Democratic Engagement Research Articles

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: EDUCATIONAL STUDIES AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL

ABSTRACT This paper will investigate patterns of historical periodisation with regard to public intellectual work. It will begin with a focus on educational studies and with a specific case study of the Centre for Applied Research in Education (CARE) at the University of East Anglia. The case study will highlight the roles of leading public intellectuals such as Lawrence Stenhouse and explore the genre of applied research. The notion of applied research in education explicitly sought to connect the project of public education and social justice with research which was applied to these projects In this way, in an idealised form, the public intellectual and applied researcher would offer aid and sustenance, which would enhance and energise the overall project of public education for all By exploring a case study of an institution and the associated research genre I hope to elucidate the relationship between educational studies and the public intellectual and also to examine the changing prospects for such work over different historical periods. Part of the task is to delineate the changing ‘windows of opportunity’ for public intellectual work. And as we shall see, Brief Encounters are a reasonable characterisation of such patterns of possibility Using the case study as an entry point the paper goes on to discuss broader questions about public intellectuals’ prospects. These questions are embedded in the discussion of some of the work of Sandel on market societies, and Applebaum on changing patterns of democratic engagement. The paper concludes with a commentary on contemporary and future prospects for public intellectual engagement.

“Developing Critical Listening”

The mid-1930s saw broadcasters, educators, and researchers coalesce around the study and implementation of critical listening for educational radio as a new technology for school instruction. These early media literacy researchers were motivated by ambitions to counter distracted and passive listening caused by commercial radio, advertising, and propaganda; to foreground the aural sense in classrooms dominated by reading and writing; and to promote democratic listening in young people. The following investigation draws from previously unexamined archival materials from research centers and radio schools of the air in Ohio and Wisconsin in addition to the oral history of Dorothy Gordon, progressive host of the Youth Forum educational program on New York Times–owned WQXR-AM. This article provides a critical perspective on the role of listening, sound technologies, and literacies for contemporary concerns about political polarization, tensions between commercial and noncommercial media, and democratic engagement.

Introduction

Introduction

Just Transition: A whole-systems approach to decarbonisation

ABSTRACT Transition to a post-carbon economy implies changes that are both far-reaching and unprecedented. The notion that a decarbonization transition must encompass multiple forms of justice is gaining ground. In response, the concept of Just Transition has become ever more popular – and confusion about its meaning ever greater. We argue in this paper that the term Just Transition needs a rigorous updating to develop its full conceptual power for the analysis and evaluation of the rapid and extensive energy transitions already underway. After reviewing the different uses of Just Transition in practice and scholarship, we propose that the term be used as an analytical concept for an ongoing process of transition. The Just Transition concept can provide an integrated, whole-system perspective on justice (procedural, distributive, recognition, and restorative) that can help in identifying systemic solutions to address environmental and socio-economic concerns. This would differ from reductionist approaches that derive from legacy silo-sectoral or technologically driven approaches; these too often overlook negative side-effects and wider justice implications of reorganizing economic practice. An examination of COVID-19 pandemic responses illustrates our operationalization of the Just Transition concept, highlighting the importance of designing whole-system policies that are equitable, as well as the pitfalls of pursuing a narrow sectoral approach. Taking seriously the implications of complex systems with hard-to-predict effects also has concrete implications for policy interventions at all levels of governance. In particular, we highlight the importance of attending to multiple social inequalities for ensuring the resilience of whole-system decarbonization in the face of instability, unpredictability, and unprecedented change. Key policy insights The transition to net-zero will be neither sustainable nor credible if it creates or worsens social inequalities; a backlash is likely if the transition is not perceived to be just. Pathways forward may only emerge through observation, experimentation, and experience. A range of policy tools exist to address Just Transition concerns. These include addressing social and environmental aspects of economic policy; making sure that interventions are adapted to local contexts; building democratic engagement platforms; and open and transparent communication. Job creation does not guarantee just outcomes, as justice goes beyond employment conditions.

Becoming an Activist: Individualisation and a Democratic Contentious Ethos in ‘How to’ Books

The article explores a new aspect of the interplay of individualisation and democracy. I ask how individualisation affects a contentious ethos, a set of ethical relations that contentious actors cultivate towards themselves and others in articulating their idea of the good. I analyse the ethea in the public through ‘how to become an activist’ books. The books instruct individuals in how they should turn inwards and work on themselves to become activists. I delineate three ethea: individuals can work on themselves to discover their passion, connect to an impersonal truth or situate themselves in a structural context. These may undermine collective political projects but can also facilitate deep democratic engagement.

The elitist subaltern? Jonathan Moyo’s tweets as a Machiavellian barometer of post-Mugabe Zimbabwean politics

ABSTRACT Discussing and contesting politics on Twitter has taken centre stage in Zimbabwe. In this discursive cyber-scape, political celebrities have emerged. Professor Jonathan Moyo is one of the popular voices (re)configuring the ideological and conceptual (dis)continuities of Zimbabwe’s post-coup d’état political culture. Moyo was ejected from his position as a ZANU PF political insider after the military-led ousting of long-time ruler Robert Gabriel Mugabe in November 2017. His knowledge of the ruling party invokes a political forecast, retro-cast, and insight that is puzzling and transforming political discourse. This article argues that Moyo’s tweets use carefully selected ideas and concepts to expose, undermine, and predict ZANU PF political manoeuvres in the post-Mugabe era. It analyses the celebrity politician’s tweets after the November 2017 coup d’état, showing how they capture and influence the political mood in the post-Mugabe nation-state. The article confirms that Twitter has taken a central role as a platform for democratic engagement while also being exploited by disgraced politicians. It provides an open and free digital medium for citizens to interact and share their concerns as well as disagreements over state politics.

Civic Hope and the Perceived Authenticity of Democratic Participation

In two studies, we tested how the expression of civic hope in narratives and the perceived authenticity of civic/political actions relate to civic/political engagement. In a cross-sectional study of undergraduates (N = 230), the expression of civic hope predicted the perceived authenticity of civic actions (e.g., voting), which in turn predicted the motivation to engage in them. In a longitudinal on-line study that began 8 weeks prior to the 2020 U.S. Presidential election (N = 308 MTurk workers), overall expressions of civic hope positively predicted the perceived authenticity of voting and the motivation to vote. In addition, expressions of civic hope positively predicted the perceived authenticity of voting, which in turn positively predicted the likelihood of reporting that one did vote. These findings indicate that a sense of civic hope and the experience of authenticity in political contexts may be important for democratic engagement.

Democracy and belief in conspiracy theories in New Zealand

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic supercharged the spread of fake news, misinformation, and conspiracy theories worldwide. Using a national probability sample of adults from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study during 2020 (17–99 years old; M = 48.59, SD = 13.86; 63% women, 37% men; N = 41,487), we examined the associations between agreement with general conspiracy beliefs and political indicators of intention to vote and satisfaction with government, alongside political factors including trust in politicians, political efficacy, identity centrality, and political ideology. Left-wing political ideology, trust in politicians, and political efficacy accounted for most of the explained variance in satisfaction with the government. General conspiracy belief was also a unique contributor to lower satisfaction with the government. We also found a curvilinear relationship between political ideology with heightened belief in conspiracies at both ideological extremes and the centre. Findings are discussed in terms of the consequences of conspiracy belief on democratic engagement.

Cultural story models in making sense of a desired post-corona world

The corona pandemic has been a disruptive event that calls for individual and collective efforts to make sense of the future. This paper aims to delineate the ways in which people from Greece (N = 41) and Finland (N = 18) draw on cultural story models (narrative schemas for organizing knowledge and experiences) to anticipate and make sense of a post-corona future. Personal anticipations of what their own post-corona future lives and the world should look like were collected using the Letters from the Future method. Using structural narrative analysis, five main storylines were discerned: (1) back to normal through human efforts; (2) back to normal through natural course; (3) persisting problems; (4) safety through technology; (5) transformation through profound value change. We argue that the first, return to normal narrative, functions as a master narrative that is countered in nuanced ways by the other four storylines. At a decisive moment in history, we argue that space for counter narratives is required for democratic engagement in shaping our futures.

Democracy’s Invisible Savior: Why Citizens Should Welcome Taxes with Open Arms

This article aims to understand the transformative power that the fiscal requirement to impose taxation has on democratization. An exploration into the fiscal development of early modern Europe alongside modern empirical examples, demonstrates the value of taxation as a solution to leaderships that don’t represent their people. It’s reasoned that the confluence of taxation and democracy can be attributed to two distinct mechanisms. One, that the government is more willing to compromise to the peoples’ demands, and two, that the people are more willing to demand this compromise. The latter is of particular significance in suggesting the role that behavioral phenomena play in inflaming democratic engagement. Critically, the behavioral effects of taxation should take more of a leading role in policies that pursue democratization whilst aid, more of a support role.

The Creation and Withdrawal of Spaces for Participatory Governance: The Case of Village Development Committees in West Bengal, India

This article examines how more democratic forms of state-citizen engagement can be engineered under less than favorable political conditions, through the case of the Village Development Committees under the Left Front government in West Bengal, India. Our research shows that these Committees embodied empowered participatory governance ideals and made meaningful contributions to citizens' participation within the local state, confirming the potential for well-designed institutions to deepen democratic engagement. However, this reform's abrupt reversal indicates that leftist parties are not automatically wholehearted supporters of empowered participatory governance, and that this reform needed to be connected to a wider set of claims about the Left Front's participatory successes, in order to build its legitimacy. Our wider argument is that research should examine not only the quality of participatory spaces themselves but also their political contexts, if we are to understand how experiments in empowered participatory governance can “scale up” and become durable.

Democracy’s Relationship With the Future: Transforming Society’s Promise

This essay introduces a juxtaposition of adult education, futures perspectives, transformative learning theory, and democratic engagement. Within adult education, the promise of education, and the possibilities of transformative learning (TL) are often linked to democracy and human freedoms, yet that democratic promise is often left unfulfilled or incomplete. At the same time, futures perspectives coalesce around the strengthening of capacity for adults to change their conceptualizations of and relationships to the future and facilitate skills in navigating discontinuity, complexity, and ambiguity. The inclusion of futures work potentially shifts the TL discourse and may change the ways that we study and support how adults learn, change, and grow through shared human experiences. Futures literacy may become a new dimension for democracies.

Between everyday politics and political elites: transmission and coupling within Westminster's parliamentary e-petitions system.

Popular dissatisfaction with representative democracy has encouraged governments and legislatures worldwide to experiment with democratic innovations. However, despite calls for a ‘systemic’ approach to the study of democratic engagement and participation, empirical knowledge is limited about the diffusion of democratic innovations within civil society, and, in particular, about the connective mechanisms that bring the ‘voice’ of citizens to the ‘ears’ of political elites. This article responds to this gap, presenting original empirical research examining the UK House of Commons’ e-petitions system. This research maps public engagement with parliamentary e-petitions across a range of expressive spaces, and highlights the facilitative role of non-institutional intermediaries. However, it also underlines the predominant role of institutional actors in structuring public participation, and shows that effective transmission between the informal public and formal political spheres remains contingent on both ‘designed-in powers’ of institutional coupling and ‘developed practices’ of public engagement. Through this analysis, the article makes an important contribution to debates concerning democratic innovations, political participation, and institutional design.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41293-022-00208-9.

Performing Democracy

Contemporary protests draw on a rich variety of performances to communicate their messages, attract attention to societal problems and display potential solutions. In addition to verbal and textual expressions, protesters employ various forms of nonverbal expression, such as images, sounds, silence as part of their public performances. This article offers a way of making sense of nonverbal protest performances, relying on insights from contemporary democratic theory. It proposes a ‘democratic lens’, which supplements the ‘performative lens’ often used to comprehend performative protests and their effects on diverse audiences. The democratic lens enables us to distinguish between deliberative, agonistic, and antagonistic modes of democratic engagement and examine the ways they are enacted in performative protests. The article illustrates the utility of the democratic lens by focusing on the nonverbal performances of Black Lives Matter in the USA, pot and pan protest in Brazil, and the Knitting Nannas in Australia.

Anything Goes? Youth, News, and Democratic Engagement in the Roaring 2020s

Anything Goes? Youth, News, and Democratic Engagement in the Roaring 2020s

Earth stewardship: Shaping a sustainable future through interacting policy and norm shifts

Transformation toward a sustainable future requires an earth stewardship approach to shift society from its current goal of increasing material wealth to a vision of sustaining built, natural, human, and social capital—equitably distributed across society, within and among nations. Widespread concern about earth’s current trajectory and support for actions that would foster more sustainable pathways suggests potential social tipping points in public demand for an earth stewardship vision. Here, we draw on empirical studies and theory to show that movement toward a stewardship vision can be facilitated by changes in either policy incentives or social norms. Our novel contribution is to point out that both norms and incentives must change and can do so interactively. This can be facilitated through leverage points and complementarities across policy areas, based on values, system design, and agency. Potential catalysts include novel democratic institutions and engagement of non-governmental actors, such as businesses, civic leaders, and social movements as agents for redistribution of power. Because no single intervention will transform the world, a key challenge is to align actions to be synergistic, persistent, and scalable.

Promoting Democratic Engagement with Low-Stakes Discussion Board Interventions

This study describes a series of interventions that enhanced preservice teachers’ experiences with online discussion boards. Data were analyzed using an experimental posttest design, and findings indicate that the interventions not only improved the quality and substance of students’ responses, but also promoted an equitable distribution of course-based social capital.

Deportation threat and political engagement among latinos in the Rio Grande Valley

ABSTRACT How does the threat of deportation affect Latinos’ political engagement and participation? Little scholarship systematically analyzes deportation effects upon Latino political engagement. This article explores how the threat of deportation raised under the Trump administration affects cognitive and electoral behaviour in politics among Latinos in the Rio Grande Valley (RGV). By utilizing original data from an RGV public opinion survey conducted in 2018, we examine how deportation threat, measured as knowing a deportee or detainee as well as worrying about deportability affects democratic engagement and political activism of Latinos in the RGV. We find the fear of being deported depresses the level of attention to politics, but increases the frequency of discussion. Also, it discourages voting. Our findings identify a potential hurdle of political behaviour among Latinos in the U.S.-Mexico border region which has been directly affected by immigration policy threat under the Trump administration.

Tribal Deliberations about Precision Medicine Research: Addressing Diversity and Inequity in Democratic Deliberation Design and Evaluation.

Deliberative democratic engagement is used around the globe to gather informed public input on contentious collective questions. Yet, rarely has it been used to convene individuals exclusively from Indigenous communities. The relative novelty of using this approach to engage tribal communities and concerns about diversity and inequities raise important methodological questions. We describe the design and quality outcomes for a 2.5-day deliberation that elicited views of American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) leaders about the potential value and ethical conduct of precision medicine research (PMR), an emerging approach to research that investigates the health effects of individual genetic variation in tandem with variation in health-relevant practices, social determinants, and environmental exposures. The event met key goals, such as relationship and rapport formation, cross-site learning, equality of opportunity to participate, and respect among participants in the context of disagreement.

Vaccine nationalism will persist: global public goods need effective engagement of global citizens

Covid-19 presents a unique opportunity to transform democratic engagement in the governance of global public goods. In this paper, I describe a global public goods framework and how it relates to Covid-19 vaccines, and summarize some of the global responses to Covid-19. I discuss some of the global threats to health and prosperity posed by the inequitable distribution of vaccines, and propose transformative thinking to democratically engage citizens in the governance of global public goods. In recent years, public-private partnerships and philanthropic organizations have successfully stepped in to help international organizations like the UN and WHO provide global public goods, but they are not democratically elected or publicly accountable. Global public goods are critical to addressing Covid-19, future pandemic preparedness, global health policy, health equity, and the unfolding climate crisis. To make us more resistant and resilient to future global health crises we need transformative thinking to democratically engage global citizens. We need to lay the foundations for a ‘global social contract’ on global public goods.