The Virtuous,the Critical and the Trustworthy: Citizen Ideals and Forms of Democratic Participation

A vibrant democratic society requires continuous innovation to actualize and encourage democratic ideals through participation, but no universal answers exist as to which kinds of participation are best suited to achieve this. This article demonstrates that different types of participation correlate with different citizen ideals, implying that the remedies to democratic deficits depend on which ideals need to be strengthened. Citizen survey data is used to examine the relationships between two types of citizen participation – in voluntary associations and workplaces – and three empirical citizen ideals: the virtuous citizen, the critical citizen and the trustworthy citizen. The results suggest that voluntary associations make space for all three ideals, while workplace participation tends to be characterized specifically by the critical citizen's ideal of reason‐giving and critical reflection. The article ends by discussing the implications of these results: new democratic designs should be more effective if tailored to address context‐dependent weaknesses in democratic practices.     

民主行政视野下的公民参与浅析

民主行政作为后现代社会为适应迅速变化的环境而设计的公共行政模式,它以公民积极的参与行为为典型特征和重要的管理运行方式。但是从我国的具体行政环境来看,民主参与的实现还受到经济发展状况、公民参与热情、制度保障、既得利益集团等等因素的限制,认清障碍是发展的第一步,本文试从民主行政的本质入手分析这些显见的阻却因素,并为排除这些因素提供几点措施。     

Labor Unions and White Democratic Partisanship

The Democratic Party’s declining support among white voters is a defining feature of contemporary American politics. Extant research has emphasized factors such as elite polarization and demographic change but has overlooked another important trend, the decades-long decline of labor union membership. This oversight is surprising, given organized labor’s long ties to the Democratic Party. I argue that the concurrent decline of union membership and white support for the Democratic Party is not coincidental, but that labor union affiliation is an important determinant of whites’ partisan allegiances. I test this using several decades of cross-sectional and panel data. I show that union-affiliated whites are more likely to identify as Democrats, a substantively significant relationship that does not appear to be driven by self-selection. Overall, these findings underscore the political consequences of union decline and help us to better understand the drivers of declining white support for the Democratic Party.

     

The Citizen Soldier and Democratic Societies: A Comparative Analysis of America's Revolutionary and Civil Wars

This paper reviews and criticizes the argument that citizens should take active responsibility for and be willing to sacrifice their life to establish and protect a liberal democratic social order. The argument is faulted for assuming that the key for good democracy is to get people to accept their responsibilities, in particular, their responsibility to be citizen soldiers. It is at least as important to ask how the service of citizen soldiers is connected with the constitution of democratic society. The argument is also faulted for ignoring that democratic societies vary in form and virtue and that it is necessary to explain when citizen soldiers will promote the establishment of one kind of democracy or another. To correct these deficiencies, a theory is offered that ties the service of citizen soldiers during war to the quality of democratic society through the allocation and routinization of charisma. The theory is illustrated by a comparative historical analysis of American experience during its Revolutionary and Civil Wars.     

Laski on Rights and the Problem of Liberal Democratic Theory

From 1919 until the mid-1920s Laski developed a cogent egalitarian theory of democratic rights. In the 1930s he turned his attention to the conflict between such rights and the capitalist property rights of liberal theory. His defence of democratic rights is significant in the context of contemporary discussions of rights, autonomy and democracy.     

Immigration,Latinos, and White Partisan Politics: The New Democratic Defection

Immigration is profoundly changing the racial demographics of America. In this article, we seek to understand if and how immigration and increasing racial diversity are shaping the partisan politics of individual white Americans. We show that whites’ views on immigration and Latinos are strongly related to their core political identities and vote choices. Using a range of different surveys, we find that, all else equal, whites with more anti‐immigrant views or more negative views of Latinos are less apt to identify as Democrats and less likely to favor Democratic candidates. This rightward shift harkens back to an earlier period of white defection from the Democratic Party and highlights the enduring but shifting impact of race on American politics.     

The Citizen Deliberator

Books reviewed in this article:
Bruce Ackerman and James S. Fishkin, Deliberation Day
Ethan Leib, Deliberative Democracy in America: A Proposal for a Popular Branch of Government     

公民治理理论析论

20世纪90年代后期产生于美国的公民治理理论代表了一种新的公共行政价值观,它建立在对新公共管理理论某些缺陷的批判基础之上,在一定意义上可以看成是对新公共管理理论的一种超越。本文比较系统地辨析和概括了公民治理的基本观点,公民治理与公民参与之间的紧密关系,并对其实践价值作了简要评析。     

Class,Race Issues,and Declining White Support for the Democratic Party in the South

The Democratic Party in the South has experienced a major loss of white voters in recent decades. Two major hypotheses have been proposed to explain this change. The dominant explanation in recent years has been that race issues have driven whites from the Democratic Party in the South. In this view, defections from the Democratic Party have occurred because whites oppose the party's positions on race issues. In contrast, others have suggested that class divisions have emerged as important, with affluent whites increasingly supportive of the Republican Party because they find its positions more compatible with their interests. Using NES data, this article assesses the evidence for these hypotheses, examining the impact of income position and race issues on partisan behavior since 1952. While both factors affect partisan support, income has come to have a relatively greater effect on partisan support than race issues. The evidence clearly indicates that class divisions in the South have steadily increased and that affluent whites have steadily shifted to the Republican Party. The implications are significant for understanding the dramatic changes in the South in recent decades. Much has been made of the tensions over race issues, and the findings presented here lend further support to the importance of race issues in southern electoral politics. However, these findings also suggest that class divisions are a steadily increasing source of political cleavage in this region. The current state of electoral politics in the South cannot be properly understood unless both of these factors are taken into account.     

The Distribution of Political Participation in Norway: Alternative Perspectives on a Problem of Democratic Theory*

How citizen participation is distributed within the population is one of several fundamental questions of general significance to democratic theorists. This article briefly reviews some of the most salient normative arguments regarding the distribution of democratic citizen participation and then turns to the principal conceptual-methodological issues to be encountered when considering the basic empirical question. Against this background the Norwegian case is discussed in detail, first in light of prior synchronic investigations, then by means of a diachronic analysis of panel study data from the 1965, 1969 and 1973 national election surveys. These analyses document more broadly based citizen participation in Norway than might otherwise be anticipated and discredit the idea of a cumulative hierarchical overlap pattern of political involvement. The article concludes with a discussion of several considerations relating to these findings, all of which suggest the need for greater sensitivity and explicitness among those who would advance claims or comparisons regarding the distribution of citizen participation in modern democracies.     

The Democratic Deficit in the States

We study how well states translate public opinion into policy. Using national surveys and advances in subnational opinion estimation, we estimate state‐level support for 39 policies across eight issue areas, including abortion, law enforcement, health care, and education. We show that policy is highly responsive to policy‐specific opinion, even controlling for other influences. But we also uncover a striking “democratic deficit”: policy is congruent with majority will only half the time. The analysis considers the influence of institutions, salience, partisan control of government, and interest groups on the magnitude and ideological direction of this democratic deficit. We find the largest influences to be legislative professionalization, term limits, and issue salience. Partisanship and interest groups affect the ideological balance of incongruence more than the aggregate degree thereof. Finally, policy is overresponsive to ideology and party—leading policy to be polarized relative to state electorates.     

The Scandinavian Democratic Model

Given the continuing importance of democracy as an analytic concept. this article seeks to compare Scandinavian practice with accepted general definitions and theories. Definitions that recognize contemporary political democracy as consensual and procedural seem most appropriate to the Scandinavian cases. Although remaining dynamic. political democracy has not been a contested principle for more than 50 years.
Efforts since 1945 to extend democracy to social and economic spheres have been more controversial, however. Welfare state measures enjoy broad support, not least for functional reasons. For many, however, such policies seek a broader social democracy instead of merely a humane 'safety net'. Economic democracy remains the most contested dimension. Seeking to transcend corporatism and rational collective bargaining, economic democracy seeks simultaneously to promote greater economic equality and participation while maintaining an efficient productive system.
The dynamic and expanded democratic model has engendered much domestic debate about means and ends. This has been, on balance, a source of reinvigoration.     

The White House as a Black Box: Oral History and the Problem of Evidence in Presidential Studies

Scholars who study the American presidency usually have to rely on indirect evidence for understanding the internal operations of the 'black box' that is a contemporaneous White House. Most of the direct evidence about White House behavior becomes available only after a president has left office, when confidential communications are opened to the public by the presidential libraries. In recent years, however, such direct evidence has become increasingly inaccessible, because of changes in the record-keeping habits of senior executive branch officials and because of the politics of archival release. This article explores the nature and extent of these problems, and how elite oral history interviewing can compensate for them. It further examines the strengths and weaknesses of oral history as a means of learning about the usually hidden workings of the American presidency.     

Neo-liberalism and the Decline of Democratic Governance in Australia: A Problem of Institutional Design?

This paper is a preliminary attempt to evaluate changing patterns of democratic governance, at least in Westminster-style parliamentary settings, and possibly more generally. It has two specific purposes: first, to propose a paradigm for evaluating the empirical evolution of democratic governance; and second, to illustrate the explanatory potential of this paradigm through a mini-case study of changing patterns of governance in one particular polity. The conceptual framework is drawn from March and Olsen's eponymous study (1995) from which polar ('thick' and 'thin') forms of democratic governance are derived. Four conjectures about its evolution are then explored. First, in its mass party phase, the pattern of democratic governance approximated the 'thick' pole. Second, the subsequent evolution of democratic politics has been in the direction of the 'thin' (minimalist or populist) pole. Third, the cause of this shift was a failure to adapt political institutions to changing citizen identities, which was masked by the ascendancy amongst political elites of the neo-liberal account of governance. Fourth, the paper considers the means by which democratic governance might be renewed. The approach is applied to explain changes in Australian politics over recent decades.     

公民社会中的道德诚信

关于社会诚信和公民社会的研究,是近年学术界的热点,但公民社会的诚信问题却被关注的不多.究其原因还在于公民社会是个难以把握的复杂问题.