Pathologies of Democratic Frustration

Pathologies of Democratic Frustration PDF Author: Sarah Harrison
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783031242366
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
At a time of widespread disillusion, citizens keep telling us how "frustrated" they feel with their democracies. However, whilst scholars and commentators alike have heard that complain millions of times, we may not have taken it as seriously as we should. The author takes the concept of democratic frustration literally and puts it under an unprecedented analytical and empirical microscope. She applies insights from the psychology and political science literatures and uses a mixture of panel studies, surveys, interviews, and experiments to understand its sources, nature, dimensions, and consequences. The book sheds unprecedented light on pathologies of democratic frustration in the US, UK, Australia, and South Africa with a double focus on the general population, and on young people. Doing so, it reveals new thought-provoking insights on the true nature of contemporary democratic crises, and not least on how citizens' actual desire for democracy uniquely shapes their dissatisfaction. Sarah Harrison is Deputy Director of the Electoral Psychology Observatory and Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, Department of Government, LSE, UK. .

Pathologies of Democratic Frustration

Pathologies of Democratic Frustration PDF Author: Sarah Harrison
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783031242366
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
At a time of widespread disillusion, citizens keep telling us how "frustrated" they feel with their democracies. However, whilst scholars and commentators alike have heard that complain millions of times, we may not have taken it as seriously as we should. The author takes the concept of democratic frustration literally and puts it under an unprecedented analytical and empirical microscope. She applies insights from the psychology and political science literatures and uses a mixture of panel studies, surveys, interviews, and experiments to understand its sources, nature, dimensions, and consequences. The book sheds unprecedented light on pathologies of democratic frustration in the US, UK, Australia, and South Africa with a double focus on the general population, and on young people. Doing so, it reveals new thought-provoking insights on the true nature of contemporary democratic crises, and not least on how citizens' actual desire for democracy uniquely shapes their dissatisfaction. Sarah Harrison is Deputy Director of the Electoral Psychology Observatory and Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, Department of Government, LSE, UK. .

Pathologies of Democratic Frustration

Pathologies of Democratic Frustration PDF Author: Sarah Harrison
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031242351
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
At a time of widespread disillusion, citizens keep telling us how “frustrated” they feel with their democracies. However, whilst scholars and commentators alike have heard that complain millions of times, we may not have taken it as seriously as we should. The author takes the concept of democratic frustration literally and puts it under an unprecedented analytical and empirical microscope. She applies insights from the psychology and political science literatures and uses a mixture of panel studies, surveys, interviews, and experiments to understand its sources, nature, dimensions, and consequences. The book sheds unprecedented light on pathologies of democratic frustration in the US, UK, Australia, and South Africa with a double focus on the general population, and on young people. Doing so, it reveals new thought-provoking insights on the true nature of contemporary democratic crises, and not least on how citizens’ actual desire for democracy uniquely shapes their dissatisfaction.

Inside the Mind of a Voter

Inside the Mind of a Voter PDF Author: Michael Bruter
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069120201X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
An in-depth look into the psychology of voters around the world, how voters shape elections, and how elections transform citizens and affect their lives Could understanding whether elections make people happy and bring them closure matter more than who they vote for? What if people did not vote for what they want but for what they believe is right based on roles they implicitly assume? Do elections make people cry? This book invites readers on a unique journey inside the mind of a voter using unprecedented data from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, South Africa, and Georgia throughout a period when the world evolved from the centrist dominance of Obama and Mandela to the shock victories of Brexit and Trump. Michael Bruter and Sarah Harrison explore three interrelated aspects of the heart and mind of voters: the psychological bases of their behavior, how they experience elections and the emotions this entails, and how and when elections bring democratic resolution. The authors examine unique concepts including electoral identity, atmosphere, ergonomics, and hostility. From filming the shadow of voters in the polling booth, to panel study surveys, election diaries, and interviews, Bruter and Harrison unveil insights into the conscious and subconscious sides of citizens’ psychology throughout a unique decade for electoral democracy. They highlight how citizens’ personality, memory, and identity affect their vote and experience of elections, when elections generate hope or hopelessness, and how subtle differences in electoral arrangements interact with voters’ psychology to trigger different emotions. Inside the Mind of a Voter radically shifts electoral science, moving away from implicitly institution-centric visions of behavior to understand elections from the point of view of voters.

Age of Anger

Age of Anger PDF Author: Pankaj Mishra
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374715823
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book of 2017 • Named a Best Book of the Year by Slate and NPR • Longlisted for the Orwell Prize One of our most important public intellectuals reveals the hidden history of our current global crisis How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world—from American shooters and ISIS to Donald Trump, from a rise in vengeful nationalism across the world to racism and misogyny on social media? In Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra answers our bewilderment by casting his gaze back to the eighteenth century before leading us to the present. He shows that as the world became modern, those who were unable to enjoy its promises—of freedom, stability, and prosperity—were increasingly susceptible to demagogues. The many who came late to this new world—or were left, or pushed, behind—reacted in horrifyingly similar ways: with intense hatred of invented enemies, attempts to re-create an imaginary golden age, and self-empowerment through spectacular violence. It was from among the ranks of the disaffected that the militants of the nineteenth century arose—angry young men who became cultural nationalists in Germany, messianic revolutionaries in Russia, bellicose chauvinists in Italy, and anarchist terrorists internationally. Today, just as then, the wide embrace of mass politics and technology and the pursuit of wealth and individualism have cast many more billions adrift in a demoralized world, uprooted from tradition but still far from modernity—with the same terrible results. Making startling connections and comparisons, Age of Anger is a book of immense urgency and profound argument. It is a history of our present predicament unlike any other.

Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation

Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation PDF Author: Juan J. Linz
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421404923
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
Since their classic volume The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes was published in 1978, Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan have increasingly focused on the questions of how, in the modern world, nondemocratic regimes can be eroded and democratic regimes crafted. In Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, they break new ground in numerous areas. They reconceptualize the major types of modern nondemocratic regimes and point out for each type the available paths to democratic transition and the tasks of democratic consolidation. They argue that, although "nation-state" and "democracy" often have conflicting logics, multiple and complementary political identities are feasible under a common roof of state-guaranteed rights. They also illustrate how, without an effective state, there can be neither effective citizenship nor successful privatization. Further, they provide criteria and evidence for politicians and scholars alike to distinguish between democratic consolidation and pseudo-democratization, and they present conceptually driven survey data for the fourteen countries studied. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation contains the first systematic comparative analysis of the process of democratic consolidation in southern Europe and the southern cone of South America, and it is the first book to ground post-Communist Europe within the literature of comparative politics and democratic theory.

The Misguided Search for the Political

The Misguided Search for the Political PDF Author: Lois McNay
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745681158
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
There has been a lively debate amongst political theorists about whether certain liberal concepts of democracy are so idealized that they lack relevance to ‘real’ politics. Echoing these debates, Lois McNay examines in this book some theories of radical democracy and argues that they too tend to rely on troubling abstractions - or what she terms ‘socially weightless’ thinking. They often propose ideas of the political that are so far removed from the logic of everyday practice that, ultimately, their supposed emancipatory potential is thrown into question. Radical democrats frequently maintain that what distinguishes their ideas of the political from others is the fundamental concern with unmasking and challenging unrecognized forms of inequality and domination that distort everyday life. But this supposed attentiveness to power is undermined by the invocation of rarefied models of political action that treat agency as an unproblematic given and overlook certain features of the embodied experience of oppression. The tendency of radical democrats to define democratic agency in terms of dynamics of perpetual flux, mobility and agonism passes over too swiftly the way in which objective structures of oppression are often taken into the body as subjective dispositions, leaving individuals with the feeling that they are unable to do little more than endure a state of affairs beyond their control. Drawing on the work of Adorno, Bourdieu and Honneth, amongst others, McNay argues that in order to make good the critique of power, radical democratic theory should attend more closely to a phenomenology of negative social experience and what it can reveal about the social conditions necessary for effective political agency.

Freedom in the World 2018

Freedom in the World 2018 PDF Author: Freedom House
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538112035
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1265

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Book Description
Freedom in the World, the Freedom House flagship survey whose findings have been published annually since 1972, is the standard-setting comparative assessment of global political rights and civil liberties. The survey ratings and narrative reports on 195 countries and fifteen territories are used by policymakers, the media, international corporations, civic activists, and human rights defenders to monitor trends in democracy and track improvements and setbacks in freedom worldwide. The Freedom in the World political rights and civil liberties ratings are determined through a multi-layered process of research and evaluation by a team of regional analysts and eminent scholars. The analysts used a broad range of sources of information, including foreign and domestic news reports, academic studies, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, individual professional contacts, and visits to the region, in conducting their research. The methodology of the survey is derived in large measure from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and these standards are applied to all countries and territories, irrespective of geographical location, ethnic or religious composition, or level of economic development.

The Politics of Sincerity

The Politics of Sincerity PDF Author: Elizabeth Markovits
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271046112
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
A growing frustration with “spin doctors,” doublespeak, and outright lying by public officials has resulted in a deep public cynicism regarding politics today. It has also led many voters to seek out politicians who engage in “straight talk,” out of a hope that sincerity signifies a dedication to the truth. While this is an understandable reaction to the degradation of public discourse inflicted by political hype, Elizabeth Markovits argues that the search for sincerity in the public arena actually constitutes a dangerous distraction from more important concerns, including factual truth and the ethical import of political statements. Her argument takes her back to an examination of the Greek notion of parrhesia (frank speech), and she draws from her study of the Platonic dialogues a nuanced understanding of this ancient analogue of “straight talk.” She shows Plato to have an appreciation for rhetoric rather than a desire to purge it from public life, providing insights into the ways it can contribute to a fruitful form of deliberative democracy today.

Democracy in Times of Pandemic

Democracy in Times of Pandemic PDF Author: Miguel Poiares Maduro
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108845363
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Examines the most important democratic challenges of today, using the Covid-19 pandemic as a case study.

Contemporary Democratic Theory

Contemporary Democratic Theory PDF Author: Simone Chambers
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509543414
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Is democracy worth saving? Responding to the erosion of democracy, philosophical debates have pivoted from analyzing the best forms of democracy to questioning what is so valuable about democracy to begin with, how we can save it, and whether it is indeed worth saving. Contemporary Democratic Theory charts this pivot and surveys the most important new developments in the philosophical, theoretical, and normative examination of the concept of democracy. Comparisons that dominated 20th century democratic theory - between direct democracy, participatory democracy, deliberative democracy, and agonistic democracy - are in the 21st century giving way to comparisons between democracy and its challengers: epistocracy, technocracy, meritocracy, oligarchy, and autocracy. Philosophical interest in the canonical figures of democratic theory like Aristotle, Rousseau and Mill is being eclipsed by damage control in the face populism, sinking trust in democratic institutions, failing political parties, and the spread of misinformation. Overarching epochal forces of crisis and threat are pushing democratic theory in new directions and towards new ideas. This refreshing and authoritative text identifies, explains, and evaluates the new directions taken by contemporary democratic theory in challenging times.