Democratic Project Research Articles

EUROPEAN SCEPTICISM AND ANTI-AMERICANISM IN THE EURO-ATLANTIC POLITICAL PROCESS IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

The article is devoted to a comparative analysis of the development of European scepticism and anti-Americanism in the public political process in the United States and the European Union. In the countries of the European Union, the term European scepticism refers to a negative attitude towards the process of European integration and its functional result in the form of the European Union. In the United States, mostly in ultra-conservative circles, European scepticism refers to a critical attitude towards the EU as the embodiment of the liberal democracy project. Anti-Americanism as an ideological attitude is present not only in European far-left political circles, but also in European far-right political circles. In the United States, the ideology of anti-Americanism was clearly manifested in the Black Lives Matter movement. European scepticism and anti-Americanism are actively used by Russian and Chinese propaganda as signs of an allegedly inevitable crisis of the ‘collective West’ and a ‘natural transition’ to a multipolar world in which Western democracies will not be crucial for further development. The conclusions emphasise that populist diseases of liberal democracies are actively used by autocracies to discredit the democratic experience of political life. At the same time, Russia, Iran, and China are trying to take advantage of discourses on scenarios of the US isolation from active foreign policy and the European Union's self-restrictions in pursuing its own common foreign policy and impose their own versions of ‘hybrid wars’, pushing Western influence out of key regions of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. In view of this, the transfer of ideas of anti-Americanism and European scepticism from the circle of leading trends in public political life to its deep periphery can actually ensure greater stability not only for liberal democracies, but also for modern international relations.

SINGAPORE: A SOCIAL DEMOCRACY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY?

One of the key challenges that globalization poses to the project of social democracy is that, by allowing capital to move production anywhere that suits its interests, the ability of labor to organise in opposition to capital is threatened, as capital can simply move production to other places as soon as labor starts making uncomfortable demands. In this article, I argue that Singapore is best understood as a social democracy adapted to the conditions of globalization. As such, Singapore's form of social democracy looks very different from most traditional/Western social democracies. Nevertheless, I argue, Singapore's form of social democracy is based on the same underlying principle of class compromise as traditional social democracy, only applied to very different circumstances. To make this argument, I begin by outlining what I mean by the term “social democracy”, and why we should care about whether Singapore fits that label. I then describe the nature of Singapore's class compromise, as well as its underlying social contract, which I argue has a distinctly corporate character — one that is based on getting the citizens to invest as shareholders in the state-as-a-corporation, rather than on accepting high taxes in exchange for a generous public sector in which goods and services are offered in a “de-commodified” form. Lastly, I address the question of why it makes sense to view Singapore as a social democracy, given that the country is not very “socialistic”, nor very “democratic”.

A Sociological Imagination: The Neglected Concept in Transformation Theory

Malcolm Knowles visited Teachers College as I commenced studying there in 1978. But Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed opened the possibility that adult education could be radical and transformative. In the same year Jack Mezirow (1978) published his theory of perspective transformation. Andragogy was useful but a paradigm shift in the field of adult education had occurred and through multiple iterations over the following decades we are the inheritors of these exciting developments. Mezirow borrowed from Jürgen Habermas whose theory of communicative action he creatively integrated with the theory of transformative learning (TL). Adult education, that traditionally linked itself with the project of democracy, had a new critical theory inspired understanding of adult learning that works towards democracy. It is this connection that makes TL important in a world facing multiple (connected) crises – climate change, radicalizations, the rise of the far right and wars.

How transformative can a democratic project of the urban be?

In our initial paper we presented the urban as a question of democracy. The aim was to advance thinking about democracy through thinking about the urban, to use contemporary urban theory to theorise contemporary democracy. Seeing Democracy Like a City involves looking differently at the urban world out there, but also looking a little differently at the world of urban research in journals like this one. Underpinning our work was the epistemological release arising from an urban ontology of politics, as the state shuffles stage right and urbanity moves centre stage. The forum articles suggest that seeing democracy like a city can be inspiring. But the question of how transformative this approach can actually be is posed by all the authors. In this rejoinder we highlight some of the issues we think are crucial to address this question and to unlock the transformative potential of an urban democracy.

Conspiracy Beliefs and Perceptions of Electoral Integrity: Cross-National Evidence from 29 Countries

Abstract Extant research shows that belief in conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking are negatively related to citizens’ perceptions about the fairness and integrity of elections. However, by exclusively focusing on the United States as only one important empirical case, previous studies have left unanswered crucial questions on the scope, generalizability, and context dependency of their empirical findings. In this research note, I aim to fill this void by providing first empirical evidence on the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and electoral-integrity perceptions across twenty-nine countries. Using high-quality individual-level data from the European Social Survey enriched with contextual-level data on the quality of elections taken from the Varieties of Democracy Project, the findings from linear mixed-effects regression models reveal that (1) conspiracy beliefs are negatively related to citizens’ evaluations concerning the integrity of national elections; (2) the specific strength of the observed individual-level relationship varies substantially across countries; and (3) the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and individual electoral-integrity perceptions depends on the contextual-level quality and integrity of elections across countries. Specifically, the results indicate that the negative relationship between conspiracy beliefs and electoral-integrity perceptions is strongest in contexts in which the actual quality of elections is high, and in which citizens have little reason to (seriously) doubt the integrity of the electoral process. These findings provide an important and hitherto missing cross-national and multilevel perspective on the nexus between individual conspiracy beliefs and electoral-integrity perceptions, highlighting that the “conspiratorial challenge” to electoral legitimacy in contemporary democracies is real and more than an “American affliction.”

“News Desertification” in Europe: Highlighting Correlations for Future Research

The Local Media for Democracy (LM4D) project is the first project that explores news deserts in Europe comprehensively. Its final report highlighted challenges and opportunities for local and community media and identified the level of risk of news deserts in the 27 European Union (EU) Member States. As a pilot project, however, its results are still preliminary and open to evaluation, and, thus, they require further discussion and corroboration. Drawing from these results, and applying a multidisciplinary approach, we extrapolated research directions for the study of news deserts in the EU. By cross-analyzing data from the LM4D dataset with other datasets, we provide a preliminary analysis of three promising lines of research: (1) the relationship between public service media quality and news deserts, (2) news deserts and the spread of disinformation, and (3) social media usage and news desertification. We conclude by pointing out the limitations of this preliminary analysis and opportunities for further research on news deserts in the EU.

Measuring online political activity: introducing the digital society project dataset

ABSTRACT Political engagement is deeply enmeshed with online activity. However, there has been a lack of publicly available cross-country datasets enabling researchers and policymakers to understand how politics and digital space intersect. This paper introduces the Digital Society Project (DSP), which aims to provide systematic, cross-country measurement of political institutions and behavior that manifest online or are affected by online activity. Using the Varieties of Democracy Project infrastructure, DSP provides annual global data from 2000 to 2021. The dataset features 35 indicators measuring online censorship, politicization of social media, coordinated information operations, foreign influence, monitoring of domestic politics, and regime cyber capacity. This article introduces the DSP data collection effort, overviews the resulting dataset, and validates key indicators by conducting a series of diagnostic tests. We demonstrate that the DSP dataset aligns with extant datasets measuring internet freedom and offers expanded coverage across countries and over time. We analyze two case studies, walking through how the DSP data can be used to extend existing work on China to generalize this case to other contexts, and examining in depth the case of Ethiopia, which differs the most between DSP and Freedom House’s Freedom on the Net.

The Istanbul Convention, Sofagate, and Turkey’s EU Candidacy: A Gender-Centric Convergence Analysis

Abstract Gender-related issues feature prominently on the EU’s agenda and in policies such as the Gender Equality Strategy 2020–2025 which identifies gender equality as a core principle of the EU. Within the broader convergence discourse which examines whether candidate countries are converging with the EU, prompted by Turkey’s withdrawal from the Council of Europe Istanbul Convention and the Sofagate incident, this paper conducts a gender-centric convergence analysis in the case Turkey. To this end, it uses five gender-focused indices compiled by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project. The empirical results from the convergence tests do not provide evidence supporting convergence in terms of these five gender-related indices. The findings of the present study concur with the existing relevant literature and should be viewed in the broader context of Turkey’s democratic backsliding and de-Europeanization process.

Partners in Forming the People: Jacques Maritain, Saul Alinsky, and the Project of Personalist Democracy

At first glance, Jacques Maritain, the influential Catholic philosopher, and Saul Alinsky, the infamous “dean” of community organizing, could scarcely be more different, in temperament or reputation. Nevertheless, for nearly three decades, these two men were close friends and dedicated collaborators, drawn together by a passionate commitment to democracy. By reading the two alongside each other, this article offers a new interpretation of both. After historically contextualizing the relationship between Maritain and Alinsky, it advances two major claims about their democratic thought. First, it shows that Maritain and Alinsky shared a commitment to a political project best described as “personalist democracy,” insofar as it founded democratic politics upon a specific ethical (and, for Maritain, theological) conception of the human person. Second, the article argues that both thinkers understood personalist democracy to be realizable, in practice, only through a particular kind of democratic organization. They saw the process of organizing as the indispensable means for forming the diffuse persons who comprised society into a coherent “people,” capable of acting for the common good and, in so doing, discovering their own dignity. The article concludes by offering reasons why the project of personalist democracy, as Maritain and Alinsky conceived it, may still have much to offer today.

“The Flower and the Wall”: Poet‐Activist Wiji Thukul and Progressive Martyrdom in Post‐Suharto Indonesia

<p>Since the fall of Major-General Suharto’s “New Order” regime, Indonesia has struggled to deal with its authoritarian legacy. This article argues that in the quarter of a century since his disappearance, the Indonesian poet-activist Wiji Thukul (1963–1998?) has become a martyr for the still unfulfilled progressive ideals of the Reformasi (reform) movement that helped to bring down that regime in 1998. Using the developing body of theory around “secular” or “political” martyrdom, this article examines the process by which this status has been achieved, situating its development alongside the emergence of the Refusing to Forget movement, as well as comparing and contrasting his fate with that of two other candidates for the label of Reformasi martyr: those of the labour activist Marsinah (1969–1993) and the human rights lawyer Munir Said Thalib (1965–2004). It argues that Thukul’s role as a martyr has been significant in maintaining progressive public discourse about the human rights abuses of the Suharto period, as well as the continuing illiberalism of the period since the end of the regime, and that Thukul remains relevant to efforts to stimulate and nurture the fragile democratisation project that was initiated in the late New Order period. In particular, the authors see Thukul’s brand of grassroots creative practice as playing a central role in his emergence as a progressive icon and in giving his life and work international significance.</p>

(Political) political liberalism and the constitutional project

Abstract This review essay follows Alessandro Ferrara and Frank Michelman’s dialogic journey into the legitimation-by-constitution idea, which they submit as the institutional expression of political liberalism in Legitimation by Constitution: A Dialogue on Political Liberalism, to illustrate the challenges for contemporary philosophy of political liberalism in its transposition to the constitutional project. It argues that Ferrara and Michelman’s liberal endeavor to answer the fundamental questions surrounding political liberalism rests on a normative conception of identity, which eventually leads them to a dilemma: the project of constitutional democracy they defend and justify is sustained by a liberal ethos, while it is tasked to accommodate those who do not value the liberal form of life. Instead of choosing between the project of constitutional democracy and their liberal soul, Ferrara and Michelman eventually offer a thin constitutional account of political liberalism resembling the international legal order amidst the retrenchment of the liberal ethos. It contends that what liberal democracies need from political liberalism in battling antiliberal forces is not more political philosophy but rather something akin to what Jeremy Waldron calls “political political theory.” It is suggested that political liberalism take a political turn to confront antiliberal forces with an enriched rather than diluted constitutional project.

Conformity of public policy and citizens’ attitudes towards the public service media

The article examines how the structural conditions (ownership, management, financing, and accountability) of public service media (PSM) functioning established by public policy decisions align with citizens’ attitudes. The empirical research employs the case of Lithuanian PSM because of relatively favorable conditions created for developing the PSM as a project of democracy and civil society. A document analysis was performed, and a representative survey of the Lithuanian population was conducted in response to the research questions. The analysis concludes that the intentions of public policy and civil society are quite different concerning the operating conditions of PSM. The citizens would like to have more say in the management of the PSM and to see the PSM much more accountable to society.

Franco Basaglia: the body and the corporality of the encounter.

On the centenary of the birth of Franco Basaglia - Italian psychiatrist and neurologist - it is incumbent upon us to question the ways in which Basaglia can critically illuminate or help us interpret the social uncertainty in which we are living. Many important contributions have enriched our knowledge of Basaglia's work in recent months. He was a modern practical intellectual, in the Gramscian sense, where the authentic intellectual moves from the real needs of the masses and seeks their solution from the given historical situation, recomposing it in the more general course of the world. Basaglia addresses our society: Do we want to be "fair"? Do we not want to remain in barbarism? Then, in our project of democracy, there must be a place for madness. It is not enough to stop marginalizing the insane or those whom, in the language of medicalization, we call "mentally ill". We have to make room for it. We must "reload" Basaglia's work beginning with restoring value to the centrality of the encounter with the other and to the corporality of the encounter, two themes that guided Franco Basaglia throughout his life.

What Does It Take for Immigrants to Join Political Parties?

Political parties are crucial agents in democratic representation and political integration of persons of immigrant origin, a growing category of citizens in the European Union. Research demonstrates that citizens of immigrant origin are less likely to join political parties than persons without a migratory background. Nevertheless, party membership varies across countries and between immigrants. Accounting for such inter-individual and cross-national variations, this article uses secondary data from the European Social Survey, the Migrant Integration Policy Index, and the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project for 25 European democracies to uncover mechanisms that explain the party membership of immigrants. In our multilevel analysis, we test interactions between country-specific variations in legislation on migration policies on the one hand and individual differences in political socialisation and political efficacy on the other. Our models suggest significant positive effects of exposure to a democratic regime in the country of origin and of internal efficacy on party membership of citizens of immigrant origin. Additionally, our findings highlight the significance of an inclusive national framework for immigrant integration, serving as a moderator to diminish the impact of political socialisation in less democratic countries on the decision of citizens with immigrant backgrounds to participate in political parties within their country of residence.

Democracy in India is at Stake: Image of the Last Decade

Indian democracy is going to step its 75 years of journey. Indian democracy is still singing even after happening many ups and downs in the country and in the world. Ours is a world largest democracy. We are really, proud of it. Democracy has a long tradition and rich history in India. That means the idea that democratic ethos and principles are not new to the Indian subcontinent. Our rich democratic heritage, sets a precedent a for promoting civic culture, political participation, and a well understanding of democratic principles among its citizens. In recent, India's G20 presidency reflects its commitment to democratic values and international cooperation. The country sets an example to promote global democratic principles. The Parliament 20 (P20) Summit in New Delhi put forwards India's rich democratic heritage and core values to the world. The inclusivity, equality, and harmony are central to Indian democracy. But the scholars and theorists of Indian democracy come to realize that, the picture of our democracy of the last one decade is not so satisfactory. Democracy-watching organizations categorize democracies differently. They all classify India today as a “hybrid regime”—that is, neither a full democracy nor a full autocracy. And this is new one. In 2021, in view of Freedom House, India’s freedom rating is Partly Free (the only remaining category is Not Free). That same year, the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project India as “electoral autocracy” on its scale of closed autocracy, electoral autocracy, electoral democracy, or liberal democracy. And the Economist Intelligence Unit stated India to be “flawed democracy” on its scale of full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime, and authoritarian regime. Keeping all these things in mind, in this paper, I have tried to critically examine the Indian democracy of the last one decade on the basis of a small ground level study.

Agonizm polityczny a myślenie o prawie i prawoznawstwie

The article contains a polemic with the thesis that populism and the unveiling of the hitherto hidden political nature of law have resulted in a crisis of legal discourses. In addition, it argues against recognizing democratic/liberal hegemony as the main cause of these phenomena. Criticism of democratic liberalism from a political point of view provides little basis for announcing that jurisprudence has lost its credibility and its reconstruction should mean the overt politicization of legal discourses. Such a position is not an element of Ch. Mouffe’s agonistic theory. On the contrary, the project of agonistic democracy assumes maintaining legal democratic institutions that require political neutrality. The rule of law and the law meeting the requirements of the normative idea of law should be considered as political demands. Only then can law as normativity be contrasted with the factuality of law as the sovereign’s decision. This duality is visible in the concept of the state of emergency (C. Schmitt). To a large extent, the article is a polemic with the works of A. Sulikowski.

Application of a Microeconomic Approach for Explanation of Citizen Participation in Open Government

The digital economy and the sharing economy have changed the role citizens may acquire in society. Citizens can perform at least two roles from the open government perspective: on the one hand, they can be passive users/demanders of information and, on the other hand, they can provide or produce the information in an active manner. The objective of this paper is to offer a theoretical model to explain citizens’ incentives to participate in open government projects. Which is the opportunity cost of participation for the citizen? Which are the drivers of the preferences for the social good? This model is based on the utility function and consumption theory. We complement the theoretical framework with an exploratory–descriptive analysis based on a case study’s primary data about citizen participation. In democracy projects where citizens actively collaborate and could earn monetary gains or become entrepreneurs, the opportunity cost of participation is lower than in a passive type and the amount of the social good depends on the preferences. Preferences for social goods are related to community experiences and e-government and they also affect the decision to participate. Very few studies in the field of open government have pretended to explain citizens’ participation by using microeconomic foundations.

‘Re-education’: The Imperial Pre-History and Afterlives of a Pedagogical Conceit

In the aftermath of World War II, the terms ‘re-education’ and ‘rehabilitation’ were ubiquitous. Often employed almost interchangeably, these nouns named the aspirational outcomes sought by military government personnel, civilian administrators and relief workers – for entire national populations or particular encamped populations. This article traces the origins of these entangled efforts to ‘remake’ subject peoples, now primarily associated with the postwar occupations of Germany and Japan. The essay uncovers the hidden connections between re-education and democratization projects – typically projected as constructive and progressive – with Britain’s brutal suppression of colonial counterinsurgencies, as well as the afterlife of the concept in the United States’ Cold War era preoccupation with POW camps and brainwashing. By the 1960s and ’70s, ‘re-education’ in the Western political lexicon denoted something pernicious practiced exclusively by cold war nemeses: in murderous camps in China, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Yet at the dawn of the twenty-first century, George W. Bush’s administration reanimated memories of the ‘good occupations’ that had transformed Axis foes into pacific and prosperous allies, hoping to persuade sceptics that ‘de-Baathification’ would be every bit as straightforward and successful as ‘de-Nazification’ had come to appear with hindsight. Re-education again provided a language of both obfuscation and legitimation.

Engaging adolescents’ negative emotional experiences as a resource for decision-making

In this study, youth participation in a participatory democracy project is examined at the intersection of the deontic and emotional order. The data are drawn from a yearlong participatory democracy project where 14–15-year-olds meet with politicians and public servants to decide on a vision for how the community should be in 2050. By analysing their interactions, the present study shows how adult community representatives elicit adolescents’ negative emotional experiences and transform these into deontic building blocks in the impending decision-making. The analysis shows how the transformation of adolescents’ negative emotional experiences casts the adolescents as emotional perceivers and deontic objects, a role they are shown to comply with. Furthermore, this sets up a proximal deontic order that, in turn, re-establishes a distal deontic order, both in which the adolescents’ positions are subordinated and regulated. Ultimately, by inviting youths to participate in the democracy project itself as well as eliciting their negative emotional experiences the politicians and public servants are shown to use the youths as emotional gearwheels in an already set larger deontic machinery.

Social and solidarity economy in the cultural field: governance as a transforming lever? A comparison between three French organizations

PurposeThis paper aims to analyze the “crafts” of governance within social and solidarity economy (SSE) cultural organizations, considering formal and informal rules, to support their project of democratization of arts and culture and more generally of cultural democracy. The hypothesis is that it is through participatory and democratic governance that SSE can have a transformative role.Design/methodology/approachThis paper builds upon a qualitative, multiple case study of three SSE organizations in the performing arts and audiovisual production in France. Although different in age, size and legal form, they all experiment a more participative governance system, not without tensions, to face deep institutional changes in their environment.FindingsThe results show that legal forms from the SSE are necessary safeguards but not sufficient to effectively implement a democratic governance beyond the “one member, one vote” principle. Democratic governance is supported by both formal and informal rules. By experimenting with innovative participative and democratic governance rules, these organizations contribute to the transformation of practices in the cultural field (democratization of art and culture) but also in society at large by fostering cultural democracy.Research limitations/implicationsBuilding upon three case studies, this exploratory work stresses important issues that are worth to explore on a larger scale to understand by which levers SSE can play a transformative role in the cultural field.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the literature on SSE and on governance by enlarging the analysis beyond the board of directors and the statutory rules. Applying the approach of collective action and reasonable values developed by Commons to SSE, it shows that participatory governance cannot be based on an ideal or a choice of preestablished values and principles but must leave room for creativity and representations of stakeholders not only to support transformation of practices within the cultural field but also externally by increasing cultural democracy.