Suchergebnisse

The concept of party identification has been central to our understanding of American electoral behavior. This research builds upon the functional logic of party identification and asks what occurs if citizens become better able to manage the complexities of politics without relying on habitual party cues. Using the data from the American National Election Studies, we track the distribution of party mobilization and cognitive mobilization within the American electorate. Then, we demonstrates the importance of these different mobilization patterns by documenting strong differences in the content of political thinking, voting choice, and electoral change. The results suggest a basic transformation in the characteristics of the American public since our the classic images of The American Voter, leading to a more differentiated and dealigned electorate.

Although scholars generally agree that social interactions within traditional social groups build social capital, they debate the benefits of a virtual civil society based on social interactions over the Internet. Our research examines how interpersonal social group activity and virtual activity contribute to the multiple dimensions of social capital: social trust, citizen norms and political involvement. Our analyses rely on data collected in the 2005 Citizenship Involvement Democracy survey conducted by the Center for Democracy and Civil Society at Georgetown University. This survey provides unique detail on participation in both social groups and virtual interactions. Our findings suggest that social group activity and virtual interactions both foster democratic norms and activities.

Political protest plays an ambiguous role in the repertoire of political action. This essay examines cross-national levels of protest. With data from the new 1999-2002 wave of the World Values Survey, we test theories of protest derived from relative deprivation theory, political opportunity structures and political culture. The WVS enables us to test these theories on a near global scale with data from nearly 70 national surveys, comparing how the nature of protest potentially varies cross-nationally. We find that the primary sources of protest reflect the existing of resources and political opportunities to engage in protest activity. People protest not because they are frustrated and excluded from politics, but because the can protest and they expect governments to respond to their actions.

This paper addresses the question of whether ordinary people express a reasonable understanding of the meaning of democracy, and what are the contents of their definitions? Do people focus on the procedural aspects of democracy—elections, democratic institutions, and processes—which are the main focus of democratization efforts. Alternatively, do they see democracy in terms of rights and liberties, or economic or social welfare terms? We draw on a wide range of recent public opinion surveys from Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Our research yields three generalizations about popular conceptions of democracy. First, even in new democracies, most people can define democracy in their own words. Second, and most important, most people think of democracy in terms of the freedoms, liberties and rights that it conveys, rather than procedural conceptions of liberal democracy. Third, equating democracy with social benefits emerges as a minor theme, even in the poorest of nations. Our findings thus suggest that democratic aspirations are shaped by perceptions of the liberties and freedom that democracy can produce, and that are seen as lacking in other political systems.

The popular pressures for reforms of the democratic process have mounted across the OECD nations over the past generation. In response, democratic institutions are changing, evolving, expanding in ways that may alter the structure of the democratic process. These changes include reforms of the electoral process, the expansion of referendums, introduction of open government provisions, and more access points for direct political involvement. Indeed, some observers claim that we are witnessing the most fundamental transformation of the democratic process since the creation of mass democracy in the early 20th Century. This essay reviews the evidence of how democratic institutions and processes are changing, and considers some of the larger implications of these reforms for the nature of democracy. This essay is adapted from the edited volume, Democracy Transformed? Expanding Political Opportunities in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2003).