scholarly journals The Changes of Forms of Public Contestation in PostDemocracy

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 134-143
Author(s):  
Roman V. Savenkov
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Funding ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Collective Actions ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Basic Institution ◽  
The Cost

The paper discusses the main trends in changing forms of political contestation of citizens in contemporary competitive and non-competitive political regimes. Social transformations led to the destruction of traditional social groups capable of joint political action. Along with social changes in the political sphere, the nature of the basic institution of political contestation - political parties - has changed, acting as political opposition. Contemporary political party reduces the scale of citizen involvement in political action, increasing the cost of political advertising, thereby becoming dependent on influential economic interest groups and state funding. The weakening of the political pressure of society through institutionalized channels led to the disappointment of the democratic system as a whole. Citizens in the contemporary world increasingly prefer noninstitutionalized and illegitimate forms of political action. However, observations of dispute practices in North Africa, the Middle East, Spain, the United States, France, and Russia in the 2010s demonstrate that the dominant position of institutional channels of influence on political and public decisions has been maintained. New opportunities of the Internet for organizing collective actions of citizens have not led to the formation of a new identity of dissatisfied people and the consolidation of effective online deliberation practices.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Lacombe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Financial Resources ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Rifle Association ◽  
Gun Policy ◽  
Competitive Shooting ◽  
Military Preparedness

This chapter focuses on the political power of the National Rifle Association (NRA), and asks the questions: What is the source of its power? How does it operate? How has it shaped gun policy and the broader political system? It looks beyond the NRA's use of financial resources and turns instead to what the chapter describes as ideational resources: the identity and ideology it cultivates among its members, which have enabled it to build an active, engaged, and powerful constituency. The chapter contends that the NRA has played a central role in driving the political outlooks and political activity of its supporters — activity that has had both direct and indirect influence on federal gun policy in the United States. Even from its earliest days as a relatively small organization dedicated to marksmanship, competitive shooting, and military preparedness, the NRA cultivated a distinct worldview around guns — framing gun ownership as an identity that was tied to a broader, gun-centric political ideology — and mobilized its members into political action on behalf of its agenda. The chapter analyzes how a group can construct an identity and an ideology, and what happens when it aligns these behind a single party.

Religious Traditions in Politics: Judaism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth D. Wald
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Political Opportunity Structure ◽  
Political Opportunity ◽  
Opportunity Structure ◽  
Playing Field

Lacking sovereignty, a well-developed theology of politics, and a central organizing mechanism, the Jewish political experience is unique among the three Abrahamic faiths. Apart from research on the political content implicit in Jewish scriptures, there has been little scholarship on what Jews do when they engage in political action. Using a contextual framework, this article examines the politics of Jews by reviewing both single-country studies and the few extant cross-national analyses. In considering why Jewish political behavior differs from one place to another, political process theory and Medding’s theory of Jewish interests guide the analysis. Medding argued that Jewish politics is primarily a response to threats perceived in the political environment. The ability of Jewish communities to resist such threats depends largely on the rules governing the political environment, the political opportunity structure. Where Jews are a majority and control the rules, as in the state of Israel, they have adopted a regime that prioritizes the Jewish character of the state against perceived threats from the country’s Arab citizens. Where Jews are a minority, as in the United States, their ability to control the political environment is limited. However, the political rules of the game embodied in the U.S. Constitution have levelled the playing field to the advantage of religious minorities like Jews. Specifically, by rejecting “blood and soil” citizenship and denying the religious character of the state, those rules provide Jews and other minorities a valuable resource and access to sympathetic allies in the political system. Hence American Jews have been able to counter what they perceive as the major threat to their political interests—a replacement of the secular state by a confessional regime. Focusing on threats, the political opportunity structure, and political context helps to anchor Jewish political studies in research on ethnic political cohesion and to bring such research into the scholarly mainstream.

The Deccan Riots of 1875

1965 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 613-635 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ravinder Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Special Interest ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
The Political ◽  
Western India ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Administrative Policy ◽  
British Rule ◽  
The Social

The Deccan Riots of 1875 highlight the social transformations brought about in rural Maharashtra in western India during the first five decades of British rule. The riots are of special interest to the social historian since they hinged upon relations between two important and well defined rural social groups, namely, the cultivators and the moneylenders. This paper will focus on the social changes which precipitated this conflict. I shall also attempt to link these changes with the social ideals and the political objectives which inspired the new rulers of Maharashtra and determined their administrative policy.

A Signaling Model of Informative and Manipulative Political Action

1993 ◽  
Vol 87 (2) ◽  
pp. 319-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Lohmann
Keyword(s):  
Private Information ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Critical Threshold ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Leader ◽  
Signaling Model ◽  
Free Rider Problem ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Taking Action

I develop a signaling model of mass political action. I establish that rational, self-interested individuals may have incentives to engage in costly political action despite a free-rider problem. Their political actions are informative for a political leader who rationally takes a cue from the size of the protest movement. However, some information is trapped in extremist and rationally apathetic pockets of the society. Some extremists take political action regardless of their private information, to manipulate the political leader's decision. Others abstain hoping to benefit if the leader makes an uninformed decision. Rationally apathetic moderates abstain because, being nearly indifferent between the policy alternatives, they do not find it worthwhile to incur the cost of taking action. Only activist moderates take informative political action. The political leader discounts the observed turnout for extremist political action and shifts policy if the estimated number of activist moderates exceeds a critical threshold.

scholarly journals Socially Induced Changes in Legal Terminology

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Matulewska
Keyword(s):  
Technological Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Language Usage ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Pertinent Literature ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Research Material ◽  
Induced Changes

Abstract The author intends to present evolutionary and revolutionary changes in legal terminology. Legal terminology changes as a result of language usage, technological development, political and social changes and even economy reasons. The following research methods have been applied: the terminological analysis of the research material (empirical observation, analysis of comparable texts and parametric approach to legal terminology comparison) and the analysis of pertinent literature. The research material included legislation from the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada and Australia. The author focuses on terminological changes resulting from social transformations. Selected terms and their transformation in respect to meaning and form are elaborated on in the paper. Finally, the author draws conclusions that translation of such terminology should aim at communication precision and many of them may be false friends in interlingual communication.

scholarly journals Trans* Identities and Politics: Repertoires of Action, Political Cleavages, and Emerging Coalitions

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-311
Author(s):  
Gustavo Santos Elpes
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Gender Diversity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Situated Knowledge ◽  
Collective Actions ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Collective Actors ◽  
Embodied Action ◽  
New Strategies

The current political landscape provides collective actors with new strategies to articulate individual interests, hardships, identities, critiques, and solutions, engage with social mobilisation’s conflictual demands, and move towards sustainable practices of collective actions. This article will focus on theoretical challenges surrounding the political action and organization of feminist and trans* identities in order to provide situated knowledge about the dynamics of the transfeminist activism in the Madrilenian geopolitical context. Throughout LGBT*Q+ activists’ integrated forms of doing politics along different axes of oppression (e.g., class, migration, racialisation, disability, ethnicity, gender diversity), new visibility regimes are trying to expand the repertoires of action by nurturing emerging coalitions and agencies among a variety of hybrid political subjects. This article thus argues that trans* politics, through nonbinary activism and a new intersectional feminist praxis, may expand the political subject of feminism and our understanding of identity politics and embodied action.

Conclusion: Political Philosophy and Political Change

2019 ◽  
pp. 265-278
Author(s):  
Burke A. Hendrix
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Aboriginal People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Aboriginal Peoples ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Opportunity Structures ◽  
Ethical Choices ◽  
Political Opportunity Structures ◽  
Political Choices

The political environment to which Aboriginal people must respond has been constructed by others, and it does not respond easily or quickly to deliberative calls for change. Rather, it must be navigated instead, despite the difficulties and discomfort associated with doing so. The concluding chapter revisits the central claims of the book as a whole, arguing for the importance of careful normative analysis where the political choices of disadvantaged political actors are involved. It defends the importance of strongly contextualized work on the ethics of political action by groups facing particular patterns of persistent injustice and responding to particular political opportunity structures, while recommending nuanced comparative work on the ethical choices available to groups facing different patterns of injustice than those experienced by Aboriginal peoples (e.g., African Americans in the United States).

Strategies of Justice

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Burke A. Hendrix
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Aboriginal Peoples ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Political Choices

Political theorists often imagine themselves as political architects, asking what an ideal set of laws or social structures might look like. Yet persistent injustices can endure for decades or even centuries despite such ideal theorizing. In circumstances of this kind, it is essential for political theorists to think carefully about the political choices normatively available to those who directly face persistent injustices and seek to change them. The book focuses on the claims of Aboriginal peoples to better treatment from the United States and Canada. The book investigates two intertwined issues: the kinds of moral permissions that those facing persistent injustice have when they act politically, and the kinds of transformations that political action may bring about in those who undertake it. The book argues for normative permissions to speak untruth to power; to circumvent or nullify existing law; to give primary attention to protecting one’s own community first; and to engage in political experimentation that reshapes future generations. The book argues that, when carefully used, these permissions may help political actors to avoid co-optation and self-delusion. At the same time, divisions of labor between those who grapple most closely with state institutions and those who keep their distance may be necessary to facilitate escape from persistent injustice over the long term.

A Mighty Power against the Cost of Living: Canadian Housewives Organize in the 1930s

2010 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Guard
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Domestic Roles

AbstractConsumer activists organizing in the 1930s against rising milk prices demonstrated the power of a strong grassroots movement to enlarge prevailing understandings of the political and to wring responses from an unwilling state. Their maternalism, combined with milk's emotional, social, and political meanings, attracted broad popular support and deflected criticism from the dairy industry, hostile public officials, and anticommunists. Their campaign for affordable milk became a synecdoche for broader demands that the state restrain business in the interests of consumers and protect ordinary people from the harsh injustices of the Depression. After winning immediate concessions, the Toronto Housewives Association failed to achieve their long-term goals, but their impact was nonetheless significant. Their campaign fueled and informed public debates about the political economy of food and government's responsibilities to protect citizens, pushing socialist policies onto the political agenda under the cover of maternalism. Participation in Housewives' campaigns transformed powerless victims into effective political actors. Housewife-activists challenged prevailing notions of normative feminine behavior, creating social space for ordinary women acting within their domestic roles to engage in direct political action.

scholarly journals Regrounding Critical Theory: Lenin on Imperialism, Nationalism, and Strategy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Pahnke
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dual Nature ◽  
Political Right

Abstract We live at a time of heightened nationalism on the political right and left, from the mobilization of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States and Europe, to promoting Palestinian liberation. This article, focusing on Lenin's work concerning imperialism, shows the importance, yet shortcomings of foregrounding the nation in calling for social transformation. The piece reads Lenin's contributions on imperialism, highlighting his understanding of strategy and the dual nature of nationalism, in light of debates within Critical Theory more generally. As I argue, Lenin offers insights for Critical Theorists, particularly on the place of nationalism within transformative political projects, as well as on the dynamics of capitalist accumulation and territorial acquisition. Lenin's work on imperialism draws our attention to the idea that only by mobilizing beyond the state/society binary—which many Critical Theorists and activists reify, sometimes unintentionally—can we explore the nature of emancipatory political action.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document