Personality cults of political leaders can be conceptualized in one of two different ways: as propaganda that portrays the leader positively, or as rituals of leader worship. The first model stresses ...the forms of communication that make possible the transformation of bureaucratic state power into charismatic (extra-bureaucratic) authority, while the second emphasizes the forms of participation that make possible the construction of charismatic authority in micro-interaction contexts. These two ideal types are not mutually exclusive, since leader-focused propaganda and rituals of leader worship can interact and amplify each other. But each of these ideal types has distinctive origins and political consequences. Moreover, each conceptualization leads to distinctive scholarly emphases: on the persuasive aspects of cult messages, on the one hand, or on the diversity of reasons for participation in rituals and the signaling function of such participation, on the other hand. In this paper I argue for a greater focus on the signaling and ritual aspects of leader cults, and show how it pays dividends in understanding these multifaceted phenomena. I illustrate this argument with a case study of the cult of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. This collection of short essays on texts in the history of ...democracy shows the diversity of ideas that contributed to the making of our present democratic moment. The selection of texts goes beyond the standard, Western-centric canonical history of democracy, with its beginnings in ancient Athens and its climax in the French and American revolutions, recovering some of the significant body of democratic and anti-democratic thought in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. It includes discussions of well-known philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, but also of a variety of thinkers much less well known in English as writers on democracy: Al Farabi, Bolívar, Gandhi, Radishchev, Lenin, Sun Yat-sen, and many others. The essays thus de-center our understanding of the moments where the idea of democracy was articulated, rejected, and appropriated. Spanning antiquity to the present and global in scope, with contributions by key scholars of democracy from around the world, Democratic Moments is the ideal text for all students wishing to expand their understanding of the ways in which this contested concept has been understood.
Political thought has long identified demagogic leadership as one of the key pathologies of democracy. Unusually among political thinkers, Max Weber not only accepts the inevitability of demagogy in ...democratic politics but also appropriates the figure of the demagogue for democratic thought, praising certain kinds of ‘responsible’ demagogic leadership. This paper examines the role of demagogues in democracy through the lens of Weber's political thought. It critically reconstructs Weber's view of demagogy in terms of the kind of representation charismatic leaders can offer. Demagogues articulate images of ‘the people’ that express a group's deep values and identities. However, Weber worried that demagogues often act irresponsibly, exacerbating dangerous divisions, given their ability to overcome legal and normative constraints. For Weber, democracy requires institutions that encourage an ‘ethic of responsibility’ in leaders while also holding them accountable. Weber's partial defence of demagogy provides useful perspectives on representation and on the institutional prerequisites for responsible leadership that neither deliberative nor minimalist models of democracy sufficiently appreciate.
The Statesman is a difficult and puzzling Platonic dialogue. Marquez argues that Plato abandons here the classic idea, prominent in the Republic, that the philosopher, qua philosopher, is qualified ...to rule.
The objective of this study is to test the feasibility and impact of a 10-wk after-school exercise program for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and/or disruptive behavior ...disorders living in an urban poor community.
Children were randomized to an exercise program (n = 19) or a comparable but sedentary attention control program (n = 16). Cognitive and behavioral outcomes were collected pre-/posttest. Intent-to-treat mixed models tested group-time and group-time-attendance interactions. Effect sizes were calculated within and between groups.
Feasibility was evidenced by 86% retention, 60% attendance, and average 75% maximum HR. Group-time results were null on the primary outcome, parent-reported executive function. Among secondary outcomes, between-group effect sizes favored exercise on hyperactive symptoms (d = 0.47) and verbal working memory (d = 0.26), and controls on visuospatial working memory (d = -0.21) and oppositional defiant symptoms (d = -0.37). In each group, within-group effect sizes were moderate to large on most outcomes (d = 0.67 to 1.60). A group-time-attendance interaction emerged on visuospatial working memory (F1,33 = 7.42, P < 0.05), such that attendance to the control program was related to greater improvements (r = 0.72, P < 0.01), whereas attendance to the exercise program was not (r = 0.25, P = 0.34).
Although between-group findings on the primary outcome, parent-reported executive function, were null, between-group effect sizes on hyperactivity and visuospatial working memory may reflect adaptations to the specific challenges presented by distinct formats. Both groups demonstrated substantial within-group improvements on clinically relevant outcomes. Findings underscore the importance of programmatic features, such as routines, engaging activities, behavior management strategies, and adult attention, and highlight the potential for after-school programs to benefit children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and disruptive behavior disorder living in urban poverty where health needs are high and services resources few.
The Irrelevance of Legitimacy Marquez, Xavier
Political studies,
04/2016, Letnik:
64, Številka:
1_suppl
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Both popular and academic explanations of the stability, performance and breakdown of political order make heavy use of the concept of legitimacy. But prevalent understandings of the idea of ...legitimacy, while perhaps useful and appropriate ways of making sense of the political world in ordinary public discourse, cannot play the more rigorous explanatory roles with which they are tasked in the social sciences. To the extent that the concept of legitimacy appears to have some explanatory value, this is only because explanations of social and political order that appeal to legitimacy in fact conceal widely different (and often inconsistent) accounts of the mechanisms involved in the production of obedience to authority and submission to norms. It is suggested in this article that explanatory social science would be better off abandoning the coarse concept of legitimacy for more precise accounts of the operation of these mechanisms in particular contexts.
Many environmental problems have the familiar structure of the dilemmas of the commons (Gardner et al. 1990), where any given individual may have reason to act in ways that result in the group being ...collectively worse off when everyone else acts in similar ways, so that recognisably suboptimal outcomes are produced for all if each person acts in accord with their ʹprivateʹ reasons.¹ The climate change problem (Gardiner 2001, 2004), the problems caused by rapid population growth (Hardin 1968), the problems of sustaining fisheries (Ludwig et al. 1993), some problems of agricultural and forest land use, and many other environmental
‘Epistemic’ arguments for conservatism typically claim that given the limits of human reason, we are better off accepting some particular social practice or institution rather than trying to ...consciously improve it. I critically examine and defend here one such argument, claiming that there are some domains of social life in which, given the limits of our knowledge and the complexity of the social world, we ought to defer to those institutions that have robustly endured in a wide variety of circumstances in the past while not being correlated with intolerable outcomes. These are domains of social life in which our ignorance of optimal institutions is radical, and there is uncertainty (rather than quantifiable risk) about the costs of error. This is an argument for the preservation of particular institutions, not particular policies or outcomes, and it specifically identifies these with the institutions that John Rawls called ‘the basic structure of society.’ The argument further implies that to the extent that there is any reason to change these institutions, changes should be calculated as far as possible to increase their ‘epistemic power.’
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