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The political activism of the American counterculture during the 1960s remains a subject blighted by misconceptions and stereotypes. To many, the political thought of the 1960s is synonymous with widespread drug abuse, failed social experiments, and general irresponsibility. Despite sustained public interest, few remember that many of the freedoms and rights Americans enjoy today are the direct result of those who defiantly challenged the established order during this tumultuous period. The period frightened both mainstream and elite Americans and still does. In Generation on Fire, both well-k

In this essay, the author recounts his experience with a student complaint that reached an influential Republican legislator and raises questions about academic freedom in an era of right-wing political activism. The context of the complaint was a course on white-collar crime in which the author raised issues about the nature of economic and political power that the student found objectionable. Although the complaint was dismissed, its aim was to create a chilling atmosphere in which faculty will self-censor and become fearful about advancing a progressive politics of pedagogical and scholarly advocacy.

Why have women remained marginalized in Chilean politics, even within a context of democratization? Addressing this question, Susan Franceschet traces women's political activism in the country—from the early twentieth century struggles for suffrage to current efforts to expand and deepen the practice of democracy. Franceschet highlights the gendered nature of political participation in Chile, as well as changing perceptions of what is and is not political. Even as women enter electoral and bureaucratic politics in greater numbers, she argues, they are divided by ideology, competing interests, and unequal access to power. Clarifying the themes and challenges of the Chilean women's movement today, she finds an inextricable link between women's struggles for citizenship rights and the nation's broader struggles for democracy and social justice

This article examines two competing theories explaining the effects of political satire on citizens in an authoritarian context. The "activism" proposition argues that political satire works as a form of resistance to erode people's support for the regime and encourages collective action. The "cynicism" proposition argues that while satire discourages regime support, it also discourages political participation. Our online survey experiment on young Chinese Internet users provides evidence supporting the cynicism proposition. Satire consumption reduces audiences' political trust, deflates their political efficacy, and discourages them from participating in politics, as it reduces the perceived severity of political problems and implies that audience participation is useless. We conclude that the dissemination of political satire may stabilize the authoritarian regime temporarily but induces it to become erosive in the long run.

This article focuses on the political biographies of two sisters, Claudina and Luz García Pérez, between 1918 and 1931 within the Agrupación Femenina Socialista de Madrid (Women's Socialist Group of Madrid) and various trade unions linked to the Casa del Pueblo. Their biographies question the stereotype of the male union and political leader by highlighting the importance of the family unit in adopting and maintaining a lifelong commitment to the socialist cause. Moreover, their transgression of the hegemonic gender system highlights the role played by women-only political fora in relation to the formation of female political leaders within regimes in which women were deprived of the right to vote. ; Este artículo aborda la trayectoria política de las hermanas Claudina y Luz García Pérez en la Agrupación Femenina Socialista de Madrid y en varios sindicatos vinculados a la Casa del Pueblo entre 1918 y 1931. Sus biografías sirven para cuestionar el estereotipo del varón activista sindical y político, al evidenciar la importancia de la militancia familiar en la adopción y mantenimiento de un compromiso de por vida con el socialismo. Además, su trasgresión a los roles hegemónicos de género pone de manifiesto el papel desempeñado por los espacios de sociabilidad política exclusivamente femeninos en la formación de mujeres líderes en regímenes que no reconocían derechos de ciudadanía a las mujeres.

Song has the power to express a social truth and is consistently employed in actions across the world in solidarity with political struggle. This article discusses the campaigning work of the Campaign Choirs Network, a UK network of radical political choirs, whose story is founded on
diverse solidarities and a commitment to singing as a means of emotional engagement and pedagogy. The network has conducted a participatory action research programme, including oral history interviews with 42 members of 11 street choirs, exploring members' life-course activism and their utopian
imaginaries. As one aspect of their research, the authors sought to more fully understand the emotions that song and singing release, and the connections that can then be made between people – in order to find out more about the nature of the power of song and the political possibilities
of such connections. Drawing extensively on the interviews, this article discusses the political and pedagogic possibilities of the emotions released through singing.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, disability rights found a place on the U.S. policy agenda. However, it did not do so because social movement groups pressured political elites or because politicians were responding to changes in public preferences. Drawing from recent work in neo- institutionalism and social movements, namely the theory of strategic action fields, I posit that exogenous shocks in the 1960s caused a disability policy monopoly to collapse giving way to a new policy community. Using original longitudinal data on congressional commit- tees, hearings, bills, and laws, as well as data from the Policy Agendas Project, I demonstrate the ways in which entrepreneurs pursued a new policy image of rights within a context of increasing committee involvement, issue complexity, and space on the policy agenda, and the consequences this had on policy.

Cover -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Acknowledgements -- Preface -- 1 British Democracy in the Twenty-First Century -- British parliamentary democracy: theory and practice -- Challenges to British parliamentary democracy -- Democracy and civil society -- Outline of the book -- 2 Changing Political Values and Attitudes -- What do citizens want from the state? -- What do citizens think they owe the state? -- Are people tolerant? -- Do people trust their fellow citizens and the state? -- Do citizens feel they can change circumstances? -- How interested are people in politics? -- Changes in norms and attitudes over time -- The decline in the demand for government -- Conclusion -- 3 Trends in Participation in Britain -- Changes in participation over time -- Who votes? -- Why do people vote? -- Why has voting declined? -- Conclusion -- 4 Political Parties and Grassroots Activism -- The importance of parties -- Parties and voters -- Parties and activists -- Party supporters and political participation -- Parties at the centre -- Conclusion -- 5 Voluntary Activity and Social Capital -- Voluntary activity, trust and social capital -- Changes in social capital and voluntary activity in Britain -- The consequences of declining social capital -- Conclusion -- 6 The Media and Political Participation in Britain -- Media usage in Britain -- Media influences on public opinion -- The role of the mass media in influencing collective perceptions -- Methodological issues -- A case study - the Sun backs New Labour -- Conclusion -- 7 Britain in Comparative Perspective -- Is government too big? -- The growth of government in comparative perspective -- Theorizing the demand for government -- Attitudes to transfer payments -- The demand for government spending and income -- Conclusion -- 8 Government Effectiveness and Civil Society.

A sharp rise in the use of digital media in Southeast Asia in recent years has raised questions about the impact of these digitally networked technologies on the prospect for democratization in a region known for its authoritarian resilience. In the absence of a regional uprising as witnessed in the Middle East through the Arab Spring, Southeast Asian authoritarian states have maintained their durability despite a massive surge in online political activities and in some cases, digitally mediated large-scale mobilization of opposition groups. What explains authoritarian resilience in Southeast Asia in the face of rising opportunities for online political opposition? This article argues that while digital media has emerged as an important repertoire of activism, particularly for political opposition groups, a deft combination of political authoritarianism and increasing Internet controls have stunted democratic pressure in society and hampered future prospect for democratization. It also offers a comparative analysis of how the Internet more generally and digital media in particular has affected state-society relations in Southeast Asia in recent years. In order for digitally mediated political opposition to meaningfully challenge the existing authoritarian incumbents, sufficient opening in the political system is needed. This means, authoritarian states with competitive, routinized elections which have recently experienced large-scale or sustained mobilization by opposition groups are most likely to be susceptible to breakdown than closed regimes.

Interrogating the oft-stated emotion of 'guilt' amongst young female activists, I develop a theoretical account of why young women seem to be more burdened with such negative emotions than young men. Drawing on feminist theorising, I posit that young women's emotional accounts of activist work highlight the retraditionalisation of gender under neoliberal modernity. I provide evidence of the gender-differentiated demands that heightened forms of reflexivity place on women, young women in particular. I then consider alternative conceptions of politics, grounded in the work of Hannah Arendt, and extending my own earlier work on relational agency ( Kennelly, 2009 ). Drawing on phenomenology to offer an account of political engagement grounded in the lived experiences of activists, I suggest that social movements might be bolstered through a deepened understanding of the role played by webs of relations and world-building practices, without losing sight of the gendered implications of such a turn.

Electoral turnout in Norway has been declining over a long period for local elections and, at the four most recent Storting elections, turnout has been at a lower level than in the preceding 25 years. This article investigates whether the fall in turnout generalises to other forms of political participation and political involvement. Data from the Norwegian Election Studies 1965–2001 and the Norwegian Values Studies 1982–1996 are analysed. In contrast to the decline of turnout, the authors find that the broader political activity of citizens has increased. The rise in political involvement and activism is quite widespread, covering dimensions like political interest, political discussion and political action. The increase includes forms of participation where political parties play a strong role and in direct action where parties are supposed to be less important. Education is strongly associated with most forms of civic participation and the rise in educational levels normally leads to an increase in participation rates. Data show that women are now as active as men in most dimensions of participation. In Norway, turnout at elections displays one pattern over time, while other indicators of political participation and involvement show different trajectories. There is no general civic decline. Using political involvement and participation as a criterion for judging the state of democracy, and taking into account the whole set of indicators studied in this article, one may reasonably conclude that Norwegian civic democracy is in better health than if one focused only on the fall in electoral turnout.

The history of the US Black Power movement and its constituent groups such as the Black Panther Party has recently gone through a process of historical reappraisal, which challenges the characterization of Black Power as the violent, misogynist and negative counterpart to the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, scholars have furthered interest in the global aspects of the movement, highlighting how Black Power was adopted in contexts as diverse as India, Israel and Polynesia. This article highlights that Britain also possessed its own distinctive form of Black Power movement, which whilst inspired and informed by its US counterpart, was also rooted in anti-colonial politics, New Commonwealth immigration and the onset of decolonization. Existing sociological narratives usually locate the prominence and visibility of British Black Power and its activism, which lasted through the 1960s to the early 1970s, within the broad history of UK race relations and the movement from anti-racism to multiculturalism. However, this characterization neglects how such Black activism conjoined explanations of domestic racism with issues of imperialism and global inequality. Through recovering this history, the article seeks to bring to the fore a forgotten part of British history and also examines how the history of British Black Power offers valuable lessons about how the politics of anti-racism and anti-imperialism should be united in the 21st century.

Publicly confronting political misperceptions enacts political conflict, generating communicative forms of public resistance as well as psychological resistance. Applying Schattschneider's classic model of interest group political conflict to communication by those who publicly resisted messages debunking the misperception that vaccinations can cause autism offers insight into how misperceptions evolve and survive in public discourse. It also extends the model, establishing its relevance for contemporary forms of political conflict. Faced with debunking, believers socialize conflict, inviting audiences to join the struggle on their side, and alter the debate's terms such that discussion escapes control by authorities. The resulting political debate is a moving target with changing standards of evidence. Consequently, confronting political misperceptions may generate activism that encourages misperceptions to evolve and spread.

The discourse of political activism makes use in many cases of an intertextual rereading of historical events for purposes of discussion. This is the case of the action of the Zentrum für Politische Schönheit Erster Europäischer Mauerfall, which took place in Berlin in 2014. The action evokes the Berlin Wall and its fall in a prototypical way to project its political discourse on all the walls currently present in the world and on the consequences of their existence for some political minorities. This contribution, remaining within the theoretical horizon of digital multimodality, intends to focus on the pragmatic and linguistic strategies recurring in this action, identifying the different plans for constructing the discourse and the numerous visual linguistics conflicts essential to the communication of contents. ; The discourse of political activism makes use in many cases of an intertextual rereading of historical events for purposes of discussion. This is the case of the action of the Zentrum für Politische Schönheit Erster Europäischer Mauerfall, which took place in Berlin in 2014. The action evokes the Berlin Wall and its fall in a prototypical way to project its political discourse on all the walls currently present in the world and on the consequences of their existence for some political minorities. This contribution, remaining within the theoretical horizon of digital multimodality, intends to focus on the pragmatic and linguistic strategies recurring in this action, identifying the different plans for constructing the discourse and the numerous visual linguistics conflicts essential to the communication of contents.