook will introduce students to the concept of participatory culture, explain how researchers approach participatory culture studies, and provide original examples of participatory culture in action. The wide range of topics explored in participatory culture include crowdsourcing, citizen journalism, fanfiction, wikis, video games, video sharing, transmedia storytelling, and much more.

William Nylen begins by discussing North Americans' love-hate relationship with politics and politicians, then shows how Brazilians feel the same way (as do many citizens of democracies throughout the world). He argues that this is so because contemporary democracies have increasingly trickled up and away from so-called 'average citizens'. We now live in a world of 'Elitist Democracies' essentially constructed of, by and for moneyed, well-connected and ethically-challenged elites. Fortunately, there are alternatives, and that's where Brazil offers valuable lessons. Experiments in local-level participatory democracy, put into practice in Brazil by the Workers Party show both the promise and the practical limitations of efforts to promote 'popular participation' and citizen empowerment.

This book is concerned with the contexts, nature and quality of the participation of young people in European democratic life. The authors understand democracy broadly as both institutional politics and civic cultures, and a wide range of methods are used to analyse and assess youth participation and attitudes.

Political participation is falling and citizen alienation and cynicism is increasing. This volume brings together the first work of this kind by leading scholars in the US and Europe to consider the issue. Four of the leading philosophers of deliberative democracy contribute their commentaries on the groundbreaking empirical research.

The intellectual history of the Civic Culture concept / Gabriel A. Almond -- The structure of inference / Arend Lijphart -- The Civic Culture : a philosophic critique / Carole Pateman -- The Civic Culture from a Marxist-sociological perspective / Jerzy J. Wiatr -- Political culture in Great Britain : The decline of The Civic Culture / Dennis Kavanagh -- The United States : political culture under stress / Alan I. Abramowitz -- Changing German political culture : continuity and change / Giacomo Sani -- Political culture in Mexico : continuities and revisionist interpretations / Ann L. Craig and Wayne A. Cornelius -- On revisiting The Civic Culture : a personal postcript / Sidney Verba

This book discusses how public cultural policies can relate to the principle political issue of democracy. Here, democratic cultural policies include ideas and ideologies, institutional structures, agents and interests, power, access and participation and distribution of economic resources. Contributors focus on analysing the relationship between a political system and culture and the arts as an empirical field. They critically consider questions such as: How do different democratic forms affect cultural policy consequences? Can cultural autonomy be combined with cultural democracy? How is cultural policy-making used as a political process and which interests are involved? What position does popular culture have in cultural policies? How does a former Soviet state like Lithuania handle the question of culture and democracy? What does it mean when UNESCO talks about cultural diversity? How did intellectuals act in cultural policy debates in France in the late 19th century? The volume also looks at whether the democratisation of culture is actually possible. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Policy.

This volume describes and analyzes the proliferation of new mechanisms for participation in Latin American democracies and considers the relationship between direct participation and the consolidation of representative institutions based on more traditional electoral conceptions of democracy.