Democratic Arena Research Articles

Between Cooptation and Surveillance: Varieties of Civic Monitoring in Spain

Civic monitoring is a democratic practice that allows citizens to hold accountable powerholders and enhance the accountability of democratic systems. To date, democratic theorists and collective action scholars have stressed the relevance of monitoring by NGOs, social movement organizations, and alternative media to increase civil society’s watchdog potential, filter publicly relevant information, and ensure the inclusion of new voices and the representation of new instances in democratic arenas. However, little is known about how such diverse collective actors leverage monitoring practices, particularly in interaction with monitored actors and their constituencies. Focusing on the Spanish case (2011-2021), often considered a prominent example of monitory democracy, the study employs Situational Analysis and builds on semi-structured interviews and document analysis to discuss differences within the Spanish monitoring field. The results contribute to ongoing discussions on the hybridization of civic efforts and classifications of civic monitoring initiatives.

Disenfranchisement as Distancing from Offenders?

This paper questions the notion that states may be justified in denying certain prisoners the right to vote as a means of distancing themselves from particularly grave wrongs. Christopher Bennett has recently defended prisoner disenfranchisement as a fair and deserved retributive punishment for crimes, and Mary Sigler and Andrew Altman have argued in favor of prisoner disenfranchisement as a civil restriction. All three proponents agree that disenfranchisement should be reserved for those guilty of the most serious offenses. I assert that it is inappropriate to treat citizens in this manner and will advocate for the right to vote, whether disenfranchisement is perceived as a form of punishment or as a civil measure. I will present two arguments against disenfranchisement as it impacts both citizens and political community at large. First, it excludes citizens from the democratic arena and restricts the opportunity to reintegrate offenders into the political community. While a criminal sentence is intended to be burdensome, the burden associated with disenfranchisement extends beyond the appropriate penal scope.

Analyzing People's Silence Power and the Incumbent Local Party Regime in Aceh Province Regional Head Elections in 2017

Simultaneous regional head elections aim to properly build democratization at the local level. It is related to the level of participation and the power relations that result from the principle implementation of people's sovereignty. Election results improve people's social, political, and economic circumstances. The purpose of this research is to determine why political dynamics of local and national parties occurred in the 2017 post-conflict local election in Aceh, as well as the influence of political dynamics of local and national parties on the Aceh post-conflict local election in 2017. This study was conducted in Aceh Province and used a descriptive qualitative research method. Primary data is obtained from the first source in the form of writing or written notes, whereas secondary data is obtained from existing sources. Basically, a political battle in general elections or regional head elections is a natural thing, the most important thing is how each candidate and his supporters are mature. This means giving political lessons that in a fight there must be a winner. Later when whoever wins will not influence the people not to stay away from the leader who becomes the winner. The journey of democracy teaches the winners in the sense that all people will honestly and fairly participate, even if they don't support it at first. What's more, we see that the battles that took place were dominated by former combatants of the Free Aceh Movement, who incidentally were comrades-in-arms. We can see the battle this time around in the democratic arena under the auspices of the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia which has become a commitment between the Free Aceh Movement and the Republic of Indonesia. The response is that whoever our winners are still brothers, in the future we can join hands hand in hand to create prosperity and peace in Aceh. Keywords: Political Information, Positioning Strategy, Silence Power, Hegemony, and Regional Head Elections

Banging on Closed Doors or Beating the Drum? Social Movements’ Interpretations of Opportunities in Legal Appeal Processes

ABSTRACT Social movements and interest groups in Europe are increasingly using litigation as a form of legal mobilization in their campaigns. Current literature often depicts this as a result of favourable opportunities in movements’ legal contexts, with activists responding to rising prospects of legal success. This comparative study of fifteen cases of mobilizations against mineral exploration projects in Sweden explores a puzzle in relation to this view: Why do movements frequently litigate even when the prospects of legal success seem non-existent? Using frame analysis within a multi-institutional politics (MIP) approach, this study explores how movements interpret opportunities in appeal processes linked to mineral exploration projects. While confirming that the prospect of legal success is a relevant motivator in several cases, the results also indicate that some movements interpret the court as a democratic arena, presenting opportunities to mobilize adherents and signal popular resistance to policy makers and extractive companies. These diverging interpretations of the court are tentatively connected to organizational needs for mobilizing adherents, previous experiences of litigating and available institutional logics in society. Building upon the MIP approach, this study introduces the idea that the democratic understanding of the appeal process signifies a ‘creative infringement’. A democratic institutional logic is imported into the court, an arena typically dominated by an institutional legal-bureaucratic logic. Movements’ increasing use of litigation may thus be driven not only by goals of legal success, but also by creative reinterpretations of legal processes as arenas in which goals of popular participation and democracy may be achieved.

Civic Friendship and Partisanship

ABSTRACT Politics and friendship connect to one another in complex and often conflicting ways. Some theorists, following a particular reading of Aristotle, regard civic friendship between citizens as necessary for, even prior to, justice. By contrast, those political friendships that are grounded in shared party affiliations are often taken as signs of partiality and factionalism, as evidence of a lack of amity between those in and those out of the party. In this paper, I explain and argue for productive compatibility between these two forms of political friendship: Trying to rid politics of partisanship is not only not a prerequisite for civic friendship, but serves to undermine one of the mechanisms through which different meanings of civic friendship are articulated. At its best, partisanship provides an associational space within which different meanings of civic friendship can be given concrete, programmatic form. These programmes then compete with other programmes – understood as expressing, amongst other things, different articulations of civic friendship – in wider democratic arenas. Partisanship then, correctly understood and practiced, offers means whereby contests over different meanings of civic friendship can be navigated and given a determinate form.

A Shift Towards Digital and Participatory Performance Practice Post-Pandemic

This perspective analyses and reflects upon the experience of conceiving, curating and participating in Bodies:On:Live – Magdalena:On:Line, the first online multi-platform Magdalena Festival, bringing together digitally competent artists with creative roots in the immateriality of the internet, in dialogue about current shifts in performance making with performers, writers, and directors declaring their uneasiness towards online adaptations of live work. As part of the global reaction to the standstill brought about by the Covid pandemic, we argue that shifts in practice for women in contemporary theatre associated with the Magdalena network – whether as an attempt for immediate artistic survival or a conscious experimental choice – were not exclusively determined by the available sharing of technical knowledge, or by the need to increase awareness of the digital medium in order to gain experience of different working modalities, but served a participatory and social purpose. These conditions were surfacing due to the digital space manifesting as a specific format of gathering through the Zoom windows and other platforms, which framed the encounters within a democratic performance arena, making the boundaries between participation and spectatorship porous. Therefore, the shift provoked by the festival not only pertains to the aesthetic sphere, but it is dynamically and organically geared towards the recognition of new working contexts arising from the unsettling experience of ‘disembodiment’ – as an ontological paradox of the original in-person Magdalena festival – and the embedded argument of the creative use of new technologies for a more sustainable and accessible future of performance making, both live and digital. 

Is Constructive Engagement Online a Lost Cause? Toxic Outrage in Online User Comments Across Democratic Political Systems and Discussion Arenas

This study is the first to simultaneously investigate country-level and platform-related context factors of toxic outrage, that is, destructive incivility, in online discussions. It compares user comments on the public role of religion and secularism from 2015/16 in four democracies (Australia, United States, Germany, Switzerland) and four discussion arenas on three platforms (News websites, Facebook, Twitter). A novel automated content analysis ( N = 1,236,551) combines LIWC dictionaries with machine learning. The level of toxic outrage is higher in majoritarian than in consensus-oriented democracies and in arenas that afford plural, issue-driven rather than like-minded, preference-driven debates. Yet, toxic outrage is lower in forums that tend to separate public and private conversations than in those that collapse varying contexts. This suggests that user-generated discussions flourish in environments that incentivize actors to strive for compromise, put relevant issues center stage and make room for public debate at a relative distance from purely social conversation.

Refurbishing Democracy: More Direct, More Deliberative, and Younger

AbstractWhat would it mean to (better) integrate children into democratic life? This essay attempts to dispel some potential reservations and explore the grounds for including children in deliberative and/or electoral processes. Across the world, public satisfaction with democracy is at historic lows, with young people particularly dissatisfied, both in absolute terms and relative to older cohorts at the same age. The situation is not terminal; the overall number of democracies has declined slightly over the past two decades, but the world’s most established democracies have stayed largely intact and are relatively stable. That said, to be successful in the long term, a political system must be seen to be working, and if people’s dissatisfaction with democracy is allowed to fester, their belief and trust in it will drain away. To ensure this does not happen, (representative) democracy—which, in institutional terms, has remained largely unchanged for the past 50–100 years—will need to renew itself. This could take various forms. But one option—and the focus of this essay—is to bring young people or children into the democratic arena, and deliberative democratic processes, in particular.

An Imperfect Legacy

An Imperfect Legacy

Disrupting Dialogue? The Participatory Urban Governance of Far-Right Contestations in Cottbus

This article investigates how municipal governments negotiate far-right contestations through the format of citizens’ dialogues and contemplates to what extent they disrupt established assumptions about participatory urban governance. In doing so, I want to contribute to emerging scholarship on reactionary responses to migration-led societal transformations in cities via scrutinising their effects on institutional change in participatory practices. Building on participatory urban governance literature and studies on the far right in the social sciences, I argue that inviting far-right articulations into the democratic arena of participation serves to normalise authoritarian and racist positions, as the far right’s demand for more direct involvement of ‘the people’ is expressed in reactionary terms. I will show how this applies to two prominent notions of participation in the literature, namely, agonistic and communicative approaches. This argument is developed through an explorative case study of two neighbourhood-based citizens’ dialogues in Cottbus, East Germany, which the municipal government initiated in response to local far-right rallies. While a careful reading of these forums reveals productive potentials when the issue of international migration is untangled from context-specific, socio-spatial problems in the neighbourhoods, my analysis also shows how the municipality’s negotiation of far-right contestations within the citizens’ dialogues serves to legitimise far-right ideology. I find that to negotiate today’s societal polarisation, municipal authorities need to rethink local participatory institutions by disentangling these complex dynamics and reject far-right contestations, while designing dialogues for democratic and emancipatory learning.

Zoom in on Dry Joy—Dissensus, Agonism and Democracy in Art Education

Literature on art education often emphasizes dialogue as a preferred approach and as a way of practicing democratic education in museums and galleries. Dialogue-based tours in such contexts are often characterized by a sense of harmony and agreement. In contrast, this article discusses the democratic aspect and political potentiality when dissensus and agonism are used as central educational strategies. The point of departure for the discussion was a teaching session on the online platform Zoom with student teachers as part of their module on art and crafts at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway, in spring 2020. Artworks from the exhibition Dry Joy, in Sørlandet Art Museum, by Finnish photographer Iiu Susiraja, were the pivot point in the session. Before the lockdown caused by COVID-19, the exhibition caused intense debates. The strong reactions were particularly prevalent amongst parents whose children had witnessed the exhibition as part of a school trip. A central part of the teaching session was encouraging students to come up with and explore arguments both for and against exposure of school children to these images. This article aims to contribute to knowledge about how educational strategies that challenge consensus may enable democratic arenas beyond hegemony.

Decentralization and the governance of climate adaptation: Situating community-based planning within broader trajectories of political transformation

Decentralized, “community-based” approaches to climate adaptation are now viewed as a key strategy to assist vulnerable populations confront global climate change. While these efforts are premised on the belief that citizen participation will lead to more effective climate responses, there remains limited empirical evidence of the relationship between local democracy and climate risk reduction. This paper asks: How, and through which processes, do local institutions emerge as more substantively democratic arenas to coordinate responses to climate risk and change? And how does the character of local democratic practice, in turn, influence the effectiveness of adaptive responses? To answer these questions, the paper analyzes the implementation of India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA)—a substantial devolution of development resources to rural local governments in India—and its effects on climate risk reduction in the state of Himachal Pradesh. A primary dataset of 798 small-scale development projects in 35 villages shows that a majority of water-related interventions are helping to improve water access in the face of water stress, while benefits skew towards poorer and historically marginalized social groups. Drawing on intensive qualitative enquiry, the paper argues that these outcomes were made possible as the result of long-term political transformations in the region, which have paved the way for more inclusive — if often contested — participation in local decision-making processes. The analysis underscores the need to move beyond a narrow focus on institutional building to undertake longer-term investments in supporting more robust subnational democratic systems. The growing flow of resources dedicated to climate assistance has the potential to help drive such processes where the nascent conditions for democratic deepening are in place.

Neocons in Exile

For more than twenty-five years, starting in 1980, neoconservatives stood at the intellectual forefront of a conservative coalition that controlled the national government. Drawing inspiration from Leo Strauss’s political philosophy, neocons earned their prominent position by leading an assault on the hegemonic pluralist democratic regime. Pluralist democracy accepts ethical relativism: individuals and interest groups press their own interests and values in the democratic arena, without any interests and values being deemed inherently superior. From the array of competing interests and values, the government chooses to pursue those goals that emerge through certain established processes. While attacking pluralist democracy, neocons simultaneously advocated for a return to republican democracy, which had predominated before the 1930s. According to republican democratic theory, virtuous citizens and officials pursue the common good rather than their private interests. Thus, neocons rejected the ethical relativism that supports the pluralist democratic regime and instead championed traditional American virtues that were to direct us toward the common good. But given the election results of 2008, neoconservatives find themselves shorn of power in Congress and the executive branch. Yet, they are not completely impotent: exiled neoconservative justices will continue to control the Supreme Court for years to come. This Article explores how these justices have shaped constitutional adjudication over the previous years, and how they will do so in the future. The Article concludes by examining how progressives might confront the challenge of a largely neoconservative Court.

Behind the Comments Section: The Ethics of Digital Native News Discussions

Initially offered as a digital public sphere forum, comments sections became the preferred democratic arena for gatekeepers to encourage their readers to engage in constructive dialogue about relevant issues. However, news sites require commenters to remain civil in their interactions, which led users to seek alternative ways of commenting on the news. This article explores in-depth the contents of a sample of 98,426 user-comments collected between February–March 2019 from three major Spanish digital native newspapers: <em>ElDiario.es</em>, <em>ElEspañol.com</em>, and <em>ElConfidencial.com</em>. The main goals were to analyze whether comments in news outlets are deliberative, to assess the quality of the debate that takes place in them, and to describe their specific features. Discourse ethics were explored to determine the discussions’ impact, the language used, the acceptance of arguments, and the recognition and civility of participants. Findings reveal that comments sections in news outlets do not have a dialogic nature and that the debates have a low-quality profile. Nonetheless, the degree of mutual respect in interaction is acceptable, with slightly observed levels of incivility. Finally, the data suggest that the focused comments are higher on social media and that memes and emojis represent a new form of digital discourse.

The Role of Civil Society in Democratic Consolidation in Pakistan and Turkey

In the modern era, the role of civil society cannot be ignored in the development of a country. In the democratic arena, it compels the undemocratic elements to follow democratic norms in a given society and keeps a vigilant watch on the activities of the government. This article, apart from the conceptual clarification of civil society and democracy, throws light on how civil society played its role in the promotion of democratisation in Pakistan and Turkey. In Pakistan, civil society is considered as an umbrella phrase for a range of non-state and non-market citizen organisations and initiatives, network, and unions operating in an expansive gamut. The civil society in Pakistan has been flawed by the structural dynamics of state consolidation from the beginning. In current years, nevertheless, civil society organisations have proven to be stronger and dedicated but is still at a developing stage. Looking at the Turkish politics after the World War II, it has been under the influence of rapid democratisation as well as social mobilisation. It also precipitated the delivery of services to the neglected periphery of society.

Fontanarrosa y la literatura ilustrada: parodias en la revista Chaupinela (1974-1975)

ABSTRACTChaupinela (November 1974–November 1975) was an Argentinian humor magazine that became a best seller. It also became an experimental field for comics as a central and renewed genre and a surviving spinoff of the magazine Satiricón, that had been shut down due to official censorship policies. As a main staff author across the twenty issues of Chaupinela, Roberto Fontanarrosa mixed a selection of popular and traditional narratives with cinematographic imagination to involve the literary order in the more democratic arenas of press sensationalism and daily life. The result is an anthology of parodic pieces that reveals its postmodern and self-conscious operations.

Explaining Foreigners’ Political Rights in the Context of Direct Democracy: A Fuzzy-Set QCA of Swiss Cantonal Popular Votes

In the direct democratic arena, the consensus of voters is required to deliberate policies; without that consent policies are blocked. When bills that support cultural diversity or foreigners’ integration are put into referendums, voters may or may not exert their veto power over the proposed policies. In order to determine under which circumstances these types of bills are successful in referendum, I have undertaken a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of 39 referendums about the extension of political rights to foreigners at the Swiss cantonal level. My analysis identified a total of five theoretically-informed conditions that explain citizenship liberalization and the success of popular votes. I then located these conditions within two configurational hypotheses which postulate how referendum proponents might overcome direct democratic hurdles. The analysis of the success of referendums reveals that the only sufficient path that leads to the popular vote’s success is to insert the sensitive issues into a multi-faceted bill. As demonstrated by a more in-depth case analysis, the sensitive object is successful because it is hidden from voters during the referendum campaign or because other priority objects inside the bill reduce its salience.

Recognition, inclusion and democracy: learning from action research with young people

ABSTRACT This paper draws upon learning from three action research projects conducted as part of a Europe-wide project exploring young people’s social and political participation. Challenging dominant discourses about what ‘counts’ as participation and what does not, the paper explores how, through the action research projects, young people engaged in knowledge democracy in ‘new democratic arenas’. Building upon experiential knowing and creating knowledge and learning through practice, the young people explored their own democratic knowledge production, communication and engagement within a context of shifting discourses of participation, democratic engagement and active citizenship. The increasing preference of young people for more informal forms of participation as lived practice reflects a shift to young people constructing their own modes of participation and ‘remaking democracy’ in their own vision and according to their own needs. By working outside of the confines of normative assumptions of democratic practice and participation, young people exercised their own ‘political’ agency in response to their own priorities, interests and concerns and, in doing so, illustrated that new forms, understandings and practices of knowledge democracy can emerge that reflect the promise of inclusive democratic societies more meaningfully.

Children’s active participation during meals in Early Childhood and Care Institutions

The meal in Early Childhood and Care Institutions is often characterized by routines and rules determined by adults. This, if correct, is not in line with today’s ideals about children’s involvement and active participation. In this article I argue for children’s active participation, which is a key prerequisite in the understanding of seeing meals as a democratic arena. Next, I review the theoretical work on how Early Childhood and Care Institutions staff can arrange for meals to be characterized by children’s participation and active exploration.

Crises of Representation and Populist Challenges to Liberal Democracy

In recent years, populist leaders, movements, and parties have posed formidable challenges to liberal democracy in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. These challenges are rooted in representational crises: in particular, party systems and their diminishing capacity to integrate and represent broad popular constituencies in the democratic arena. To understand these institutional failures, it is essential to explore the changing patterns of partisan competition and representation under the constraints of market globalization and the social fragmentation which it has produced. These constraints create openings for populist contenders to politicize economic insecurities and cultural resentments, in opposition to traditional political establishments.