Political discontent in new democracies: the case of Brazil and Latin America

Political changes related to globalization apparently produce similar effects on old and new democracies. All over the world, comparative research on democratization has showed that political distrust is a common variable affecting the whole of the State and the relationship between citizens and democracy. Nevertheless, political discontent in old democracies has stimulated citizens to adopt new attitudes and modes of political participation, while in newly democratized countries citizens tend to withdraw from politics as a consequence of institutional distrust. In fact, in many new democracies, although adhering to the normative meaning of the democratic regime, distrust of democratic institutions is associated to citizens’ negative feeling about political efficacy, low levels of political interest and political participation, and also preference for democratic models which exclude political parties and/or parliaments. This paper evaluates the meanings and consequences of the contemporary phenomenon of political discontent in Brazil and Latin America and discusses its implications for democratic theory.     

Political discontent in South Korea

This paper examines the nature and sources of political discontent in South Korea, one of the most successful third-wave democracies in East Asia. The analysis of a recent national sample survey indicates that ordinary people are able to distinguish among regime principles, regime performance, and regime institutions, which constitute separate targets of political discontent. The analysis also indicates that sources of political discontent vary depending on its targets. Noteworthy is that official corruption is most consistently related to disbelief in democratic principles, democratic dissatisfaction, and institutional distrust. Furthermore, less free and fair elections are related to more democratic dissatisfaction and institutional distrust. The results suggest that the democracy in Korea confronts not only critical citizens but also disloyal citizens suspicious of democracy. The fact that institutional trust declined, democratic satisfaction ceased to grow, the view of democracy as a universal value weakened while desire for democracy remained high suggests that the new democracy in Korea faces considerable difficulty, if not a crisis.     

Social media use and democratic engagement: a comparative study of Hong Kong,Taiwan, and China

Recent studies in political communication have found a generally positive role of social media in democratic engagement. However, most research on youth’s social media use in relation to their political engagement has been conducted in the context of American and European democracies. This study fills a gap in the literature by examining the effects of the uses and structural features of social media on democratic engagement in three different Asian political systems: Taiwan (young liberal democracy); Hong Kong (partial democracy); and China (one-party state). The findings showed that sharing political information and connections with public actors consistently predicted offline participation (i.e., civic and political participation) and online participation (i.e., online political expression and online activism) in the three political systems. Although social media use for news, network size, and network structure did not consistently predict political outcomes, they played significant roles in influencing different engagement in the three political systems. The comparative approach used in this study helped to demonstrate the role of social media in the democratic engagement of youth in three places with similar cultures but different political contexts.     

我国城市社区民主治理的困境与出路

积极推进城市社区民主治理对我国民主政治建设和法治进程具有重要而深远的影响,但宥于我国历史传统和民主法治国情,城市社区民主治理仍存在民主权利与民主需求、民主需求与民主实践、民主实践与民主权利之间不相协调一致的问题,使得社区民主治理陷入“权利-需求-实践”的困境,这严重阻碍着中国城市社区建设及基层民主政治的健康发展。当务之急是结合我国实际,完善民主权利,满足民主需求,深化民主实践,积极探索具有我国特色的城市社区民主治理之路。     

The Sociology of Political Representation and Deliberation

The language of democracy and citizenship is infused with a complicated idea: political representation. While political theorists have explored what representation and deliberation should be like, most research on how political discussion actually happens fails directly to address these theoretical standards. This article shows the importance of representation and deliberation to our contemporary ideas about democracy and citizenship. It shows that there is no clear line between deliberation and everyday conversation. Instead, everyday talk constitutes the foundation on top of which citizens build ideas about politics. These, in turn, are the bedrock of democratic representation.     

Representation Beyond the State: Towards Transnational Democratic Non-state Politics

The crises of representative democracy and of state-based politics have been declared many times and ‘participation’ is often advocated as a remedy for the shortcomings of both. While the literature has extensively discussed representative practices in relation to territorial states, we argue in this article that more attention should be paid to the question of representation within transnational social movements striving for a politics that transcends current territorially bounded representative democracy. Analysing the World Social Forum and West African participatory trade policy-making, we find that as transnational social movements aiming at democratic goals deepen their interactions, they can face demanding questions such as: who or what has a right to be made present in a given political process and how is this established? We claim that avoiding the question of representation in transnational non-state-centred politics leaves power too many places to hide.     

SOCIAL CAPITAL AND DEMOCRACY IN A NEW DEMOCRACY

Taiwan made the transition from political authoritarianism to democracy in the late 1980s. Data from representative samples of the Taiwan population in 1992 and 1997 show how, in the early phase of democratization, citizens varied in the extent of their democratic political behavior and attitudes. I attempt to explain these variations on the basis of variables drawn from social capital theory (participation in voluntary organizations and trust), controlling for the individual's position in the social structure (sex, age, ethnicity, marital status, socioeconomic status, and social class). The findings of the multivariate analysis support only one of the social capital hypotheses: The more organizations one participates in, the more one engages in various forms of democratic political behavior . However, organizational participation has no effect on democratic political attitudes . There is no positive reciprocal relationship between the two key social capital variables of organizational participation and trust. Trust, instead of having a positive effect, either has no net effect (on some forms of democratic political behavior) or a significant negative effect (on democratic political attitudes and petitioning a government agency). The political context of Taiwan may explain why people who distrusted Taiwan's political system were more democratic and more tolerant in their attitudes than those who had more political trust.     

ON BEING BOUND TO EQUIVALENTIAL CHAINS

Taking up the test case of radical anti-globalization protest, this essay addresses Ernesto Laclau's theory of the democratic demand, reading it against Lacan's and Freud's conceptions of demand. I argue, largely drawing from Lacan's conception of enjoyment that a theory of the democratic demand must take into account the risk that a subject's enjoyment in positing a demand can overwhelm the potential political of the demand itself. In response to this risk, I argue that a theory of democracy should shift from a demand-driven politics centred around enjoying a specific subject position tied to ‘resistance’ towards a desire-driven politics that productively incorporates the ‘no’ as a means of articulating collective political aspirations.     

Sciences,politics, and associative democracy: democratizing science and expertizing democracy

Relations between science and politics are under pressure because urgent problems create an increasing external demand on sciences while inside sciences the old idea that “science speaks truth to politics” is increasingly seen as unfeasible and undesirable. We are not forced to choose between such an objectivist and a skepticist model. Associative democracy provides more fruitful interactions between sciences and politics in order to “democratize science/expertise” and to “expertize democracy” compared with the outworn institutional alternative of parliamentary democracy – incapable of solving risk-decisions because of limited and misguided information, lack of qualification and practical knowledge – and neo-corporatist “shifts from government to governance” – suffering from rigidity, exclusion of legitimate stakeholders, intransparency and lack of democratic legitimacy. It introduces contest where it matters most and where it is most productive: in the framing of issues, in the deliberation/negotiation on alternatives, and in the implementation and control of the chosen problem solving strategy.     

Unpolitical solutionism: Wealth elite sentiments against democracy and politics

The last few decades have been marked by discourses that challenge many basic presumptions supporting liberal democracy. Populist parties in particular have raised criticism against democratic systems, and authoritarian programmes have made electoral gains. This article offers the elite's perspective on this phenomenon, which is often discussed in the context of lower income groups. Drawing from qualitative interviews with 90 Finnish top earners, the article shows how wealth elites sustain strong discontent towards liberal democracy and see it as an ineffective and sometimes fundamentally flawed system. They are concerned with its alleged (in)efficiency and disagreements typical of democratic processes and are correspondingly fascinated by solutions that are presented as self-evident but that no one has the courage to execute. In this article, we refer to this type of reasoning by introducing and developing the term unpolitical solutionism, which refers to a preoccupation with quick solutions to complex problems that are political in nature. The concept of unpolitical solutionism builds on discussions of unpolitical democracy (Urbinati) and technosolutionism (Morozov) and brings them to our dialog. By analysing wealth elites' views in a Nordic democracy and by developing the concept of unpolitical solutionism, this article contributes to recent discussions on different forms of unpolitical argumentation in the context of (liberal) economic thinking.     

POLITICAL DEMOCRACY, ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, DISARTICULATION, AND SOCIAL WELL-BEING IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

The level of political democracy is hypothesized to have an independent positive effect on social well-being irrespective of either level of economic development or level of disarticulation of economies of developing countries, which is considered to be the most socially harmful structural feature created by dependency. In addition, political democracy is hypothesized to buffer the negative effects of disarticulation on social well-being. Findings from the analysis of data from eighty-two developing countries confirm these hypotheses. Political democracy showed a consistent positive effect on social well-being measures, and the least democratic countries were more vulnerable to the negative effects of disarticulation. These findings underscore the independent positive role that political democracy may play in improving social well-being in developing countries.     

Philosophes of the Conservative Nation: Burke, Macaulay, Disraeli

The argument here concerns the myths of the English, and of English history; it suggests that myths of providential England were powerful elements in twentieth-century British political life. Most of all, they powerfully informed Conservative conceptions of civilization, though they also exerted a wider political influence. The essay explores the invention of these myths in three pre-eminent writers: Burke, Macaulay, and Disraeli, and suggests that from their writings emerged a system of narration which came to be 'remembered' as the founding myth of the political nation — the conservative nation — in the twentieth century. By the time of mass democracy, the partisan divisions (between Whig and Tory) had been forgotten in favour of a wider cultural 'transformism,' which did much to cement the emerging coalition of landed and bourgeois politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the process, the very nature of politics itself came to be redefined.     

Issue Conclusion: Sociology,Political Inequality,and Democracy Beyond 2020

The articles in this special issue all contribute to a broader and richer understanding of racial and gender politics. They help reveal how racialized and gendered barriers to political participation reflect and reproduce intersecting racialized and gendered systems of domination. In doing so, they provide insights that can be applied to uncover political processes, cultivate political praxis, and draw our awareness to empowering modes of social and political transformation. Given all this, I propose a renewed sociology of political inequality that focuses on advancing democracy. This agenda includes (1) emphasizing the state of democracy over the state of political party competition, (2) highlighting how democratizing social change happens at various levels, (3) developing and practicing empirically grounded public advocacy, (4) seeing social and political structures are interconnected, and (5) employing sociology in the service of democracy.     

Sparks and Ashes

The conditions for liberal democracy – by any operational definition of that concept – include some minimum level of knowledge. We can assume everybody knows something about local matters. But total ignorance of non-local matters must make people incompetent to deliberate about those issues. If a majority of citizens know nothing about such problems, are they ready for non-local democracy? This question has been raised by scholars with reference to the pace of democracy in developing countries. But it is equally relevant for some developed countries where widespread ignorance is demonstrable. Some theorists argue that ‘democratic ignorance’ is not harmful because electoral democracies are actually run by well-informed elites. The problem with this model of elite politics is that ignorant citizens vote (even if their voting rate is lower),1 For an estimate of the relation between political knowledge and voting in the US, see Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics and Why it Matters, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996, p. 227. View all notes and are sampled in political polls. Elections and polls are used to legitimize both policies and rule by particular elites. Ignorance, therefore, has consequences. There is no democratic society where a majority of the electorate are completely ignorant about non-local matters. But large proportions of the population in some countries are uninformed to the point of ignorance. What is the minimum level of non-local knowledge which should be the goal of a democratic society? This abstract question has implications for education, for political citizenship, and for the evolution of democratic politics in developing and developed countries.     

Gender,globalisation, and democracy

This article discusses the link between gender, globalization and democracy in relation to women?s empowerment. Analyzing gender relations within the processes of development planning involves five approaches: 1) welfare, 2) equity, 3) anti-poverty, 4) efficiency, and 5) empowerment. In addition, a new approach, which combines efficiency and empowerment, must be added to highlight the problematic nature of the direction of causality assumed by traditional theory of development. The rise on women's representation in national parliament can be attributed to the increase of women's economic power and women's political struggles. However, promotion of globalization produces new opportunities for feminist politics, as well as difficulties, which include: the emergent position of productive engagement in which an efficient economy and democratic society are seen as interdependent; and increase in parliamentary representation correlates with increased paid employment for women. In conclusion, the author underscores that globalization is a gendered process which is restructuring social relations on a large scale and the challenges it bring provide opportunities for women in development.     

The Political Implications Of Digital Innovations: Trade-offs of democracy and liberty in the developed world

This paper addresses three issues: the potential trade-offs of democracy and liberty that the Internet may produce, the connection between real life and cyberspace, and the consequences for the conceptual apparatus of political science. It is argued that the Internet and real worlds are entwined, and thus classic political trade-offs remain pertinent. Important normative issues are addressed. It is established that the Internet is a nearly-neutral medium, so it is important how its development and effects are controlled. It is argued that a privately-controlled Internet would have negative implications for citizenship, political democracy and liberty.However, it is shown that existing Internet politics is significantly democratic, and if the 'net was used within a system similar to existing arrangements, i.e. with checks and balances, then one could optimistically foresee enhanced democracy. In this relatively unexplored but rapidly changing area of political life, this paper serves as a simple warning - public good, private bad - and justifies this in terms of the potential trade-offs of political citizenship versus market consumerism.     

Transnational connections and anti‐colonial radicalism in the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, 1946

In this article, I explore the spatial politics of the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946 and call for a more maritime sense of ‘the political’. The RIN only existed from 1934 to 1950; it became the Indian Navy after independence. Its mutiny in 1946, which was caused by a number of grievances from anticolonial nationalism to more mundane challenges about the standard of food, continues to be the dominant event in this history. Leela Gandhi (2014) used the RIN mutiny to challenge the binary distinction between elite and subaltern in much Indian historiography by depicting it as an ‘anti‐colonial counterpublic’, or space in which discourses other than the dominant nationalist framings of independence were mobilized. She also regards the mutiny as a potential example of inconsequential ethics in which, instead of worrying about its causes, the mutiny can be read as an experimental space in which democratic politics occurred, rather than one in which people were striving for a ‘successful’ outcome. I argue that, while there is much to be admired in Gandhi's reading of these events, she discounts the maritime nature of the RIN mutiny. In other words, she fails to acknowledge that travelling to different international locations allowed the sailors to learn about democracy and other ideas, which in turn influenced their beliefs about what the future of India, and the RIN, should look like. As a result, I argue for the need to explore in greater depth the important connections that exist between anti‐colonialism, democratic politics and the naval/maritime experience.     

Narrating democracy in Myanmar: The struggle between activists,democratic leaders and aid workers,Tamas Wells, 2021, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press

In Narrating Democracy in Myanmar: The Struggle Between Activists, Democratic Leaders and Aid Workers, Tamas Wells explores how central political concepts like democracy and democratization can bear radically different meaning to different political actors. With the example of Myanmar...s reform period, prior to the 2021 military coup, Wells shows that diverging narratives of what democracy means have impact on how different national and international political actors understand each other, and in turn may threaten democratic reforms.