Strong Democracy

Strong Democracy
Author: Benjamin Barber
Publsiher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520242335

Download Strong Democracy Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

"One of the chosen few: an enduring contribution to democratic thought."—Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science, Yale University

Social Media and Democracy

Social Media and Democracy
Author: Brian D. Loader,Dan Mercea
Publsiher: Routledge
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2012-06-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781136459702

Download Social Media and Democracy Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This book critically investigates the complex interaction between social media and contemporary democratic politics, and provides a grounded analysis of the emerging importance of Social media in civic engagement. Social media applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, have increasingly been adopted by politicians, political activists and social movements as a means to engage, organize and communicate with citizens worldwide. Drawing on Obama’s Presidential campaign, opposition and protests in the Arab states, and the mobilization of support for campaigns against tuition fee increases and the UK Uncut demonstrations, this book presents evidence-based research and analysis. Renowned international scholars examine the salience of the network as a metaphor for understanding our social world, but also the centrality of the Internet in civic and political networks. Whilst acknowledging the power of social media, the contributors question the claim it is a utopian tool of democracy, and suggests a cautious approach to facilitate more participative democracy is necessary. Providing the most up-to-date analysis of social media, citizenship and democracy, Social Media and Democracy will be of strong interest to students and scholars of Political Science, Social Policy, Sociology, Communication Studies, Computing and Information and Communications Technologies.

Participatory Politics

Participatory Politics
Author: Elisabeth Soep
Publsiher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2014-01-31
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780262525770

Download Participatory Politics Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

An examination of the mix of face-to-face and digital methods that young people use in their experiments with civic engagement. Although they may disavow politics as such, civic-minded young people use every means and media at their disposal to carry out the basic tasks of citizenship. Through a mix of face-to-face and digital methods, they deliberate on important issues and debate with peers and powerbrokers, redefining some key dynamics that govern civic life in the process. In Participatory Politics, Elisabeth Soep examines the specific tactics used by young people as they experiment with civic engagement. Drawing on her scholarly research and on her work as a media producer and educator, Soep identifies five tactics that are part of effective, equitable participatory politics among young people: Pivot Your Public (mobilizing civic capacity within popular culture engagements); Create Content Worlds (using inventive and interactive storytelling that sparks sharing); Forage for Information in public data archives; Code Up (using computational thinking to design tools, platforms, and spaces for public good); and Hide and Seek (protecting privacy and information sources). After describing these tactics as they manifest themselves in a range of youth-driven activities—from the runaway spread of the video Kony 2012 to community hackathons—Soep discusses concrete ideas for cultivating the new literacies that will enable young people to participate in public life. She goes on to consider some risks associated with these participatory tactics, including simplification and sensationalism, and ways to avoid them, and concludes with implications for future research and practice.

Participation and Democratic Theory

Participation and Democratic Theory
Author: Carole Pateman
Publsiher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 134
Release: 1970
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 052129004X

Download Participation and Democratic Theory Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Shows that current elitist theories are based on an inadequate understanding of the early writings of democratic theory and that much sociological evidence has been ignored.

Cultural Production and Participatory Politics

Cultural Production and Participatory Politics
Author: Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández,Alexandra Arráiz Matute
Publsiher: Routledge
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2020-06-29
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781000651461

Download Cultural Production and Participatory Politics Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

This book addresses the conceptual lapse in the literature regarding the relationship between cultural production and participatory politics by examining their connections in a range of national and political contexts. Each chapter examines how youth engage cultural production as part of their political participation, and how political participation is sometimes central to, and expressed through, cultural production. The contributing authors provide examples of the intersections between youth cultural production and participatory politics and bring together a range of approaches to the examination of these intersections, providing illustrations of the complexities involved in these processes. Each of the chapters takes up different kinds of practices – from street art to video production, from online activism to installation work. They also examine a range of political contexts – from students striking at the University of Puerto Rico to activism in community arts centres and university classrooms. The book considers what becomes evident when close attention is paid to the intersection of cultural production and participatory politics: what does participatory politics help people to see about cultural production and how does cultural production expand how people understand participatory politics? This book was originally published as a special issue of Curriculum Inquiry.

Participatory Democracy and Political Participation

Participatory Democracy and Political Participation
Author: Thomas Zittel,Dieter Fuchs
Publsiher: Routledge
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2006-11-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781134194704

Download Participatory Democracy and Political Participation Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

A detailed new examination of the initiatives governments are exploring to reform the institutions and procedures of liberal democracy in order to provide more opportunities for political participation and inclusion. Combining theory and empirical case studies, this is a systematic evaluation of the most visible and explicit efforts to engineer political participation via institutional reforms. Part I discusses the phenomenon of participatory engineering from a conceptual standpoint, while parts II, III and IV take a comparative, as well as an empirical, perspective. The contributors to these sections analyze participatory institutions on the basis of empirical models of democracy such as direct democracy, civil society and responsive government and analyze the impact of these models on political behaviour. Part V includes exploratory regional case studies on specific reform initiatives that present descriptive accounts of the policies and politics of these reforms. Delivering a detailed assessment of democratic reform, this book will of strong interest to students and researchers of political theory, democracy and comparative politics.

Political Participation in a Changing World

Political Participation in a Changing World
Author: Yannis Theocharis,Jan W. van Deth
Publsiher: Routledge
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2017-09-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781351394604

Download Political Participation in a Changing World Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

In the last decades, political participation expanded continuously. This expansion includes activities as diverse as voting, tweeting, signing petitions, changing your social media profile, demonstrating, boycotting products, joining flash mobs, attending meetings, throwing seedbombs, and donating money. But if political participation is so diverse, how do we recognize participation when we see it? Despite the growing interest in new forms of citizen engagement in politics, there is virtually no systematic research investigating what these new and emerging forms of engagement look like, how prevalent they are in various societies, and how they fit within the broader structure of well-known participatory acts conceptually and empirically. The rapid spread of internet-based activities especially underlines the urgency to deal with such challenges. In this book, Yannis Theocharis and Jan W. van Deth put forward a systematic and unified approach to explore political participation and offer new conceptual and empirical tools with which to study it. Political Participation in a Changing World will assist both scholars and students of political behaviour to systematically study new forms of political participation without losing track of more conventional political activities.

The Politics of Local Participatory Democracy in Latin America

The Politics of Local Participatory Democracy in Latin America
Author: Françoise Montambeault
Publsiher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2015-10-14
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780804796576

Download The Politics of Local Participatory Democracy in Latin America Book in PDF, Epub and Kindle

Participatory democracy innovations aimed at bringing citizens back into local governance processes are now at the core of the international democratic development agenda. Municipalities around the world have adopted local participatory mechanisms of various types in the last two decades, including participatory budgeting, the flagship Brazilian program, and participatory planning, as it is the case in several Mexican municipalities. Yet, institutionalized participatory mechanisms have had mixed results in practice at the municipal level. So why and how does success vary? This book sets out to answer that question. Defining democratic success as a transformation of state-society relationships, the author goes beyond the clientelism/democracy dichotomy and reveals that four types of state-society relationships can be observed in practice: clientelism, disempowering co-option, fragmented inclusion, and democratic cooperation. Using this typology, and drawing on the comparative case study of four cities in Mexico and Brazil, the book demonstrates that the level of democratic success is best explained by an approach that accounts for institutional design, structural conditions of mobilization, and the configurations, strategies, behaviors, and perceptions of both state and societal actors. Thus, institutional change alone does not guarantee democratic success: the way these institutional changes are enacted by both political and social actors is even more important as it conditions the potential for an autonomous civil society to emerge and actively engage with the local state in the social construction of an inclusive citizenship.