From the American and British counter-insurgency in Iraq to the bombing of Dresden and the Amristar Massacre in India, civilians are often abused and killed when they are caught in the cross-fire of ...wars and other conflicts. In Democracy's Blameless Leaders, Neil Mitchell examines how leaders in democracies manage the blame for the abuse and the killing of civilians, arguing that politicians are likely to react in a self-interested and opportunistic way and seek to deny and evade accountability. Using empirical evidence from well-known cases of abuse and atrocity committed by the security forces of established, liberal democracies, Mitchell shows that self-interested political leaders will attempt to evade accountability for abuse and atrocity, using a range of well-known techniques including denial, delay, diversion, and delegation to pass blame for abuse and atrocities to the lowest plausible level. Mitchell argues that, despite the conventional wisdom that accountability is a 'central feature' of democracies, it is only a rare and courageous leader who acts differently, exposing the limits of accountability in democratic societies. As democracies remain embroiled in armed conflicts, and continue to try to come to grips with past atrocities, Democracy's Blameless Leaders provides a timely analysis of why these events occur, why leaders behave as they do, and how a more accountable system might be developed.
It is frequently claimed that online disinformation threatens democracy, and that disinformation is more prevalent or harmful because social media platforms have disrupted our communication systems. ...These intuitions have not been fully developed in democratic theory. This article builds on systemic approaches to deliberative democracy to characterize key vulnerabilities of social media platforms that disinformation actors exploit, and to clarify potential anti-deliberative effects of disinformation. The disinformation campaigns mounted by Russian agents around the United States’ 2016 election illustrate the use of anti-deliberative tactics, including corrosive falsehoods, moral denigration, and unjustified inclusion. We further propose that these tactics might contribute to the system-level anti-deliberative properties of epistemic cynicism, techno-affective polarization, and pervasive inauthenticity. These harms undermine a polity’s capacity to engage in communication characterized by the use of facts and logic, moral respect, and democratic inclusion. Clarifying which democratic goods are at risk from disinformation, and how they are put at risk, can help identify policies that go beyond targeting the architects of disinformation campaigns to address structural vulnerabilities in deliberative systems.
Scholars have paid increasing attention to how questions of multi-level governance have become politicized in the domestic political arena. Issues surrounding democratic government itself have ...received surprisingly little attention in this debate. In this article, we ask how political parties politicize the principles of liberal democracy within advanced democracies. We expect that challenger parties are most likely to question existing principles. The targets of their criticism, however, should vary according to their ideological origins. Conducting automated quantitative text analysis of Swiss, German and Austrian party press releases between 2006 and 2018 using a multidimensional dictionary of liberal democracy, we confirm that left-libertarian and populist radical right parties are the main challengers of the democratic status quo. The foundation of criticism, however, differs fundamentally. While left-libertarians focus on principles that strengthen individual autonomy in politics, populist radical right parties demand more forms of participation and fewer constraints by liberal elements of democracy.
This article introduces this special issue on Participatory Democracy and Inequality, identifying both the primary claims made by the modern iteration of participatory democracy, as well as the main ...challenges faced by participatory democrats, by drawing on a range of literature, both empirical and theoretical. Despite these challenges, it finds cause for optimism, based on the trajectory of recent research on participatory democracy, and suggests there might be a number of potential means of addressing the problems raised by democratic inequality.
As American politics becomes ever more dominated by powerful vested interests, positive change seems permanently stymied. Left out in the cold by the political process, citizens are frustrated and ...despairing. How can we take back our democracy from the grip of oligarchy and bring power to the people? In Direct Deliberative Democracy, Jack Crittenden and Debra Campbell offer up a better way for government to reflect citizens' interests. It begins with a startlingly basic question: "Why don't we the people govern?" In this provocative book, the authors mount a powerful case that the time has come for more direct democracy in the United States, showing that the circumstances that made the Constitutional framers' arguments so convincing more than two hundred years ago have changed dramatically—and that our democracy needs to change with them. With money, lobbyists, and corporations now dominating local, state, and national elections, the authors argue that now is the time for citizens to take control of their government by deliberating together to make public policies and laws directly. At the heart of their approach is a proposal for a new system of "legislative juries," in which the jury system would be used as a model for selecting citizens to create ballot initiatives. This would enable citizens to level the playing field, bring little-heard voices into the political arena, and begin the process of transforming our democracy into one that works for, not against, its citizens.
How middle-class economic dependence on the state
impedes democratization and contributes to authoritarian
resilience Conventional wisdom holds that the rising
middle classes are a force for ...democracy. Yet in post-Soviet
countries like Russia, where the middle class has grown rapidly,
authoritarianism is deepening. Challenging a basic tenet of
democratization theory, Bryn Rosenfeld shows how the middle classes
can actually be a source of support for autocracy and authoritarian
resilience, and reveals why development and economic growth do not
necessarily lead to greater democracy. In pursuit of development,
authoritarian states often employ large swaths of the middle class
in state administration, the government budget sector, and state
enterprises. Drawing on attitudinal surveys, unique data on protest
behavior, and extensive fieldwork in the post-Soviet region,
Rosenfeld documents how the failure of the middle class to gain
economic autonomy from the state stymies support for political
change, and how state economic engagement reduces middle-class
demands for democracy and weakens prodemocratic coalitions. The
Autocratic Middle Class makes a vital contribution to the
study of democratization, showing how dependence on the state
weakens the incentives of key societal actors to prefer and pursue
democracy.
This book conclusively demonstrates that direct democracy-institutions like the ballot initiative and the referendum-endangers the rights of minorities and perpetuates a tyranny of the majority. ...While advocates of direct democracy advocate that these institutions protect citizens from corrupt lawmakers beholden to special interests, Daniel Lewis's thorough investigation shows how such mass participation exposes minority groups to negative policy outcomes favored by only a slim majority of voters. Some would argue that greater democratic responsiveness is a positive outcome, but without the checks and balances of a representative, separated powers system that encourages deliberation and minority representation, minority rights are at increased risk under direct democracy institutions.
While research has been presented that supports both sides of the debate, the existing literature has yet to produce consistent and compelling evidence in favor of one side or the other. This book undertakes a comprehensive examination of the "tyranny of the majority" critique of direct democracy by examining a host of contemporary American state policies that affect the rights of a variety of minority groups. By assessing the impact of direct democracy on both ballot measures and traditional legislation, the book provides a more complete picture of how citizen legislative institutions can affect minority rights, covering a myriad of contemporary (and sometimes controversial) minority rights issues, including same-sex marriage, affirmative action, official English, hate crimes laws, racial profiling, and anti-discrimination laws.
The book is unique in its approach and scope, making it compelling for scholars interested in direct democracy, state politics, minority politics and electoral institutions, as well as American politics generally.
'Deliberative democracy' is often dismissed as a set of small-scale, academic experiments. This volume seeks to demonstrate how the deliberative ideal can work as a theory of democracy on a larger ...scale. It provides a new way of thinking about democratic engagement across the spectrum of political action, from towns and villages to nation states, and from local networks to transnational, even global systems. Written by a team of the world's leading deliberative theorists, Deliberative Systems explains the principles of this new approach, which seeks ways of ensuring that a division of deliberative labour in a system nonetheless meets both deliberative and democratic norms. Rather than simply elaborating the theory, the contributors examine the problems of implementation in a real world of competing norms, competing institutions and competing powerful interests. This pioneering book will inspire an exciting new phase of deliberative research, both theoretical and empirical.
PDF
