Who Are the Educators and How Can We Help Them?

Author(s):  
Arthur Lupia

From this point of the book forward, I ask you to think about the challenges described in chapter 1 from a civic educator’s perspec­tive. That is, consider the perspective of a person who wants to increase other people’s knowledge about politics or their competence at a politically relevant task. With that perspective in mind, I first convey a few important facts about civic educators and their aspirations. Next, I present a plan for helping many of them achieve these aspirations more effectively. The plan covers the book’s main themes and offers a chapter-by-chapter description of what’s ahead. Let’s start with a brief discussion of “ignorance”—a topic that motivates many people to become civic educators. According to numerous surveys and news reports, the mass public appears to know very little about politics, government, and policy. When pollsters ask even simple questions on any of these topics, many people fail to give correct answers. For example, while nearly every adult American can name the president of the United States, many cannot recall the names of their US senators. Millions cannot easily remember which political party holds a majority of seats in the US House of Representatives or the US Senate. Many Americans give incorrect answers when asked to identify the chief justice of the United States by name. They do the same when asked about basic aspects of the US Constitution. Many provide incorrect answers to questions about who leads our nation’s closest international allies, such as the United Kingdom and Israel. Most seem not to know basic facts about our major trading partners, such as Canada and China. People provide incorrect answers or no answers at all to survey questions about all kinds of policies and politics. In “The Star Spangled Banner,” America is “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” but when asked to answer fact-based questions about policy and politics, Americans appear to be, as filmmaker Michael Moore (2010) put it, “a society of ignorant and illiterate people.”

Significance Trump’s controversial Middle East policy decisions have met bipartisan criticism in the US Senate, but in the House of Representatives -- where the influence of the party grassroots is more keenly felt -- Republican congressmen have staunchly backed the president. There are growing partisan differences towards other countries, a notable shift from previous decades when party was not a clear indicator for preference. This may have a major impact on Washington’s future relationship with the Middle East. Impacts Foreign lobbying efforts in Washington will increasingly be targeted on a partisan basis. Russian foreign policy, not beholden to the vagaries of democracy, may become more influential in the Middle East. The EU could seek to play a stronger, independent regional role to replace the United States.


Author(s):  
Halyna Shchyhelska

2018 marks the 100th anniversary of the proclamation of Ukrainian independence. OnJanuary 22, 1918, the Ukrainian People’s Republic proclaimed its independence by adopting the IV Universal of the Ukrainian Central Rada, although this significant event was «wiped out» from the public consciousness on the territory of Ukraine during the years of the Soviet totalitarian regime. At the same time, January 22 was a crucial event for the Ukrainian diaspora in the USA. This article examines how American Ukrainians interacted with the USA Government institutions regarding the celebration and recognition of the Ukrainian Independence day on January 22. The attention is focused on the activities of ethnic Ukrainians in the United States, directed at the organization of the special celebration of the Ukrainian Independence anniversaries in the US Congress and cities. Drawing from the diaspora press and Congressional Records, this article argues that many members of Congress participated in the observed celebration and expressed kind feelings to the Ukrainian people, recognised their fight for freedom, during the House of Representatives and Senate sessions. Several Congressmen submitted the resolutions in the US Congress urging the President of United States to designate January 22 as «Ukrainian lndependence Day». January 22 was proclaimed Ukrainian Day by the governors of fifteen States and mayors of many cities. Keywords: January 22, Ukrainian independence day, Ukrainian diaspora, USA, interaction, Congress


Author(s):  
Sergey Polischuk

The article examines the main political events that took place in the United States from the controversial election results to the tragic events on Capitol Hill for Trump supporters, which led to human casualties, finally untied the hands of the Democrats and allowed them to bury all the democratic values that America has taught the whole world since the adoption of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights by the founding fathers of the state.


2006 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 243-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Muirhead

Abstract The articulated foreign economic policy of the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker following its election in June 1957 was to redirect trade away from the United States and toward the United Kingdom. This policy reflected Diefenbaker's almost religious attachment to the Commonwealth and to Britain, as well as his abiding suspicion of continentalism. However, from these brave beginnings, Conservative trade policy ended up pretty much where the Liberals had been before their 1957 defeat-increasingly reliant on the US market for Canada's domestic prosperity. This was a result partly of the normal development of trade between the two North American countries, but it also reflected Diefenbaker's growing realisation of the market differences between Canada and the United Kingdom, and the impossibility of enhancing the flow of Canadian exports to Britain.


Author(s):  
D.V. Shram ◽  

The article is devoted to the antimonopoly regulation of IT giants` activities. The author presents an overview of the main trends in foreign and Russian legislation in this area. The problems the antimonopoly regulation of digital markets faces are the following: the complexity of determining the criteria for the dominant position of economic entities in the digital economy and the criteria for assessing the economic concentration in the commodity digital markets; the identification and suppression of cartels; the relationship between competition law and intellectual property rights in the digital age. Some aspects of these problems are considered through the prism of the main trends in the antimonopoly policy in the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Russia. The investigation findings of the USA House of Representatives Antitrust Subcommittee against Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook are presented. The author justifies the need to separate them, which requires the adoption of appropriate amendments to the antimonopoly legislation. The article analyzes the draft law of the European Commission on the regulation of digital markets – Digital Markets Act, reveals the criteria for classifying IT companies as «gatekeepers», and notes the specific approaches to antimonopoly regulation in the UK and the US. The article describes the concepts «digital platform» and «network effects», presented in the «fifth antimonopoly package of amendments», developed in 2018 by the Federal Antimonopoly Service of the Russian Federation, and gives an overview of the comments of the Ministry of Economic Development regarding these concepts wording in the text of the draft law, which formed the basis for the negative conclusion of the regulator. It is concluded that in the context of the digital markets’ globalization, there is a need for the international legal nature antitrust norms formation, since regional legislation obviously cannot cope with the monopolistic activities of IT giants.


2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-256
Author(s):  
Karolina Palka

This article is about the limits of the right to free speech. The first section provides a brief introduction to this topic, primarily in the context of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The second section describes the case of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, which was fundamental to the topic of this paper because the United States Supreme Court created the so-called "fighting words" doctrine based on it. In the next two sections, two court cases are presented that perfectly demonstrate the limits of the right to free speech in the United States: Snyder v. Phelps and Village of Skokie v. National Socialist Party of America. The fifth part shows the right to freedom of speech in the context of Polish civil, criminal, and constitutional law, as well as acts of international law binding on Poland. The last part is a short summary.


Author(s):  
David Cannadine

Sir John Plumb was a commanding figure, both within academe and also far beyond. He was as much read in the United States as in the United Kingdom; he was a great enabler, patron, fixer and entrepreneur; he belonged to the smart social set both in Mayfair and Manhattan; a race horse was named after him in England and the stars and the stripes were once flown above the US Capitol in his honour; and he appeared, thinly disguised but inadequately depicted, in the fiction of Angus Wilson, William Cooper and C. P. Snow. Yet one important aspect of Plumb's career has been repeatedly ignored and overlooked: for while his life was an unusually long one, his productive period as a significant historian was surprisingly, almost indecently, brief.


Author(s):  
Christian Freudlsperger

The first of the three case studies looks at the United States. It finds that while the states’ opportunities for individual exit have remained unconstrained in the non-coercive field of procurement in which federal pre-emption is not an option, no serious attempts have been made to systematically increase their voice. This is due, firstly, to the mechanics of the US senate-type system of multilevel representation and, secondly, to the lack of an institutionalized procedure of vertical collaboration in a policy environment characterized by ‘coercive federalism’. Persisting barriers in the internal market and a widespread politicization of international procurement liberalization as a threat to state sovereignty have further contributed to constituent units’ high propensity to seek exit from international constraints. Ultimately, the US case highlights the limits of self-rule systems in organizing trade openness across multiple levels of government. Endowing the states with little voice in polity-wide policy-making, the US model shows a marked tendency to breed resistance to internationally driven adaptational pressures among constituent units. As self-rule systems are built on a delineation of central and subcentral spheres of competence, they generally tend to lack the institutional means and ideational underpinnings to effectively organize collaborative power-sharing by establishing patterns of shared rule.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 173-184
Author(s):  
Calum Watt

Ten years on from the 2008 global financial crisis, this article sets in dialogue two French treatments – by the novelist Mathieu Larnaudie and the philosopher Bernard Stiegler – of footage of the 2008 testimony of Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The article introduces and compares the concepts of ‘effondrement’ and ‘prolétarisation’ developed by the two writers in relation to the Greenspan hearing, and analyses how both understand the question of ideology as it emerges in the hearing. Informed by interviews conducted by the author with Larnaudie and Stiegler, the piece concludes by discussing the notion common to both writers that Greenspan is a ‘saint’ of the crisis.


2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 645-667
Author(s):  
Vicki C Jackson

Aspects of an entrenched constitution that were essential parts of founding compromises, and justified as necessary when a constitution was first adopted, may become less justifiable over time. Is this the case with respect to the structure of the United States Senate? The US Senate is hardwired in the Constitution to consist of an equal number of Senators from each state—the smallest of which currently has about 585,000 residents, and the largest of which has about 39.29 million. As this essay explains, over time, as population inequalities among states have grown larger, so too has the disproportionate voting power of smaller-population states in the national Senate. As a result of the ‘one-person, one-vote’ decisions of the 1960s that applied to both houses of state legislatures, each state legislature now is arguably more representative of its state population than the US Congress is of the US population. The ‘democratic deficit’ of the Senate, compared to state legislative bodies, also affects presidential (as compared to gubernatorial) elections. When founding compromises deeply entrenched in a constitution develop harder-to-justify consequences, should constitutional interpretation change responsively? Possible implications of the ‘democratic’ difference between the national and the state legislatures for US federalism doctrine are explored, especially with respect to the ‘pre-emption’ doctrine. Finally, the essay briefly considers the possibilities of federalism for addressing longer term issues of representation, polarisation and sustaining a single nation.


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