Narratives of Politics and Leadership

2019 ◽  
pp. 274-297
Author(s):  
Shirin M. Rai ◽  
Carole Spary
Keyword(s):  
Gender Relations ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
The Public ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
Public Work

This chapter analyses whether narratives of politics and leadership that women members of Parliament employ and perform suggest that women’s precarious position within Parliament, party politics, and on the borders of the public and the private generate a vocabulary of service rather than leadership, which is seen as an appropriate characterisation of women’s public work. In order to study the subjectivation of women members of Parliament, the chapter analyses their subject narratives when they describe what they do, how others describe what they do, and how their roles are received by citizen audiences. In so doing, the chapter concludes that the subjectivation of women members of Parliament reflects, negotiates, and sometimes challenges gender relations that they encounter, perform, and sometimes defy.

Westminster Women: The Politics of Presence

2003 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joni Lovenduski ◽  
Pippa Norris
Keyword(s):  
Women Politicians ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The Public ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Testable Model

The entry of the 1997 cohort of Labour women into public life offers a test case of whether, and under what conditions, women politicians have the capacity to ‘make a substantive difference’. We outlines the theory of the politics of presence and discuss how to operationalise this in a testable model. We, use the British Representation Study survey of 1,000 national politicians (including parliamentary candidates and elected Members of Parliament) conducted in the 2001 general election. The analysis centres on the impact of gender on five scales measuring attitudes and values on issues that commonly divide British party politics. Once we control for party, there are no significant differences among women and men politicians across the value scales concerning the free market economy, Europe, and moral traditionalism. Yet on the values most directly related to women's interests – namely the affirmative action and the gender equality scales – women and men politicians differ significantly within each party, even after controlling for other common social background variables that explain attitudes, such as their age, education, and income. The conclusion considers why these findings matter for the composition of parliament, the public policy agenda and for women's roles as political leaders.

Why Politicians Are More Tolerant: Selective Recruitment and Socialization Among Political Elites in Britain, Israel, New Zealand and the United States

1993 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Sullivan ◽  
Pat Walsh ◽  
Michal Shamir ◽  
David G. Barnum ◽  
James L. Gibson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Personal Characteristics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Personality Characteristics ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Political Tolerance ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Public ◽  
Members Of Parliament

In this article, we present data showing that national legislators are more tolerant than the public in Britain, Israel, New Zealand and the United States. Two explanations for this phenomenon are presented and assessed. The first is the selective recruitment of Members of Parliament, Knesset and Congress from among those in the electorate whose demographic, ideological and personality characteristics predispose them to be tolerant. Although this process does operate in all four countries, it is insufficient to explain all of the differences in tolerance between elites and the public in at least three countries. The second explanation relies on a process of explicitly political socialization, leading to differences in tolerance between elites and their public that transcend individual-level, personal characteristics. Relying on our analysis of political tolerance among legislators in the four countries, we suggest how this process of political socialization may be operating.

scholarly journals Considering Power in Community-Based Research: Shifting Toward New Pedagogical Approaches with a 'Public Work for Public Things' Framework

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Haarman ◽  
Patrick M Green
Keyword(s):  
Service Learning ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Power Differential ◽  
Community Based Research ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Work ◽  
Community Based Learning ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Service Learning Pedagogy ◽  
The Voice

One of the fundamental questions of power in the pedagogy of community-based research (CBR) is who gets to decide what is research worthy and what is the focus of CBR questions? The reality of the power imbalance in community-based research and learning is often reflective of a systemic disengagement with the broader community. Even when instructors and administrators are intentional in how they solicit feedback or think through the impact of their work, they may not know the neighbourhood. Prioritising the voice of community partners does not provide a simple solution, as the individuals we work with to organise community-based learning opportunities may not be residents of the neighbourhood. This article adopts a theory-building approach to this crucial question. Building on the work of Boyte (2014) and Honig (2017), community-based research is reoriented as ‘public work for public things’ (Haarman 2020). After establishing the ‘public work for public things’ framework, the article explores how this new framework impacts collaborative research by addressing the power differential and creating new lines of inquiry – specifically the practice of ‘elicitation of concerns’. Through the lens of critical service-learning pedagogy (Mitchell 2008) and a practitioner-scholar framework (Lytle 2008; Ravitch 2013; Salipante & Aram 2003), we then interrogate two community-based research courses we have recently taught, examining how a ‘public work for public things’ approach would have altered the course and its methods.

scholarly journals Keeping an Eye on the People: Who Has Access to MPs on Twitter?

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niels Spierings ◽  
Kristof Jacobs ◽  
Nik Linders
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
The Public ◽  
Organized Interests ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
The People ◽  
Ordinary Citizens

Twitter is credited for allowing ordinary citizens to communicate with politicians directly. Yet few studies show who has access to politicians and whom politicians engage with, particularly outside campaign times. Here, we analyze the connection between the public and members of parliament (MPs) on Twitter in the Netherlands in-between elections in 2016. We examine over 60,000 accounts that MPs themselves befriended or that @-mentioned MPs. This shows that many lay citizens contact MPs via Twitter, yet MPs respond more to elite accounts (media, other politicians, organized interests,…), populist MPs are @-mentioned most but seem least interested in connecting and engaging with “the” people, and top MPs draw more attention but hardly engage—backbenchers are less contacted but engage more.

Lacking conviction: Inquiries and trials after Bristol

2019 ◽  
pp. 73-97
Author(s):  
Simon Peplow
Keyword(s):  
Party Politics ◽  
Local People ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Inquiry ◽  
The City

This chapter charts the divided response to the St Pauls disturbance, through rejected appeals for a public inquiry and the authorities’ alternative reaction, which attempted to divert attention onto law and order and away from governmental policies. There was a clear division of local attitudes between moderates, who desired the societal legitimisation of a public inquiry, and radical or younger groups, more likely to have been involved in disturbances, who believed it would be a diversion or ‘whitewash’. Other government measures that were implemented – such as select committees turning their focus to the city – were thus boycotted by various groups, who thought their attendance would imply satisfaction with this limited response; similarly, attempted left-wing inquiries were snubbed by local people who rejected attempts to introduce party politics. This chapter lastly examines failed court trials to convict twelve locals under the serious charge of riotous assembly; influenced by criticism directed towards Bristol police for their temporary withdrawal during the disorder, authorities continued their focus upon law and order to the detriment of wider social or political issues, attempting to obtain criminal sentences to reassure the public and deter future violence.

Woolf, Weeping Women, and the European mater dolorosa

2020 ◽  
pp. 143-158
Author(s):  
Gill Lowe
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
The Public ◽  
War Photography ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Public Nature ◽  
Public Work ◽  
Film And Video

The gendered maxim ‘men must work and women must weep’ comes from Charles Kingsley's 1851 ballad 'The Three Fishers'. Virginia Woolf appropriated 'Women Must Weep' for early version of Three Guineas, serialised in The Atlantic Monthly (1938). This chapter argues that the public nature of Woolf’s polemical anti-fascist essay may, concurrently, be read as a more intimate document about personal grief and grievance. For Woolf her sister, Vanessa Bell, was the weeping woman, devastated by the tragic death in 1937 of Julian Bell in the Spanish Civil War. Duncan Grant drafted posters (reproduced here) to raise money for refugee Spanish children, employing the trope of mothers cradling babies. Woolf’s contemporary, the German artist Käthe Kollwitz, a mother bereaved twice by war, repeated the poignant pietà image in numerous anti-war pieces. Picasso, inspired by Dora Maar whom he regarded privately as ‘the weeping woman’, created sixty mater dolorosa works in preparation for his immense elegiac public work, ‘Guernica’ (1937). The chapter traces the powerful aesthetic of the sorrowful mother as a European anti-war figure. It concludes by considering how this iconography has been used cross-culturally and trans-historically. The pietà has been gender-flipped, adapted and plagiarised in war photography, murals, comic books, manga, fashion, film and video.

Worship

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Allen
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The Public ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
The People ◽  
Public Work ◽  
The Church

In Catholic argot, the various rites and rituals of the Church are known as “liturgies,” from the ancient Greek term leitourgia, meaning “work,” referring to the public work of the state done on behalf of the people. The term was used in Greco-Roman...

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