Silence And Democracy

Download or read book Silent Citizenship written by Justin Gest and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does silent citizenship mean in a democracy? With levels of economic and political inequality on the rise across the developed democracies, citizens are becoming more disengaged from their neighbourhoods and communities, more distrustful of politicians and political parties, more sceptical of government goods and services, and less interested in voicing their frustrations in public or at the ballot box. The result is a growing number of silent citizens who seem disconnected from democratic politics – who are unaware of political issues, lack knowledge about public affairs, do not debate, deliberate, or take action, and most fundamentally, do not vote. Yet, although silent citizenship can and does indicate deficits of democracy, research suggests that these deficits are not the only reason citizens may have for remaining silent in democratic life. Silence may also reflect an active and engaged response to politics under highly unequal conditions. What is missing is a full accounting of the problems and possibilities for democracy that silent citizenship represents. Bringing together leading scholars in political science and democratic theory, this book provides a valuable exploration of the changing nature and form of silent citizenship in developed democracies today. This title was previously published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

Download or read book Silence and Democracy written by John Zumbrunnen and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The role of elites vis-&à-vis the mass public in the construction and successful functioning of democracy has long been of central interest to political theorists. In Silence and Democracy, John Zumbrunnen explores this theme in Thucydides&’ famous history of the Peloponnesian War as a way of focusing our thoughts about this relationship in our own modern democracy. In Periclean Athens, according to Thucydides, &“what was in name a democracy became in actuality rule by the first man.&” This political transformation of Athenian political life raises the question of how to interpret the silence of the demos. Zumbrunnen distinguishes the &“silence of contending voices&” from the &“collective silence of the demos,&” and finds the latter the more difficult and intriguing problem. It is in the complex interplay of silence, speech, and action that Zumbrunnen teases out the meaning of democracy for Thucydides in both its domestic and international dimensions and shows how we may benefit from the Thucydidean text in thinking about the ways in which the silence of ordinary citizens can enable the domineering machinations of political elites in America and elsewhere today.

Download or read book The Silent Takeover written by Noreena Hertz and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2002-06-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of the best books of the year by The Sunday Times of London, and already a bestseller in England, Noreena Hertz's The Silent Takeover explains how corporations in the age of globalization are changing our lives, our society, and our future -- and are threatening the very basis of our democracy. Of the world's 100 largest economies, fifty-one are now corporations, only forty-nine are nation-states. The sales of General Motors and Ford are greater than the GDP (gross domestic product) of the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, and Wal-Mart now has a turnover higher than the revenues of most of the states of Eastern Europe. Yet few of us are fully aware of the growing dominance of big business: newspapers continue to place news of the actions of governments on the front page, with business news relegated to the inside pages. But do governments really have more influence over our lives than businesses? Do the parties for which we vote have any real freedom of choice in their actions? Already sparking intense debate in England and on the Continent, The Silent Takeover provides a new and startling take on the way we live now and who really governs us. The widely acclaimed young socio-economist Noreena Hertz brilliantly and passionately reveals how corporations across the world manipulate and pressure governments by means both legal and illegal; how protest, be it in the form of the protesters of Seattle and Genoa or the boycotting of genetically altered foods, is often becoming a more effective political weapon than the ballot-box; and how corporations in many parts of the world are taking over from the state responsibility for everything from providing technology for schools to healthcare for the community. While the activities of business, frequently under pressure from the media and the consuming public, can range from the beneficial to the pernicious, neither public protest nor corporate power is in any way democratic. What is the fate of democracy in the world of the silent takeover? The Silent Takeover asks us to recognize the growing contradictions of a world divided between haves and have-nots, of gated communities next to ghettos, of extreme poverty and unbelievable riches. In the face of these unacceptable extremes, Noreena Hertz outlines a new agenda to revitalize politics and renew democracy.

Download or read book Breaking the Silence written by Suzanne Falgout and published by Social Process in Hawai'i. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection reminds us of the pattern in US history slighted by standard narratives of nation. Those histories, these essays reveal, are powerful creations in the constitution of a nation and people, and they uncover how exclusions can operate to install hierarchies of power.

Download or read book Democracy's Reconstruction written by Katharine Lawrence Balfour and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-16 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Democracy's Reconstruction, the latest addition to Cathy Cohen and Fredrick Harris's Transgressing Boundaries series, noted political theorist Lawrie Balfour challenges a longstanding tendency in political theory: the disciplinary division that separates political theory proper from the study of black politics. Political theory rarely engages with black political thinkers, despite the fact that the problem of racial inequality is central to the entire enterprise of American political theory. To address this lacuna, she focuses on the political thought of W.E.B. Du Bois, particularly his longstanding concern with the relationship between slavery's legacy and the prospects for democracy in the era he lived in. Balfour utilizes Du Bois as an intellectual resource, applying his method of addressing contemporary problems via the historical prism of slavery to address some of the fundamental racial divides and inequalities in contemporary America. By establishing his theoretical method to study these historical connections, she positions Du Bois's work in the political theory canon--similar to the status it already has in history, sociology, philosophy, and literature.

Download or read book From Dictatorship to Democracy written by Gene Sharp and published by Albert Einstein Institution. This book was released on 2008 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A serious introduction to the use of nonviolent action to topple dictatorships. Based on the author's study, over a period of forty years, on non-violent methods of demonstration, it was originally published in 1993 in Thailand for distribution among Burmese dissidents.

Download or read book Silence and Concealment in Political Discourse written by Melani Schröter and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2013-05-08 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes a significant contribution to political discourse analysis and to the study of silence, both from the point of view of discourse analysis as well as pragmatics, and it is also relevant for those interested in politics and media studies. It promotes the empirical study of silence by analysing metadiscourse about politicians’ silence and by systematically conceptualising the communicativeness of silence in the interplay between intention (to be silent), expectation (of speech) and relevance (of the unsaid). Three cases of sustained metadiscourse about silent politicians from Germany are analysed to exemplify this approach, based on media texts and protocols of parliamentary inquiries. Ideals of political transparency and communicative openness are identified as a basis for (disappointed) expectations of speech which trigger and determine metadiscourse about politicians’ silences. Finally, the book deals critically with the role of those who act as advocates of ‘the public’s’ demand to speak out.