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Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was a French intellectual and politician, who has been variously considered as historian, sociologist, and political theorist. His most well-known work is Democracy in America (1835–1840), a classic study not only of democracy in America but of democracy itself. Sociologists have found in this analysis of the early years of the American Republic a seminal source of inspiration for the study of contemporary American society and politics. By the 1970s, the interest of sociologists in Tocqueville's work began to dwindle. By contrast, in political science Tocqueville's status as a classic thinker of democracy was never in question. In recent years, however, sociologists have joined political scientists in responding to Tocqueville's call for a "new political science". His writings provide sociologists with an enduring source of inspiration for the analysis of social problems such as slavery, revolution, inequality, individualism, materialism, religion and colonialism. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/submittedVersion

Este artículo ofrece una nueva perspectiva para entender el populismo. El argumento se desarrolla de la siguiente forma. En un primer momento, se pasa revista a la literatura populista y se identifican dos enfoques principales: uno óntico y otro orientado a la lógica, entre los que destaca la lógica de la enemistad planteada tanto por Schmitt como por Laclau. A pesar de que compartimos con Laclau la crítica a los enfoques ónticos, en este artículo no se comparte ni su comprensión ontológica de la enemistad, ni su doble aseveración entrelazada de que el populismo es toda la política y de que la enemistad es la lógica del populismo. En un siguiente momento, se localizan los orígenes del populismo en una paradoja dentro del corazón mismo de la democracia. Si bien la democracia se entiende como una comunidad de inclusión; al mismo tiempo, sin embargo, la exclusión es constitutiva de toda inclusión, asimismo, por tanto, de la inclusión democrática. Luego se discute lo que los autores consideran la verdadera lógica del populismo: el resentimiento. A diferencia de la enemistad –que funciona en la teoría laclauniana del populismo como una ontología de no-identidad–, el resentimiento opera en un marco de rivalidad, lo que presupone una identificación entre las partes y hace referencia a un conjunto de compromisos normativos. Finalmente, el artículo concluye presentando un entendimiento del populismo como una lógica específica de acción política. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

This article offers a new understanding of populism. The argument unfolds as follows: first, the populist literature is reviewed and two main approaches are identified: ontic and logic-oriented, the more important of which is the Schmitt-Laclau logic of enmity. While the authors broadly agree with Laclau's criticism of ontic approaches, they endorse neither his ontological understanding of enmity, nor his claim that populism is politics, and enmity is the logic of populism. Next, the origins of populism are located in a paradox at the heart of democracy. Democracy defines itself as a community of inclusion, yet exclusion is constitutive of inclusion, including therefore democratic inclusion. Then is discussed what the authors believe to be the true logic of populism: resentment. Unlike enmity, which functions in Laclau's populist theory as an ontology of non-identity, resentment operates within a rivalrous framework, which presupposes identification between the parts and refers to a set of normative commitments. Finally, the article concludes by presenting an understanding of populism as a specific logic of political action. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

What are the reasons for Tocqueville's eternal youth?" This is the question Raymond Boudon asks in his recent book, Tocqueville for Today (Boudon 2006: 2). In other words, why do we keep reading Democracy in America, a book written in the 1830s, in order to understand how liberal democracy works today, both in the US and elsewhere? Boudon's answer — that Tocqueville gave us a new and innovative sociological analysis that has yet to be surpassed — points to the exceptional character of his contribution to the understanding of modern societies. Alongside the names of Weber and Durkheim, Boudon doubtless includes Tocqueville as one of his most admired classic social thinkers. Curiously enough, Boudon's assessment of Tocqueville as a sociological classic was itself an exceptional judgment only a generation ago.

his article examines social attitudes towards social rights in Portugal. It utilizes original survey data from 2013 to study the distribution of welfare attitudes in a context of economic austerity and welfare retrenchment. The main argument is that there are at least two sources of preference formation regarding public social provision: one is universalistic (or needs-based), and the other is contributory. These two logics frame choices concerning the future of the welfare state in Portugal. We explore the determinants of this choice through three hypotheses: dualization between insiders and outsiders (H1), the type of welfare regime (H2) and social rights consciousness (H3). Our findings suggest that choice between universalistic and contributory models is not impervious to macro-institutional factors and labour market performance. The paper's main contribution, however, is to empirically demonstrate that this choice is significantly shaped by pre-existing understandings of social rights in Portugal, namely its politically contested character.

The question of how human subjectivity responds to urban life was as central to the founding fathers of urban sociology as it is to us today. Simmel's insight that urban life presents man with an unprecedented, and ever changing complexity, a cognitive and sensuous overload, which reflects back on individuals' awareness of themselves as multiply holds true, if not truer, of our crowded and densely populated cities as of the fin-de-siècle Berlin which inspired it to be first written. In this paper, we revisit this Simmelian classical theme with a view to critically re-examine contemporary approaches to urban democratic politics.

Desde meados da década de 1990, o ideal deliberativo tem vindo a assumir um papel central na teoria democrática contemporânea. Mais recentemente, outra tendência tem vindo a registrar-se: a democracia deliberativa está a deixar de ser uma proposta puramente teórica e a tornar-se num modelo regulador de soluções institucionais concretas. É por essa razão que os principais problemas com que a democracia deliberativa se confronta hoje em dia são, por um lado, o da sua "institucionalização" e, por outro, o da sua articulação com outros mecanismos democráticos de natureza não deliberativa. Quanto ao primeiro problema, o artigo lança um olhar crítico sobre a forma como a democracia deliberativa vem sendo institucionalizada, discutindo os perigos de despolitização e de dissolução do projeto democrático emancipatório que tal institucionalização potencialmente acarreta. No que se refere à relação entre deliberação e outros mecanismos democráticos como a negociação ou a agregação de preferências individuais, por oposição às quais havia sido tradicionalmente definida, defendemos que a democracia deliberativa depende hoje da renúncia a esse antagonismo de origem, e do seu envolvimento numa relação de complementaridade - não de complementaridade passiva, mas antes transformadora - com esses outros elementos essenciais à vida política democrática.

Current definitions of populism are insufficiently determinate. They fail to distinguish between populism and nationalism. We propose to remedy this problem by advancing a new definition of populism as the logic of democratic resentment. We apply this new definition to a comparison between Spain's Podemos and Portugal's Left Bloc (BE), which we classify as social carriers of populism. We make two contributions to the literature. First, our findings dispute existing characterisations of the Portuguese case, which fail to distinguish between populist and nationalist claim-making. Second, our analysis undermines depictions of Podemos as the consummate populist party in Iberia: In 2015, the little studied BE was a stronger populist carrier than Podemos. The analytical framework underpinning this conclusion offers a more refined approach to populism than the alternatives and sets a higher standard for empirical replication. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Political culture refers to the values and political conduct of individual or collective agents. As a concept it is as old as the analysis of politics itself. Aristotle wrote about a "state of mind" that could inspire either political change or stability; Machiavelli stressed the role of the values and feelings of identity and commitment; Burke praised the "cake of custom" that enabled political institutions to fulfil their aims; Tocqueville emphasized moeurs as the key determinants of the character of a particular society. But the contemporary understanding of political culture has been uniquely influenced by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's classic behaviorist formulation in the Civic Culture (1963), leading up to today's multicausal, relational, and mixed methods approaches to the study of the concept (Thompson, Ellis, & Wildavsky, 1990). As a result of this methodological diversity, political culture has ceased to be narrowly identified with the attitudes toward government of political agents, to be measured in the aggregate and then compared across political systems, or even more broadly conceived as a process in which political meaning is constructed in the interplay between the attitudes of individual citizens and the language and symbolic systems in which they are embedded. Contemporary analysis of political culture is a broad church, taking in everything from data collection on political opinions, attitudes, and values conducted by means of structured interviews with representative samples of citizens (e.g., Inglehart, 1997), to interpretive approaches that use a range of qualitative methods to clarify how political identities are generated, or how symbols and rhetoric can generate compliance or conflict, to discussions of why some ethnic identities become radicalized and others do not. The field has become so broad, that it is hard to pinpoint what is political culture and what is not.

Selectively using Tocqueville, many social scientists suggest that civic participation increases democracy. We go beyond this neo-Tocquevillian model in three ways. First, to capture broader political and economic transformations, we consider different types of participation; results change if we analyze separate participation arenas. Some are declining, but a dramatic finding is the rise of arts and culture. Second, to assess impacts of participation, we study more dimensions of democrat ic politics, including distinct norms of citizenship and their associated political repertoires. Third, by analy zing global International S ocial Survey Programme and World Values Survey data, we identify dramatic subcultural differences: the Tocquevillian model is positive, negative, or zero in differen t subcultures and contexts that we explicate.