Democratic Politics Research Articles

Community organising and radical democracy

Abstract Community organising is a way of doing democratic politics distinct from electoral and radical protest politics yet has been largely overlooked in discourse studies and activist scholarship, particularly when compared to the attention paid to ‘flashier’ grassroots movements. We aim to contribute to rectifying this shortcoming by exploring the conceptual connections between community organising and the political discourse theory of radical democracy. Our theoretical argument is supplemented with an illustrative vignette-based exploration, drawing on the experiences of community alliances and their members within Citizens UK, the UK’s community organising umbrella organization. We show that while radical democratic theory can help ground community organising practice and its dilemmas in a conceptually illuminating way, community organising practice, in turn, can help put some valuable ‘flesh’ onto what many consider to be the rather abstract pronouncements associated with radical democracy and its failure to elaborate what an agonistic politics looks like in practice.

Courage and Charm: Annedore Leber, German Resistance, and Memory Activism, 1946–9

Interest in memory activism is the methodological starting point for this account of Annedore Leber, Social Democratic politician in post-1945 Berlin and surviving member of the resistance group that plotted the assassination attempt of 20 July 1944 on Adolf Hitler. Beginning in 1946, her memory work entailed a narrative to influence Germans, prone to view that plot as treasonous, to reconsider the resistance. Initially, her often-articulated contempt for the nation that had backed Hitler made this effort problematic: which Germans comprised her intended audience? The Cold War gave her an opening. She compared Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union. She called on Germans who opposed communism to appreciate the courage and love of freedom that informed anti-Nazi resistance. She re-enacted those resistance values by confronting the communists publicly. The other methodological angle regarding this research comes from awareness that the German patriarchy, despite defeat, was largely intact. Comments on Annedore Leber as a woman appeared in press coverage of her confrontation of communist leaders; men challenged her version of the resistance. How she met those challenges, assumed her stance as a politically active woman and expressed the necessity for women to engage in politics are key to understanding her activism.

Territory and democratic politics: a critical introduction

Territory and democratic politics: a critical introduction

NATIONAL ISLAM IN THE CONTESTATION OF IDEOLOGY AND POLITICS IN INDONESIA

This article explores the contestation of ideology and commodification of identity within Indonesia’s political democracy. The interplay between religion and the state presents significant challenges, influencing political movements aligned with religious convictions. Employing a political sociology approach, this study examines the contention between factions advocating for the integration of religion and the state and those supporting their separation. Additionally, the analysis considers the relationship between identity commodification and ideological contestation, highlighting Pancasila’s role as a national consensus. A qualitative methodology provides in-depth insights, incorporating content and descriptive analysis to process information from various documents. Primary materials for this research encompass documents related to Pancasila values, identity commodification, and political contestation. The politicization of identity in Indonesia, characterized by the dichotomy between nationalist Islam and secular nationalism, is depicted as a strategic maneuver aimed at achieving power dominance. There are three political groups that will continue to color Indonesian politics because they have different perceptions of the relationship between religion and the state: Islamist groups who want to unite religion and state, secular groups who want to separate religion and state, and accommodative groups who place religion as a source of ethics and the moral basis of policy.

Fact-checks focus on famous politicians, not partisans.

Does the fact-checking enterprise focus its attention on one party? If Republican or Democratic politicians were systematically more likely to have their statements evaluated, that would call into question both the impartiality of the fact-checking enterprise and the results of the many papers that rely on fact-checks to drive other measurements. Despite frequent claims that fact-checking organizations are biased against Republicans, there is little systematic evidence regarding political bias in this industry. We address these gaps using data on how often each member of Congress was fact-checked from 2018 to 2021. We construct measures to account for multiple factors theorized to influence fact-checking, including a member's partisanship, prominence, and the quality of the news sites they link to. We find that Republican elected officials are not fact-checked more often than Democratic officials. Politician prominence predicts fact-checking, but partisanship does not. Our findings suggest it is unlikely that the selection approach used by fact-checking groups creates partisan bias in fact-check-derived measures.

Post-Islamism and the Muslim Left: notes on Turkey and Iran

ABSTRACT Whereas the existing literature on political Islam has often examined post-Islamism in relation to political and economic liberalism, this intervention foregrounds a variety of post-Islamism that is decidedly Leftist in its political and economic commitments. In so doing, the present article moves away from a conception of post-Islamism as a monolithic project. Instead, the article uses the term in relation to a plurality of conditions and projects in and by which some Muslim individuals and groups, having become disenchanted with the project of establishing an Islamic political order (nizam Islami) as an instrument for the implementation of Islamic law (sharia), continue to draw on their religious faith in order to advance a range of competing – at times clashing – political projects and socioeconomic agendas. By focusing on examples from Turkey and Iran, the article provides an alternative to the hitherto existing conception of post-Islamism as a project with a predominantly neoliberal economic orientation and an ambivalent position on democratic politics. It argues that the post-Islamist Muslim Left in Turkey and Iran has contributed to the articulation in these countries of a democratic and socialist conception of Islamic public religiosity.

“This is what the Bolsheviks do”: How Democratic Politicians Use Foreign Revolutions to Attract Voters

Revolution in one country can inspire protests in another country, demanding responses from elites seeking to maintain power. Scholars typically use a policy-centered approach to analyze these responses, focusing on how policy strategies of repression or co-optation are used to prevent revolution. But in democracies, political survival is also electoral success. This article therefore argues that studying the communicative signaling of political elites allows us to see another important response to foreign revolutions: how democratic politicians through speeches use foreign revolutions to attract revolution-wary voters. Building on recent legislative debate scholarship, the article develops a parliamentary speech signaling framework and demonstrates its usefulness by analyzing Danish elite responses to revolutions in the 1910s. This approach enables us to see how democratic politicians use foreign revolutions for electoral advantages, and it addresses a noted difficulty of previous research in clarifying whether co-optation or repression in democracies emerged as responses to revolutions.

“Problems of an Other’s Making”: B. R. Ambedkar, Caste, and Majoritarian Domination

This article presents a new theory of majoritarian domination drawn from Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar’s critique of majoritarian tyranny during the decades preceding British India’s decolonization. Ambedkar’s critique of British colonial pluralism and Congress-led Indian anticolonialism emphasizes attention to social structures and the mechanisms that produce and sustain communal majorities. He argues that caste prevents equality and fraternity, thus foreclosing the possibility of a democratic society. In such a context, Ambedkar argues that the majority is likely to be communal and fixed, rather than political, inclusive, and open to change over time. Ambedkarian majoritarian domination supplements nineteenth-century accounts of the institutional and epistemic dimensions of majoritarian tyranny. I defend comparison as a tool for theoretical analysis to show that Ambedkarian majoritarian domination can explain the interaction of hierarchical social structures with democratic politics in contexts beyond colonial India.

The Relevance of Zainudin MZ's Political Preaching Thoughts to Urban Community Development

In practice, Islamic preaching in this era is more often displayed and preached only on the narrow aspects of spirituality and morality. Meanwhile, aspects of culture, social, economy, let alone politics are rarely mentioned. The involvement of preachers in politics is still considered taboo. In such conditions, Zainudin MZ emerged to break the taboo. With a brave attitude, the kyai not only preached politically verbally but also directly entered into the practice of democratic politics that was full of deceit. By using a qualitative descriptive method that uses research data in the form of books, journals, and videos related to Zainudin MZ's political thoughts and movements, several findings were produced: first, the relationship between preaching and politics for Zainudin MZ is an integralistic relationship that is reflected in his preaching material on the ethics of political preaching and criticisms of government policies. Second, Zainudin MZ's political activities are based on a strong spirit of Islamism. It was proven when mass organizations and political parties were prohibited from using Islamic principles with the implementation of the sole principle of Pancasila, Zainudin immediately left the world of practical politics and focused on preaching. For him, there was no point in being in a party if the principle was not Islamic. When the sole principle was revoked, he returned to being active in politics and even became the general chairman of the Islamic party. Third, Zainudin's involvement in practical politics found a new phenomenon that preaching politics is difficult to realize in the realm of democratic politics. Therefore, after feeling that his preaching idealism could not be implemented practically, Zainudin MZ chose to withdraw from politics and called his involvement in past politics the era of ignorance. Fourth, the substance of Zainudin MZ's preaching is very relevant for urban society, especially in maintaining Muslim identity and in facing various social, cultural and political challenges.

Spatial Construction and Grassroots Willingness to Participate in Democracy: Analytical Framework and Empirical Tests

In China, political participation exists as a mainstream understanding of democratic politics. There are many factors that influence citizens' willingness to participate, often pointing to some form of "space"， but few studies have explored the relevance of different forms of space to the willingness to participate in democracy. This study focuses on the grassroots space of NPC deputies' contact stations in China and utilizes data collected from 185 contact stations for empirical analysis. The study adopts the physical, interactional and digital spaces identified in established research and operationalizes their variable indicators, on the basis of which an analytical framework is constructed and hypotheses are formulated. The empirical results show that there is a significant positive correlation between the improvement of the three types of spatial conditions and the willingness to participate in grassroots democracy. It has been proved that promoting grassroots democratic participation willingness through spatial constructs has a positive performance. This study aims to make an empirical test to support the spatial examination of democratic participation and provide an understanding of the spatial construction of grassroots democracy in China.

Sin and Socialism: The Development of Realism in Christian Socialist Thought

ABSTRACT In this article I investigate how Christian socialist thought has approached the problem of human nature and realism. I focus on four key figures in the tradition: F. D. Maurice, Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and William Temple. My account makes two claims: first, that realist grounds for the Christian socialist vision developed as the tradition matured; and second, that it is possible to reconcile a realism grounded in original sin with socialism. The core of the realist argument for socialism is simply an extension of a primary justification for political democracy: because of sinful human nature, power needs countervailing forces. Decentralized economic democracy achieves this by distributing power widely. Markets do the same by decentralizing decision-making and enabling selfishness to be “harnessed” and yet “contained” by social ownership. Christian socialism can thus be understood as not only compatible with realism but as the logical outworking of realism.

Migrant Democracy: Constitutional Promise and Political Struggle in Contemporary Italy

AbstractThe article addresses the tension between the internalization of a violent border regime intent on preempting migrant arrivals and the everyday democratic struggle against that regime. It builds on ethnographic fieldwork in Rome to illuminate conflicting political imaginations and existing practices of the already plural, albeit unequal, Italian polity. On the one hand, we see a bordered democracy. This democracy keeps investing in nationalizing itself, by fortifying the Mediterranean as a lethal border and by shoring up social, economic, and racialized boundaries. On the other hand, there is also an emerging migrant democracy. This migrant democracy actively works on two interrelated fronts: to build a more democratic, pluralistic, and egalitarian polity, and to reform how legal and physical access to the polity is governed in the first place. The article argues that, on both fronts, the anti-Fascist Constitution of Italy offers a viable political and ideological framework. More generally, the article proposes that if democratic politics and constitutional arguments are to produce more than a rhetorical edifice for democracy, they need to attend to the social, economic, and racialized inequalities of life in common.

How Vital is Nature?

This paper brings into conversation two ontologies that depart from the anthropocentric norm: new materialism, represented here by the US vitalist philosopher Jane Bennett, and the animated cosmology common among Indigenous peoples, as an example of which I take Braiding Sweetgrass by the Potawatomi bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer. I provide exegeses of both philosophies, with respect in particular to the notion of “animation,” noting that the animated sphere is much more extensive for Bennett than for Kimmerer. I then track Bennett’s shift away from environmental ethics. Finally, I relate differences in philosophy to differences with regard to race and racism, with a detailed discussion of Bennett’s tribute to Walt Whitman, and the genocidal elements within his democratic politics.

Beyond Flexibility

While Derrick Darby and Eduardo Martinez's "Making Identities Safe for Democracy" proposes flexible identities as a solution to reconciling social identity with democratic politics, this paper argues that flexibility alone is insufficient to address contemporary challenges to democracy. Through a critical examination of their work, I identify two significant limitations in their argument. First, their primary example of veteran status as a flexible identity is problematic, as empirical evidence shows it remains significantly aligned with Republican partisan identity and may be grounded in potentially restrictive forms of national identity. Second, their framework fails to adequately address how identity flexibility can counter the phenomenon of partisan sorting, where partisanship has evolved into a mega-identity that increasingly structures both political and social life. In response to these limitations, I argue that emphasizing the plurality of social identities, rather than merely their flexibility, offers a more effective approach to treating—rather than just preventing—the challenges that identity poses to democratic practice. While flexibility remains important, cultivating multiple, distinct social identities that coexist and interact within individuals and communities may better dilute the dominance of partisan mega-identities and foster more inclusive democratic engagement.

Twenty‐First Century Autocrats and Their Followers: A Comparative Inquiry

<p>Leadership and followership have long been considered to be defining features of democratic politics. However, more recently, both conceptual redefinitions and real-world developments have put issues of leadership and followership in regimes from beyond the family of established liberal democracies center-stage. This article looks into the nature of authoritarian leadership and followership from a comparative perspective and in light of theories of democratic political leadership. As the inquiry suggests, the rise and nature of leadership activities in contemporary authoritarian regimes reflects both the turn towards more competitive types of autocracy and the aspiration of many authoritarian powerholders to be seen as democratic. At the same time, some of the most spectacular manifestations of autocratic leadership relate to democratic rather than established authoritarian regimes. While followers of autocratic leaders can control their leaders only to the extent that a regime provides mechanisms of vertical accountability, authoritarian followers, even in established autocracies, are not in all regards less important or powerful than their democratic counterparts. Many authoritarian followers do not just support autocrats, but actively attack and chase non-followers or followers of other leaders, and thus play an independent role in the legitimation or de-legitimation of leaders and regimes.</p>

Dilemmas of Powerlessness: The Ethical Dimensions of Political Action in the Swedish Parliament

Abstract What are the most challenging ethical dilemmas for politicians, and how do they handle them? The classical literature on ethical dilemmas in politics has mainly explored them as conflicts between ethical principles in high-stakes decisions. However, empirical evidence of the extent to which such dilemmas accurately reflect the experience of most politicians is scarce. Drawing on extensive in-depth interviews with Swedish parliamentarians, I show that their dilemmas stem mainly from powerlessness. Powerlessness in politics manifests itself in primarily two ways: relational powerlessness, which is driven by constraints like party and constituency loyalties, and inherent powerlessness due to formal and informal barriers like constitutional mandates and limited time and resources. This study contributes to the field of political ethics by anchoring political dilemmas in everyday democratic politics and by introducing powerlessness as a new central concept. In doing so, it supplements our understanding of ethical dilemmas in politics with insights from those confronting them.

From Panthers to Political Dalits: Revisiting the Legacy of Dalit Panthers in India

The Panthers had created a rupture from the earlier pattern that Ambedkar has strategized to integrate the Dalits as one of the important political subjects of the modern nation state. The Panthers deviated and invested in two radical ideological traits; the Civil Right Movement in the US (including the Black Panthers’ Party) and radical Marxism (Indian Naxalite movement) to transform Ambedkar’s social theory into an aggressive brand of transformative politics. The Panthers showed open discomfort with the given liberal model of democratic politics and attempted to shift the traditional Dalit political ideology into a revolutionary force. Though the Panthers’ innovations have impressed the urban Dalit youths and intelligentsia, it failed miserably in forming a concrete political alternative at the regional or the national level. I have concluded that, with the rise of Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the Dalits were introduced to an improvised liberal political agenda, different from the earlier variants of Ambedkar’s participatory politics and the Panthers’ militant rhetoric. It shows that the Dalits are more convinced and engaged with the liberal-democratic model and consciously refute the militant and radical methods for political actions.

‘I do feel proud that almost everyone I know voted’: The emotional foundations of dutiful citizenship

Democratic politics in many parts of the world seems increasingly characterised by intense emotions, bitter divisions and growing polarisation. Amidst this charged political atmosphere it is a common refrain that an emotional politics forfeits rational dialogue and threatens our democracy. In contrast to such claims this article argues that emotions are central to citizenship and political participation. Drawing upon qualitative archival material from the British Mass Observation Project (1983–2017) the article explores the enduring emotional dimensions of dutiful citizenship. Civically engaged respondents experienced electoral politics emotionally and with a striking intensity. In contrast to accounts which associate dutiful citizenship with dry notions of duty, responsibility and obligation, this article begins an exploration of the emotional underpinnings of dutiful citizenship; the deep and abiding feelings citizens can have towards democratic politics and their political engagement. Findings indicate that a wide range of emotions are central to the evaluative and sense-making processes of dutiful citizens and the ways in which they are mobilised for sustained political engagement. The article concludes by suggesting that a focus on the emotional and expressive aspects of dutiful citizenship may help to cultivate committed young democrats for the future.

What Is Democracy?

Abstract Modern democracies, including the United States, rely upon three normative elements: (1) rights expressing the dignity of the citizen; (2) law expressing a commitment to public reason; (3) elections as the method of selecting representatives. In each dimension, citizens are to see a representation of themselves as popular sovereign. Morality and law are not matters to be resolved at the polls. Yet, popular opinion, supported by contemporary social sciences, tends to reduce democracy to the third element. On this view, the higher the voter turnout, the better the democracy. In an age in which we worry as much about majority, as minority, tyranny, this view is not credible. A mob at the polls is still a mob even if it is a majority. An exclusive focus on quantification represents a profound misunderstanding of the meaning of democracy. Democratic politics includes an interpretive practice across the moral and the legal dimensions. It relies as much on persuasion as on proof. Recovery of a vibrant democratic life requires a renewed appreciation of a public humanities, not as a pastime but as way of living.

Imaginary of Post-National European Constitutionalism: Lessons from Central European Philosophy, Sociology and Jurisprudence

Abstract The article focuses on the paradoxes of constitutional identity and the impact of constitutional sovereignty on post-sovereign European society and politics. It uses post-1989 constitutional and social transformations in Central European countries, the rise of constitutional populism and identitarian politics to argue that the nation state continues to operate through the principle of constitutional sovereignty even in the EU’s post-sovereign constitutional constellation. It thus proves that democratic politics is identity politics even in post-sovereign and post-national politics and the EU’s supranational organisation has to respond to the constitutional and political identity question through its own structures and semantics. The central argument, therefore, revisits classic notions of social and constitutional theory such as the distinctions between community and society, ethnos and demos or authenticity and alienation to outline the persistence of nationalism and its varieties in contemporary constitutional populism in Central Europe. While recognising that the nation state continues to be the only organisation to successfully combine rational efficiency and communal bonds constituted by the national identity, the EU’s response to the challenges of constitutional populism and nationalism needs to enhance its democratic legitimation and constitutionally integrate the imaginaries of European public spheres and demoicracy to promote an anti-explosive alternative to the explosive nationalist imaginaries.