Democratic Rhetoric Research Articles

The decoupling practice of “Democraticwashing”: the case of Israel

ABSTRACT This study introduces and elaborates on the decoupling practice of “democraticwashing” within contemporary political discourse, where anti-democratic actions are concealed behind democratic rhetoric. The primary aim is to unravel the multifaceted nature of democraticwashing, which extends beyond mere language manipulation for legitimization. It explores instances where democratic values and the legitimation attached to them in the present day are internalized to the extent that contradictions between rhetoric and reality are adamantly denied. By analysing the relation between democratic discourse and anti-democratic actions in the Israeli case since 2009, this study provides a comprehensive understanding of how democraticwashing contributes to the erosion of democratic elements in states usually considered as democracies in the global arena. This research advances our comprehension of the contemporary challenges facing democratic governance worldwide while proposing a new analysis tool for the erosion of democracy in the contemporary era.

Democracy, Infocracy and the Challenges of Algorithmization to Democratic Rhetoric: The Digital Narcissism and Colonialism

Democracy, Infocracy and the Challenges of Algorithmization to Democratic Rhetoric: The Digital Narcissism and Colonialism

Rhetoric of Democracy in the Americas

Rhetoric of Democracy in the Americas

The influencer pay gap: Platform labor meets racial capitalism

Existing research emphasizes the precarity of workers engaged in the exchange of goods and services through digital platforms. Yet few studies have systematically examined how racial discrimination shapes the opportunities of platform workers. Here, we focus on influencers, or people who monetize content on social media platforms. Drawing on a mixed-method analysis of 1,082 posts crowdsourced by the @InfluencerPayGap Instagram account, we document three findings. First, while most influencers in our sample received monetary payment for sponsored campaigns, rates are significantly lower than expected based on industry estimates. Second, social media metrics are racialized to justify paying influencers of color less than white influencers. Third, influencers of color are less likely than white influencers to receive monetary compensation or succeed in their negotiations with brands. Contrary to the rhetoric of fairness and democratization promoted by digital platforms, these dynamics reproduce racial domination and undermine collective action among social media influencers.

The rule of unreason: Analyzing (anti‐)democratic regression

The rule of unreason: Analyzing (anti‐)democratic regression

Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions, by Rob Goodman

Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions, by Rob Goodman

Paradoxical Politics? Partisan Politics, Ethnoracial Ideologies, and the Assimilated Consciousnesses of Latinx Republicans

Because of the Republican Party’s racist rhetoric, Latinx Republicans are considered paradoxes as their partisanship contradict perceptions of Latinxs’ sociopolitical interests. Methodologically departing from prior Latinx politics research, this study employs qualitative methods to understand how Latinx Republicans interpretively link ethnoracial and partisan identities. Drawing on original interviews with Latinx Republicans, I argue that respondents are not paradoxes but strategic actors engaging in politics that align with respondents’ interpretations of their social identities. Specifically, I develop the concept of “assimilated consciousness”—how Latinx Republicans politicize ethnoracial identity by disaggregating Latinx groupness and positioning themselves in opposition to other racialized people. I show how most respondents reject seeing racism as systemic, perceive themselves as assimilated, and subsequently use interpretive tools to distance themselves from other Latinxs and Black Americans; minimize racist Republican rhetoric; and maximize problematic Democratic rhetoric. In doing so, respondents reconcile the relationship between their ethnoracial and partisan identifications. I further employ the concept of assimilated consciousness to show how a minority of respondents rejected the Republican Party due to Trump’s and Trump supporters’ racist rhetoric. Overall, I contend my findings provide a better understanding of how racialized immigration processes shape ethnoracial and political identities.

From revolutionary paroles to democratic rhetoric: replacement of the political vocabulary within the Norwegian Labour Party in the interwar period

ABSTRACT This article examines the Norwegian Labour Party’s political language in the interwar period to uncover the relationship of its contentious shifts in political strategy and rhetoric. This is done through a quantitative and qualitative empirical case study of Labour’s use of the two concepts, ‘revolution’ and ‘democracy’. The findings show that Labour’s change from a radical-left position to reformism was accompanied by gradual replacement of its rhetorical repertoire, most notably in that its revolutionary paroles were superseded by democratic rhetoric. The findings show also that the development towards reformism did not imply full endorsement of the established democratic system, but rather that a reformist stance was adopted with the objective of changing to a system of social and economic democracy. In its analysis of the Norwegian Labour Party’s rhetoric the article provides new insights, which help to explain changes to its strategies that have greatly puzzled historians. From a wider perspective, the article offers a nuanced understanding of Norwegian exceptionalism within the Nordic labour movement.

Unifying Solidarity: The Concept of International Solidarity in Swedish Social Democracy 1972–1985

This article studies the concept of solidarity and the definition of international solidarity in congress materials dated 1972–1985 from the Swedish Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sveriges Socialdemokratiska Arbetareparti, SAP) and its three branch organizations. On the one hand, it examines the different definitions and functions of the concept within the party at large, thereby adding to historical research on the recent history of Swedish social democracy. In source material published by youth, women’s, and religious wings affiliated with the SAP, the struggle for the meaning of the concept should become apparent, because these organizations represent both the traditional and official concept of solidarity that had been dominant in social democratic rhetoric, as well as the new, challenging concept of solidarity associated with the emerging solidarity movements of the 1970s. On the other hand, the article has a conceptual historical and theoretical aim, intending to understand how solidarity functions as a political and ideological concept for Swedish social democrats during the studied period of time. The study shows that solidarity as an ideological concept had a unifying function for Swedish social democracy. In the concept of solidarity and in the definition of international solidarity, the relevance and topicality of social democratic politics could be emphasized. This was done temporally by giving the contemporary political relevance of solidarity a historical dimension by presenting solidarity in general and international solidarity in particular as a social democratic concept with roots in the early years of the movement. By accentuating the history of the concept, solidarity, despite its obvious contemporary political link, was presented as a timeless social democratic concept, as central in the early twentieth century as in the 1970s and in the future. Thus, in a conceptual struggle with contemporary movements for solidarity and in polemic with the bourgeoisie’s attempts to relegate social democracy to the past, the relevance and topicality of social democratic politics was asserted through the concepts of solidarity and, in particular, the definition of international solidarity.

Imprints of Indigenes and the Optics of Settlement: A Bifocal Reading of Summer on the Lakes and A Millimetre of Dust

This article is a comparative reading of Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844) and Julia Martin’s A Millimetre of Dust: Visiting Ancestral Sites (2008), travelogues that explore erstwhile frontier zones in view of a changing social landscape inflected with the rhetoric of democracy. The comparison is based on the thematic parallels between literature from the American Renaissance and post-apartheid South Africa in which the landscape is portrayed in metonymic relation to the nation. Drawing on the field of world literature and the notion that texts might undergo transformation in the way they are interpreted due to their movement across space and time, the article employs a ‘bifocal’ lens that produces a contrapuntal engagement between mid-nineteenth century America and post-apartheid South Africa.

Noble Lying and Democratic Rhetoric in Sophocles' Philoctetes and Plato's Republic

This article unsettles the traditional views about Sophocles' Philoctetes and Plato's Republic on the issues of noble lying and democratic rhetoric. I do this by delving deeper into 1) the Athenian democratic context in which both works are set or were staged, 2) the intertextualities between the two works, and 3) recent scholarship that reads both Plato and Sophocles against the grain of the traditional scholarship. This new reading allows us to understand Plato's infamous noble lie (gennaion pseudos) as a less anti-democratic teaching about ideal forms of rhetoric than it is normally taken to be.

Totalitarian and Democratic Rhetoric as an Indicator of the Relations of Power in the Contemporary Information Society

The article is devoted to study of totalitarian and democratic types of rhetoric. The classical dichotomy of rhetorical influence has been discovered: monologic use of rhetoric as a verbal weapon through propaganda, demagoguery, populism, creation of the image of an enemy, division of society (totalitarian type of rhetoric) and dialogical use of rhetoric as consolidating communication, truth-seeking, social consent and understanding (democratic type of rhetoric). It is shown that the trigger of democratic and totalitarian regimes is the existential of freedom. The active influence of the postmodern rhetoric of the information age in its performativity in the acquisition of snack culture is determined, which significantly strengthens the manipulative strategies. Totalitarian tendencies of digital rhetoric are found in information warfare technologies (network trolling, mobbing, hype, hatering, holy waring, click-baiting, sockpuppeting), in the processes of censorship, ambivalence and negativism of information, spreading fake news, igniting conflicts in mass media. Militarization of vocabulary and spread of obscene language in ordinary communication as factors of compensatory aggression of the population, the danger of excessive information transparency of people’s private lives are noted. Democratism of the digital rhetoric is manifested in such phenomena as the direct creation of e-democracy, access of citizens to e-voting, e-services, e-petitions, overcoming digital inequality, the ability to communicate with officials and public officers live on TV and radio, in social networks. Democratic principles of rhetoric, especially in Ukraine as a state of “transitional democracy” should be supported by quality education, fostering critical thinking and activity of civil society.

Excessively Harsh Critique and Democratic Rhetoric: The Enigma of Bhimrao Ambedkar’s Riddles in Hinduism

Abstract Democracy seems torn between the ideal search for harmony and unity and the reality of polarizing differences and injustices. Harsh criticism both seems a useful response to societal problems and appears to undermine the search for this ideal of unity. This article engages Bhimrao Ambedkar, the Indian statesman and anti-caste philosopher, to explore this tension in democratic rhetoric. By placing his harsh critique of Hinduism in Riddles in Hinduism in conversation with his crafting of fraternity and love as ideals in The Buddha and His Dhamma, we can perceive the tense dialectic between the democratic injunction to seek community with opponents and the very human impulse to harshly criticize those perpetuating injustice. Analyzing archival drafts of his work that capture his processes of revision and invention, I extract a sense of tentative critique as an entailed form of Ambedkar’s reconstructive rhetoric. Such a tentative rhetorical style reduces the tensions between loving one’s enemies and harshly criticizing one’s opponents by introducing ways to lessen the impact of excessive critique, showing Ambedkar’s potential as an innovative thinker in the global history of rhetoric.

Band of Brothers or Band of Others?: Rhetoric, Veterans, and Civil Rights Fights in Germany and the United States

Research suggests that marginalized groups can use military service to win greater governmental and social acceptance by using civic republican rhetoric, however, conditions in which claims-making rhetoric is coercive are underspecified. Because rhetorical effectiveness requires sympathetic ears, we examine the influence of (1) expectations and political efforts of marginalized group members seeking greater acceptance, (2) whether majority group economic status is outpacing marginalized groups seeking improved treatment, and (3) whether marginalized groups have influential military veterans from majority groups as allies. We apply these factors to explain the claims-making failure of German Jews following the First World War and the success of African Americans after the Second World War. From the African American case, we also conclude that military service led to greater socio-political inclusion and rights based on development of future political actors through leadership development processes and inter-group contact, especially regarding Presidents Truman and Eisenhower.

The Impact of the American Revolution on James O'Kelly's Understanding of Ecclesial Governance in the Methodist Episcopal Church

This article examines the egalitarian convictions and doctrines of the Reverend James O'Kelly and how his belief in church autonomy led to one of the earliest schisms in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Although O'Kelly would attempt to frame his conflict with the Methodist Church and Francis Asbury as a theological dispute, an examination of O'Kelly's beliefs reveal that he was an individual profoundly influenced by the democratic rhetoric and ideals of his era, which ultimately came to fruition in the American Revolution. As a veteran of that conflict, O'Kelly adopted many of the principles espoused in the Revolution and viewed both individuals and churches as autonomous and capable of self‐governance. His inherent distrust of hierarchical authority would eventually lead O'Kelly and several of his followers to leave the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1792 to found a separate denomination based on his convictions. This analysis builds on prior scholarship that portrays the “O'Kelly Schism” in the Methodist Episcopal Church as less of a doctrinal dispute, and more of a controversy over the nature of church government, sovereignty, and individual rights in the early American Republic.

China’s challenge to world development paradigms

ABSTRACT The past forty years of world development have seen multiple operational frameworks, most notably, the neoliberal Washington Consensus or structural adjustment policies (1981–2001), the international development framework guided by the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG, 2000–2015), and the Chinese Economic Model or Beijing Consensus emerging from Deng Xiaoping’s reforms (1978-present). I criticize the Washington Consensus as an economic, ethical-political, and environmental failure. I cast doubt both on the novelty and efficacy of the frameworks to enact the Millennium Development Goals by showing that they largely repackage structural adjustment policies in democratic terms and contribute far less to recent global successes than alternative Chinese and Indian models. I describe the Chinese Economic Model as both a far more successful domestic economic alternative to the hegemonic Western models and a problematic export with the potential to transform as well as to destabilize developing countries. Finally, I articulate conditions for an alternative that would enact the democratic rhetoric of the Millennium Development Goals, learn from the domestic scale of infrastructure and education spending, the national focus, local implementation, and recent environmental experiments of the Chinese Economic Model, and recognize the environment’s fundamental significance to development.

Kirsten Twelbeck, "Beyond the Civil War Hospital: The Rhetoric of Healing and Democratization in Northern Reconstruction Writing, 1861-1882" (Bielefeld: transcript, 2018), 438 pp.

Kirsten Twelbeck, "Beyond the Civil War Hospital: The Rhetoric of Healing and Democratization in Northern Reconstruction Writing, 1861-1882" (Bielefeld: transcript, 2018), 438 pp.

Democracy under Threat: Study of the Implementation of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to the Management of Natural Resources in Riau Province

This article discusses why the failure to fulfill indigenous peoples' rights in managing natural resources in Riau Province will pose a threat to democracy. The empirical phenomenon in Riau Province showed that even though regulations in recognition and protection existed, conflicts in forest management and land belonging to indigenous peoples continued to occur. This study uses qualitative research methods by collecting data through interviews and documents. The results show that the non-fulfillment of indigenous peoples' rights in managing natural resources will lead to injustice, discrimination, and economic inequality. It will ultimately have implications for the decline in the quality of democracy and the government regime's legitimacy. The implementation of indigenous peoples' rights in managing natural resources in Riau Province is limited to democratic rhetoric. The conclusion in this study is that violations of indigenous peoples' rights will contribute to democratic de-consolidation.

Идея законопроекта как скрытый элемент законодательной техники (на примере реформы местного самоуправления 2014—2015 гг.)

The article analyzes the supra-legal nature of the decrees is analyzed, by which the President of the Russian Federation implements a constitutional authority to determine the main directions of the state’s domestic and foreign policy. It is proven that the idea and concept of the draft law — it’s not the same thing: the idea of many legislative novels is initially hidden, not indicated in the concept of the bill. The concept of the bill is always positive, aimed at the future, even if the reform is unpopular. The concept of federal government reform in 2014, relying solely on democratic rhetoric, it allowed not to expose or even hide the main idea of this reform. Federal law of May 27, 2014 no. 136-ФЗ — example of legally jewelry reform, the real (hidden) idea of which differs from the concept of the law, and is also different from the rhetoric of its initiators. Local government has become an extension of state power, which is a hidden idea of reform. The stated concept of reform — proximity to the people — not realized, for there was a different purpose (hidden idea) — embedding local governments in the vertical of state power.

The riddle of the missing feathers: rise and decline of the Dutch Third Way

ABSTRACT Internationally, the social-liberalism of the Third Way is experiencing a deep crisis. The Netherlands is no exception to the trend. In the 2017 elections, the Dutch social democrat party suffered the worst defeat in Dutch parliamentary history. At the same time, the Dutch Third Way distinguishes itself from its more famous Anglo-American counterparts by its implicit character. Social democrat leaders in the Netherlands have sought to downplay the idea of a break with traditional social democracy, combining a Third Way agenda with more classically social democratic rhetoric. As a result, the crisis has taken on a different form. The Dutch social democrat party is commonly associated with a wholesale lack of principles and ideas, rather than with the Third Way. As such, the curious case of the Dutch Third Way might be illustrative of a broader, ‘muffled’ crisis in other countries where the Third Way has been adopted in a more implicit manner.