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The main theories of the thriving field of study of public policies have been formulated at institutions of developed countries, mostly by the American academy, based on the particular conditions of policy-making processes of their own country. However, its heuristic premises are considered, initially, as universal and are used extensively in teaching and academic studies around the world. This paper examines the complexities derived from the application of such predominant theoretical approaches to the study and teaching of public policies that are implemented in Latin American countries. Based on an extensive use of specialized literature, 10 public policy variables are identified and organized into two dimensions, one institutional and the other procedural. It is argued that the values of these variables in the countries of this region differ significantly from those observed in the United States, which reveals the explanatory shortcomings of those approaches to account for the particular modalities of public policymaking in these countries.

The Covid-19 crises in the United Kingdom and the United States show how democracies may struggle to confront disasters that are increasingly impinging on the Global North. This paper highlights the extent to which disasters are now 'coming home' to Western democracies and it looks at some of the principal reasons why democracy has not been especially protective, at least in the case of the UK and the US. These include: reconceptualising disaster as a good thing (via 'herd immunity'); the influence of neoliberalism; and the limitations in the circulation of information. A key pandemic-related danger is the conclusion that democracy itself is discredited. Disasters, though, call for a reinvigoration of democracy, not a knee-jerk invocation of autocratic 'emergency' rule. A fundamental problem in the UK and US is that these countries were not democratic enough. The paper underlines the risk of a move towards a disaster-producing system that is self-reinforcing rather than self-correcting., (© 2021 The Authors Disasters © 2021 Overseas Development Institute.)

The paper "American democracy is distress: The failure of social education" presents several "symptoms of democracy's dysfunction in the United States". These include the extreme reliance on campaign contributions, giving the donors--economic elites and groups representing business, frequently operating at a transnational level--an excessive power in determining government policy in areas such as the environment, media or fiscal regulations, as profusely exemplified in the paper. At the same time, policies impose restrictions on citizens' rights in areas such as voting, healthcare or employment. In this sense, the power gap between citizens and economic elites in the form of a global capital is growing and, as it goes undisputed and unchallenged, menaces the core of democracy itself. This is a paper worth reading. Not only does it present an argument--and this is something to be praised and cherished--but it also sustains its argument on a sound and systematic analysis of documents and research. As such, this is not a trivial paper. The data, analysis and argument the author develops call for our attention and challenges us to reflect on whether and how the situation described for the US resonates with the situation of those currently living in Europe.

Successful deliberations over contentious issues require a publicly spirited citizenry that will encourage elected officials to promote what James Madison called the "permanent and aggregate interests" of the country. Unfortunately, atomizing forces have pulled American society apart, undermining trust and making collective action difficult. Residential segregation is one of those atomizing forces. Residential segregation undermines a commitment to civic virtue because it encourages people to think about fellow citizens as "others" with whom they have little in common. To address this situation, we must start by fixing our neighborhoods and creating local institutions that enhance trust and foster a public-spirited democratic citizenry. For example, our existing educational policies reinforce the disparities associated with residential segregation and have created massive resource inequalities among school districts across the country. A useful first step would be to equalize school district funding to promote a more genuine equality of opportunity., (© 2021 The Hastings Center.)

The aim of this study was to compare the level of allocation of human rights education issues in social studies textbooks in Turkey and the United States. For this aim, six social studies textbooks from both countries were examined. Textbooks were analyzed in terms of their level of "human rights education issues," in accordance with Karaman-Kepenekci's (1999) subcategories. A content analysis method was used to analyze the textbooks. As a result, it was observed that human rights education issues were included more in Turkish social studies textbooks. The study showed that Turkish and United States textbooks contained the "rights" subcategory the most. While the intensity scores of the "democracy," "freedom," and "judgment" subcategories were listed the highest in both countries' textbooks, on the other hand, the intensity scores of the "tolerance" and "peace" subcategories were placed last in the textbooks of both countries. [This study was presented at the International Conference on Educational Research and Innovation (ICERI) (Institute of Research and Community Services of Yogyakarta State University Yogyakarta, Indonesia, May 11-12, 2016).]

By 1989, fascism had long been defeated in Europe, and reforms in the Soviet Union appeared to signify the collapse of communist ideology, prompting Francis Fukuyama to famously declare the 'end of history'. Since then, neoliberalism has been rolled out globally. This paper argues that, with regard to higher education, Fukuyama's claim that the pursuit of knowledge will be replaced by the 'satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands' is prescient. What, then, prompted Fukuyama to qualify his predictions in 2018? Citing both the turmoil of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, Fukuyama blames identity politics for the breakdown of consensus over what the nation is, or should be, and suggests that the promotion of creedal identity might rescue Western democracy from populism. This paper disagrees: using the examples of Brexit and the promotion of Fundamental British Values in schools, it argues that creedal identity has become another expression of populism. Rejecting the claim that identity politics are the ultimate source of populism, it argues that populism is the predictable outcome of recession in the market economy.

Support for democracy is based on warmth, inclusiveness, and a general belief that others are well-intentioned. It is also related to a willingness to respect the rights of outgroups which do not necessarily share the views of one's ingroup. In this research, we analysed the relationships between different types of national identity and support for democracy. In two surveys (Study 1; American participants, n = 407 and Study 2; Polish participants; n = 570), we found that support for democracy was negatively linked to collective narcissism, measured in relation to the national group, previously associated with negative intra- and inter-group outcomes. The effect of national narcissism on democracy support was present even when accounting for national identification. In Study 2, we also found that this effect was mediated by social cynicism - a negative view of human nature. In both studies, support for democracy was positively linked to a secure national identity, that is national identification without the narcissistic component, which tends to be associated with positive attitudes towards others. We discuss implications for understanding the role of national identity in support for (il)liberal politics., (© 2021 The British Psychological Society.)

This paper argues that it is important for educators in democratic education to understand how the rise of right-wing populism in Europe, the United States and around the world can never be viewed apart from the affective investments of populist leaders and their supporters to essentialist ideological visions of nationalism, racism, sexism and xenophobia. Democratic education can provide the space for educators and students to think critically and productively about people's affects, in order to identify the implications of different affective modes through which right-wing populism is articulated. Furthermore, this paper points out that 'negative' critique of the affective ideology of right-wing populism is not sufficient for developing a productive counter politics. An affirmative critique is also needed to set alternative frames and agendas which endorse and disseminate alternative concepts and affective practices such as equality, love and solidarity. These ideas provide critical resources to democratic education for developing a culture and process of democracy that transcends the negativity of mere critique of either right-wing populisms or inadequate forms of democracy.

Statistics is one of the important branches of mathematics taught in schools, colleges and universities. It is also an important tool in public policy discussions. This paper focuses on the use of statistics in the latter context, rather than its use in adult mathematics education research. I review the key characteristics of the statistical approach to constructing public knowledge, and give a very brief history of key points in its development. I discuss how what I call the "overt crisis of statistics," the apparent disenchantment of large sections of the public with the "expert" statistical methods, outputs and pronouncements, leads to dilemmas both for citizens and for democratic governments. Recently "Big Data" and data analytics seem to many to offer new solutions to problems resulting from the essential lack of certainty surrounding efforts to understand society, and from the need to make quick decisions in a rapidly changing world. These approaches have potential, but also limitations. This leads me to consider a second, "covert" crisis of statistics, resulting from a struggle between proponents of freely available public information and public argument, and those aiming to profit from the appropriation and sequestering of information for private ends. I finish by considering what can be done by ourselves, as citizens, as adult mathematics teachers, and as researchers.

This paper is an introduction to the special issue of the Athens Journal of Social Sciences on Politics. It includes six papers, which relate to various aspects of politics in today's democracies. The first paper examines populism in selecting political parties of the European Union (EU); the second explains a political experiment performed in USA; the third discusses the prospects of the 2022 elections in Brazil; the fourth states that democracies need leaders as this is the case with Israel; the fifth looks at a real threat to democracy which is radicalism and violence using the case of the Slovakian youth; and the last paper examines a case of primary elections of a Greek political party (PASOK). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the interrelations between power, politics, academia and curriculum reform in British Columbia (BC) using social studies curriculum documents as a case study. It describes how curriculum reform occurred and argues that reform was undemocratic as it was largely the product of individuals with power who invited individuals with educational ideologies that were attractive to them to aid them in the revisions. These educational ideologies came from the USA, illustrating the influence of US ideas overseas. The non-democratic nature of the curriculum reform process may partly explain why teachers often resisted the revisions, and why government officials attempted to appear more democratic by increasing teacher participation in the curriculum revision process later in the century. However, curriculum revision remained undemocratic. The paper comments on whether the curriculum revision process in a democracy ought to be democratic or not.

The paper highlights the role of translation in qualitative research that involves multiple languages. Its particular focus is on untranslatables, that is, those words or phrases in a source language that pose challenges to translators because no direct equivalent is available in the target language. "Untranslatables" create moments of productive difficulty by forcing a critical examination of both the data and the assumptions that framed the research questions. The paper discusses two cases: research with Mandarin-speaking participants on the topic of democracy and democratic subjectivity, and research with Q'eqchi'-speaking participants on the topic of civic engagement and political participation.

As a postsecondary educator with most of my experience teaching in colleges, but with some also in undergraduate and postgraduate studies both in Canada and the United States, I have been teaching politics and government for close to fifty years. That time has been spent not only undertaking empirical analyses of political behaviour and the normative analysis of political theory, but also in the practical activity of promoting understanding of what is frequently called "civic life". The authorities who develop broad educational goals seem to have it in mind that promoting ideas of good citizenship and suggesting ways in which this citizenship can be enacted should be among the several goals of faculty members involved in "general education." As we live in a liberal democracy, it follows that a good part of that mission should involve the both cognitive knowledge (how governments work, issues of policy development, elements of the political process, etc.) and what are sometimes called affective and behavioural traits--habits of attitude and action that encourage and exemplify good citizenship. Specifically, we are expected to teach something about democracy.

This paper reviews two main historical approaches to creativity: the Romanticist approach, based on the culture of the irrational, and the Enlightenment approach, based on the culture of the objective. It defends a paradigm of creativity as a sum of rich semiotic systems that form the basis of distributed knowledge and learning, reviews historical ideas of the university, and identifies two conflicting mainstream models in regards to understanding of the university as a public good: the 'Public' University circa 1960-1980, and the 'post-historical' university. Based on practical experiences, and on previous works by Peters and Jandric, it develops the new model of 'the creative university as digital public university,' and argues that it provides a useful philosophical goal for directing present and future practices of the contemporary university.

This commentary suggests that a countermovement for educational and social justice must learn from the dominant global neo-liberal movement and its successes in creating institutions and knowledge-making processes and networks. Local struggles for educational justice are important, but they need to be linked to a broader educational justice movement. Such a movement itself has to be seen as part of a struggle for genuine democracy.

Drawing from archival research, this article explores Thomas Jefferson's understanding of property and his embrace of a political community defined by communal sharing. Tracing the evolution of Jefferson's view on property holdings from the Anglo-Saxons to the American colonies to his speculative vision of ward republics, this paper argues that fears concerning economic and property inequities in the early republic compelled the principal author of the Declaration of Independence to endorse small, communal experiments. Importantly, this reading of Jefferson problematizes strict liberal or republican interpretations of his thought, further calling into question the philosophical heritage of the American republic. By evaluating personal letters from 1804 to 1824, this article offers an alternative reading of Jefferson, one that carefully showcases his wholly original, compelling, and radical democratic thinking. The significance of this heterodox interpretation has far-reaching implications on our understanding of the foundational principles of the early republic as well as how we address the issue of economic inequality in the modern-day United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses distinctions between differing senses of "private," "public" and "political" in the United States to argue for the value of framing food issues as a collective problem that calls for broadscale demands for justice. We argue that food choices do not simply belong to the realm of private preferences and market transactions. Rather, they are a set of decisions that have systemic causes and public consequences. They are shaped and constrained by public policies that underwrite the transportation of food over long distances as well as particular crops and foodstuffs, and by the vendors and advertisers who try to convince us to eat more of the foods they produce. Because the consequences of eating an abundance of empty calories are not easily remedied at the personal level, citizens need to demand public, systemic solutions, including better food information, youth food education, and a healthier food supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Hart Ely's representation-reinforcing theory of the US Constitution had a significant impact on the drafting of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. This short article begins by recapping briefly the pathway by which that influence occurred. It then expands on earlier accounts in two ways. The first is to suggest that Ely's influence in New Zealand illustrates the significance of American postgraduate legal education programs as a vector for the migration of constitutional ideas (although the causal relationship in this case is neither straightforward nor direct). The second is to confront more explicitly a nagging question raised by earlier scholarship: to what extent was it Ely specifically (rather than US process theories more generally) that influenced the New Zealand experience? The article suggests that, at very least, Ely's work acted as the conduit by which the ideas underlying American process theory were transmitted into the New Zealand text. Although it is inevitably somewhat speculative, the article also suggests that it is unlikely that, in the absence of Ely, the drafters of the N.Z. Bill of Rights would have pursued a process-perfecting strategy with quite the same vigilance and systematicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether the number of official visits to and from the U.S. allows the country to adopt a more democratic system of governance. To achieve its objective, the paper develops a model that derives the conditions under which a host invites a guest to persuade or pressure for democratic improvement, and the conditions under which the guest accepts an invitation to visit and decides to improve the quality of democratic governance after the visit. To test our hypothesis, we introduce novel variables that indicate the number of leader's trips to the U.S., and the number of visits of U.S. Presidents and Secretaries of State to the country, from 1960 to 2015. The estimation results show that the official visits have a statistically significant positive effect on democracy. These results are robust. The paper also uses 3SLS to deal with potential endogeneity. The estimation confirms our previous findings that the official visits have a statistically significant positive effect on democracy. Finally, we explore the channels of transmission and find that American administrations use bilateral trade flows and U.S. aid as an incentive for countries to democratize. This supports our model predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Black Lives Matter campaign has led many people around the world to reassess monuments that are installed in public spaces to commemorate historical figures. These reassessments raise questions about what it means to attack the statues of the past, what the rights and wrongs of such actions are, what this teaches us and how all this is passed on to the next generation. In line with this, I focus on a statue of the former dictator of Korea, Chun Doo‐hwan, installed in 2019. The purpose of the statue was, however, somewhat different from that of many other statues currently at issue. It was erected for the purpose of humiliation rather than respect. By examining the case of the statue of Chun Doo‐hwan in Korea, this paper discusses the nature of democracy in relation to these attacks on statues. In particular, it attempts to interpret the installation of the statue as a form of art for an emancipated community, where democracy is understood as involving a haunting of the collective memory. It concludes that democracy is something never to be grasped fully, something that slips away from its intentions and that is always to be tested and reconsidered. Finally, the paper addresses the educational significance of the statue in question in terms of how history is to be taught and how, in our interactions with the statues around us, the past is to be remembered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Applied & Theoretical Social Sciences is the property of Journal of Applied & Theoretical Social Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung Discussion Papers is the property of Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The problem of balancing power through institutional design--always a central concern of constitutional theory--has taken on even greater salience in current scholarship in light of contemporary concerns over economic inequality and failures of American democracy today. This paper extends these concerns into the realm of administrative law and the design of regulatory policy. I argue that in an era of increasing (and increasingly interrelated) economic and political inequality, we must design public policies not only with an eye towards their substantive merits, but also in ways that redress disparities of power. In particular, we can design policies to institutionalize the countervailing power of constituencies that are often the beneficiaries of egalitarian economic policies, yet lack the durable, longterm political influence to sustain and help implement these policies over time. This concept of "policymaking as power-building" rests on a descriptive and normative claim. Descriptively, the paper shows how historical and contemporary analyses of administrative governance indicates that regulatory institutions and policies are already involved in shaping and responding to the balance of power among civil society groups. Normatively, the paper argues that this reality should be harnessed to pro-actively design policies that mitigate power disparities, and in so doing promote greater democratic responsiveness through regulatory policy design. The paper develops this argument through case studies of power-balancing policy design in local regulatory bodies around economic development initiatives, and in federal regulation around the case of financial reform. The paper then theorizes a more general framework for designing similar power-shifting policies that are portable across substantive areas of law and policy and across federal, state, or local level administration. This framework should be of interest to policymakers, advocacy groups, and other practitioners designing regulatory policies and concerned about dangers of capture and disparate influence. This account of policymaking as power-building synthesizes literatures in law, social science, and political theory to offer a more institutionally-rich account of power and the interactions between constituencies on the one hand and policymaking institutions on the other. It also extends the current debates on power and public law, law and inequality, and administrative and local government law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the twenty-first century, voter choice and the broader political debate are within the reach of those that can access and channel the vast streams of user data that are generated online. How digital platforms utilize personal user data to influence the outcome of democratic processes has become a central issue that liberal democracies must confront. The paper explores whether competition law has a role to play when it comes to addressing this intersection of Big Tech, data, and democracy. It first sets out the democratic roots of competition or antitrust law in the United States and the European Union. From these, the paper deduces that competition law cannot remain inactive when it comes to maintaining a democratic society in the face of the abilities of Big Tech to influence democratic processes and outcomes. The paper then goes a step further and asks what role competition law could play in this regard. Should democratic values simply be reflected in the procedural set-up of antitrust law, or is there a role for democratic values in the substantive provisions as well? And if so, does antitrust law's focus on keeping market power in check suffice to fulfill its role in a democratic society, or does this role require the law to specifically target antidemocratic market behavior as anticompetitive harm? In navigating these questions, the paper contributes to the ongoing debate on political antitrust and sets out an ambitious research agenda on how to carry this discussion forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liberal democracies and their allies are facing a generational challenge from increased and evolving efforts by foreign actors to undermine public trust and degrade democracy. This article examines the problem of foreign interference with particular reference to the US midterm elections of 2018 as a case study, to draw potential lessons for liberal democracies in advance of future democratic processes. These lessons are centred upon five vulnerabilities to malicious actors, which – if exploited, either partly or wholly – can potentially degrade a democratic political system. The five vulnerabilities incorporate democratic institutions, election infrastructure and private industry. They also include individuals, and the core ideas that underpin democratic norms and values. We call these the 'Five Is'. The paper outlines the challenges facing the integrity of elections for liberal democracies and fills out the concept of the 'Five Is'. We note that the 'Five Is' are causally linked and overlapping. Having discussed the 'Five Is', we then look at the US 2018 midterms as a way to clarify and specify the 'Five Is' in practice. The paper then offers eight recommendations for policymakers to increase the resilience of electoral processes to such threats and attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was a prolific writer, public speaker and broadcaster. She appeared on her own radio programs in the 1930s, 40s and 50s and those of others, both in the US and abroad. In many of her daily newspaper columns over the years, Mrs. Roosevelt spoke of the importance of international radio and seemed to suggest there was a unique role for the medium as a way to reach ordinary men and women. Of the Voice of America, she said it played a vital role in spreading understanding of the American way of life and American democracy. This paper looks at American broadcasting to France in the early Cold War and considers two broadcasts Mrs. Roosevelt made while in France with the United Nations: a 1948 episode of the program Changement de Decors and a series of weekly talks about the UN for the French service in 1951–52. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalists in democratically "free" countries have faced harassment from those external to the newsroom for decades, though that has recently increased in the United States by many accounts. To assess the effects of such harassment in the United States, 32 journalists were interviewed and more than 500 surveyed about their experiences with harassment, and how it has affected their professional work. Journalists' emotions, gender, and the frequency at which they experience harassment were predictors of affect-driven work behaviors such as avoiding interviewing someone, being less active on social media, and even considering leaving journalism. Younger journalists were also more likely to engage in affect-driven work behaviors. Harassment also affected journalists' work attitude of job satisfaction—specifically incivility and disruptive harassment. This type of harassment is likely to decrease job satisfaction while supervisor support and larger organizational size are likely to increase satisfaction. In sum, harassment from viewers, readers, and strangers affects how journalists act and think about their work. This research adds to literature on Affective Events Theory by highlighting harassment from organizational outsiders (readers, viewers, and strangers) as an affective event with significant affect-driven behaviors and attitudes. Furthermore, there are practical implications for practitioners discussed at the end of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

General political knowledge is a central variable in American politics research. Individuals with high political knowledge exhibit behaviors that are consequential to a well-functioning democracy, including holding more stable political opinions, exhibiting greater ideological constraint, knowing more about political candidates, and being more likely to vote correctly. In this paper, we examine whether the internet revolution, enabling citizens to look up anything at any time, has changed the relative importance of political knowledge in American politics. We show that important generational differences exist between Americans raised during the broadcast era and Americans raised with the presence and accessibility of the internet. Internet access can be a substitute for political knowledge stored in long-term memory, particularly among this younger generation, who may be relying on the internet to store knowledge for them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public libraries are not only political institutions, they are enmeshed in the politics of society. This paper presents some of the more thoughtful conceptions of both conservative and liberal politics, to a specific end. That end is the suggestion that public libraries can act as commons within their communities. The intricacies of acting as commons are detailed here, along with some practical suggestions for realizing the goal of becoming a commons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American election and its results in 2016 made it timely to provide a psychoanalytic analysis of the similar political events in the United States and in Hungary. Applying psychoanalytical theories to society has always been part of the tradition of the Budapest school. This paper argues that Hungarian and other transgenerational trauma theories can help us understand these developments. The author begins in using these theories to analyze the impact of political regimes on societies and individuals in Central Europe after World War II. She then continues to look at the political transformation that took place in 1989 in the socialist countries existing since 1945. This transformation promised liberation. But, this paper argues, the unexplored past resulted in the emergence of hierarchic, irrational political forces. The paper uses social and individual examples to help demonstrate these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper makes an argument for the democratic value of distrust. It begins by analyzing distrust, since distrust is not merely the negation of trust. The account that it develops is based on Martin Luther King Jr.'s work in Why We Can't Wait. Distrust is the confident belief that another individual, a group of individuals, or an institution will not act justly or as justice requires. This paper argues that distrust's democratic value lies in its ability to temper tyranny. The main example discussed is Ring's involvement in the Birmingham Campaign during the Black Civil Rights movement in America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Security: Theory & Practice / Bezpieczeństwo.Teoria i Praktyka is the property of Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski Krakow University, AFM Publishing Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines an important aspect of the politicisation of contingent work: the evolution of grassroots organising strategies by immigrant day labourers, an allegedly ‘unorganisable’ class of contingent workers. The paper focuses on the ways in which repertoires of contestation – based in a philosophy of social transformation through radical democracy and Popular Education – have defused from mass-movement social struggles in Latin America in the 1980s to street-corner organising in US cities today. Through a series of in-depth interviews with day labour organisers, the paper: (1) follows the continental travels of Popular Education methodologies; and (2) explores how organising approaches from the global South have been adapted and recombined to meet the challenges presented by day labour markets in the US which are characterised by rampant violations of core labour standards. [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]

During the 1980s, the United States initiated an explicit policy of democracy promotion throughout the world. William Robinson (1996) more accurately described this initiative as "promoting polyarchy," whereby the United States supported moderate elite actors that promoted neoliberal economic policies to displace both right-wing and communist despots, such as General Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Soviet rulers in Eastern Europe. While much of Latin America remained characterized by polyarchies throughout the late 20th Century, Latin American citizens began to reject these political arrangements and to elect anti-neoliberal candidates that promoted participatory democracy by the turn of the 21st Century, particularly in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. How has the United States changed its democracy promotion strategies to respond to these new dynamics? The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how the U.S. government, through agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID, has altered the main thrust of its foreign policy in Latin America, from promoting polyarchy and displacing despotic leaders, to supporting opposition actors to unseat democratically-elected far leftist leaders that promote participatory democracy. This paper deploys a case study method involving recent U.S. foreign policy in Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and it utilizes both U.S. diplomatic cables and interviews with U.S. state elites to illustrate this shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Policy Studies Journal is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we describe democracy and evidence of its erosion globally and in the US. Specific concerns about the erosion of democratic values are discussed, and how this erosion manifests in group behaviors. We call on group work to consider how the global expansion of repressive policies and practices that empower privileged and the elite impact group member participation, especially members of targeted minority groups. Through examples we demonstrate ways group work practice can champion the protection of all member voices, and preserve a structure and mechanisms that model such protections for all its participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]