Political Sea Change Research Articles

Consulting citizens: Addressing the deficits in participatory democracy

‘Democracy’ is a pliable, and much abused concept, yet constitutional law cannot do without it. It is usually linked to the equally flexible notions of rule of law and constitutionalism. Due to many changes in public life around the world, entrenched ideas of governmental propriety, including being democratic, are undergoing a ‘loss of meaning’. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 explicitly requires democracy to be participatory. Despite various official efforts to formulate the modalities of public consultation and an established routine of public hearings and calls for comment on draft legislation and policies, it has not developed beyond a ‘box-ticking’ exercise, sometimes amounting to outright abuse. As a corrective to the shortcomings of standard electoral democracy a novel approach to the involvement of the citizenry in contentious decision-making has emerged in many parts of the democratic world. It takes the form of citizens’ assemblies composed to achieve descriptive representation rooted in an age-old method of randomised selection, known as ‘sortition’. To employ these mechanisms to realise genuine participatory democracy would require surmounting the difficulties presented by the complexity of South African society. Modern technology and advances in sortition methodology hold promises of overcoming the difficulties, but it would also require a political sea change.

Learning to Live with the Virus

Learning to Live with the Virus

Turn of the Tide? Cultural Critique and the New Right

The following contributions are transcripts of talks and debates from a workshop jointly organized by the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and the Latin American Center Zurich, which took place at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, on March 2–3, 2017. Titled, somewhat provocatively, ‘Cultural Criticism and the Fascist Turn’, the workshop invited four renowned cultural critics from Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay to reflect on the recent political sea-change in all three countries, and the ways in which it compared to, and perhaps even foreshadowed, political and cultural trends as well as critical discussions that have recently occurred across the region as well as on a global scale.

Conservative Bias: How Jesse Helms Pioneered the Rise of Right‐Wing Media and Realigned the Republican PartyBryan HardinThrift. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014.

Conservative Bias: How Jesse Helms Pioneered the Rise of Right-Wing Media and Realigned the Republican Party Bryan Hardin Thrift. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014.Current debates over gay marriage, Obamacare, the role of the federal government in the economy, as well as the racially divisive tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri have again highlighted the differences between liberal and conservative. It appears impossible for the two sides to ever agree. In Conservative Bias, Bryan Hardin Thrift provides a historical explanation for this ideological and rhetorical divide by making a compelling argument for the influence of Jesse Helms in the creation of the modern conservative movement. Some historians such as Dan T. Carter have suggested a top-town theory on the rise of conservatism, pointing to Wallace and Nixon leading a conservative Southern revival during the 1968 presidential campaign. Others, like Matthew Lassiter, have argued that grassroots movements against liberal programs like welfare, civil rights, busing, and the ERA are what have created the new conservative movement. Thrift's perspective is significant because he bridges these two divergent theories by arguing that control of the media and the repackaging of the conservative message are what brought about a political sea change after the 1960s. In Thrift's view, Helms's deft use of the media allowed him to develop his right-wing position and gain white supporters during the 1960s.After winning his Senate seat in 1972, Helms noted that, 'Nothing pleased me more than to have had a part in demonstrating that the lib'rul editors are virtually without influence-if those of us on the other side simply fight hard enough (193). In this statement, he encapsulated a strategy focused on intractable adherence to a conservative position leaving little room for compromise. Thrift traces the evolution of this point of view through Helms's work in newspapers and television during the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1950s, Helms, like most Southern whites, was a solid Democrat from North Carolina. He was the editor of the Tarheel Banker, a conservative magazine committed to free enterprise. It was in this capacity that Helms began his attacks on the mainstream media, believing it to be too liberal. By 1960, Helms had joined the team at WRAL-TV in Raleigh where his conservative message was able to reach a much broader audience. Up until his successful run for the Senate in 1972, Helms remained free of the constraints that a political office imposed and was able to push his conservative agenda without having to adjust this message to be elected. …

Thatcherism and its geographical legacies: the new map of socio‐spatial inequality in the Divided Kingdom

The 1979 election heralded a political sea change in the UK, as Thatcherite ‘Two Nation’ politics regarded inequality as evidence of a vibrant capitalism. As a result, inter‐regional inequalities were exacerbated as the effects of deindustrialisation, capacity reductions and job losses fell most heavily in the ‘North’. The lifting of restrictions on capital export precipitated the overseas relocation of private sector manufacturing, with job losses concentrated in the ‘North’. Cuts to nationalised industries were also concentrated in the ‘North’. Meanwhile the ‘South’ benefitted because of the primacy given to banking and financial services in economic policy priorities and the spatially selective concentration of Government spending on R&D and infrastructure. However, there were also widening intraregional inequalities within both ‘North’ and ‘South’, not least because of housing policies. Crucially, post‐Thatcher the neoliberal emphases on private sector growth and commodification were adopted by New Labour and Conservative–Liberal coalition governments so that socio‐spatial inequality became more deeply embedded in a Divided Kingdom.

Japan's Power Shift and Its DPRK Policy

Many serious issues exist between Japan and North Korea (DPRK), such as nuclear, missile, abduction, and colonial issues. Progress on their resolution has been limited. Consequently, the two countries have remained unfriendly neighbors. Their relations recently deteriorated as a result of the DPRK's satellite launch and its second nuclear test in the first half of 2009, and Japan's strong response to them. In the middle of this period of significant tension, in August 2009, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) won a landslide victory in the lower house elections, ending the dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) over the last half a century. This political sea change in Japan has not resulted in major improvements in the Japan–DPRK relations. Yet, the DPJ's stance toward the DPRK's military threat and the Japan–US alliance is different from that of the LDP. So far, the DPJ has opted to avoid following in the LDP's footsteps of strengthening the alliance and expanding Japan's military operations in response to the DPRK's military threat. Instead, it intends to increase Japan's independence from the USA, and reduce US military presence in Japan. Given such intentions, the DPJ seems willing to improve Japan's relations with the DPRK. The question is whether its willingness will be translated into real actions to bring about major improvements.

Democracy In Cyberia

Democracy In Cyberia Christopher C. Robinson (bio) Darin Barney, Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert B. Rodman, eds. Race in Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2000). David R. Koepsell, The Ontology of Cyberspace: Law, Philosophy, and the Future of Intellectual Property (Chicago: Open Court, 2000). In the fourth chapter of his book, Prometheus Wired, Darin Barney advances a bold thesis. He observes that students of the relationship between Information Technology and politics miss the transformational effects of the Internet on political institutions. What is argued in the literature on politics, law, and communications technology is that the global character of the Internet defies national attempts to regulate transactions and other activities. The solution advanced most often is an international agency or world confederation with a mandate to control Internet activities and products like child pornography, hate speech, or gambling. Barney asserts, to the contrary, that such images of the relations between government and networks miss the point: The Internet is itself the new form of political authority in the world. There has been a transfer of power, heretofore unnoticed, and any thought that national sovereignties can combine to regulate cyberspace is hopelessly anachronistic and illusory. This provocative assertion is not the thesis that Barney pursues ultimately. Indeed, his main claim in Prometheus Wired is that the radical promises of the Internet — the idea that all old knowledge and political categories like national sovereignty, pluralism, and citizenship have been rendered otiose — are inflated, empty, and hide the truth that traditional political theory has much to offer an analysis of this technology and its social consequences. Underlying this explicit thesis is the question I wish to explore in this essay: How different is cyberspace from “real-time” space? That is, should cyberspace be perceived as entailing an ontological, epistemological, and political sea change? Or should it be seen in a continuum with our traditional notions of a physical and political world? There are differences between real time and cyberspace, to be sure; but do these differences add up to a dividable world? The projections of those technophiles who see the Internet as a liberation from all strictures imposed by the frictional world are part of a larger culture of metaphysical escapism that is as understandable as it is untenable. Whether we are discussing Plato’s form world or the various attempts by mathematicians and logicians to fashion a symbolic language that is detached from the imprecision and prejudices of natural languages, escapism has been a consistent theme across human cultures.1 Cyberspace does afford users a variety of “Ring of Gyges”-type escapes from the world of real time. I can, for example, participate in a variety of role-playing fantasy games where my avatar’s character — an alter ego of my own design — can accumulate all sorts of prestige, weapons, and powers. If I wish, I can leave my gender, age, ethnicity, sexuality, physical infirmities, social status, and reticence at the threshold of cyberspace and thrill in expressing myself as a completely different identity. Through chat rooms I can become a member of different communities, confess intimate secrets and desires to anonymous “friends,” have cybersex, or perpetrate virtual acts of violence. But just how different are these activities from the real time world? Could I not commit my imaginative flights from my true life to paper and write stories and novels? Would a relationship with a pen pal be as fulfilling as a chatroom conversation? Is cybersex anything more than mutual masturbation (at this point in the technology)? We move between these realms with relative ease. And there are areas of imbrication. For instance, I have a student who made almost twenty thousand dollars last year by playing fantasy games, acquiring weapons and powers in these games, and then selling these virtual properties on e-Bay. Real cash for a fantasy wizard’s wand! Viewed differently, all this student has done is trade time — the time it takes him to find these desirable game tools — for money paid by people who have the means and enjoy the role-playing, but do not have...