Tag: democracy
You Like this and I Like that: is Facebook just an echo chamber, or is something more complicated going on?
Does Facebook create ‘echo chambers’ for its users, or is something more complicated going on? Nick Anspach (York College of Pennsylvania) created mock News Feeds and found that seeing friends endorse and comment on political items made participants 25% more likely to select political news from sources with which they agreed – and 40% more likely […]
Why defend democracy? Because the job of pursuing justice belongs to everybody
When we think about how to vote, writes Jeffrey Howard (University College London), we have a duty to try to achieve justice for everybody – not just ourselves. Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for US president. Photo: Public domain Similar PostsHow Covid-19 is altering our conception of citizenshipBook Review | Capitalism, Alone: The […]
Trump, Brexit and baby Searyl: what is the populist signal really telling us?
Are people rejecting democracy, as some scholars suggest? Matt Flinders asks whether a focus upon all things ‘post’ – post-Trump, post-Brexit, post-truth, post-democratic – has prevented scholars and social commentators from looking beyond or beneath the populist signal. Trump’s success, and that of other populists, is little more than the socio-political manifestation of a deeper set of structural […]
To fend off populism, we must stop believing in the will of the People
Populists rely on an idea of the people as a single, united force. Unfortunately, argues Luke Temple, traditional conceptions of democracy itself depend on a very similar notion. Unity and concordance is prized. This makes it difficult to challenge the underlying basis of populists’ arguments. But there is another way of understanding democracy – as […]
Throughout history, only violent and catastrophic events have significantly cut inequality
Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes, argues Walter Scheidel in this extract from his new book, The Great Leveller: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the 21st Century. Over thousands […]
Watch | Religious intolerance and its impact on democracy – Asma Jilani Jihangir & Amartya Sen
‘It is a question of tolerating intolerance’: Asma Jilani Jahangir and Professor Amartya Sen discuss the impact of religious intolerance on democracy in a lecture at the LSE. Jahangir is a Pakistani human rights lawyer and social activist who co-founded and chaired the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Sen is Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and […]
Contrary to recent reports, coups are not a catalyst for democracy
Coups used to be associated with the rise of dictatorial regimes – but since the Cold War, many have been followed by elections. Yet the regimes that emerge are often undemocratic. Oisín Tansey says these elections are frequently window-dressing and are held in order to secure favourable trade deals and placate international organisations. More often than not, coups […]
What to read in the age of Trump
We need to think about democracy – now more than ever. As Donald Trump becomes the 45th President of the United States, Democratic Audit asked Brian Klaas, Russell Dalton, Cas Mudde and Meg Russell what texts they are turning to in order to understand and learn from the Trump phenomenon. This post is a work in progress […]
So-called ‘populist’ parties have many different grievances. Lumping them together won’t help defeat them
Populism is the buzzword of the moment. But, Takis Pappas explains, there are three kinds of parties aggregated under the populist label: anti-democrats, nativists and ‘pure’ populists. Lumping them together is both misleading and politically perilous because they do not spring from the same source or the same set of grievances. Instead of lamenting a generic, ill-defined populism, we need […]
Book review | What is Populism? by Jan-Werner Müller
In What is Populism?, Jan-Werner Müller provides a timely perspective on the pressing question of what populism is and how to respond to it. Defining populism as anti-pluralist, elite-critical politics with a moral claim to representation, he cautions that populists are both willing and able to govern and may therefore deform democracy by turning states towards […]
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