Political Disengagement Research Articles

Suffering and liberation in the age of therapy: Germany’s‘grandchildren of the Second World War’

This article focuses on the ‘ Kriegsenkel’ – the German ‘grandchildren of the Second World War’. Born in the 1960s and 1970s, Kriegsenkel feel that through processes of transgenerational transmission unresolved war experiences were passed on to them by their families and are largely responsible for their emotional problems – from depression and anxiety disorders to relationship break-ups and career problems. I explore how, after decades of public taboos on the suffering of the majority population, this emergent identity is constructed and addressed entirely within the framework of Western therapeutic culture. Sociologists have long critiqued therapy culture for promoting political disengagement and attitudes of victimhood. Based on more than 80 ethnographic interviews, I argue that this view needs to be moderated to account for the ways in which individuals use therapeutic culture to exert agency and devise strategies to actively deal with emotional distress in an environment where wartime suffering is considered politically sensitive.

Social Media and Political Disengagement Among Young Adults: A Moderated Mediation Model of Cynicism, Efficacy, and Social Media Use on Apathy

To examine the role of social media use in the process of political disaffection, a web survey of young adults was conducted prior to the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Results showed that the positive relationship between cynicism and apathy was weaker for respondents who paid greater attention to social media for political information. Also, the indirect relationship between cynicism and apathy through external political efficacy was weaker for those who paid greater attention to social media for political information. We discuss implications for the role of social media in political disaffection.

Majority Members’ Feelings About Political Representation of Muslim Immigrants

Abstract. In three survey experimental studies among national samples of the native Dutch, we examined feelings towards Muslim immigrants’ political party representation. The strategy of disengagement (reject political representation) was evaluated most positively, followed by the descriptive representation strategy (participate as Muslims in existing political party). The group representation strategy (participate in the existing political system with a Muslim party) was evaluated most negatively. Furthermore, participants who perceived higher group-based power threat had more negative feelings towards political representation of Muslim immigrants, but less so towards disengaged immigrants. In addition, negative feelings were stronger towards Muslim versus Christian immigrants and this difference was somewhat more pronounced for the group representation and descriptive representation strategy compared to political disengagement.

The Anxiety of Leisure in Early China

The present study focuses on the concept of leisure in early China. Leisure is a form of disengagement with the usual concerns of life; but the message of many early texts is that there is no time in which one can afford to be disengaged. However, toward the mid-to-late Spring and Autumn period, when traditional power structures began to spiral out of control, political disengagement became a morally acceptable option for those faced with unscrupulous rulers who could not be served without fear of moral compromise. Political disengagement thus opened a space for leisure in early Chinese culture.

Race, Poverty, and the Redistribution of Voting Rights

The relative political disengagement of people living in poverty poses an enduring challenge to the integrity of American democracy. In 1993, Congress attempted to address this by passing section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act. This law requires that all public assistance agencies serve as voter registration sites. Though advocates had high hopes for section 7, it has proven difficult to implement. Since very early on, state compliance has varied widely, maintaining an overall trajectory of decline. This article explains the reasons for such patterns. By examining changes in compliance between 1995 and 2012, I demonstrate that race is a pivotal determinant of when states incorporate low-income policy beneficiaries into the electorate. I find that state compliance decreases significantly when (i) non-Whites are less active in electoral politics relative to their White counterparts; (ii) African Americans comprise a greater share of the state population; and (iii) welfare bureaucracies employ more Latinos. These findings raise concerns about the political equality of disadvantaged citizens and underscore the need to scrutinize the outcomes of expansionary voting policies. Even more broadly, this research shows how the entanglement of race and poverty in a federalist polity frustrates efforts to advance participatory equality.

Restoring sanity through comic relief: Parody television viewers and political outlook

ABSTRACTParody news programs regale viewers with satirical, witty, and humorous exposés of the political world and news coverage, but they have also been criticized for creating cynicism and political disengagement. This study found that parody news viewers are self-efficacious and more politically active than viewers of CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, or broadcast television news. Moreover, reliance on parody news shows does not lead to political polarization or government distrust.

Civil Society Efficacy, Citizenship and Empowerment in Africa

This paper contributes to the debate on the limited efficacy of civil society in Africa. It examines the complex interface between notions of civil society and citizenship within the context of the postcolonial state in Africa. It argues that the bifurcated character of citizenship is implicated in the inefficacy of civil society. This is underlined by the limited achievements in social citizenship, aggravated by the economic crisis and neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s as well as the politics of regime sustenance. Political disengagement, drain on the moral content of public life and diminished collective orientation of citizens, aggravated conflicts within society, thereby, promoting a democratisation of disempowerment and a disorganised civil society.

Witnessing Capital Punishment: Vigny's Ambivalent Bystander

In his historical novels, Alfred de Vigny links questions of free will and political agency to spectacles of public execution. His fiction places witnesses of death in predicaments where time seems to slow as they experience the longing to take action alongside the constraint of being caught up in the course of events, history, and normative behaviour. Despite the near impossibility of saving the condemned, executions tempt Vigny's protagonists to interfere. When they fail to take timely action, they experience the helplessness of vicarious death. Vigny's scenes of capital punishment highlight contradictions in the author's philosophy of political disengagement while creating thought experiments that address the ethical and epistemological stakes of watching others die. I argue that Vigny reshaped arguments against the death penalty by interrogating human capacity for free will, knowledge, and action.

Citizenship education, educational policies and NGOs

The transition from the 20th to the 21st century has been the stage of contradictory messages regarding youth citizenship. There is a powerful public and academic rhetoric on youth political disengagement and apathy and, concurrently, an assumption that young people are not knowledgeable, competent and responsible enough to be active citizens, and therefore some kind of ‘education’ should be provided to them. Over this landscape, citizenship education in schools has been the object of fluctuations in European educational policy, from a relative absence to becoming the central transversal goal of education, and back again. This paper contrasts educational policies with the vision of school practice by significant actors (in this case, NGOs working in the field of citizenship education), departing from a cross‐European analysis to focus on the specific experience of Portugal and England. On the whole, results suggest that the political disinvestment might be reinforcing the ‘NGOisation’ of citizenship education, a phenomena that has both advantages and risks. If ‘all that comes in threes is perfect’ then education policies must provide a coherent framework that would guide schools and NGOs in collaboratively fostering opportunities to practice citizenship and learn democracy in and out of schools.

“We have our own struggle”: Up Against the Wall Motherfucker and the avant-garde of community action, the Lower East Side, 1968

This article examines the activist method and motivation of Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (UAW/MF), an art-political collective formed on the Lower East Side in the late 1960s. Exploring a series of actions, organizational alliances and community-orientated programs, it argues that the group’s project was informed by a critique of the social and political disengagement of postwar American art practice. In examining these themes within their neighborhood context, the paper makes an ancillary argument for addressing the local within histories of the radical American 1960s. While 1968 stands as a symbolic moment of political and social upheaval, the actions of UAW/MF – and its forbearer, Black Mask – illustrate the local dimensions of the so-called “protest era,” and highlight anxieties and concerns that promoted social revolt at the grassroots level.

Biowaste separate collection and composting in a Small Island Developing State: The case study of São Tomé and Principe, West Africa.

São Tomé and Principe archipelago in West Africa is a Small Island Developing State facing acute waste management problems. This article describes the implementation of selective collection of biowaste combined with composting in São Tomé, as a case-study of an innovative action in the framework of a Small Island Developing State. Collection was designed to gather 225 t y(-1), targeting non-domestic biowaste producers, namely local businesses, municipal markets and municipal green waste. A municipal composting plant was built using basic facilities and windrow composting. The total investment amounted to €50,000, mainly supported by external aid. Biowaste producers reacted very positively, source segregating enthusiastically. Irregular service - collection collapsed each time the old vehicle was repaired - together with political disengagement and unmotivated work force were the major constrains. Biowaste was intermittently delivered to the composting plant and yielded 2 t of compost from July to December 2013 and 10 t during 2014. Compost was sold as organic fertiliser to a touristic resource, to small farmers and to gardeners, at a market price slightly below production costs, meaning the process is not economically sustainable without support. Nevertheless, biowaste is one of the few waste fractions (other than glass) that can be turned into a product that has both market value and a real demand, showing the enormous potential of composting source-separated biowaste in this part of the world.

Noted: Disengagement and idiocy

Cass, P. (2015). Disengagement and idiocy. Pacific Journalism Review, 21(2): 213-214. Book review of American Democracy, by Andrew Perrin. Cambridge: Polity Press. 2014, 228pp. ISBN 978-0-7456622-32-9. Perrin's study of American democracy begins by stating what has become a commonplace of fear in many democracies, that people have become cynical and distrusting of the democractic system and that apathy and political disengagement are widespread. Only multi-millionaries backed by capitalist corporations with the deepest pockets can afford to run for office in the United States and nobody in power seems to be in any hurry to do anything about it.

Is Deliberative Democracy Feasible? Political Disengagement and Trust in Liberal Democratic States

Liberal democratic states throughout the world are experiencing declining rates of political participation and trust among their citizens. Many political theorists have argued that deliberative democracy offers hope. Deliberative democracy, they argue, is a distinctive conception of democracy which improves upon traditional aggregative or majoritarian approaches by providing a more inclusive space in which citizens can collectively deliberate on political decisions. I argue, however, that the deliberative model presupposes and requires widespread participation and trust which it is incapable of ensuring. The more normative weight that is placed upon the need for inclusive deliberation among citizens, the less politically feasible deliberative democracy becomes as a strategy for the reform of liberal democratic states experiencing declines in trust and participation. I therefore argue that deliberative democrats are faced with a choice: they can afford central weight to the idea of deliberation and thus render their theories unfeasible as a strategy for democratic reform, or they can downplay the importance of deliberation in their theories and thus minimise the distinctiveness of deliberative democracy.

The General Rejection? Political Disengagement, Disaffected Democrats and ‘Doing Politics’ Differently: Table 15.1

In the run up to the 2015 General Election Douglas Carswell, the former Conservative MP who defected to UKIP in 2014, reflected on the growth of anti-politics and argued that British political parties seemed to resemble ‘Kodak parties’. He drew from arguments made in his book The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy that identified the need for an ‘old politics’ to keep pace with a ‘new politics’ that was being driven by exactly those processes of social, economic and technical change that have been identified as ‘liquid modernity’. Carswell’s argument is that the Kodak brand was once synonymous with cameras and from the moment George Eastman launched the first Kodak camera in 1888 Kodak had a dominant market share. By the 1970s, more than 90% of camera film products sold in the USA were made by Kodak to the extent that people even spoke of taking family photographs as capturing that ‘Kodak moment’. Then came digital cameras and in 2012 Kodak filed for bankruptcy. Political parties were once synonymous with democratic politics but their social position and role has clearly changed from the mass-based organisations of the twentieth century. Carswell diagnoses a failure of British political institutions to keep pace with the expectations and demands of an increasingly diverse society and that exists to some extent beyond the reach of the public—the demos. It is in this context that this chapter reflects on the 2015

The new class war: Excluding the working class in 21st‐century Britain

Is Britain's working class already lost to a vicious cycle of political disengagement and exclusion? Geoff Evans and James Tilley outline the terms of a ‘new class war’ against the working class, based on its shrinking share of the population, low political participation rates and the decreasing return it provides to electoral vote‐chasers.

The primacy of politics: Towards a more realistic liberalism

Matt Sleat asks how liberal politics can recharge its vision and ideals for a contemporary reality marked by increased political disengagement and the rise of populism. The answer, he argues, lies in a dialled‐down sense of morality, a willingness to compromise, and an unerring eye on power in all its forms.

Embedding and Disembedding of Political Elites: A Filter System Approach

This article looks at the issue of political disengagement in mature democracies and the growing tendency towards disconnect between citizens and their political representatives. It locates itself in relation to ‘demand-side’ (external to politics) and critical ‘supply-side’ (focused on the political centre) explanations of disengagement. It concentrates on the latter and, accordingly, builds on critical, post-Marxist and elite-oriented work. As such it follows on from earlier calls in the journal for a return to elite-based research ( Savage and Williams, 2008 ). Drawing on general concepts in economic sociology (Polanyi, Granovetter) the article presents an alternative embedding-disembedding paradigm for explaining and evaluating this tendency towards political elite disengagement. The propensity for politicians to disembed from wider society is explained by way of a series of eight ‘filters’. Such filters work, alone or cumulatively, both to socially embed political elites within the institutions and networks of formal politics and also to disembed them from wider society and the populace they represent. The interpretive framework outlined here draws on a combination of secondary literature and ongoing interview-based research with some 150 political actors (politicians, journalists, officials) working at Westminster. As such, the filters and embedding-disembedding paradigm focuses primarily on the UK case. However, the framework is easily adaptable to other nations and systems.

The Great War and the 1918–19 Revolutions as Experienced and Remembered by the Hungarian Peasantry

At the beginning of the 20th century more than 60 percent of the Hungarian population was made up of peasants. This essay examines how this large section of society experienced and remembered the Great War, and the 1918–19 revolutions that followed. Utilizing letters, diaries, memoirs, and autobiographies produced by the peasants themselves, as well official reports, newspapers, oral history interviews, and novels with sociological observations, this study emphasizes that the reception of the mobilization was much more reserved among peasants than within the urban population. With the outbreak of the war the traditional immobility, isolation, and political disengagement of the peasants ended. One of the lasting effects of the war on the mentality of the peasantry was the widening of their worldview and the strengthening of their self-respect. The other was their becoming acquainted with the modern techniques of killing and the consequent devaluation of human life. Finally, this paper considers how such affects contributed to the red terror practices by the Communists in 1919 and the white terror committed by rightist paramilitary units in 1919–20.

A deliberative public sphere? Picturing Portuguese political blogs

Deliberative democracies are based on the principle of citizens’ participation. However, election turnouts and citizens’ alienation are signs of a political disengagement that could endanger the foundations of democratic systems. The spaces in which political debate and rational argumentation between equals may take place have diminished, yet new digital technologies have brought up potentialities in the promotion of online, horizontal and deliberative communication. Political blogs have been one of the most studied platforms, as they allow citizens engaged in political discussion and argumentation to establish a public sphere in which matters of public concern are debated. Nonetheless, issues of political polarization, fragmentation and non-rational debate have also been pointed out to limit the most optimistic perspectives over political blogs. By using the social network analysis, this paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the role of Portuguese political blogs, by assessing its level of deliberation.

The Maple Spring as the Background for the Flourishing of the Fifth Estate in Québec

The political disengagement of the Millennials has long been a subject of scholarly debate. Using ethnographic research methods, our lab conducted a multi-sited field study to investigate the digital practices of some of the community networks that have emerged or consolidated since the Maple Spring. Our field findings suggest that the Millennial student protesters – alongside citizens from all generations who have lent them their support – have actively engaged in their own forms of political participation and by doing so, have helped to firmly entrench the Fifth Estate in Québec society. In particular, we have found that these grassroots networks might have expanded Québec’s alternative press by using interactive technologies to self-publish, self-represent and self-document issues that are of great concern to them and have typically not been topics up for debate on the public agenda. Our analysis brings to the fore the fraught relationship between the Fifth Estate and the four traditional democratic institutions.