scholarly journals Foundational Moments, Representative Claims and the Ecology of Social Ignorance

2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172199563
Author(s):  
Mihaela Mihai
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
True Belief ◽  
Blind Spot ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Opinion Formation ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Political Imaginary

This article identifies a blind spot in constructivist theories of representation and their account of legitimacy in terms of the challenge posed by ecologies of social ignorance, generally and especially during foundational moments. Social ignorance is conceptualised here not merely as the absence of knowledge or true belief but as a social practice of legitimising epistemically problematic political imaginaries and the institutional systems they underpin. In dialogue with social epistemologists and phenomenologists, the article shows how representation can nurture social ignorance, despite the availability of ample opportunities for political contestation and alternative opinion formation. A permanent feature of democratic politics, this problem becomes most salient during moments of constitutional re-founding, such as regime change, post-conflict reconstruction or constitutional referenda, when representative claims can reconfigure a community’s political imaginary, rendering it more or less ignorant. The representative claims made by the Vote Leave’s key figures during the Brexit referendum campaign serve as illustration.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harald Schoen ◽  
Sigrid Roßteutscher ◽  
Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck ◽  
Bernhard Weßels ◽  
Christof Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Political Behavior ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Contextual Effects ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Voter Behavior ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Opinion Formation ◽  
Context Sensitive ◽  
Contextual Features ◽  
And Behavior

This concluding chapter summarizes the main findings of the preceding chapters in light of the model of contextual effects on voter behavior. Accordingly, the processes of communication and politicization are of key importance for contextual effects. By implication, we cannot take for granted that contextual features exert sizable effects on voters’ opinion formation and behavior in each and every case. Findings about contextual effects are also context-sensitive and thus do not lend themselves to generalization by default. These observations suggest that context plays a nuanced and conditional role in voting behavior. Exploring it further should be a focal topic of future research on political behavior and democratic politics.

Civic Duty and Political Preference Formation

2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin J. Mullinix
Keyword(s):  
Motivated Reasoning ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Opinion Formation ◽  
Preference Formation ◽  
Education Policies ◽  
Political Preference ◽  
Citizen Competence ◽  
Civic Duty ◽  
Survey Experiments ◽  
Policy Information

While a sense of civic duty has long been perceived as important for political participation, little is known about its implications for political preference formation. I argue that civic duty has salubrious effects for opinion formation by dampening partisan distortions in decision making. I theorize that a heightened sense of civic duty stimulates a motivation to form “accurate” opinions and, in doing so, diminishes the effects of partisan motivated reasoning. Using survey experiments focused on tax and education policies, I provide evidence that when civic norms are accentuated, at times, people shirk party endorsements and incorporate substantive policy information in preference formation. The implications for citizen competence and public opinion in democratic politics are discussed.

Continuidade na renovação? Ten years of multiparty politics in Mozambique: roots, evolution and stabilisation of the Frelimo–Renamo party system

2005 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-442 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanni M. Carbone
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Party System ◽  
Mutual Recognition ◽  
Essential Feature ◽  
Electoral Competition ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Political Expression ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Historical Origins

Post-conflict elections in Mozambique, held in 1994, 1999 and 2004, established a formally competitive and pluralistic system. This paper examines the country's emerging two-party system as an essential feature affecting prospects for democratic deepening and consolidation. The condition for political parties to actually help the establishment of democratic politics is their development as durable, socially rooted, country-wide effective and legitimate organisations. The paper contends that the current party system has indeed been a major instrument for political expression and for the channelling and peaceful management of conflicts. It shows how both Frelimo and Renamo – and the competition between them – have deep-seated historical origins and well-established regional roots. Yet, a number of aspects concerning the Mozambican party system negatively affect the deepening of democratic politics: the legitimacy of the party system is weakened by post-conflict polarisation and uncertain mutual recognition; the ethno-regional entrenchment of the two main parties bestows a communal connotation on electoral competition; and most importantly, the party system remains unbalanced and unevenly institutionalised, with Frelimo's disciplined and fundamentally institutionalised organisation opposed by a strongly personalistic and weakly organised Renamo, which struggles to operate within state institutions and to accommodate internal differences.

Occupation as Liberation: International Humanitarian Law and Regime Change

2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 51-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Chesterman
Keyword(s):  
Security Council ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
The United States ◽  
Military Occupation ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Un Security Council ◽  
The Law

The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 has been the subject of much discussion for its impact on the use of force outside of UN Security Council authorization. Less commented upon is the fact that the so-called “Operation Iraqi Freedom” resurrected a body of international law that had been dormant through the second half of the twentieth century: the law of military occupation. Developed at a time when war itself was not illegal, this doctrine became something of an embarrassment after the UN Charter established a broad prohibition on the use of force. Nevertheless, through the 1990s the United Nations itself had become involved in operations in Kosovo that looked distinctly like military occupation. Even the most liberal reading of the instruments governing occupation law, however, finds it hard to reconcile this law with military intervention and post-conflict occupation premised on regime change. This article first surveys the law of military occupation before briefly examining the role of the UN Security Council in post-conflict administration. It then turns to the ambiguous responsibilities accorded to the United States and Britain as occupying powers in Iraq in 2003–2004.

scholarly journals Limits of the Local: Expanding Perspectives on Literacy as a Social Practice

2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Brandt ◽  
Katie Clinton
Keyword(s):  
Social Practice ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Blind Spot ◽  
Practice Model ◽  
Local Practices ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Methodological Bias

This essay reflects on how the social practice model of literacy, an approach that defines reading and writing as situated, social practices, under-theorizes certain aspects of literacy, making it hard to account fully for its workings in local contexts. We trace this theoretical blind spot to the ways that the social practice model was formulated as a challenge to the “Great Divide” or “autonomous” models of literacy. We suggest that in rejecting a conception of literacy as a deterministic force, the revisionists critique veers too far in a reactive direction. By exaggerating the power of local contexts to define the meaning and forms that literacy takes and by under-theorizing the potentials of the technology of literacy, methodological bias and conceptual impasses are created. To open new directions for literacy research we suggest more attention be paid to the material dimensions of literacy. Drawing on the work of Bruno LaTour (1993, 1996), we seek to theorize the transcontextualized and transcontextualizing potentials of literacy = particularly its ability to travel, integrate, and endure. Finally, we propose a set of analytical constructs that treat literacy not solely as an outcome or accomplishment of local practices, but also as a participant in them. By restoring a “thing status” to literacy, we can attend to the role of literacy in human action. The logic of such a perspective suggests that understanding what literacy is doing with people in a setting is as important as understanding what people are doing with literacy in a setting.

Bahrain Anno 2017: Peace or Regime-Change?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anja Matwijkiw ◽  
Bronik Matwijkiw
Keyword(s):  
Conflict Resolution ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
Failed States ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Civil Unrest ◽  
Contentious Issue ◽  
Post Conflict

Transitional justice addresses conflicts and their resolution with the use of a conceptual and normative apparatus that captures, clarifies and, wherever possible, corrects failed states. These undermine values that derive from humanity, the conditio sine qua non for social cohesiveness. Notwithstanding, the six-year anniversary of the 2011 civil unrest in Bahrain is a reminder of the fact that post-conflict success—which entails compliance with the United Nations rule of law standards—is still a contentious issue. Thus, the national rulers’ interest in maintaining the system may continue to compete with the international stake in legitimate statehood without thereby compelling those in power to consider the constituency that primarily depends upon them for their freedom and welfare: the majority of people in Bahrain. Logically, system-conservation requires peace. Ethically, peace is problematic for the same reason. This accentuates the need for change, especially since (so-called) conflict-resolution has resulted in strict(er) law-and-order measures.

scholarly journals Political Opinion Formation as Epistemic Practice: The Hashtag Assemblage of #metwo

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 84-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Berg ◽  
Tim König ◽  
Ann-Kathrin Koster
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Politics ◽  
The Political ◽  
Topic Modelling ◽  
Opinion Formation ◽  
Epistemic Practices ◽  
Opinion Polling ◽  
Network Position ◽  
Media System ◽  
Subaltern Agency ◽  
Opinion Expression

The article contributes to the literature on the political use of hashtags. We argue that hashtag assemblages could be understood in the tradition of representing public opinion through datafication in the context of democratic politics. While traditional data-based epistemic practices like polls lead to the ‘passivation’ of citizens, in the digital constellation this tendency is currently challenged. In media like Twitter, hashtags serve as a technical operator to order the discursive fabrication of diverse publicly articulated opinions that manifest in the assemblage of tweets, algorithms and criticisms. We conceptualize such a critical public as an epistemic sensorium for dislocations based on the expression of experienced social imbalances and its political amplification. On the level of opinion formation, this constitutes a process of democratization, allowing for the expression of diverse opinions and issues even under singular hashtags. Despite this diversity, we see a strong tendency of publicly relevant actors such as news outlets to represent digital forms of opinion expression as unified movements. We argue that this tendency can partly be explained by the affordances of networked media, relating the process of objectification to the network position of the observer. We make this argument empirically plausible by applying methods of network analysis and topic modelling to a dataset of 196,987 tweets sampled via the hashtag #metwo that emerged in the German Twittersphere in the summer of 2018 and united a discourse concerned with racism and identity. In light of this data, we not only demonstrate the hashtag assemblage’s heterogeneity and potential for subaltern agency; we also make visible how hashtag assemblages as epistemic practices are inherently dynamic, distinguishing it from opinion polling through the limited observational capacities and active participation of the actors representing its claims within the hybrid media system.

Parties and Regime Change in Latin America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Gamboa
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Party System ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Democratic Institutions ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
Party System Institutionalization

The importance of political parties has been at the heart of the debate about regime and regime change. Parties are essential actors for democratic politics. They can trigger transitions from and to democracy, polarize making democracies vulnerable to breakdown, or manage conflict to protect democratic institutions. However, not all parties or party systems are equal. The levels of fragmentation, polarization, and institutionalization in any given party and/or party system are key to understanding the rise, fall, and survival of democracy. In Latin America, the literature has focused, mostly, on party and party system institutionalization. In general, scholars agree that institutionalization fosters democracy. The organizational strength and embeddedness of political parties in society and the extent to which they interact regularly in stable ways, they argue, is key to the survival of democratic politics. There are instances, however, that suggest that this relationship is more problematic than the literature assumes. In contexts of crisis, highly institutionalized parties and party systems can be slow to adjust to new groups or demands and stiffen party leaders’ ability to respond to new issues. When facing a polarizing potential autocrat, for instance, high levels of party and party system institutionalization could hurt more than help democracy. They can reduce the ability of politicians to attract moderate voters from opposing parties, hinder their capacity to counteract antisystemic trends in order to lead opposition efforts, or limit the extent to which they can reach across the aisle to build ideologically diverse prodemocratic coalitions.

scholarly journals Troubled state-building in the DR Congo: the challenge from the margins

2010 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 643-661 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis M. Tull
Keyword(s):  
Central Government ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Group ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Dr Congo ◽  
Western Province ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
The Government ◽  
Building Project

ABSTRACTThis paper examines contentious state–society and centre–periphery relations in the DR Congo and their implications for state-building. Since the 2006 post-conflict elections, the state's authority has come under fire in the western province of Bas Congo, where a politico-religious group (Bundu Dia Kongo) has emerged as a serious challenger. Enjoying huge local legitimacy, the group has articulated political grievances that the newly elected central government has violently repressed. As locally perceived, elections are a legitimising tool in the hands of the government to impose its unfettered authority in the name of the state-building project. Furthermore, and backed by donors, the Kinshasa authorities also refuse to implement a wide-ranging decentralisation reform. This has fed disenchantment about post-conflict politics in Bas Congo, boding ill for democratic politics and the prospects of state-building in the DR Congo.

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