Political participation,political action and political identities: young d/deaf people's perspectives

This paper critically examines the dominant, and predominantly negative, discourses around young people's political participation, or supposed lack of it. Drawing upon contemporary debates about young people within geography, political science and sociology, it considers the ways in which a redefinition of what constitutes ‘the political’ is required if young people's engagement in political participation is to be understood fully. The paper reports on research conducted with young D/deaf people that did not intentionally set out to research their political participation, action or identi ties, but which uncovered a range of political aspects in their lives and experiences. It explores the ways in which volunteering can be defined as political action and, after de Certeau and Scott, how the use of British Sign Language can be a resistive act, a tactic or weapon of the weak. Threaded throughout the paper is a consideration of the ways in which there are complex geographies of activism at play.     

Performative Bodies,Tactical Agents and Political Selves: Rethinking the Political Geographies of Childhood

Theoretical elaboration and conceptualisation of children's political geographies is presently in a state of modification. Since the concepts of childhood and politics are not commonly brought together, there is plenty of work to be done. This article concentrates on revealing some political aspects of childhood and bringing up other focal questions concerning children's political geographies. Special attention is paid to children's agency and tactics to reach a better understanding of their ways of participating in politics. The theoretical foundations for this paper are in critical social theory. Following the thoughts of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau and Nigel Thrift on the potentials of non-representational theory, it explores performativity and body politics in general.     

The role of civil society in European integration

This paper explores the concept of ‘civic society’ in Western political thought, charting the changing understanding of this concept through history and its manifestation in contemporary political and social life. The paper draws out the inferences for our understanding of the role of government, particularly with the European Union and its relationship with citizens and other representative community‐based and non‐governmental organisations. The paper argues that the fundamental values that are central to civic society underpin the proposed EU Charter on Fundamental Rights and maintains that effective European integration requires responsible participation by Europe's citizens. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

The role of political parties: An analysis based on transaction costs

This paper explores the proposition that political parties reduce the ‘transaction costs’ of electoral participation. Political parties provide a low cost signal of a candidate's policies and personal characteristics and, in this way, reduce voters' information costs. With reference to ‘transaction cost economics’, political parties offer an ‘implicit contract’ between voters and politicians and thereby reduce the scope for opportunism by politicians. This impact on transaction costs is important in any evaluation of public policy towards political parties.     

Political participation,personality, and the conditional effect of campaign mobilization

Why are some people more responsive to campaign mobilization than others? I argue that the composition of a person's core personality makes some people more responsive to mobilization cues than others. However, the degree to which personality alters the effectiveness of mobilization also depends on the type of political participation for which people are being mobilized. I explore the determinants of political participation by looking at the interaction between the Big-5 traits of agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability and the intensity of campaign environments. This paper demonstrates that despite the possible ameliorative effect mobilization has on unequal patterns of political participation, an enduring source of participatory inequality may very well be rooted in a person's core psychological structure.     

Gender,political participation and electoral systems: A cross‐national analysis

This article investigates whether the smaller gender gaps in political engagement, found in more proportional electoral systems, translate into smaller gender differences in political participation. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, it presents the argument that more proportional systems may send signals that multiple interests are included in the policy‐making process, which may increase women's levels of political participation and thereby reduce gender gaps. Additionally, the article tests for the possibility that a greater number of political parties and the elected representatives they provide act as barriers to political participation that have a greater impact on women's levels of participation than men's. It is argued that women's lower levels of political resources and engagement might create more difficult barriers for them than for men. Results lend little support for the first hypothesis, but a greater confirmation for the second.     

Building community? The characteristics of America's most civic cities

A tremendous amount is known about individual civic and political participation. Those who participate are more educated, more affluent and easier to mobilize. Yet, the social value of participation lies not in its individual impact but in democratically meaningful units such as local governments. Little is known about why some communities display vibrant patterns of participation while others are characterized by disengagement. This paper furthers this understanding by examining what corporate, political and nonprofit leaders in 10 America's cities see as fostering their civic life. This study finds that institutional factors unite those cities with the highest levels of participation. These include a strong corporate presence, mechanisms for mobilization, a strong community identity, public spaces, good government and investment in youth. This serves as a basis for fostering pro‐civic policies. This is a practitioner‐oriented paper that while grounded in research is designed to foster policy solutions rather than prove casual mechanisms. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Active Child Citizen: Lessons from Canadian Policy and the Children's Movement

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has advanced a model of active citizenry for children, which is difficult to reconcile with the still dominant Western notions of childhood that fetishize innocence and attribute passivity and incompetence to children. This article explores the manner in which state policy, Canadian courts, and children's politics in Canada have responded to the imaginary of the active child citizen. The Canadian government has provided limited political space to young people and has narrowly construed children's participation rights as limited to family law and juvenile justice. The reluctance of adult decision-makers to open up policy-making to the contributions of children has been further hindered by the current anti-democratic cast of neo-liberal governance. This article examines how quasi-judicial tribunals and the Canadian courts have invoked the Convention in their dealings with child asylum seekers, only to construct childhood participation and childhood protection as mutually exclusive. The article concludes with a brief exploration of the alternative model of children's citizenship revealed by the children's movement organization, Free the Children. In contrast to the relative failure of adult decision-makers to implement the participation rights of children, the contemporary children's movement advances a view of children as empowered, knowledgeable, compassionate and global citizens, who are nonetheless, like other marginalized groups, in need of special, group-differentiated protections.     

Discourses of popular politics,war and authenticity in Turkish pop music

Turkey and the United States (US) have had a close mutually beneficial political and military relationship since the end of World War Two. However, this relationship came under pressure when the US government and Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) tried to cooperate closely in the 2003 military invasion of Iraq. AKP's leadership failed to persuade Turkey's parliament to accept the deployment of US troops and equipment in Turkey partially due to public opinion. Despite Turkish media and its government being intertwined to the extent where subversive discourses are all but silenced, some popular music videos were able to articulate discourses which questioned AKP's military policies. This paper analyses lyrics, visuals and sounds of one of these songs to look at the way war and political issues become articulated through a form of simplified popular politics, despite being presented as serious and authentic by a number of key signifiers across the different modes. A number of scholars have addressed the issue of subversion in music both as actual political challenge and as popular counter culture. This case study is used to assess subversion in music in these terms in order to consider its likely place in political debate in Turkey.     

Interdependence Effects in Mixed-Superposition Electoral Systems: An Empirical Test on Women's Participation in Sub-national Elections

Mixed-superposition electoral systems, while devoid of compensatory mechanisms interconnecting their proportional and non-proportional sections, may create effective linkages that exert some impact upon the behaviour of political parties. This article examines the resulting interdependence effects with respect to women's electoral participation and legislative representation. It is hypothesized that if political parties embrace the logic of ticket-balancing when forming their candidate lists in the proportional representation sections of elections, they become more willing to nominate female candidates in majoritarian districts, which creates an important interdependence effect that ultimately contributes to the increased levels of women's representation. This hypothesis is empirically tested on a sample of 139 sub-national elections held in Russia in 2003–2011, with some additional information derived from the results of 81 previously held elections. The statistical analysis confirms the presence of interdependence effects with respect to women's political participation. The principal contextual factor that intermediates the observed effects is political regime. It is shown that electoral authoritarianism mitigates the interdependence effects of mixed-superposition electoral systems.     

In Defence of British Politics Against the British Political Tradition

This article explores some of the current themes round the perceived crisis in British politics in supposed an age of ‘anti‐politics’. Drawing on Bernard Crick's In Defence of Politics, it offers a critique of what is referred to as a dominant British political tradition and in so doing seeks to challenge ‘demand‐side’ accounts that ostensibly defend the traditional arena politics of the Westminster system. Instead, it argues that developments around issues such as big data, social media and freedom of information have led to a more open society in recent years. It concludes by suggesting that if traditional political institutions wish to restore a greater degree of legitimacy, they need to ‘do’ or, more particularly, ‘supply’ politics differently, adapting to these changes by seeking out new modes of openness, engagement and accountability.     

Political Participation Online: The Replacement and the Mobilisation Hypotheses Revisited

This article discusses the state of political participation online more than ten years after the Internet's great popular breakthrough as an everyday medium. Denmark is used as a case study to critically re‐examine the frequently discussed replacement and mobilisation hypotheses on behalf of the Internet. The pure replacement hypothesis is rejected. Instead, it is found that the Internet still supplements rather than replaces other media, even among heavy Internet users. The Internet is one among several media used by ‘media omnivores’, and political participation online supplements rather than substitutes offline participation. More interesting, the mobilisation hypothesis is partly confirmed. Even though some online participation patterns resemble traditional ones, it seems as if the Internet finally is starting to mobilise younger generations. Further, traditional predictors behind political participation, efficacy and social capital seem to have less impact on online political participation. In the end, these findings are related to more overall discussions on the democratising potential of the Internet.     

The truth about youth? Media portrayals of young people and politics in Britain

Some forms of political participation in Britain appear to be in crisis. Official rates of turnout are alarmingly poor and the sub‐population least likely to participate in general—and vote in particular—is the youngest section of society. Moreover, the way that the media and and politicians have responded to the apparent crisis of youth participation has become a self‐fulfilling prophecy. A full review of young people's place in the political environment is needed. This requires the application of different criteria for evaluating youth interests, and the avoidance of some of the most routinely used phrases to describe young people's attitudes to politics. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications     

A Wider Range of Friends: Multi‐speed Organising during the 2015 Labour Leadership Contest

The British Labour party's recent adoption of a partially open primary for the selection of its leader conforms to a trend seen across many European political parties of increasing rights and privileges in internal party decision‐making and expanding opportunities for more loosely affiliated supporters to participate in party activity. This dual trend can be seen as a response to changes in the membership environment, greater individualisation of political participation and growth in social movement politics and online activism. Yet as much as parties are responding to a changed membership environment, they are also driving that change, increasingly blurring the distinction between members and supporters. This article examines the recent impact of this change within the British Labour party and argues that, in line with Susan Scarrow's theory of ‘multi‐speed’ membership, the Labour party's experiment in expanding affiliation options has led directly to a tension in locating the source of authority within the party, creating a challenge for its new leader in accommodating his new supporters within his party's representative traditions.     

Post-conflict reconstruction and citizenship agendas: lessons from Beirut

How does post-conflict reconstruction embody citizenship agendas? By emphasizing the intersections between urban planning, architecture and political community in Hizballah's reconstruction discourse following the 2006 war, this article explores the articulation of such agendas in the historical production of urban space. The first section explores the denial of urban space and membership in the political community to Lebanon's Shi'a in the reconstruction of Beirut following the 1975–1990 civil war. The second section introduces Harat Hreik and the struggle over its reconstruction as resistance, on the part of Hizballah and its cadres, to this exclusion. The party's approach, anchored in an innovative not-for-profit NGO, ‘The Solemn Promise Project’ (Mashru' Wa'ad al-Sadiq), asserted the claims of its constituency to a place in both the city and the nation over considerations of profit. This citizenship agenda, inclusionary in sectarian terms, however, entailed its own set decidedly class-based inclusions and exclusions.     

Negotiating obligations,creating rights: Conscientious objection and the redefinition of citizenship in Israel

This article examines the ways in which modes of inclusion in the community of citizens are constitutive of political identities and frame the kinds of contestations and claims of individuals and groups vis‐à‐vis the state's agents. It analyses the emergence of selective conscientious to warfare and military service in Israel during the Lebanon war (1982–85). The article is based on the interpretative analysis of interviews with 66 individuals who refused to serve in the war in Lebanon. It shows, through the interpretative analysis of interviews, how conscientious objectors mobilised the hegemonic discourse on citizenship obligations and the identities constructed by it, in order to negotiate and promote and alternative discourse on citizenship. It claims that conscientious objection in Israel embodies an alternative discourse on citizenship and on the subject of rights and obligations. This redefinition entails a reformulation of modes of participation in the political community and of the political culture that frames it.     

The partisan politics of gold: Switzerland and the sale of gold

This paper explores the relative strength of social, economic and political factors in determining public attitudes towards the sale of a portion of Switzerland's gold reserves and how the money realised from these sales should be used. Partisan political allegiance and generational economic interest are the major factors in determining attitudes towards gold sales in Switzerland in the early 2000s. Cantons and individuals that had supported the Swiss People's Party were more inclined to support its Gold Initiative than supporters of the Swiss Social Democratic Party and other parties of the left which actively campaigned against it. This pattern suggests that, contrary to the suggestions of previous studies, Swiss political parties can play a substantial role in framing political options in referendum campaigns.     

Quotas,women's leadership and grassroots women activists: Bringing women into the party?

Research has consistently shown that women are less likely than men to participate in political parties as members and activists; this participation gender gap has persisted despite narrowing gender gaps in education, employment and in other types of political participation.  Yet while the gaps are widespread, their size varies greatly by country as well as by party.  To what extent do party organizational factors help explain these disparities? More pointedly, are there any lessons to be learned from past experiences about party mechanisms which might help to reduce these gaps? To answer these questions, this study investigates grassroots partisan participation in 68 parties in 12 parliamentary democracies, considering whether factors that have been shown to boost the number of women candidates and legislators are also associated with changing the traditionally male dominance of grassroots party politics.  We find evidence of links between some party mechanisms and higher women's intra-party participation; however, because the same relationship holds for men's participation, they do not alter the participation gender gap. Only greater participation of women in parties’ parliamentary delegations is associated with smaller grassroots gender gaps. We conclude that parties which wish to close grassroots gender gaps should not rely solely on efforts aimed at remedying gender gaps at the elite level.     

A Case for reflexive politics: challenging Luhmann's account of the Political system

This article attempts an internal critique of N. Luhmann's account of the political system. Internal because it takes up the principal tense of system epistemology. Critical because it attempts to situate the potential for utopian politics within that framework which, according to Luhmann, precludes it. The article briefly explores this epistemology, its specific application to the political system and the negative conclusions that are drawn from this account for utopian politics. In order to confront these conclusions, the strategy of the argument is to extract from Luhmann's notion of political theory, as the meta-level of the political system, the possibility to problematize the terms in which the political system casts political questions. In political theory, this article argues, inheres the potential to turn politics reflexive. This in turn both suggusts opportunities for action carrying utopian vision but also leads to a better understanding of what shifts are involved in the social problematic of alternative politics that have shifted away from the framework in which Luhmann sees political possibility circumscribed.     

Self-Referencing and Political Candidate Brands: A Congruency Perspective

Although political and marketing analysts commonly describe political candidates as brands, the conceptualization of political candidates as brands within academic research and popular culture is uncommon. This paper presents empirical evidence in support of viewing candidates as such. Using data from a nationwide study that measures the self concept of Mexican voters and their perceived images of the presidential candidates in Mexico's 2006 election, the paper demonstrates that voters see themselves and each candidate as a distinct brand. Furthermore, this view of a voter's self-brand influences his or her perception of a political candidate's brand image. The academic and managerial implications of these findings are discussed.