scholarly journals Algorithms, Manipulation, and Democracy

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Thomas Christiano
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Society ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Participation ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Political Sophistication ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Political Inequality

Abstract Algorithmic communications pose several challenges to democracy. The three phenomena of filtering, hypernudging, and microtargeting can have the effect of polarizing an electorate and thus undermine the deliberative potential of a democratic society. Algorithms can spread fake news throughout the society, undermining the epistemic potential that broad participation in democracy is meant to offer. They can pose a threat to political equality in that some people may have the means to make use of algorithmic communications and the sophistication to be immune from attempts at manipulation, while other people are vulnerable to manipulation by those who use these means. My concern here is with the danger that algorithmic communications can pose to political equality, which arises because most citizens must make decisions about what and who to support in democratic politics with only a sparse budget of time, money, and energy. Algorithmic communications such as hypernudging and microtargeting can be a threat to democratic participation when persons are operating in environments that do not conduce to political sophistication. This constitutes a deepening of political inequality. The political sophistication necessary to counter this vulnerability is rooted for many in economic life and it can and ought to be enhanced by changing the terms of economic life.

The Politics of Pandemics

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Zielonka
Keyword(s):  
International Organizations ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Intervention ◽  
The Relationship

The outbreak of Covid-19 prompted the greatest political intervention in our lifetime. Governments around the world introduced measures that shattered our private life, brought economic life to a virtual standstill, and threw into question the value of international organizations. The article first shows how the political interventions undertaken throughout 2020 have crushed long standing equilibria on such fundamental issues as the notion of a common good, the limits of individual freedom, or the relationship between the state and markets. It then analyses the battle of power and minds between the main political protagonists. The following section scrutinizes the policies applied by these actors, and their implications for democracy. The final section tries to envisage a democratic politics suitable for the world of viruses, super-bugs, climate change, poverty and hyper-connectivity.

Representative Democracy and Religious Thought in South Asia

2021 ◽  
pp. 114-136
Author(s):  
Humeira Iqtidar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Representative Democracy ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Participation ◽  
Representative Government ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
The People ◽  
Democratic Polity

What role did popular enthusiasm about democratic participation in the early twentieth century play in the ideas of two key religious revivalists in South Asia: Abul A‘la Maududi and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar? This chapter lays out the differently inflected visions of the two thinkers to argue that they were both working through new conceptions of religion and society, which crystallized around the mythical entity “the people.” How to recognize and organize the people who form the constituency as well as the legislators of a democratic polity was the challenge they tackled. They differed sharply in their analysis of nationalism as the glue that held “the people” together, and in their resistance to prevailing European theories of nationalism and representative government. Despite many differences, the two thinkers were united in an enthusiasm for democratic politics. Understanding the political manifestations of their ideas today requires a reckoning with their respective visions of democracy.

Palestinian Diaspora Communities in Latin America and Palestinian Statehood

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-120
Author(s):  
Yousef M. Aljamal ◽  
Philipp O. Amour
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
South America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The Political ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Latin Americans ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Right

There are some 700,000 Latin Americans of Palestinian origin, living in fourteen countries of South America. In particular, Palestinian diaspora communities have a considerable presence in Chile, Honduras, and El Salvador. Many members of these communities belong to the professional middle classes, a situation which enables them to play a prominent role in the political and economic life of their countries. The article explores the evolving attitudes of Latin American Palestinians towards the issue of Palestinian statehood. It shows the growing involvement of these communities in Palestinian affairs and their contribution in recent years towards the wide recognition of Palestinian rights — including the right to self-determination and statehood — in Latin America. But the political views of members of these communities also differ considerably about the form and substance of a Palestinian statehood and on the issue of a two-states versus one-state solution.

The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Screen Bureaucrat

Public Voices ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Vache Gabrielyan
Keyword(s):  
Economic Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Soviet Cinema

The depiction of bureaucrats in Soviet cinema echoes the development in the political and economic life the country: it mirrors peoples’ attitudes towards the authorities, towards civic rights and freedoms, changing values and ideas

Searching for Political Parties in the Past

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Common

Chapter 1 introduces the long and difficult process of the theoretical legitimation of the political party as such. The analysis of the meaning and acceptance of ‘parties’ as tools of expressing contrasting visions moves forward from ancient Greece and Rome where (democratic) politics had first become a matter of speculation and practice, and ends up with the first cautious acceptance of parties by eighteenth-century British thinkers. The chapter explores how parties or factions have been constantly considered tools of division of the ‘common wealth’ and the ‘good society’. The holist and monist vision of a harmonious and compounded society, stigmatized parties and factions as an ultimate danger for the political community. Only when a new way of thinking, that is liberalism, emerged, was room for the acceptance of parties set.

Democracy and Political Culture

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross McKibbin
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Social System ◽  
Political System ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Definition Of

This book is an examination of Britain as a democratic society; what it means to describe it as such; and how we can attempt such an examination. The book does this via a number of ‘case-studies’ which approach the subject in different ways: J.M. Keynes and his analysis of British social structures; the political career of Harold Nicolson and his understanding of democratic politics; the novels of A.J. Cronin, especially The Citadel, and what they tell us about the definition of democracy in the interwar years. The book also investigates the evolution of the British party political system until the present day and attempts to suggest why it has become so apparently unstable. There are also two chapters on sport as representative of the British social system as a whole as well as the ways in which the British influenced the sporting systems of other countries. The book has a marked comparative theme, including one chapter which compares British and Australian political cultures and which shows British democracy in a somewhat different light from the one usually shone on it. The concluding chapter brings together the overall argument.

Looking Backward 2000-1887

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Bellamy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Democratic Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Ideal Society ◽  
The Past ◽  
Utopian Fiction ◽  
Socialist Utopia ◽  
Year 2000 ◽  
The Ideal

‘No person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity.’ Julian West, a feckless aristocrat living in fin-de-siècle Boston, plunges into a deep hypnotic sleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000. America has been turned into a rigorously centralized democratic society in which everything is controlled by a humane and efficient state. In little more than a hundred years the horrors of nineteenth-century capitalism have been all but forgotten. The squalid slums of Boston have been replaced by broad streets, and technological inventions have transformed people’s everyday lives. Exiled from the past, West excitedly settles into the ideal society of the future, while still fearing that he has dreamt up his experiences as a time traveller. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) is a thunderous indictment of industrial capitalism and a resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia. Matthew Beaumont’s lively edition explores the political and psychological peculiarities of this celebrated utopian fiction.

Frozen Negotiations: The Peace Process in Chiapas

2006 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raúúl Beníítez Manaut ◽  
Andrew Selee ◽  
Cynthia J. Arnson
Keyword(s):  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Democratic Transition ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
Democratic Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
Peace Agreement ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Government ◽  
Better Than

Mexico's democratic transition has helped reduce, if not eliminate, the threat of renewed armed conflict in Chiapas. However, absent more active measures from the government and the Ejéército Zapatista de Liberacióón Nacional (EZLN) to seek a permanent peace agreement and come to terms with the legacies of the past, the conflict will linger on in an unstable déétente, which we term ““armed peace.”” While this situation is far better than the open hostilities of the past, it also belies the promise of a fully democratic society in which all citizens are equally included in the political process. La transicióón democráática en Mééxico ha contribuido a reducir, si no eliminar, la posibilidad de que el conflicto armado en Chiapas se reanude. Sin embargo, sin esfuerzos mas activos por parte del gobierno y del Ejéército Zapatista de Liberacióón Nacional (EZLN) para buscar un acuerdo de paz permanente y saldar cuentas con el pasado, el conflicto permaneceráá en un estado inestable que llamamos ““paz armada””. Aunque esta situacióón es mucho mejor que las tensiones y agresiones del pasado, no cumple los requisitos de una sociedad plenamente democráática en que todos los ciudadanos participan en condiciones de igualdad en el proceso políítico.

History, Politics, and the Constitution: Ethnic Conflict and Constitutional Adjudication in Postcommunist Bulgaria

Slavic Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Venelin I. Ganev
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Socialist Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional Court ◽  
Constitutional Adjudication

Infamously, the 1991 Bulgarian Constitution contains a provision banning political parties “formed on an ethnic basis.” In the early 1990s, the neo-communist Bulgarian Socialist Party invoked this provision when it asked the country's Constitutional Court to declare unconstitutional the political party of the beleaguered Turkish minority. In this article, Venelin I. Ganev analyzes the conflicting arguments presented in the course of the constitutional trial that ensued and shows how the justices’ anxieties about the possible effects of politicized ethnicity were interwoven into broader debates about the scope of the constitutional normative shift that marked the end of the communist era, about the relevance of historical memory to constitutional reasoning, and about the nature of democratic politics in a multiethnic society. Ganev also argues that the constitutional interpretation articulated by the Court has become an essential component of Bulgaria's emerging political order. More broadly, he illuminates the complexity of some of the major issues that frame the study of ethnopolitics in postcommunist eastern Europe: the varied dimensions of the “politics of remembrance“; the ambiguities of transitional justice; the dilemmas inherent in the construction of a rights-centered legality; and the challenges involved in establishing a forward-looking, pluralist system of governance.

scholarly journals The Political Stakes of Academic Research: Perspectives on Johannesburg

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivor Chipkin
Keyword(s):  
Inner City ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Research Perspectives ◽  
Shift Analysis ◽  
Demographic Shifts ◽  
The City ◽  
Political Question

Abstract:This article considers a burgeoning literature on Johannesburg from the perspective of the sorts of questions it asks about the city. There is a substantial and lively literature on questions of poverty and equality, class and race. These studies are strongly informed by the idea that the mechanisms that produce such inequalities are key to understanding the nature of Johannesburg as a city: in terms of how its economy works and how political institutions function, but also in terms of what sort of city Johannesburg is and can be. I consider sociological and economic studies of the inner city that try to account for demographic shifts in the inner city and for processes of social and physical degeneration. I review urban anthropologies of inner-city society, considering in particular new forms of social and economic organization among inner-city residents. Related to these, I discuss debates among scholars about the prospects for governing the city, paying special attention to the consequences for such readings on partnerships. I also discuss an emerging literature, critical of that above, which seeks to shift analysis of the city toward studies of culture and identity. These literatures do not simply approach the city through different disciplinary lenses (sociology or economy or anthropology or cultural studies) . They come to their studies from different normative perspectives. For some, the key political question of the day is one about social and political equality in its various forms. For others, it is about the degree to which Johannesburg (or Africa) is different from or the same as other places in the world. This paper has tried to bring to the fore the political (and not simply policy) consequences of these different views. It concludes not by seeking to reconcile these perspectives, but by suggesting a way of retaining a commitment to equality and justice while not reducing them simply to questions of economy. At stake, I argue, are questions of democratic culture and of sociability.

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