Democratic Goals Research Articles

Missed Opportunity: Canada's Reengagement with Latin America and The Caribbean

In 2007, Canada announced it was making Latin America and the Caribbean a foreign policy priority. This article provides an initial assessment of Ottawa's re-engagement with the region, focusing on the tensions associated with its stated position on democracy, human rights, and poverty reduction and its continued adherence to a neoliberal policy set. It argues that support for this economic template, coupled with the fact that Ottawa's relations with the region are governed by, and regularly subverted to, powerful economic and security interests—strategic alignment with U.S. hemispheric priorities would fall in this category—undermine its efforts to address social and democratic development goals in the region. The “pink tide” that is sweeping the region and the efforts by governments of various stripes to find their distinct responses to the social, economic, and ecological crises that envelop the region make Ottawa's free-trade-driven approach seem tired and out of step with sentiments and circumstances in the region.

Narrativ kompetens

Narrative Competence – a Necessary Qualification in Multi Modal Text Universe?
 Today’s media landscape is characterized by convergence culture, where the formats and the distribution of a narrative come together and create extensive multi modal text universe. At the same time the traditional division between producer and consumer is challenged. With examples from fan fiction and role playing games, the article discusses the notion of narrative competence as a possible way of understanding and describing the participation in multi modal text universe. Some of the things that characterize narrative competence are social interplay in a collective intelligence, to be able to discern plots and make creative imitations and to develop a meta reflective ability to be able to meet, try and understand one’s own reactions. One of the conclusions in the article is that if school education wishes to be experienced as relevant among students, it should include narrative competence. At the same time it will also increase the possibilities of reaching democratic goals.

The Mediation of Representative Council of Learners Policy in South African Schools, 1997 to 2003

We investigated how education policy was mediated at a representative number of Western Cape schools, from 1997 to 2003, using the structure, symbolic, human resource and political frames of Bolman and Deal (1997) as the basis of the investigation. The investigation produced diverse research findings. At the one end there were a majority of representative councils of learners that received the full support of the main role players. These councils were fully functional and were making a significant contribution to the effective governance of their schools. At the other end there were significant numbers of representative councils of learners that were not receiving the requisite support, and which were merely tolerated to ensure legal compliance. The factors responsible for preventing the development of education policy into praxis, at these schools, are divided into three categories: technical challenges, cultural challenges and political challenges. In conclusion suggestions are made as to how these varied and complex challenges can be met in the interests of furthering the democratic goals that underpin RPL policy. Keywords : cultural challenges; education policy; learner representative councils; policy mediation; political challenges; school governance; technical challenges South African Journal of Education Vol. 29 (1) 2009: pp. 69-82

The mediation of Representative Council of Learners policy in Western Cape schools: 1997 to 2003

We investigated how education policy was mediated at a representative number of Western Cape schools, from 1997 to 2003, using the structure, symbolic, human resource and political frames of Bolman and Deal (1997) as the basis of the investigation. The investigation produced diverse research findings. At the one end there were a majority of representative councils of learners that received the full support of the main role players. These councils were fully functional and were making a significant contribution to the effective governance of their schools. At the other end there were significant numbers of representative councils of learners that were not receiving the requisite support, and which were merely tolerated to ensure legal compliance. The factors responsible for preventing the development of education policy into praxis, at these schools, are divided into three categories: technical challenges, cultural challenges and political challenges. In conclusion suggestions are made as to how these varied and complex challenges can be met in the interests of furthering the democratic goals that underpin RPL policy.

A Millennium Democratic Goal for Ethiopia: Some Conceptual Issues

This paper proposes an Ethiopian Democratic Millennium Goal that articulates development, and social justice. It examines how the conceptual stretching of democracy, nation, and civil society has created epistemic obstacles that prevent Ethiopian political thinking from pursuing such a goal. It proposes an approach toward a Millennium Democratic Goal based on an interpretation of democracy as a form of society, of development as freedom, and of freedoms as capabilities. It brings out the role of political society as the midwife of a democracy that Ethiopians can recognize as their solution to the political and economic riddles of their history.

Confronting the Moral Economy of US Racial/ Ethnic Health Disparities

For the countless number of public health scientists and professionals who have dedicated their careers to the investigation and elimination of racial and ethnic disparities in health, this issue of the Journal is a signal event. This issue features articles that were presented as papers at the April 2002 Conference on Racial/Ethnic Bias and Health sponsored by the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research of the National Institutes of Health. These articles review existing evidence on the multiple pathways through which repeated exposure to racial discrimination can undermine the health of individuals or whole populations, and they provide concrete suggestions for future research. This is a signal event because it heralds the legitimacy of the study of racial/ethnic discrimination, or racism, as a likely fundamental cause of the nation’s enduring racial/ethnic disparities in health. Because racism, operating through varied interpersonal and institutional pathways, is a fundamental cause of racial/ethnic health disparities, the elimination of these disparities—the magnificently democratic goal of Healthy People 2010—cannot be achieved without first undoing racism. This is a tall order. Good research—conducted by scholars from a variety of disciplines—is likely to be absolutely essential to accomplishing this goal. Racism is incompatible with democratic ideals, yet both are deeply characteristic of US society. What permits such an obvious contradiction to endure? Part of the answer, I believe, lies in the moral economy of US society. Moral economy refers to the norms that govern, or should govern, economic activity (Sayer A. Equality and moral economy. Lancaster, United Kingdom: Dept of Sociology, Lancaster University. Available at: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc059as.html. Accessed December 23, 2002.) in a given society and that set either tight or loose constraints on the ability of dominant groups to treat subordinated others as undeserving of the protections and privileges they accord themselves. Such constraints will be fairly loose, and the resulting group inequalities in wealth, health, and longevity fairly large, as long as the inequalities can be publicly rationalized as logical, indeed inevitable, outcomes of group differences in talent, work ethic, or unconstrained lifestyle choices. As far as the American public is concerned, the above argument has been the dominant and, until quite recently, uncontested explanation of the nation’s persistent racial/ethnic health disparities. Curiously enough, this “explanation” has taken root in the American psyche without a shred of empirical evidence to support it. In other words, the entire argument rests on an edifice of negative moral sentiments about some (though not all) racial/ethnic minorities, stereotypes that, on the one hand, increase these minorities’ vulnerability to economic exploitation in the marketplace and, on the other, portray them—subtly or overtly—as undeserving of the protections and privileges of citizenship readily made available to others. The proposed national research agenda on the role of racism in the overall health of the nation provides us with our first real opportunity to directly confront, and eventually dismantle, the moral economy that undergirds US racial/ethnic health disparities. If, through this work, we provide the American public with sound empirical knowledge that can be used to construct a new moral economy of racial/ethnic relations, it will be one of the finest examples imaginable of science at work in the service of society.

Democratic Style: An RSVP

When ing a Professor group of Engels us met s at compelling NCA in San question Antonio of last what year might to begin constitute discusa ing Professor Engels s compelling questi n of what might constit te a democratic style, I did what any task-oriented, overcommitted conventioneer would do. I answered the question. I made up a model. I mean, I had lists. I even lugged dog-eared copies of some of my favorite books in my convention totebag to take to the panel, just in case. More specifically, I drew upon some of my favorite democratic theorists to propose a three-pronged normative framework featuring the most basic characteristics I thought such a rhetorical style should exhibit. Because I think it is important to acknowledge the trade-offs between normative and empirically based accounts of democracy, I registered my conscious choice to put the theory first, even though some thinkers, including Robert Hariman, might warn against it.1 Most obviously, democratic style should be reason-giving, I said. Even if the nature and limits of various procedural forums for this reason-giving can be debated, the public articulation of reasons promotes education, legitimation, and accountability, three democratic goals to be sure.2 Second, democratic style should offer to its audience members. Here I use the term recognition in the self-consciously modernist sense influentially described by Charles Taylor, in which a sense of universal citizen dignity is understood as a moral imperative, in the traditions of Rousseau and Herder.3 Last, democratic style should overtly attend to relationships, with emphasis on the imagined more than the real. Even if democratic community can ultimately only be viewed as imagined community, vis-a-vis Benedict Anderson, this imagining itself must be called into being by a rhetoric that activates certain relational commitments to other people whom one does not know.4 Specifically, the commitments I have in mind might be part of an a priori sense of a particular subject position, akin to Deweyan intersubjectivity, to promote a notion of justice through a Rawlsian veil of ignorance and/or emotional capabilities including compassion and trust.5

Social justice, care and developmental welfare in South Africa: a capabilities perspective

One of the paradoxes of the democratic project in South Africa is that the combination of political empowerment, organised constituencies of poor people and increasing social sector spending has made minimal impact on increasing equality. Despite an overall macroeconomic framework that emphasises fiscal restraint, social welfare spending has increased in the past 14 years, and dramatically so since 2003. Almost one in four South Africans receives some or other form of grant, and the majority of recipients are women. Indeed, South Africa is regularly described as the developing world’s largest and most generous welfare state. I address the extent to which gender inequalities are reduced through public sector spending, asking the question: what is the optimal relationship between social policy and the intrinsic democratic goals of equality, social justice and citizenship? Drawing on Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, the article argues that a focus on social sector spending alone is inadequate to address questions of social justice. Instead, I draw attention to the normative assumptions, discursive environment and institutional context in which social policy is elaborated and implemented. I argue that, in a context in which there is relatively poor infrastructural capacity in the state to ensure that service delivery takes place in fair, consistent and egalitarian ways, households and communities act as shock absorbers of state failures and women’s gendered burdens increase, despite formal commitments to gender equality. While women appear to have gained from political empowerment, women politicians did not effectively leverage their position in the state to promote pro‐poor policies or to build coalitions to challenge the watering down of early commitments to reducing gender inequalities.

So Much More Than “Sex Ed”: Teen Sexuality as Vehicle for Improving Academic Success and Democratic Education for Diverse Youth

Although sexuality saturates adolescent life, schools do little to address teen sexuality. As educators feel increasingly burdened by competing societal demands, caring for youth sexual health becomes a secondary goal at best. This article argues that the public health costs are only one reason for addressing sexuality in schools and suggests that academic and democratic reasons for addressing sexuality also exist. It illustrates how sexuality can be a potentially powerful resource for increasing the academic achievement and civic engagement of a diverse range of youth. As such, addressing sexuality serves not only public health goals but also academic and democratic goals—goals that have long been central for schools. To make this argument, the author draws from her ethnography of ESPERANZA, a community-based sex education program, illustrating how ESPERANZA used teen interest in sexuality to help youth become leaders, increase academic skills, expand career aspirations, and engage in democratic civic action.

Introducing Deliberative Democracy: A Goal, a Tool, or Just a Context?1

Introducing Deliberative Democracy: A Goal, a Tool, or Just a Context?1 The concept of deliberative democracy is presented within a wide spectrum of variety of its operationalizations. Since the applicability of the principle of deliberation to the functioning of human society is of the author's primary interest, dilemmas of deliberative democracy related to different problems associated with deliberation in practice are described in some detail. The key questions raised aiming at elucidating the "ontology" of deliberativeness are as follows: is it only a tool for solving the problems of society and politics? Is it a context within which other processes decide on the running of society? Or does it embody a goal of democracy?

Independent Agencies and the Unitary Executive Debate: An Empirical Critique

The unitary executive theory - that the Constitution gives the President complete control over the executive branch - questions the constitutionality of independent agencies. The debate surrounding this theory involves competing policy arguments. Unitarians tend to see independent agencies as partisan tools of congressional aggrandizement which sap executive energy and diminish democratic accountability. Non-unitarians see independence as enabling professionalized bureaucratic decision-making or furthering deliberative democratic goals. We test these claims using the results from a unique, comprehensive database of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voting. We find neither lock-step partisanship or vise-like Chair (or proxy presidential) control. Decision making at the FCC occurs largely by consensus with unanimous orders constituting over 91% of the 8252 in our database. When predicting the likelihood to dissent, however, commissioner's individual tendency to dissent (as measured by examining conditional probabilities derived from logistic regressions) has a greater effect than party affiliation. We interpret this finding as showing that commissioners pursue individual agendas, not the President's or Congress's as an institution. The unitarians, therefore, underestimate the extent to which independent agencies frustrate democratic accountability. Most significant, micro-institutional features determine agency outcomes and mediate any congressional or executive influence. In particular, the way commissioners are chosen and the organizational structures in which they operate strongly affect partisanship, i.e., party-line voting. The FCC produced more partisan outcomes when, in the late 1990s, the commissioner nomination and confirmation process became more partisan. When the FCC changed in 1982 from a seven to five-commissioner body, there was a decrease in commissioners' tendency to dissent

Illinois Project for Democratic Accountability

Education is experiencing a case of misplaced accountability, where an exclusive reliance on high stakes tests overlooks the more subtle judgments of teachers and professional educators and, because of its simplicity, passes as democratic. This article investigates the theoretical underpinnings of current accountability initiatives and draws upon extensive teacher interviews to reveal the practical aspects of accountability pressures in schools today. We provide a discussion of local teacher knowledge that exposes teachers' commitments to a deeper sense of successful education that is eclipsed by testing and that offers a richer resource for improving classrooms and educational outcomes. We provide a discussion of educational foundations and policy that rethinks democratic goals and encourages educationists to shift the current debate in order to make accountability truly democratic. This article suggests that the contemporary climate of accountability may be misplaced in its intentions.

Review: School Commercialism: From Democratic Ideal to Market Commodity by Alex Molnar

School Commercialism: From Democratic Ideal to Market Commodity by Alex Molnar. New York: Routledge, 2005. 177 pp. ISBN Parents send children to public schools with the expectation that foremost on the schoolhouse agenda are the intellectual development of children and the future of our society. While it would be as good as treason to suggest that schooling is completely void of an interest in the welfare of children—society’s future— Alex Molnar’s School Commercialism: From Democratic Ideal to Market Commodity (2005) contends that corporate influences on public education have shifted the priorities of schooling from “promot[ing] the general welfare and strengthen[ing] civil society” to profit seeking (p. 9). Cans of Coke in school cafeterias, corporate-sponsored curriculum in classrooms, and private management of public schools are all exposed in School Commercialism as bottom-line initiatives that motivate corporate sponsorship of educational activities and undercut the democratic goals of public education. Drawing from a wide range of sources including: education research, theory, and philosophy; marketing and advertising; and well-documented corporate initiatives in schools, Molnar poses a compelling argument for how corporate interests, mass commercialism, and market-based school reforms are “rendering our society correspondingly less democratic” (p. 81). Director of the Education Policy Studies Laboratory in the College of Education at Arizona State University at Tempe, Molnar is recognized as one of the leading American critics of commercial activities in schools. Widely published in academic journals, his work has also been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The New Republic, and Education Week as well as on National Public Radio, 60 Minutes, and CNN. As part of the Routledge Positions series, School Commercialism is critically positioned at the center of any debate about who and what should guide the development of school policies and whose interest those policies should advance. Building on Molnar’s earlier work, Giving Kids the Business (1996), School Commercialism is written to capture the dynamic history of how schools have been made over into an arm of consumer culture. In so doing, Molnar categorizes the types of commercial activity that have developed in public education—selling to schools, selling within schools, and selling of schools. He also situates these phenomena within the context of market-based school policies and reforms that have catapulted to center stage over the last 25 years as a means to promote high academic achievement, specifically the Nation at Risk Report and the No Child Left Behind Act. Molnar holds that in this context schools “once held to be a public good that could be measured by their contribution to a community’s well-being, have come

The Relevance of Feenberg's Critical Theory of Technology to Critical Visual Literacy: The Case of Scientific and Technical Illustrations

Andrew Feenberg's critical theory of technology is an underutilized, relatively unknown resource in technical communication which could be exploited not only for its potential clarification of large social issues that involve our discipline, but also specifically toward the development of a critical theory of illustrations. Applications of critical theory help strengthen our discipline by forcing us to delineate extant approaches and consider whether democratic goals are being achieved through those approaches. If a critical theory of illustrations can be built from Feenberg's critical theory of technology, it should be useful for classroom instructors and researchers as well as theorists.

School and community climates and civic commitments: Patterns for ethnic minority and majority students.

The developmental correlates of diffuse support for the polity and civic commitments were explored in a survey of 1,052 students (mean age = 14.96 years) from African American, Arab American, European American, and Latino American backgrounds. Results of structural equation modeling revealed that regardless of their age, gender, or ethnic background, youth were more likely to believe that America was a just society and to commit to democratic goals if they felt a sense of community connectedness, especially if they felt that their teachers practiced a democratic ethic at school. Discussion focuses on the civic purposes of education in inculcating a sense of identification with the polity in younger generations.

Review Article: Democratization as Cultural History, or: When is (West) German Democracy Fulfilled?

This review article seeks to advance the notion of democracy as action as a concept for the study of (West) German democracy. It suggests that it would be preferable to define democracy as practical rather than speculative so as to show how democratic culture, far from being merely an object of reverence, emerged in the form of serious disputes and equally serious displacements. Because democracy is the régime within which the struggle for democracy finds legitimacy, the study of democracy means examining how men and women invoked democracy in the struggle for what they believed were democratic goals and aspirations. Among the books under review, three in particular seem best to anticipate future research in the area, in that they examine post-1945 German democratization in an anti-teleological vein, mindful of conflict and the competition for power.

Secrets Revealed, Revelations Concealed: A Secret City Confronts its Environmental Legacy of Weapons Production

Oak Ridge, Tennessee was born as a planned and secret community established during World War II to contribute to the development of the first atomic bomb. Sacrificing their own civil liberties toward the goals of democracy and freedom, residents lived behind guarded fences and learned not to discuss their work with family, neighbors or co-workers. Their clandestine work became public following the bombing of Hiroshima, but the environmental legacies of weapons production increased and remained secret throughout the Cold War. In this paper, I discuss the cultural and environmental legacy of Oak Ridge and then draw on ethnographic interviews with residents, former workers, and participation in public hearings to show how the culture of secrecy has shaped the community of today, while efforts to confront the environmental legacy of the city continues to both unite and divide the community. I conclude that the history of secrecy has limited organized efforts to confront the ongoing environmental problems facing the community, while individuals act independently to investigate past and potential exposures. Paradoxically, however, the history of secrecy contributed to the development of a proud community with a commitment to environmental stewardship, democratic principles, and concern for peace and stability that many outsiders have failed to recognize in condemning the community as a showcase of military toxic waste.

The Rhetoric of War and Remembrance: An Analysis of President Bill Clinton's 1994 D-Day Discourses

This close textual analysis of President Clinton's discourses in ceremonies commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, held on June 6, 1994, considers the rhetorical context and discursive strategies of the president on an international stage. It argues that Clinton employed generational comparisons to emphasize the gifts bequeathed by an older generation and the obligation to advance the goals of democracy in a new era. The four speeches analyzed provide evidence of the force of prudential reasoning in commemorative situations.

Democratic Sanctions: Connecting the Democratic Peace and Economic Sanctions

The democratic peace literature has focused primarily on militarized conflict; however, aspects of the democratic peace may influence how states use economic sanctions. This article investigates how democracies sanction both each other and other non-democracies. Because economic sanctions are very different from military force, some aspects of the democratic peace, such as the more peaceful nature of democracies, do not apply to the decision to sanction. However, several democratic peace factors should influence the use of economic sanctions, such as institutional constraints, shared values, and quick resolutions often found between two democracies. Using updated economic sanction data from 1978 through 2000, the article employs rare-event logit analysis to show that the democratic peace does influence the use of economic coercion - democracies are less likely to sanction each other. It also shows that democracies employ sanctions more than other regime types, in part because democracies pursue human rights and democratization goals with economic sanctions. The results further reveal that unlike other countries, the United States is not hesitant to sanction its allies.

Reconstructing the Internet: How Social Justice Activists Contest Technical Design in Cyberspace

Reconstructing the Internet: How Social Justice Activists Contest Technical Design in Cyberspace