Combining agonistic pluralism and social movements literature with trust studies, I propose a conceptualization for how the organizational dilemma is tackled in social movements. Defined as a ...trust-building organizational learning process, I show the role-played by social trust—meaning, the construction of the relational boundaries of a shared goal without diluting the heterogeneity of self-identities and interests—as an organizational prerequisite for democratic organization of a political group. Empirically, I identify four alternative pathways to the (democratic) organizational dilemma: innovation through new organizational models; repetition of past experiences; reformulation of practices; and emulation of previous organizational models.
Ideological congruence is an important and popular measure of the quality of political representation. The closer the match between the preferences of the public and those of elected elites, the ...better representative democracy is thought to function. Relatively little attention has been paid, however, to the effects of ideological congruence on political judgment. We address this gap by examining whether citizens use egocentric or sociotropic judgments of congruence to evaluate democratic performance. Using a variety of congruence measures, we find that citizens are unmoved by sociotropic congruence; however, our analyses provide clear evidence that egocentric congruence boosts citizen satisfaction, especially among political sophisticates. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the study of ideological congruence and political representation.
Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism has a wide‐ranging impact on a polity. At the same time, a complementary, yet less extensive body of research discusses the impact of terrorism on the crux of ...representative democracy, namely its citizens. In contribution to that literature, and to further explore how external shocks affect public opinions, we propose a two‐dimensional analytical framework to examine the effects of the November 2015 terrorist events in Paris and Saint Denis. Drawing from extant scholarship, we argue that we can expect both in‐group solidarity and out‐group hostility to increase in direct response to these events. This study relies on a regression discontinuity design to analyse a representative survey (DREES) that was in the field at the time of the events. Findings are two‐fold. First, and perhaps surprisingly, we find no conclusive evidence of increasing out‐group hostilities as a direct consequence of the terrorist events. Second, we find a definite strengthening of in‐group solidarity indicators following the events. This not only confirms that citizens adjust their opinions in response to environmental stimuli, but also highlights the democratic resilience of citizens, particularly when faced with a collective threat. Altogether, these findings add to our understanding of why and how individual behaviour changes in light of exogenous shocks.
Citizens in representative democracies receive party endorsements and policy information when choosing candidates or making policy decisions via the initiative process. What effects do these sources ...of information have on public opinion? We address this important question by conducting survey experiments where citizens express opinions about initiatives in a real-world electoral context. We manipulate whether they receive party cues, policy information, both, or neither type of information. We find that citizens do not simply ignore policy information when they are also exposed to party cues. Rather, citizens respond by shifting their opinions away from their party's positions when policy information provides a compelling reason for doing so. These results challenge the prominent claim in public opinion research that citizens blindly follow their party when also exposed to policy information. They also suggest that efforts to inform the electorate can influence opinions, provided that citizens actually receive the information being disseminated.
In this paper we present a new analytical model of a Parliament and investigate the beneficial effects of the selection of legislators by lot in order to reduce some of the drawbacks of modern ...representative democracies. Resorting to sortition for the selection of public officers used to be in the past a popular way of taming factionalism in public affairs. Factionalism is assumed to be detrimental since public officers tend to favour their own faction instead of pursuing the general interest. In this respect our mathematical model shows in a rigorous way how it is possible to improve the efficiency of a Parliament by introducing the use of sortition to select part of its members. It will be shown that, starting from a Parliament working with two parties (or coalitions), where the costs of representative democracy are quite apparent through the detrimental effects of party discipline, one can beneficially move towards a Parliament where independent, randomly selected legislators sit alongside elected members. In particular, we show that increasing the number of independent legislators up to a critical point enhances the efficiency of the Parliament and puts into check the factionalism likely to arise from party discipline.
•In this paper we present a new analytical model of a Parliament.•Our model shows in a rigorous way how to improve the efficiency of a Parliament.•We investigate the beneficial effects of selecting part of legislators by lot.•The adoption of sortition in politics has a long successful historical tradition.•Sortition is an effective tool to fix drawbacks of contemporary political systems.
Many contemporary democratic theorists are democratic egalitarians. They think that the distinctive value of democracy lies in equality. Yet this position faces a serious problem. All contemporary ...democracies are representative democracies. Such democracies are highly unequal: representatives have much more power than do ordinary citizens. So, it seems that democratic egalitarians must condemn representative democracies. In this paper, I present a solution to this problem. My solution invokes popular control. If representatives are under popular control, then their extra power is not objectionable. Unfortunately, so I argue, in the United States representatives are under loose popular control.
First, the article traces the historical development of and legal regulations related to the instruments of direct democracy in the Second Republic. It details such forms of direct democracy as: the ...obligatory and optional referendum (Volksabstimmung), consultative referendum (Volksbefragung) and popular legislative initiative (Volksbegehren), as well as provides historical examples of their use. The latter part of the article elaborates on the positions of the main political parties in Austria and federal coalition plans for the years 2003-2020 against the backdrop of popularisation of forms of direct democracy. The research hypothesis adopted assumes that there is no agreement among the Austrian establishment as to whether direct democracy should become a permanent and significant supplement to representative democracy. The scarce interest in referendums and non-binding (consultative) referendums in Austria results from institutional and legal barriers, which make it difficult to initiate any forms of direct democracy, as well as from the huge influence of political parties that support representative democracy.
The question, ‘which kind of democratic governance people prefer’, has moved to the forefront in current democracy research. This article uses existing hypotheses on democratic preferences as an ...input and employs an advanced research design to find out what citizens want if they had engaged in deliberation and reflection. We conducted an online-experiment with a deliberative treatment asking 256 German citizens in 2016. Our findings show that deliberation does not lead to more informed or differential preferences for governance models compared with getting informed or ‘thinking twice’. One reason are high levels of consistency between basic democratic values and governance choices already before the experiment, contradicting our initial assumption that preferences about democracy are generally ill-formed. Overall, our experiment shows that post-deliberative democratic preferences are mainly driven by issue salience and disenchantment with the actual shape of representative democracy. We detect a sort of a ‘populist’ impulse where disenchantment conduces to calls for a stronger voice of the ‘people’ and participatory governance models, irrespective of their concrete design.
Diversity is an important facet of public administration, thus it is important to take stock and examine how the discipline has evolved in response to questions of representative democracy, social ...equity, and diversity. This article assesses the state-of-the-field by addressing the following question: How has research on diversity in the field of public administration progressed over time? Specifically, we seek to examine how the focus of diversity has transformed over time and the way the field has responded to half a century of legislation and policies aimed at both promoting equality and embracing difference. We utilize a conceptual content analysis approach to examine articles published on diversity in seven key public administration journals since 1940. The implications of this study are of great importance given that diversity in the workplace is a central issue for modern public management.
Among the many criticisms carried by the Yellow Vests movement, criticisms related to representative government as a mode of exercising power occupy a prominent place and find resonance within the ...broader contemporary crisis of representative democracy. In the face of this crisis, the Yellow Vests movement has put forward many alternative propositions for direct democracy. This contribution focuses on the local experiment of assembly direct democracy that has taken place in the municipality of Commercy, a town in the Meuse region of Eastern France, from the beginning of the Yellow Vests movement to the municipal elections of March 2020. The contribution studies the specific strategy the movement adopted, that of running for elections to give power to the assembly that gathers the town residents. As the movement created a form of direct democracy – the assembly – to mark its opposition to representative democracy, and then used the paradigmatic mechanism of representative democracy – the elections – to give power to the assembly, it enables an understanding of how a movement navigated the dialectical relationship between representative and direct democracy in the framework of a libertarian municipalist electoral strategy and the tensions that have arisen in the process.
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