Analyses European Muslim communities' developing involvement in their political environment and related Muslim and public debates. Muslims are increasingly making themselves noticed in the political ...process of Europe. But what is happening behind the often sensational headlines? This book looks at the processes and realities of Muslim participation in local and national politics: voting patterns in local and national assemblies and the tensions between ethnic, political and religious identities. These developments drive internal Muslim debates including attitudes to the democratic processes and whether Muslims should take part at all, as well as rivalries over who should represent and speak for Muslims. They also inspire sharp European discussion about Muslim political participation - does it signal integration or separation? - and how the European states should view this increasingly active role of Muslims in the public space.
The rapid rise of digital media use for political participation has coincided with an increase in concerns about citizens' sense of their capacity to impact political processes. These dual trends ...raise the important question of how people's online political participation is connected to perceptions of their own capacity to participate in and influence politics. The current study overcomes the limitation of scarce high-quality cross-national and over-time data on these topics by conducting a meta-analysis of all extant studies that analyze how political efficacy relates to both online and offline political participation using data sources in which all variables were measured simultaneously. We identified and coded 48 relevant studies (with 184 effects) representing 51,860 respondents from 28 countries based on surveys conducted between 2000 and 2016. We conducted a multilevel random effects meta-analysis to test the main hypothesis of whether political efficacy has a weaker relationship with online political participation than offline political participation. The findings show positive relationships between efficacy and both forms of participation, with no distinction in the magnitude of the two associations. In addition, we tested hypotheses about the expected variation across time and democratic contexts, and the results suggest contextual variation for offline participation but cross-national stability for online participation. The findings provide the most comprehensive evidence to date that online participation is as highly associated with political efficacy as offline participation, and that the strength of this association for online political participation is stable over time and across diverse country contexts.
It Still Takes A Candidate serves as the only systematic, nationwide empirical account of the manner in which gender affects political ambition. Based on data from the Citizen Political Ambition ...Panel Study, a national survey conducted of almost 3,800 'potential candidates' in 2001 and a second survey of more than 2,000 of these same individuals in 2008, Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox find that women, even in the highest tiers of professional accomplishment, are substantially less likely than men to demonstrate ambition to seek elective office. Women are less likely than men to be recruited to run for office. They are less likely than men to think they are qualified to run for office. And they are less likely than men to express a willingness to run for office in the future. This gender gap in political ambition persists across generations and over time.
Have activists taken the bumper-sticker adage "Think Globally, Act
Locally" too literally? Randy Shaw argues that they have, with
destructive consequences for America. Since the 1970s, activist
...participation in national struggles has steadily given way to a
nearly exclusive focus on local issues. America's political and
corporate elite has succeeded in controlling the national agenda,
while their adversaries-the citizen activists and organizations who
spent decades building federal programs to reflect the country's
progressive ideals-increasingly bypass national fights. The result
has been not only the dismantling of hard-won federal programs but
also the sabotaging of local agendas and community instituions by
decisions made in the national arena. Shaw urges activists and
their organizations to implement a "new national activism" by
channeling energy from closely knit local groups into broader
causes. Such activism enables locally oriented activists to shape
America's future and work on national fights without traveling to
Washington, D.C., but instead working in their own backyards.
Focusing on the David and Goliath struggle between Nike and
grassroots activists critical of the company's overseas labor
practices, Shaw shows how national activism can rewrite the
supposedly ironclad rules of the global economy by ensuring fair
wages and decent living standards for workers at home and abroad.
Similarly, the recent struggles for stronger clean air standards
and new federal budget priorities demonstrate the potential
grassroots national activism to overcome the corporate and moneyed
interests that increasingly dictate America's future.
Reclaiming America's final section describes how
community-based nonprofit organizations, the media, and the
Internet are critical resources for building national activism.
Shaw declares that community-based groups can and must combine
their service work with national grassroots advocacy. He also
describes how activists can use public relations to win attention
in today's sprawling media environment, and he details the
movement-building potential of e-mail. All these resources are
essential for activists and their organizations to reclaim
America's progressive ideals.
In pursuit of a healthier and participatory democracy, scholars have long established the positive effects of social capital, values derived from resources embedded in social ties with others which ...characterize the structure of opportunity and action in communities. Today, social media afford members of digital communities the ability to relate in new ways. In these contexts, the question that arises is whether new forms of social capital associated with the use of social media are a mere extension of traditional social capital or if they are in fact a different construct with a unique and distinct palette of attributes and effects. This study introduces social media social capital as a new conceptual and empirical construct to complement face-to-face social capital. Based on a two-wave panel data set collected in the United States, this study tests whether social capital in social media and offline settings are indeed two distinct empirical constructs. Then, the article examines how these two modes of social capital may relate to different types of citizenship online and offline. Results show that social media social capital is empirically distinct from face-to-face social capital. In addition, the two constructs exhibit different patterns of effects over online and offline political participatory behaviors. Results are discussed in light of theoretical developments in the area of social capital and pro-democratic political engagement.
In this timely and erudite collection, writers from the Global South demonstrate that forms of publicness are multiple, mobile and varied. Drawing primarily on materials from Africa for their ...capacity to speak to global developments, they propose new concepts and methodologies to analyse how public engagements work in society.
Republic.com 2.0 Sunstein, Cass R; Sunstein, Cass R. R
08/2009
eBook
What happens to democracy and free speech if people use the Internet to listen and speak only to the like-minded? What is the benefit of the Internet's unlimited choices if citizens narrowly filter ...the information they receive? Cass Sunstein first asked these questions in 2001'sRepublic.com. Now, inRepublic.com 2.0, Sunstein thoroughly rethinks the critical relationship between democracy and the Internet in a world where partisan Weblogs have emerged as a significant political force.
Republic.com 2.0highlights new research on how people are using the Internet, especially the blogosphere. Sunstein warns against "information cocoons" and "echo chambers," wherein people avoid the news and opinions that they don't want to hear. He also demonstrates the need to regulate the innumerable choices made possible by technology. His proposed remedies and reforms emphasize what consumers and producers can do to help avoid the perils, and realize the promise, of the Internet.
Most scholars argue that the decline of citizen participation and confidence in political institutions might be explained as the transformation of traditional forms of political participation to new ...ones. However, some authors indicate that citizens are not exclusively oriented towards institutionalized or de-institutionalized forms of participation and use all available mechanisms of influence by participating in various forms of action. The focus of this article is an empirical investigation of repertoires of political participation in Lithuania. The article, which is based on the data of the fifth wave of the European Values Study, concludes that repertoires of political participation in Lithuania are diversified and complex. They are significantly associated with gender, age, education, income, place of residence, interpersonal trust, confidence in political institutions, materialist/postmaterialist values, authority orientations, democratic support, autocratic orientations, and family socialization. The repertoires of the all-around activists, the duty-based participants, and the low-involved protesters are mixed and include all forms of political participation. However, there is a slightly noticeable trend toward the repertoire of an assertive citizen among the low-involved protesters and the apolitical volunteers.
We report on a large-scale urban resettlement program in Uruguay. Under the program, thousands of low- to middle-income households were randomly assigned over the course of seven years to ownership ...of apartments in new buildings in more central areas and received a subsidy averaging $44,000 per household. We match applicants to comprehensive administrative data on employment, schooling, fertility, and voting over the decade after the move. We find that the program led to a small decline in fertility for women and a two-percentage-point increase in formal employment but did not affect school attendance. The relocation program did not result in transformative improvements in the lives of its beneficiaries, likely because of its minimum income requirements and the lack of strong spatial inequality in Uruguay.
•We study a major housing relocation program in Uruguay.•The program ran 187 independent lotteries to allocation new houses and a housing subsidy worth an average of $40,000.•We find limited impacts of the program on employment and fertility, and none on education or political participation.•Lack of impacts appears to be driven by income requirements for the mortgage component of the program, and by limited spatial heterogeneity in Uruguay overall.
