Democratic Resilience

2021 ◽  

Politics in the United States has become increasingly polarized in recent decades. Both political elites and everyday citizens are divided into rival and mutually antagonistic partisan camps, with each camp questioning the political legitimacy and democratic commitments of the other side. Does this polarization pose threats to democracy itself? What can make some democratic institutions resilient in the face of such challenges? Democratic Resilience brings together a distinguished group of specialists to examine how polarization affects the performance of institutional checks and balances as well as the political behavior of voters, civil society actors, and political elites. The volume bridges the conventional divide between institutional and behavioral approaches to the study of American politics and incorporates historical and comparative insights to explain the nature of contemporary challenges to democracy. It also breaks new ground to identify the institutional and societal sources of democratic resilience.

Author(s):  
Leilah Danielson

Peace activism in the United States between 1945 and the 2010s focused mostly on opposition to U.S. foreign policy, efforts to strengthen and foster international cooperation, and support for nuclear nonproliferation and arms control. The onset of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union marginalized a reviving postwar American peace movement emerging from concerns about atomic and nuclear power and worldwide nationalist politics that everywhere seemed to foster conflict, not peace. Still, peace activism continued to evolve in dynamic ways and to influence domestic politics and international relations. Most significantly, peace activists pioneered the use of Gandhian nonviolence in the United States and provided critical assistance to the African American civil rights movement, led the postwar antinuclear campaign, played a major role in the movement against the war in Vietnam, helped to move the liberal establishment (briefly) toward a more dovish foreign policy in the early 1970s, and helped to shape the political culture of American radicalism. Despite these achievements, the peace movement never regained the political legitimacy and prestige it held in the years before World War II, and it struggled with internal divisions about ideology, priorities, and tactics. Peace activist histories in the 20th century tended to emphasize organizational or biographical approaches that sometimes carried hagiographic overtones. More recently, historians have applied the methods of cultural history, examining the role of religion, gender, and race in structuring peace activism. The transnational and global turn in the historical discipline has also begun to make inroads in peace scholarship. These are promising new directions because they situate peace activism within larger historical and cultural developments and relate peace history to broader historiographical debates and trends.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Kostanca Dhima

Abstract Do elites exhibit gender bias when responding to political aspirants? Drawing on theories of gender bias, group attachment, and partisan identity, I conduct the first audit experiment outside the United States to examine the presence of gender bias in the earliest phases of the political recruitment process. Based on responses from 1,774 Canadian legislators, I find evidence of an overall gender bias in favor of female political aspirants. Specifically, legislators are more responsive to female political aspirants and more likely to provide them with helpful advice when they ask how to get involved in politics. This pro-women bias, which exists at all levels of government, is stronger among female legislators and those associated with left-leaning parties. These results suggest that political elites in Canada are open to increasing female political representation and thus should serve as welcome encouragement for women to pursue their political ambitions.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karam Dana ◽  
Bryan Wilcox-Archuleta ◽  
Matt Barreto

AbstractDespite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, popular perceptions in the United States, especially among political elites, continue to believe that religious Muslims oppose American democratic traditions and values. While many studies find positive relationships between mosque attendance and civic participation among U.S. Muslims, an empirical and theoretical puzzle continues to exist. What is missing is research that examines the relationships between the multi-dimensional concept of religiosity and how this is associated with public opinion and attitudes towards the American political system among Muslim Americans. Using a unique national survey of Muslim Americans, we find a positive relationship between religious beliefs, behavior, and belonging and perceptions of compatibility with American democratic traditions. Quite simply, the most religious are the most likely to believe in political integration in the United States.


2007 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 20-23
Author(s):  
Rachel Adler

Conducting research among immigrants in the United States can pose ethical problems not encountered by anthropologists working abroad. Research occurs, of course, in the context of a political milieu. When anthropologists are working outside of their own societies, it is easier to dissociate themselves from the political sphere. This is because foreign anthropologists are not expected to embrace the political rhetoric of societies of which they are only observers. Ethnographers inside the U.S., on the other hand, often become politicized, regardless of their academic intentions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 122
Author(s):  
Ahmad Sahide

Donald Trump is the 45th President of the United States who was sworn in on January 20, 2017. Donald Trump's victory shook the global political order because a number of his statements and political policies were very controversial. A number of controversial Trump policies include the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the closeness of relations with Vladimir Putin, to protectionist policies that get resistance from within and outside the country. The author uses the legitimacy theory in this study to see the political impact of the policies taken by Trump. The results of this study see that Donald Trump's policy controversy has an impact on the crisis of political legitimacy which results in the threat of US political supremacy in the global political arena.


Author(s):  
William Genieys

This chapter examinesThe Power Elite, a radical work by C. Wright Mills that challenges the foundations of US liberal democracy and analyses the conditions under which democratic pluralism in the country can be reversed. Focusing on the theory of divided and united elites in relation to the system of checks and balances, Mills argues that the emergence of a power elite in the United States after 1945 necessitates a reevaluation of the foundations of democratic pluralism due to the significant changes in the competition for power and alternation in office at different levels of government. He also contends that members of only three elite groups had access to positions of national power: the “corporate rich,” the “warlords,” and the members of the “political directorate.” This chapter considers the rise and the fall of the elite model by assessing the four strands of Mills’s thought, one of which concerns the formation of state elites as the “true” power elite.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonah Koetke ◽  
Beverly Conrique ◽  
Karina Schumann

Liberals and conservatives in the United States dislike and dehumanize those on the other side. This divide leads to political stalemates, destroyed relationships, and even violence. We examined the benefits of humanizing members of the political outgroup by providing people with humanizing information—cues that signal a person’s cognitive and emotional complexity. We examined the effectiveness of humanizing information in three preregistered experiments (N = 1389). Study 1 tested whether learning humanizing information about an outgroup member would reduce bias towards them, relative to a control containing only political information. Study 2 sought to replicate this effect by comparing the humanizing information to a control that contained non-humanizing individuating information. Study 3 tested this effect in the timely context of social media feeds, while also testing whether the benefits of learning humanizing information extended to additional members of the outgroup. Each methodology revealed that, compared to those who read non-humanizing controls, participants who learned humanizing information about a political outgroup member were less hostile and more empathic toward that outgroup member. All three studies also provided evidence that judging the outgroup member as more human contributed to this reduction in bias. Further, Study 3 revealed that the benefits of humanizing information extended to members of the outgroup that were connected to the humanized member. The current studies thus identify a promising avenue for reducing interparty hostility.


2020 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
See Seng Tan

Abstract This article assesses how south-east Asian countries and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have responded to the ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ (FOIP) strategies promoted by the United States and the other countries in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the ‘Quad’: US, Japan, Australia and India). Their nuanced ripostes imply a persistent commitment to hedging and shifting limited alignments in the face of growing great rivalry and the lack of a clear FOIP vision among Quad members. In the face of external pressure to take sides, the ASEAN states are likely to keep hedging through working selectively with China and the United States. Given the United States' apparent preference to balance China and Trump's disregard for multilateralism, ASEAN's ability to maintain its centrality in the evolving regional architecture is in doubt—despite the Quad countries' (belated) accommodation of ASEAN in their FOIP strategies. However, the success of the US strategy depends on Washington's ability to build and sustain the requisite coalition to balance Beijing. ASEAN has undertaken efforts to enhance bilateral security collaboration with China and the United States respectively. In doing so, ASEAN is arguably seeking to informally redefine its centrality in an era of Great Power discord and its ramifications for multilateralism.


Author(s):  
William Brown

Let us suppose France and the United States to enter into a convention with us to issue pieces of gold of the same weight and fineness as our sovereign—that is, containing 113 grains of fine gold; the three countries would then have a common standard of gold money. Let us examine whether, in the face of the operations of commerce, the international quality of value of these coins could at all times be maintained. The temporary balance of trade is always fluctuating in favour of one or the other country; a permanent balance against any country is impossible.


2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 97-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan Matz

This article provides an in-depth examination of the U.S. government's role in the case of Raoul Wallenberg, the courageous Swedish envoy who died mysteriously in the Soviet Union after being arrested by Soviet occupation forces at the end of World War II for unknown reasons. The article recounts how U.S. officials, particularly the diplomat Herschel V. Johnson, tried to alleviate the plight of Hungarian Jews after German forces occupied Hungary in 1944. A key part of this policy was their effort to work with Sweden in enlisting Wallenberg's help. The U.S.-Swedish relationship was never particularly close, and the mistrust that officials in each country felt toward the other side impeded any coordinated action. The article discusses the bureaucratic impediments on the U.S. side and highlights some of the obstacles that Johnson strove to overcome. The article builds on the report produced by the Eliasson Commission documenting the Swedish government's handling of the Wallenberg case. Although the Swedish authorities bore by far the greatest amount of blame for doing nothing in the face of Soviet stonewalling, Matz argues that U.S. officials also made significant misjudgments that may have exacerbated the situation.


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