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Ancient accounts of Kleisthenes's democratizing reforms to the Athenian constitution in 508/507 B.C.E. do not elaborate on the reasons why these reforms found widespread support and thus proved stable. While scholars are confident that Kleisthenes divided Athenian citizens into ten geographically representative tribes and assigned them to local units of government, they do not agree about why these reforms produced a thoroughgoing democracy. This paper argues that Kleisthenes instituted reforms to religious practices and structures that supplied ideational content to the political reforms. This paper also attempts to demonstrate that some of the religious elements that Kleisthenes repurposed to serve the democratic constitution had been politicized in the previous century. Religious observance was thus one of the sites where contestation about Athens' political direction furnished democratic conceptual vocabulary. Athenians who wished to see civic institutions become more inclusive could be and were appealed to through reforms to everyday religious practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracies are thought to behave differently from other states, particularly when cooperating in international institutions, such as alliances. We argue that these democratic differences depend on geopolitical environments that make cooperation possible. Although studies have demonstrated endogeneity between democracy and peace, few analyze the effects of this joint relationship on democratic differences. We explore this argument using the alliance literature and argue that the empirical finding that democracies are more reliable is driven by the tendency of democracies to cluster in peaceful environments. Alliances are more likely to be "scraps of paper" when found in more dangerous environments. By jointly modeling regime type and political environment using data on alliance termination from 1920 to 2001, we show that alliance reliability is a function of a threat environment. Our argument has important ramifications for a host of literatures focused on regime type, as well as current debates over the effectiveness of democratic deterrence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship across a range of disciplines has illuminated how the rhetoric of an "obesity epidemic" in public health converges with everyday fat-shaming rhetoric to mark particular bodies as indicative of moral failing, intellectual debility, and civic unfitness. Sabrina Strings, Rachel Sanders, Amy Farrell, and others have shown that this stigmatization also reinforces racialized, gendered, and neoliberal conceptions of responsible citizenship. Yet critical analysis of these discursive effects rarely highlights their relationship to democratic theory and practice. Accordingly, this paper examines how anti-obesity and fat-shaming discourse casts doubt on the worthiness and capacity of fat subjects, especially women of color, to participate as full members of the demos whose needs, desires, and concerns merit democratic consideration. Crucially, the mechanisms of marginalization through fat-shaming function across a range of approaches to democratic theory, including liberal, republican, and deliberative approaches. Furthermore, the exclusion of fat subjects from the demos contributes to an impoverished and perverse image of democracy itself as a politics of austerity, self-denial, and separation from others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I consider the "Jeffersonian problem": whether one generation has the right to bind future generations to an inherited constitutional order. Thomas Jefferson's challenge rests on fundamental democratic principles of equality and consent, and therefore—while there may be substantial pragmatic reasons to be wary of his argument—any response must also remain true to those moral ideals. I argue that through the crisis of slavery and the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was compelled to revisit the basis of the American political regime, and in doing so articulated a conception of democratic politics that answers Jefferson's challenge. He does so in two ways: first, Lincoln's political religion revives reverence for the ancestral in a democratic context; second, Lincoln's concept of rededication allows each generation to affirm that revered past while simultaneously manifesting its own sovereign power through novel applications of past principle. I conclude by arguing that the inclusion of generational obligations is essential to democratic politics and that Lincoln's approach provides the best means of doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article informs that Chinese immigrant children who traveled to the U.S. during the Chinese Exclusion Era played a significant role in moving knowledge across geographic and temporal borders, bridging cultural knowledge divides, and constructing new knowledge about the meaning of American democracy. It mentions that Chinese immigrants played a significant role in developing the mining, agriculture, fishing, railroad, and manufacturing industries of the West.

Is democracy compatible with thriving markets that produce long-term prosperity? To survive, a thriving market-economy requires restrictions on political choice, including the rule of law, secure property rights and the enforcement of contracts. This problem comes to the fore as many democratic theorists advocate fewer constraints on the choices by political officials. Robert Dahl, perhaps the most prominent theorists of democracy, asks "How democratic is the U.S. Constitution?" His answer: not very because of its many sources of constraints on politics. Americans take political and constitutional stability for granted. Yet, only 25 percent of all countries have a government free of violent turnover for a generation and the number of countries that have sustained democracy since 1950 is around two dozen. This paper advances a framework for understanding democratic stability, including three conditions: the limit condition, which enhances democracy's survival by lowering the stakes of politics and preventing coups; the consensus condition which supports citizen-coordination to defend against possible transgressions; and the adaptation condition, which holds that successful constitutions adapt the constitution to shocks and crises. Constitutions embody the limit condition through countermajoritarian constraints. The force of this paper is to demonstrate the value of appropriately chosen countermajoritarian provisions in the constitution that constrain democracy. In particular, such constraints are necessary to support long-term, stable democracy as well as a thriving market economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religion played a central role in Tocqueville's thinking and writing, and it was one of the major features of American society and culture as described by Tocqueville. This paper draws upon the working papers and text of his Democracy in America to revisit some of the key questions he asked about religion and to raise a few further questions that emerge from his responses. This paper also demonstrates how Tocqueville sometimes trimmed his opinions and arguments in order to appeal more effectively to his intended audience, the French reader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considerable scholarly work has examined the transition to democracy. In this paper, we investigate a path to democracy that is very different from that typically described. During the Archaic period (800-500 BCE), many Greek poleis (citystates) replaced aristocracies with a more narrow governing institution--an autocrat known as the tyrant. Yet as classical scholars have noted, many of the poleis where tyrants reigned in the Archaic period became among the broadest democracies in the subsequent Classical period (500-323 BCE). We analyze a data set of ancient Greek political regime types and review the history of the best-known Archaic period tyrants in order to explore why a transitory narrowing of power--Greek tyranny was a transitory institution--can set the stage for democratization. We briefly consider other historical and modern examples. Our paper shows why an understanding of progress toward democracy requires recognizing the potential importance of nonmonotonic transition paths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic stability has become a visible problem of social justice. Despite this, a paradigm to justify distribution of stability both inside and outside production is lacking. This paper offers one kind of response by examining how a notion of property rights in stability changes how we conceive of the economic aspects of democratic rights and their rooting in common ownership and control of resources. To elaborate, the paper considers implications for the relation between egalitarian principles and policies and examines links between progressive public finance and the distribution of economic stability in more horizontal and hierarchical capitalist states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is there a speed limit for democracy? Do the system imperatives of late-modern economic polities necessitate a shrinking of democratic oversight and control? Are the accelerated life-experiences of citizens in late modernity fundamentally hostile to the formation of civic identities, deliberative skills, and democratic habits? In this paper I examine recent work in democratic theory on social acceleration in order to address these questions. I argue that liberal theorists such as William Scheuerman focus excessively on institutional adjustments to the democratic polity rather than on ways in which democratic participation can be nurtured in an attempt to surmount the challenges of social acceleration. At the same time, radical pluralists such as William Connolly come close to romanticizing the effects of speed while ignoring its ill consequences for democracy (and for pluralism). I end the paper with an examination of the work of Sheldon Wolin, whose understanding of democracy has led him to formulate the idea of a 'multiple civic self' that is nurtured through slow-time political practices. Wolin's theory of the multiple civic self, I argue, offers us the best way to think about the challenges for democracy represented by social acceleration, especially in conversation with Connolly's emphasis on 'bicameral' citizenship and Bonnie Honig's treatment of the 'Slow Food' movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the system change following the collapse of socialism affected the political outlook of citizens by comparing the satisfaction with democracy among several generations of Eastern Europeans. I investigate whether people who were mainly influenced by a socialist upbringing have problems with adjusting to the circumstances of democratic regimes or, alternatively, whether the consolidation of democracy is driven by economic considerations. Using pooled cross-sectional data covering the period from 1990 to 2003, this study employs generalized additive models, which allow the separation of generational differences. The paper obtains strong support for the socialist socialization hypothesis, but also finds evidence that Eastern Europeans' assessment of the economic situation reduces the impact of generational differences on democratic support. This research provides important insights into the micro mechanisms underlying system change from authoritarian regimes to democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do NGOs affect political participation in weakly democratic settings? We know that NGOs can be an important part of moderate civil society by building trust, facilitating collective action, and encouraging voter turnout. This paper explores these relationships in weakly democratic settings. NGOs stimulate political participation by providing resources and opportunities for association. Where voting is seen as ineffective, new participation can take the form of political protests and demonstrations. This paper presents results from an original local level dataset from Bolivia on NGO activity, voter turnout, and political protest, showing a strong relationship between NGO activity and political protest in weakly democratic contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participation is a concept and practice that governs many aspects of new media and new publics. There are a wide range of attempts to create more of it and a surprising lack of theorization. In this paper I attempt to present a "grammar" of participation by looking at three cases where participation has been central in the contemporary moment of new, social media and the Internet as well as in the past, stretching back to the 1930s: citizen participation in public administration, workplace participation, and participatory international development. Across these three cases I demonstrate that the grammar of participation shifts from a language of normative enthusiasm to one of critiques of co-optation and bureaucratization and back again. I suggest that this perpetually aspirational logic results in the problem of "too much democracy in all the wrong places." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary Confucian political theory, there is surprisingly little effort among the theorists to illuminate the value of democracy. When they do on rare occasions, their focus is largely on democracy's instrumental contribution to Confucian goods. In this paper, I argue that, given democracy's dual aspects as a political system and as a way of life, it has both instrumental and intrinsic values, and insomuch as it is a kind of democracy, Confucian democracy, too, ought to possess both values. Central to my argument is that, once introduced and justified instrumentally as a political system, democracy in a Confucian society attains its noninstrumental value as it becomes consolidated as a democratic-Confucian way of life inwhich democratic institutions, rights, and practices are socially mediated by and negotiated with Confucian values, civilities, and moral sentiments. I present my overarching normative framework in terms of pragmatic Confucian democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates the Pareto efficiency of direct democracy and searches for the frequency with which the losing minority in referendum voting could compensate the majority and still be better off. A model is defined that permits the measuring of the intensity of preferences in a population, based on voting and abstention behavior. Using the model, an analysis of over 100 Swiss referenda reveals only a few instances in which the outcome of direct voting is inefficient. It seems that the political system evolves methods of trade-off that permit efficient outcomes in most cases. Criticism of direct democracy should therefore not rely on the primarily hypothetical objection of inefficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, which explores a community filmmaking program for youth facing multiple barriers, presents a unique way of reimagining democratic practice through artful community inquiry that foregrounds entanglements of relations and engagements. In an era of constant change, increasing interdependence between local needs and global influences invites us to attend to the complex dynamics of individual and community needs. Community inquiry as a conceptual framework reimagines the community as curriculum—a way of actively engaging with the world. The concept of "transversality" acknowledges that learning is an educative force that disrupts binary forms of logic and layers of hierarchy, allowing us to traverse lines of entanglement when we navigate and negotiate collective engagement in communities. Insights from a youth filmmaking program show how "community as curriculum" and thinking transversally can enhance the vital role of artful community inquiry in promoting democratic practice by connecting learning with lived experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Signed in 2003, Law 10.639 makes teaching Afro-Brazilian history and culture compulsory in primary school lessons. Training programs to educate teachers on this material have proliferated in the state of São Paulo and elsewhere in Brazil. This paper illuminates non-elite Brazilians' lived, personal engagements with ideas of racial inequality by way of these training programs. Participants in these classrooms did not express direct rejection or acceptance of these ideas but rather relied on personal experiences to negotiate their conceptions of racial identity and racial inequality that deviate from traditional ideas of racial democracy. As Brazil takes further steps to consider race when facilitating access to resources and confronting racial inequality directly, it is imperative that the everyday iterations of this shift are understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the link between political control of government bureaucracies and citizens' likelihood to stage disruptive protests. A public administration heavily controlled by politicians, and staffed to a large extent with political appointees, allows politicians to intervene in policy implementation and favor some groups over others in terms of access to public services. Such a system may induce citizens or civic associations to resort to disruptive actions to express demands and demonstrate political relevance, and thereby secure access to public goods. The effects are hypothesized to be more pronounced where civil society is stronger. We test the arguments empirically on data from 19 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the findings are consistent with the hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the research paper titled "Too much democracy in all the wrong places: toward a grammar of participation." It states that the author of the paper expressed a skeptical and critical tone presents us with an accurate interpretation of participation as a form of governance, a mechanism of domination, and mentions a study on a rural, depopulated area of Asturias, in northwestern Spain, through an ethnographic approach to the changing governance structures.

This essay first outlines Alexis de Tocqueville's well-known argument from Democracy in America that religion shapes the mores that keep American "equality of conditions" from deteriorating into the "tyranny of the majority." The paper then turns to the superb research of scholars who have published the notes, letters, and journals that Tocqueville and his traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, produced during their 1831-32 US journey. That material allows a clearer picture of where Tocqueville was perceptive, where he failed to record important aspects of American religion as it actually existed, and where what he observed accurately in 1831-32 changed significantly shortly thereafter. More attention to the neglected book that Beaumont published after their trip, Marie; or, Slavery in the United States, shows that his detailed assessment of United States' deeply ingrained racist attitudes would have helped make Tocqueville's insightful analysis of American democracy even more compelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we argue that the greater accountability of democratic leaders to their citizens creates powerful pressures on leaders to reduce the human costs of war. In an analysis of a new dataset of fatalities in interstate wars (1900 to 2005) we find that highly democratic states suffer significantly fewer military and civilian fatalities. We argue that democracies limit their war losses primarily by adopting four specific foreign and military policies. First, democracies generate higher military capabilities than nondemocracies in times of war. Second, democracies are more likely to augment their national capabilities by joining more powerful coalitions of states during war. Third, democracies are more likely than other states to utilize battlefield military strategies that minimize their fatalities. Finally, democracies are more likely to fight wars on battlefields that are not contiguous to their home territories, thereby shielding their civilian populations from the fighting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper disaggregates government accounts to examine whether and how representation affects the level and distribution of taxation. Using panel data for over 100 countries from 1970 to 1999 and cross-sectional data for approximately 75 democracies from 1990 to 1998,we find that both democratization and voter turnout induced a modest but highly systematic increase in revenue from regressive taxes on consumption. While one-third of the increase due to democratization reflects a shift from more inefficient and similarly regressive taxes on trade, most of it was new revenue. Less convincingly, democratization and voter turnout also increased total tax revenue. By contrast, neither democracy, nor voter turnout systematically increased revenue from progressive taxes on income and capital. With reasonable assumptions about tax incidence and participation patterns, these findings shed light on competing conceptions of taxation and representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of political culture have long emphasized the importance of generalized trust for effective democratic governance. Individual-level models continue to treat generalized trust as a crucial predictor of more democratic political cultures, leading some scholars to suggest that building generalized trust is an important means of developing democratic prerequisites, like the appreciation of democratic values, in the nondemocratic world. In this paper we refute this conventional wisdom, arguing that the democratic utility of trust varies cross-nationally depending on existing levels of democracy within a country. Seldom have existing studies looked at the ways in which levels of generalized trust relate to microlevel indicators of support for democracy while controlling for overall institutional contexts. We argue existing government institutions play an important role in promoting levels of generalized trust because, in democracies and non-democracies alike, political confidence in existing political institutions is linked to higher levels of generalized trust. The democratic utility of trust therefore is not consistent across the globe. The degree of democracy determines the extent to which generalized trust becomes meaningfully linked to support for democracy. We offer evidence from a multilevel model using World Values Survey data to support these claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In "the Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy," Habermas argues that a democratic regionalism could provide the necessary infrastructure for the democratic coordination of globalization in the absence of a global government. This paper asks, what is "postnational" about democratic regionalism? And to what extent can Habermas's regional polity serve as a general model for the form of democratic practice beyond the nation-state? Part I of the paper argues that globalization poses a significant enough challenge to the nation-state to warrant a reexamination of the forms of democratic practice. Part II addresses the project of regionalism as one such political response, indicating the challenges presented by political integration on the regional scale. Examining the concept of the "postnational," the paper argues that European democratic integration as described by Habermas maintains elements of an extended civic-nationalism. Political solidarity in the postnational polity is premised upon a territorially based political identity situated in a shared history, and in this sense it does not transcend the national model. Part III explores how this affects the model's claim to represent a general form of democratic practice beyond the nation-state, examining the tensions thus revealed between the particular contexts of democratic legitimacy and the broader project of cosmopolitan global governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Restorative justice is a normative theory and a reform movement in criminal justice that raises pressing questions for democratic theory. This paper draws attention to the core, democratic, values of restorative justice theory and practice. It argues that what is distinctive and appealing about restorative justice is not that it "restores" rather than "punishes," but that it attempts to make an inherently coercive process more consensual, transparent, constructive, and communicative. In addition to these substantive and procedural values, restorative justice offers a picture of how a democracy might become more accountable for punishment. This paper argues that the possibilities it offers citizens for understanding and owning up to the punishment that is meted out on their behalf are central to restorative justice as a normative theory. Concerns about mob justice, partiality, and disproportional sentencing are naturally raised by attempts to involve more lay people in deliberations at the sentencing stage, however. The sort of civic accountability I argue is present in restorative justice does not need to come at the cost of key substantive and procedural criminal justice values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the effect of direct democracy on the size and diversity of state interest group populations, providing an empirical test of a formal model of how access to the initiative process affects group formation and activities (Boehmke 2000). The model predicts that more groups mobilize and become active in initiative states; this prediction is confirmed by the regression analysis in this paper: direct democracy increases a state’s interest group population by about 17%. With an additional assumption, I also generate and test the hypothesis that the increase is disproportionately centered among traditionally underrepresented citizen groups, relative to business and economic groups. This hypothesis is also empirically supported: citizen interest group populations are increased by 29% whereas the increase is only 12% for economic groups, suggesting that direct democracy increases diversity in interest group representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a variety of reasons, the problem of political trust has become an important issue within contemporary democratic theory, especially within theories of deliberative democracy. This article argues that contributions from classical political philosophy--specifically Thucydides' representation of the Mytilenean debate and the Platonic dialogue, Protagoras--can enrich that discussion. The paper suggests that deliberative democratic theory's treatment of political trust raises a series of questions that the perspective does not fully acknowledge or engage. It then offers intersecting readings of these two classical works that, I suggest, make constructive contributions on three fronts. First, they clarify the goodness of political trust in democratic regimes. Second, they under-score the need to focus on the substantive outcomes as well as on the procedural arrangements of deliberative democracy. Third, they clarify the dependence of warranted trust on certain forms of virtue. The conclusion is not that deliberative democratic theory must give way to some sort of return to the classics, but that contemporary democratic theory can be enhanced through an appreciation of classical political philosophy's contributions and criticisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russia's political transition from a totalitarian system to a fledgling democracy has brought Russian families new legal fights, at least on paper. The 1996 Family Code gives parents the fight to rear their children as they think best rather than in the manner directed by official state ideology. However, parents face a number of obstacles in realizing their new rights in contemporary Russia, These include traditional ways of thinking about child rearing, limited information and choices for parents, vested interests of professionals, absence of detailed regulations to guide the implementation of the new laws, and lack of local resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In their seminal paper, Aumann, Kurz, and Neyman found the surprising result that the choice of levels of public goods in a democracy is not affected by the distribution of voting rights. This implies that groups of individuals may not value the franchise. This conclusion, however, does not correspond to what we commonly observe. We propose a new model to address the question of enfranchisement. The main feature of our model is that it takes into account natural affinities, such as religion or class, that may exist between voters. This allows us to show that while individuals may not value the vote, they nonetheless value the franchise. We also show that in the presence of nonconvexities, it is more likely that the group in power will grant the franchise when preferences are severely opposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taxation is fundamental to citizen-government relations. Seminal accounts attribute democratization to direct taxation's rise, and recent evidence shows that direct taxes increase citizens' accountability demands. However, today many governments rely heavily on indirect taxes; evidence is mixed on whether they have similar effects. We present cross-national data demonstrating that indirect taxes are associated with lower levels of government accountability than direct taxes. We argue that the visibility of taxes affects their accountability consequences. We further posit that, on average, indirect taxes become less visible than direct once citizens have acclimated to higher prices. We combine lab-in-the-field experiments with survey experiments in a developing country to demonstrate that less visible taxes provoke less willingness to punish leaders politically and that established indirect taxes are not highly visible to citizens. The findings suggest that the growing reliance on indirect taxes may limit taxation's accountability dividends and impair democratic representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many authoritarian regimes use policy-based strategies of social control instead of more coercive tools like repression. When these regimes transition to democracy, do authoritarian successors pay a political price for such policies? This article examines the political cost of one common authoritarian policy of social control—land settlement schemes—in Spain. The Franco dictatorship initiated a decades-long program to ameliorate land pressure by resettling excess rural labor in hundreds of new government-created towns in colonization zones throughout the country. This article examines postdemocratization voting patterns in municipalities containing new towns compared to a counterfactual set of proximate similar municipalities that were also in government-created colonization zones. I find that land settlement caused a backlash once Spain returned to democracy: voters disproportionately supported the left at the expense of the regime's successor parties. I attribute this to a legacy of authoritarian political and economic oversight and manipulation in regime-created towns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizens often describe their membership in the political community in terms of how much they belong. This article probes belonging as a category of analysis, aiming to contribute to our understanding of contemporary democratic citizenship and its challenges by using our everyday manners of speech as the object(s) of philosophical inquiry. A focus on belonging disentangles how esteem, identity, and the gaze of others shape experiences of membership. For example, it clarifies why, at times, it is important for equality to be seen not as estimable, but as unremarkable, freed from the scrutiny of others. Belonging carves space to apprehend the egalitarian potential of an ordinariness that need not imply homogeneity. The article then discusses the ways in which formal citizenship simultaneously disappoints in its inability to guarantee belonging and empowers those construed as "citizens who do not belong" to reassert their belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: democracy; citizenship; competence; polarization; radicalization EN democracy citizenship competence polarization radicalization 857 864 8 10/03/23 20231001 NES 231001 Danielle Allen is one of our most profound and inspiring democratic theorists. My confidence in citizen competence comes from the observation of citizens' assemblies. Democracy, citizenship, competence, polarization, radicalization But this view fails to account for variation across democracies - the U.S. is pathologically polarized in a way that most Western democracies are not - or variation within democracies - misinformation is asymmetrically distributed among citizens. [Extracted from the article]

Democracy is in crisis. According to a dominant view, the problem is populism. Populists, critics argue, undermine democracy through its own procedural and normative logic. This essay calls the critique of populism into question. I argue that critics misrepresent the significance of populism for democratic politics in three ways. First, by reducing populism to a single political logic, critics confound important differences between different instances of populism. Secondly, by blaming populists for the maladies of contemporary democracies, critics wrongly exonerate centrist political forces. Thirdly, critics underestimate the structural deficiencies of contemporary democracy. The main task for proponents of democracy today is not to fight populism, but to address the more fundamental sources of democratic decay: rising inequality, the decline of mass democracy, maltreatment of immigrants and ethnic minorities, and climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Turkey, tea is a near-universally consumed beverage that also operates as a salient moral and political sign in social life. This article describes how tea functions as a "medium of value" in the country, circulating as both a physical commodity and a multivalent sign vehicle that is closely linked in popular imagination to modern modes of egalitarian sociability and the formation of Turkey's postwar multiparty democracy. In describing the semiotic ideologies that inform tea's uptake as a sign and its place in Turkey's modern public culture, the article also traces the historical-material processes that have made tea into both a symbolic model of communal solidarity and a salient sign of national difference—a contested semiotic medium of representation that informs popular discourses on public virtue and democratic politics and that is prominently mobilized in divergent public making projects in contemporary Turkey and North ("Turkish") Kurdistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares Abraham Lincoln's and John Brown's justifications for violently confronting slavery during the Civil War and the raid at Harpers Ferry, respectively. Though significant differences existed between these two men, I argue that there is a surprising and often overlooked convergence. Both Brown and Lincoln rooted their opposition to slavery in their belief that it threatened the possibility of free self-government. Both concluded that violence was the only effective way to fight slavery. Finally, both argued that their violence was justified by democratic procedures and principles. In making this comparison, this article offers three contributions to the study of American political thought and political theory more broadly. First, it challenges the historical consensus that portrays these men as radically opposed exemplars. Second, it rehabilitates John Brown's political thought. Third, through the comparison, it surfaces a democratic approach to the complex relationship between violence, democracy, and racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The excerpt from John Dewey's "Creative Democracy: The Task before Us" discusses the importance of democracy and its evolution over time. Dewey emphasizes that democracy is not just a political system, but a way of life that requires personal attitudes and actions. He argues that democracy is based on a belief in the potential of every human being, regardless of race, color, or wealth, and that it requires open communication, cooperation, and the ability to learn from others. Dewey concludes by stating that democracy is an ongoing process of creating a freer and more humane society. [Extracted from the article]

The publication of Libraries and Democracy came during a precipitous time in our nation's democracy. This article revisits its findings and asks how this relationship was understood then and what we should reconsider in these turbulent times. The challenge is to create a defining narrative to reassess the relationship between libraries and democracy in the twenty-first century. As civic institutions, libraries evolve in concert with the nation's democratic theories and practices. They reflect the aspirations of the times in the broader context of civic faith in American democracy. With their legacy of civic activism, librarians can catalyze the shift from merely informing citizens to engaging them in the issues of their communities. As the nation's great experiment in democracy undergoes a momentous test, libraries are poised to reunite their communities, recommit to democratic practices, and reclaim their essential role as cornerstones of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the effects of a nongovernmental civic inclusion campaign on the democratic integration of demobilized insurgents. Democratic participation ideally offers insurgents a peaceful channel for political expression and addressing grievances. However, existing work suggests that former combatant's ideological socialization and experiences of violence fuel hard-line commitments that may be contrary to democratic political engagement, threatening the effectiveness of postwar electoral transitions. We use a field experiment with demobilized FARC combatants in Colombia to study how a civic inclusion campaign affects trust in political institutions, democratic political participation, and preferences for strategic moderation versus ideological rigidity. We find the campaign increased trust in democracy and support for political compromise. Effects are driven by the most educated ex-combatants moving from more hard-line positions to ones that are in line with their peers and by ex-combatants who had the most violent conflict experience similarly moderating their views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the origins and early activities of the National Conference of Democratic Mayors and the National Conference of Republican Mayors. I argue that the rise of partisan mayoral caucuses crystallized deeply rooted debates over the place of cities within the American political tradition. No longer collections of disparate locally rooted organizations, the parties reflected programmatic visions of urban governance in their national programs. Mayors turned to the national parties in response to changes in intergovernmental policies during the Ford administration. In doing so, they contributed to the development of the national party-as-organization and a more integrated party system. Democratic mayors, typically leading big cities that suffered owing to the urban crisis, acted as an urban lobby within their party and urged the party to focus on urban affairs. Republican mayors, typically representing smaller, "newer" cities, promoted a more limited intergovernmental agenda while encouraging mayoral involvement in the national party-as-organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to recent work treating Ralph Ellison as a major democratic theorist by reading his political thought through a heretofore overlooked, and apparently remote, interpretive lens: the linguistic and cultural theories of Johann Gottfried von Herder. Ellison's controversial endorsement of an integrationist vision of American nationhood was, I show, rooted in an underlying theory of language whose premises were essentially Herderian. Yet Ellison also creatively expanded on those ideas, notably through his concept of the "democratic vernacular," which analyzed the relationship between language, culture, and politics to explain how democracy and integration might progress in the United States, despite the racism of its political system and amid the deep pluralism of its culture. By reworking Herderian themes for radically diverse contexts, Ellison's thought furnishes resources to democratic theorists confronting a range of urgent normative issues related to cultural diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that delimiting the settler colonial analytic to colonial legacies in the "Anglo-world" risks disavowing its congruent relationship with other colonial ideologies such as those of the Spanish imperial world. In examining Alexis de Tocqueville's comparisons of Anglo- and Spanish American colonization alongside Latin American writers like Lorenzo de Zavala and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, it shows how they occupied a common discursive terrain in grappling with the prospects for democracy in the new world. For Tocqueville, the failure of Spanish American democracy compared to the United States stems from the different systems of land colonization at work in each context. Sarmiento and Zavala provide different accounts of American colonization that exhibit both intersections with and departures from Tocqueville. Bringing these writers together shows how settler colonial ideologies and imaginaries in the Americas circulated in a shared hemispheric space and reciprocally shaped one another in contingent ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many international relations theories argue that leaders and publics use regime type to draw inferences about behavior in conflict, with implications for how democracies act as well as how they are treated by other states. We show that these beliefs can be studied as reputations, and we build a framework around reputations that adhere to regime types and whose content implicates not just resolve but a host of other important attributes and expected behaviors. We put democratic reputations under the microscope, fielding survey experiments on members of the Israeli Knesset as well as six national samples in four democracies. We find strong evidence of democratic reputations' existence and pervasiveness as well as insight into their content. Specifically, we find that the reputations are asymmetric: democracy is seen as considerably and consistently more favorable in war than in crises, suggesting that these regimes may have more difficulty signaling resolve than our theories suggest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge of what voters prefer is central to several theories of democratic representation and accountability. Despite this, we know little in a comparative sense of how well politicians know citizens' policy preferences. We present results from a study of 866 politicians in four countries. Politicians were asked to estimate the percentage of public support for various policy proposals. Comparing more than 10,000 estimations with actual levels of public support, we conclude that politicians are quite inaccurate estimators of people's preferences. They make large errors and even regularly misperceive what a majority of the voters wants. Politicians are hardly better at estimating public preferences than ordinary citizens. They misperceive not only the preferences of the general public but also the preferences of their own partisan electorate. Politicians are not the experts of public opinion we expect them to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abraham Lincoln's "Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions," taken with his contemporaneous "Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society," presents a coherent view of the role of science in a democratic society. While often read either as a celebration of technology or as only a subtle condemnation of slavery, these speeches are best understood in the context of an antebellum divide between Whigs and Democrats about science and technology. Lincoln's deft deployment of biblical language in "Discoveries and Inventions" suggests that he shared the Whig concern about the social effects of unconstrained technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What accounts for the persistence of school book banning controversies in the United States? In Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982), the Supreme Court ruled that book removal violates children's right to read, but school book challenges have only increased since then. I argue that Americans have been unable to put this controversy to rest because a misleading narrative of censorship framed the Pico case and has continued to frame the question since. That narrative depicted what is fundamentally a contest between competing adult authorities—educational professionals and parents—as instead a contest between children and adults. By reconstructing the development of this narrative by young adult authors and professional educators in the 1970s, I show that the invention of children's "right to read" in this period sought to discredit the legitimate democratic authority of school boards over curricular decisions in a way that left the conflict simmering and unresolvable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article brings into conversation the democratic thought of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Black feminists Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells. I discuss how Cooper and Wells approached the challenge of shaping a turn-of-the-century white public constituted in part through Black women's subjection and exclusion. Prominent accounts have at times contrasted their political efforts. However, I read differences in their democratic thought as a question of aesthetic politics rather than ideology. The contrasting strategies they employed in writing point to distinct but complementary means of shaping the publics in which their words would be received in the future. Reading Cooper's and Wells's works to represent two facets of the broader Black feminist intellectual and political milieu of which they were a part invites consideration of the ways hoped-for democratic solidarity can rely on, and be shaped by, more agonistic efforts in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]