Socialization and generational political trajectories: an age,period and cohort analysis of political participation in Britain

The role of political socialization in explaining disengagement from specific modes of activism beyond voting remains largely unexplored, limited to date by available data and methods. While most previous studies have tended to propose explanations for disengagement linked to specific repertoires of political action, we propose a unified theory based on the different socialization experiences of subsequent generations. We test this theory using a new dataset of collated waves of the British Social Attitudes Survey and by applying age–period–cohort models for repeated cross-sectional data and generalized additive models to identify generational effects. We show that generational effects underlie the participatory decline across repertoires. Consistent with our expectations, the results reveal that the generation of “Thatcher’s Children” are much less likely to engage in a range of repertoires of political action than “Wilson/Callaghan’s Children”, who came of age in the more politicized 1960s and 1970s. Significantly, and in line with our theoretical expectations, the “Blair’s Babies” generation is the least politically engaged of all. We reflect on these findings and highlight the concerning implications of falling levels of activism for advanced democracies.     

Power,agency and structure: An examination of Steven Lukes

The dynamic between violence and politics in the American South during the Civil Rights Movement is analyzed, focusing on the relationship between racist terror and the state. The study explores how blacks in the rural South tried to defend themselves before civil rights, when white supremacists dominated local government and federal authorities ignored lynch murders. The article traces the development of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s nonviolent resistance strategy, and the long struggle to force the state to combat racist violence, one of the Civil Rights Movement's most significant achievements.     

Gender, Civil War and National Identity: Women Partisans during the Greek Civil War 1946–1949

This paper focuses on the recovery of the experience of partisan women who fought in the lines of the communist-led Greek Democratic Army (GDA) during the Greek Civil War (1946–1949). It is an extract from a research project which examines the extent to which the symbolism of Greek women in arms has informed the various waves of feminist discourse which have emerged since the founding of the modern Greek nation state. More specifically this work employs the image of the Greek woman warrior as an analytical category to investigate the relationship between militarism, nationalism and Greek feminist politics in relation to key nation-building conflicts of the modern Greek period. As such it belongs to the realm of scholarship informed by an understanding of 'gender' and 'nation' as constructed and contested relational systems of cultural and social meanings. Together the two systems not only shape the political culture in historically specific ways but also legitimate and limit the access of (groups of) people — women as well as men — to national movements as well as to the resources of the nation-state. This paper concentrates specifically on the heavily mythologised women of the GDA. It pays special attention to the historical association of their rebellion with national citizenship rights in post-war Greece.