The Civic Culture Transformed

This is the first study to demonstrate a broad shift in how citizens around the world relate to democratic politics, illustrating various manifestations of a transition from "allegiant" to "assertive" citizens.

This book re-evaluates Almond, Verba, and Pye's original ideas about the shape of a civic culture that supports democracy. Marshaling a massive amount of cross-national, longitudinal public opinion data from the World Values Survey Association, the authors demonstrate multiple manifestations of a deep shift in the mass attitudes and behaviors that undergird democracy. The chapters in this book show that in dozens of countries around the world, citizens have turned away from allegiance toward a decidedly 'assertive' posture to politics: they have become more distrustful of electoral politics, institutions, and representatives and are more ready to confront elites with demands from below. Most importantly, societies that have advanced the most in the transition from an allegiant to an assertive model of citizenship are better-performing democracies - in terms of both accountable and effective governance.

The authors interviewed over 5,000 citizens in Germany, Italy, Mexico, Great Britain, and the U.S. to learn political attitudes in modem democratic states. Originally published in 1963. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A new Germany has come of age, as democratic, sophisticated, affluent, and modern as any other western nation. This remarkable transition in little more than a generation is the central theme of Germany Transformed. Here all the old stereotypes and conclusions are challenged and new research is marshalled to provide a model for an advanced democratic republic. Kendall Baker, Russell Dalton, and Kai Hildebrandt, working with massive national election returns from 1953 onward, explain the Old Politics of the postwar period, which was based on the "economic miracle" and the security needs of West Germany, and the shift in the past decade to the New Politics, which emphasizes affluence, leisure, the quality of life, and international accommodation. But more than elections are examined. Rather, the authors delineate the transvaluation of the German civic culture as democracy became embedded in the nation's institutions, political ways, party structures, and citizen interest in governance. By the 1970s the quiescent German of Prussia, the Empire, and the 1930s had become the active and aware democratic westerner. This is among the most important books about West Germany written since the late 1950s, when the nation, devastated by war and rebuilding its economy and political life, was still struggling with the possibilities of democracy. It is a political history, recounted in enormous detail and with methodological precision, that will change perceptions about Germany and align them with realities. Germany is now an integrated part of a democratic western community of nations, and an understanding of its true condition not only illuminates better the staunch European identity but also is bound to have an impact on American policy.

In this extraordinarily wide-ranging book, Neil Nevitte demonstrates that the changing patterns of Canadian values are connected.

How popular culture is engaged by activists to effect emancipatory political change One cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic imagination is the capacity to conceptualize alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; it also requires the ability to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, as a participant in a larger democratic culture. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination represents a call for greater clarity about what we’re fighting for—not just what we’re fighting against. Across more than thirty examples from social movements around the world, this casebook proposes “civic imagination” as a framework that can help us identify, support, and practice new kinds of communal participation. As the contributors demonstrate, young people, in particular, are turning to popular culture—from Beyoncé to Bollywood, from Smokey Bear to Hamilton, from comic books to VR—for the vernacular through which they can express their discontent with current conditions. A young activist uses YouTube to speak back against J. K. Rowling in the voice of Cho Chang in order to challenge the superficial representation of Asian Americans in children’s literature. Murals in Los Angeles are employed to construct a mythic imagination of Chicano identity. Twitter users have turned to #BlackGirlMagic to highlight the black radical imagination and construct new visions of female empowerment. In each instance, activists demonstrate what happens when the creative energies of fans are infused with deep political commitment, mobilizing new visions of what a better democracy might look like.

A history of comic books from the 1930s to 9/11.