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Political Agency (political + agency)
Selected AbstractsElizabeth Eckford's Appearance at Little Rock: The Possibility of Children's Political AgencyPOLITICS, Issue 1 2008Sana M. Nakata In 1957, Hannah Arendt argued against the legally enforced desegregation of public schools in the American South. She argued that African Americans had mistaken schools and education for a site of political debate, when they properly belonged to a social realm instead. This article disagrees and reconsiders Arendt's separation between the social and political realms. Arendt also took exception to the role Elizabeth Eckford, a 15-year-old, played in this debate. It is argued here that Elizabeth Eckford's actions were deeply political and give rise to a need to consider the possibility of children's political agency. [source] Social Change, Values and Political Agency: The Case of the Third WayPOLITICS, Issue 1 2004Will Leggett The third way is based on both sociological claims about a changed world, and normative propositions about appropriate conduct within that world. Four types of claim concerning the relationship between social change and political values are identified within third way advocacy. In each case, the degree of political agency implied is assessed. This ranges from a position which minimises the room for political interventions in the face of social change, to one which gives primacy to the role of political values. A successful third way project, or alternative, needs not only to be grounded in contemporary social change, but also to show how to steer it. [source] Political Agency in Liberal Democracy,THE JOURNAL OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, Issue 2 2006Jiwei Ci First page of article [source] Transnational political action and ,global civil society' in practice: the case of OxfamGLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 3 2009CRAIG BERRY Abstract The term ,global civil society' has taken on increasing significance within scholarly debate over the past decade. In this article we seek to understand transnational political agency via the study of a particular transnational actor, Oxfam. We argue that various schools of thought surrounding the global civil society concept, in particular the prevailing liberal-cosmopolitan approach, are unable to conceptualize transnational political action in practice , due largely, in the case of liberal-cosmopolitanism, to a shared normative agenda. We also assess what contribution literature on development and civil society has made to the analysis of groups such as Oxfam. In investigating Oxfam's own perceptions of its context and the meanings of its agency, we discover an anti-political perspective derived from an encounter between Oxfam's longstanding commitment to liberal internationalism and globalization discourse. Existing scholarship has insufficiently identified the local or parochial nature of the identities of global civil society actors. [source] ,Beyond Left and Right': The New Partisan Politics of WelfareGOVERNANCE, Issue 2 2000Fiona Ross The ,new politics of the welfare state,' the term coined by Pierson (1996) to differentiate between the popular politics of welfare expansion and the unpopular politics of retrenchment, emphasizes a number of factors that distinguish countries' capacities to pursue contentious measures and avoid electoral blame. Policy structures, vested interests, and institutions play a prominent role in accounting for cross-national differences in leaders' abilities to diffuse responsibility for divisive initiatives. One important omission from the ,new politics' literature, however, is a discussion of partisan politics. ,Old' conceptualizations of the political right and left are implicitly taken as constants despite radical changes in the governing agenda of many leftist parties over the last decade. Responding to this oversight, Castles (1998) has recently probed the role of parties with respect to aggregate government expenditures, only to concludethat parties do not matter under ,conditions of constraint.' This article contends that parties are relevant to the ,new politics' and that, under specified institutional conditions, their impact is counterintuitive. In some notable cases the left has had more effect inbruising the welfare state than the right. One explanation for these cross-cutting tendencies is that parties not only provide a principal source of political agency, they also serve as strategies, thereby conditioning opportunities for political leadership. By extension, they need to be situatedwithin the ,new politics' constellation of blame-avoidance instruments. [source] Food consumption and political agency: on concerns and practices among Danish consumersINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CONSUMER STUDIES, Issue 6 2008Bente Halkier Abstract Increasingly ordinary individual consumers are expected to perform some kind of societal or political agency. In the debates about political consumption it is a recurrent topic to what degree consumption practices can be seen as political practices and how many consumers perform such practices. The aim of this article is to empirically qualify the demarcation of the political in individual consumer activities by integrating the concept of political agency in the definition of political consumption. On the basis of empirical results from a representative survey among food consumers in Denmark, the article suggests that by supplementing the criteria of consumers performing specific consumption activities with a criteria of consumers expressing political agency, a more precise empirical delimitation of political consumption can be achieved. Three groups of food consumers are identified: those who perform political consumption practices; those who perform politicized consumption practices; and those who vocalize the discourse of political consumerism. [source] Constitutionalizing Inequality and the Clash of GlobalizationsINTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 2 2002Stephen Gill Intensified inequalities, social dislocations and human insecurity have coincided with a redefinition of the political in the emerging world order. Part of this redefinition involves the emergence of new constitutionalism. New constitutionalism limits democratic control over central elements of economic policy and regulation by locking in future governments to liberal frameworks of accumulation premised on freedom of enterprise. New political "limits of the possible" are also redefined by a "clash of globalizations" as new constitutionalism and more generally "globalization from above" is contested from below by nationalists, populists and fundamentalists as well as diverse progressive movements in innovative forms of global political agency. [source] Europe in the Political ImaginationJCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 4 2010JONATHAN WHITE Perceptions of the EU tend to be studied by examining responses to targeted opinion polls. This paper looks instead at how citizens draw Europe into a wider discussion of politics and political problems. Based on a series of group discussions with taxi-drivers in Britain, Germany and the Czech Republic, it examines the motifs speakers use to explain the origins of problems, the assumptions they make about their susceptibility to address, and how, when these patterned ways of speaking are applied to the EU, they serve to undermine its credibility as a positive source of political agency. [source] Mobile discourse: political bumper stickers as a communication event in IsraelJOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, Issue 2 2000L-R Bloch The use of political bumper stickers in Israel began as a spontaneous protest medium, evolving into a routinized form of public discourse, taking place throughout the year, independently of national elections. The rules of interaction of this nontraditional means of political communication are identified and the complex relationships between the messages within their social situation are investigated using an ethnographic model. This analysis reveals that the medium does indeed constitute a structured means of expression with identifiable forms, rules, and usages, affording the person in the street a way of participating in the national discourse, bypassing traditional avenues of influence. The detailed examination of a single political bumper sticker reveals a structure parallel to the overall code, further demonstrating the intricacy of the messages. The analysis shows how this political discourse reflects social norms peculiar to Israel and how its use has become an affirmation of cultural identity. Because the fundamental properties of political bumper stickers have now been exposed, it is possible to examine how the actual use of this medium changes the structure of political agency in society through the presumption that ordinary individuals have the right of access to the public debate of national political issues, a right heretofore exclusively the prerogative of institutional power holders. [source] Urban Regime Theory: A Normative-Empirical CritiqueJOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Issue 1 2002Jonathan S. Davies Over the past 10 years, urban regime theory has become the dominant paradigm for studying urban politics in liberal democracies. Yet there is disagreement about how far it can help us to understand urban political processes. This article argues that regime theory is best understood as a theory of structuring with limits in its analysis of the market economy. These limits undermine its ability to explain the importance of political agency,the scope of individual or collective choice in political decisions and the impact of those choices in the evolution of US cities. It is further argued that there are important normative dimensions to urban regime theory, most fully articulated in Elkin's commercial republic, which academic commentaries have not acknowledged. However, the empirical analysis developed in regime theory contradicts its normative objectives. The absence of a conceptualization of market dynamics, in the light of pessimism about the prospects for equitable regime governance, not only limits it as a theory of structuring but it also renders it unable to explain how the commercial republic can be realized. Regime theory is, therefore, unconvincing for two reasons. It cannot explain how much local politics matter, and it fails to demonstrate that its normative goal,more equitable regime governance,can be achieved, given the realities of the US market economy. Regime theory needs a more developed understanding of structuring. It may be fruitful, therefore, for regime theorists to re-engage critically with variants of Marxism, which unlike Structuralism, recognize the possibility of agency. [source] The Trollopian Geopolitical AestheticLITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 9 2010Lauren M. E. Goodlad Trollope's reputation as a formally dull post-1848 realist persists even though the period of his Palliser series (1864,1879) was characterized by intense political and imperial dynamism. While most of Trollope's novels during this period exemplify a historically engaged realism, The Eustace Diamonds is distinct for its rare meditation on empire in South Asia,a topic that Trollope seems purposely to have avoided. Trollope's fourth Palliser novel captures the vexed ethics of a so-called liberal imperialism through two classic characters,Lucy Morris and Lord Fawn,and their interactions with the Sawab of Mygawb, a "non-character"who marks the novel's geopolitical unconscious. But the novel's most formally distinct features revolve around representation of Lizzie Eustace, who figures Trollope's uneasiness over the New Imperial era's neo-feudal aesthetics. Trollope associated the New Imperialism with Benjamin Disraeli whose Jewish ethnicity he tied to a "conjuring" political agency that could master the theaters of mass democracy and imperial expansion. In The Eustace Diamonds, Lizzie becomes the embodiment of an actively performed New Imperial aesthetic. As a Disraeli-like schemer, she introduces a stylistic referentiality that is alien to Trollope's ,pellucid' linguistic ideal. Where Trollope's sociological and global capitalist novels offer nuanced aesthetic capture, Lizzie marks the representational limits of such realism. Like the Sawab, she is the sign of a Trollopian power to stretch form beyond the crude anti-realism of the racialized scapegoat. [source] Female and National Self-Determination: A Gender Re-reading of ,The Apogee of Nationalism'NATIONS AND NATIONALISM, Issue 4 2000Glenda Sluga This article offers a gender re-reading of the international history of the post-First World War peace process, a period when nationalism is said to have reached its ,apogee', when national self-determination and mutual cooperation between nations in the form of a League of Nations defined liberal aspirations for a democratic new world order. It was also a period when international women's organisations emphasised female self-determination as both a national and international issue. Juxtaposed, these two aspects of the history of the peace of 1919 shed light on the importance of sex difference to the idea of national self-determination and to the overlapping constitution of the national and the international as spheres of political agency and influence in the early twentieth century. [source] Problems in the Theorisation of Global Civil SocietyPOLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 5 2002Gideon Baker Existing theories of global civil society are problematical for two reasons. First, they assume that transnational organisations can assist world-wide democratisation without questioning either the representativeness of such organisations, or their accountability, or the potentially negative ramifications of their actions for international political equality. Second, despite placing new emphasis on political agency outside of the state, many accounts of global civil society ultimately reproduce statist discourse by reducing action in global civil society to a struggle for rights. This misrepresents global civil society since arguments for rights are, inter alia, arguments for the state, whereas the agency of global civil society immanently questions the legitimacy of the state. [source] Elizabeth Eckford's Appearance at Little Rock: The Possibility of Children's Political AgencyPOLITICS, Issue 1 2008Sana M. Nakata In 1957, Hannah Arendt argued against the legally enforced desegregation of public schools in the American South. She argued that African Americans had mistaken schools and education for a site of political debate, when they properly belonged to a social realm instead. This article disagrees and reconsiders Arendt's separation between the social and political realms. Arendt also took exception to the role Elizabeth Eckford, a 15-year-old, played in this debate. It is argued here that Elizabeth Eckford's actions were deeply political and give rise to a need to consider the possibility of children's political agency. [source] Varieties of second modernity: the cosmopolitan turn in social and political theory and researchTHE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 3 2010Ulrich Beck Abstract The theme of this special issue is the necessity of a cosmopolitan turn in social and political theory. The question at the heart of this introductory chapter takes the challenge of ,methodological cosmopolitanism', already addressed in a Special Issue on Cosmopolitan Sociology in this journal (Beck and Sznaider 2006), an important step further: How can social and political theory be opened up, theoretically as well as methodologically and normatively, to a historically new, entangled Modernity which threatens its own foundations? How can it account for the fundamental fragility, the mutability of societal dynamics (of unintended side-effects, domination and power), shaped by the globalization of capital and risks at the beginning of the twenty-first century? What theoretical and methodological problems arise and how can they be addressed in empirical research? In the following, we will develop this ,cosmopolitan turn' in four steps: firstly, we present the major conceptual tools for a theory of cosmopolitan modernities; secondly, we de-construct Western modernity by using examples taken from research on individualization and risk; thirdly, we address the key problem of methodological cosmopolitanism, namely the problem of defining the appropriate unit of analysis; and finally, we discuss normative questions, perspectives, and dilemmas of a theory of cosmopolitan modernities, in particular problems of political agency and prospects of political realization. [source] Explaining the Rise of Class Politics in VenezuelaBULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 2 2009OLIVER HEATH The sudden rise to power of leftist former coup leader Hugo Chávez and the subsequent politicisation of social class raises a number of interesting questions about the sources of class politics and political change in Venezuela. Using nationally representative survey data over time, this article considers different explanations for the rise of class politics. It argues that explanations for the politicisation of class can best be understood in terms of ,top-down' approaches that emphasise the role of political agency in reshaping and re-crafting political identities, rather than more ,bottom-up' factors that emphasise the demands that originate within the electorate. The economic crises during the 1990s undermined support for the existing parties, but it did not create a politically salient class-based response. Rather, it created the electoral space that facilitated new actors to enter the political stage and articulate new issue dimensions. [source] The Messiness of Everyday Life: Exploring Key Themes in Latin American Citizenship Studies IntroductionBULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH, Issue 2 2004Lucy Taylor This section seeks to provide a brief theoretical framework for the study of citizenship in Latin America by focusing on two characteristics which are of relevance to the essays collected here: belonging and political agency. It then goes on to discuss some key themes which emerge from a reading of the collected articles: methodology; civilisation and deviation; citizenship as the organisation of subordinate inclusion; popular ideas of citizenship as ,fairness'; role of public performance in defining political relationships. [source] | ||||||||||||||||||||||