Download or read book The Voice of the People written by James S. Fishkin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosopher and political scientist James Fishkin evaluates modern democratic practices, explains how the voice of the people has struggled to make itself heard in the past and combines a review of ideas and experiments--including his own idea for a National Issues Convention that was adapted by PBS in January 1996--to legitimately rediscover the people's voice.
Download or read book Voice and Equality written by Sidney Verba and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1995-09-26 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book confirms the idea put forth by Tocqueville that American democracy is rooted in civic voluntarism—citizens’ involvement in family, work, school, and religion, as well as in their political participation as voters, campaigners, protesters, or community activists. The authors analyze civic activity with a massive survey of 15,000 people.
Download or read book The Mild Voice of Reason written by Joseph M. Bessette and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, many Americans and more than a few political scientists have come to believe that democratic deliberation in Congress—whereby judgments are made on the merits of policies reflecting the interests and desires of American citizens—is more myth than reality. Rather, pressure from special interest groups, legislative bargaining, and the desire of incumbents to be reelected are thought to originate in American legislative politics. While not denying such influences, Joseph M. Bessette argues that the institutional framework created by the founding fathers continues to foster a government that is both democratic and deliberative, at least to some important degree. Drawing on original research, case studies of policymaking in Congress, and portraits of American lawmakers, Bessette demonstrates not only the limitations of nondeliberative explanations for how laws are made but also the continued vitality of genuine reasoning on the merits of public policy. Bessette discusses the contributions of the executive branch to policy deliberation, and looks at the controversial issue of the proper relationship of public opinion to policymaking. Informed by Bessette's nine years of public service in city and federal government, The Mild Voice of Reason offers important insights into the real workings of American democracy, articulates a set of standards by which to assess the workings of our governing institutions, and clarifies the forces that promote or inhibit the collective reasoning about common goals so necessary to the success of American democracy. "No doubt the best-publicized recent book-length work on Congress is columnist George Will's diatribe in praise of term limits in which the core of his complaint is that Congress does not deliberate in its decision-making. Readers who are inclined to share that fantasy would do well to consult the work of Joseph M. Bessette. He turns up massive amounts of material attesting to the centrality of deliberation in congressional life."—Nelson W. Polsby, Presidential Studies Quarterly
Download or read book The Unheavenly Chorus written by Kay Lehman Schlozman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 727 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the current state of democracy in the United States, 'The Unheavenly Chorus' looks at the political participation of individual citizens - alongside the political advocacy of thousands of organized interests - in order to demonstrate that American democracy is marred by ingrained and persistent class-based inequality.
Download or read book Civil Society and Democratic Theory written by Gideon Baker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-08-27 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book introduces radically alternative models of civil society that have been developed outside the liberal democratic frame of reference, models which suggest that civil society does offer new and non-statist democratic possibilities. Drawing on a wide range of civil society theory-practice from Eastern Europe and Latin America (including the Zapatistas in Mexico), and from visions of global civil society too, this book is uniquely positioned to consider the questions posed by these alternative voices for democratic theory and practice. * Are there alternatives to the liberal democratic vision of civil society? * Is a democracy located in civil society rather than the state either possible or desirable? * How and why has the concept of civil society come to be used so widely today? * Can global civil society further the struggle for democracy initiated by national civil societies?
Download or read book Words That Built a Nation written by Marilyn Miller and published by Rodale. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When originally published in 1999, Words That Built a Nation was hailed for bringing together the United States’ most important historical essays, speeches, and documents into one accessible collection for kids. Now, this history lovers’ must-have is back, and it’s been revised, revamped, and expanded for the 21st century. From the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address to the 2015 Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, the updated collection preserves the documents of the first edition and introduces the landmark statements that are impacting our nation today. With all new illustrations, a refreshed design, and complementary background information behind each of the documents, Words That Built a Nation is the ultimate tour of United States history, created to engage, inspire, and equip kids with the knowledge they need to change and shape their world. “This book is attractive and the presentation engaging.”—School Library Journal
Download or read book Voices of Democracy written by Bernard Murchland and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author probes the minds of political thinkers to assess the condition of democracy in the modern world. In these conversations, he finds reasons for its continuing strength and its powerful alliance with capitalism. He also addresses challenges to democracy and the necessity to strengthen it.
Download or read book Giving Voice to Democracy in Music Education written by Lisa C. DeLorenzo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-23 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how music education presents opportunities to shape democratic awareness through political, pedagogical, and humanistic perspectives. Focusing on democracy as a vital dimension in teaching music, the essays in this volume have particular relevance to teaching music as democratic practice in both public schooling and in teacher education. Although music educators have much to learn from others in the educational field, the actual teaching of music involves social and political dimensions unique to the arts. In addition, teaching music as democratic practice demands a pedagogical foundation not often examined in the general teacher education community. Essays include the teaching of the arts as a critical response to democratic participation; exploring democracy in the music classroom with such issues as safe spaces, sexual orientation, music of the Holocaust, improvisation, race and technology; and music teaching/music teacher education as a form of social justice. Engaging with current scholarship, the book not only probes the philosophical nature of music and democracy, but also presents ways of democratizing music curriculum and human interactions within the classroom. This volume offers the collective wisdom of international scholars, teachers, and teacher educators and will be essential reading for those who teach music as a vital force for change and social justice in both local and global contexts.
Download or read book Democracy Culture and the Voice of Poetry written by Robert Pinsky and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-11 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The place of poetry in modern democracy is no place, according to conventional wisdom. The poet, we hear, is a casualty of mass entertainment and prosaic public culture, banished to the artistic sidelines to compose variations on insipid themes for a dwindling audience. Robert Pinsky, however, argues that this gloomy diagnosis is as wrongheaded as it is familiar. Pinsky, whose remarkable career as a poet itself undermines the view, writes that to portray poetry and democracy as enemies is to radically misconstrue both. The voice of poetry, he shows, resonates with profound themes at the very heart of democratic culture. There is no one in America better to write on this topic. One of the country's most accomplished poets, Robert Pinsky served an unprecedented two terms as America's Poet Laureate (1997-2000) and led the immensely popular multimedia Favorite Poem Project, which invited Americans to submit and read aloud their favorite poems. Pinsky draws on his experiences and on characteristically sharp and elegant observations of individual poems to argue that expecting poetry to compete with show business is to mistake its greatest democratic strength--its intimate, human scale--as a weakness. As an expression of individual voice, a poem implicitly allies itself with ideas about individual dignity that are democracy's bedrock, far more than is mass participation. Yet poems also summon up communal life.. Even the most inward-looking work imagines a reader. And in their rhythms and cadences poems carry in their very bones the illusion and dynamic of call and response. Poetry, Pinsky writes, cannot help but mediate between the inner consciousness of the individual reader and the outer world of other people. As part of the entertainment industry, he concludes, poetry will always be small and overlooked. As an art--and one that is inescapably democratic--it is massive and fundamental.
Download or read book Democracy Unchained written by David Orr and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stellar group of America's leading political thinkers explore how to reboot our democracy The presidential election of 2016 highlighted some long-standing flaws in American democracy and added a few new ones. Across the political spectrum, most Americans do not believe that democracy is delivering on its promises of fairness, justice, shared prosperity, or security in a changing world. The nation cannot even begin to address climate change and economic justice if it remains paralyzed by political gridlock. Democracy Unchained is about making American democracy work to solve problems that have long impaired our system of governance. The book is the collective work of thirty of the most perceptive writers, practitioners, scientists, educators, and journalists writing today, who are committed to moving the political conversation from the present anger and angst to the positive and constructive change necessary to achieve the full promise of a durable democracy that works for everyone and protects our common future. Including essays by Yasha Mounk on populism, Chisun Lee on money and politics, Ras Baraka on building democracy from the ground up, and Bill McKibben on climate, Democracy Unchained is the articulation of faith in democracy and will be required reading for all who are working to make democracy a reality. Table of Contents Foreword Introduction David W. Orr Part I. The Crisis of Democracy Populism and Democracy Yascha Mounk Reconstructing Our Constitutional Democracy K. Sabeel Rahman Restoring Healthy Party Competition Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson When Democracy Becomes Something Else: The Problem of Elections and What to Do About It Andrew Gumbel The Best Answer to Money in Politics After Citizens United: Public Campaign Financing in the Empire State and Beyond Chisun Lee Remaking the Presidency After Trump Jeremi Suri The Problem of Presidentialism Stephen Skowronek Part II. Foundations of Democracy Renewing the American Democratic Faith Steven C. Rockefeller American Land, American Democracy Eric Freyfogle Race and Democracy: The Kennedys, Obama, Trump, and Us Michael Eric Dyson Liberty and Justice for All: Latina Activist Efforts to Strengthen Democracy in 2018 Maria Hinojosa What Black Women Teach Us About Democracy Andra Gillespie and Nadia E. Brown Engines of Democracy: Racial Justice and Cultural Power Rashad Robinson Civic and Environmental Education: Protecting the Planet and Our Democracy Judy Braus The Supreme Court's Legitimacy Crisis and Constitutional Democracy’s Future Dawn Johnsen Part III. Policy Challenges Can Democracy Survive the Internet? David Hickton The New New Deal: How to Reregulate Capitalism Robert Kuttner First Understand Why They're Winning: How to Save Democracy from the Anti-Immigrant Far Right Sasha Polakow-Suransky No Time Left: How the System Is Failing to Address Our Ultimate Crisis Bill McKibben Powering Democracy Through Clean Energy Denise G. Fairchild The Long Crisis: American Foreign Policy Before and After Trump Jessica Tuchman Mathews Part IV. Who Acts, and How? The Case for Strong Government William S. Becker The States Nick Rathod Democracy in a Struggling Swing State Amy Hanauer Can Independent Voters Save American Democracy? Why 42 Percent of American Voters Are Independent and How They Can Transform Our Political System Jaqueline Salit and Thom Reilly Philanthropy and Democracy Stephen B. Heintz Keeping the Republic Dan Moulthrop The Future of Democracy Mayor Ras Baraka Building a University Where All People Matter Michael M. Crow, William B. Dabars, and Derrick M. Anderson Biophilia and Direct Democracy Timothy Beatley Purpose-Driven Capitalism Mindy Lubber Restoring Democracy: Nature's Trust, Human Survival, and Constitutional Fiduciary Governance 397 Mary Christina Wood Conclusion Ganesh Sitaraman
Download or read book Running Out written by Lucas Bessire and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-04 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Book Award An intimate reckoning with aquifer depletion in America's heartland The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force. Anthropologist Lucas Bessire journeyed back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make sense of this vital resource and its loss. His search for water across the drying High Plains brings the reader face to face with the stark realities of industrial agriculture, eroding democratic norms, and surreal interpretations of a looming disaster. Yet the destination is far from predictable, as the book seeks to move beyond the words and genres through which destruction is often known. Instead, this journey into the morass of eradication offers a series of unexpected discoveries about what it means to inherit the troubled legacies of the past and how we can take responsibility for a more inclusive, sustainable future. An urgent and unsettling meditation on environmental change, Running Out is a revelatory account of family, complicity, loss, and what it means to find your way back home.
Download or read book Democracy and Tradition written by Jeffrey Stout and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do religious arguments have a public role in the post-9/11 world? Can we hold democracy together despite fractures over moral issues? Are there moral limits on the struggle against terror? Asking how the citizens of modern democracy can reason with one another, this book carves out a controversial position between those who view religious voices as an anathema to democracy and those who believe democratic society is a moral wasteland because such voices are not heard. Drawing inspiration from Whitman, Dewey, and Ellison, Jeffrey Stout sketches the proper role of religious discourse in a democracy. He discusses the fate of virtue, the legacy of racism, the moral issues implicated in the war on terrorism, and the objectivity of ethical norms. Against those who see no place for religious reasoning in the democratic arena, Stout champions a space for religious voices. But against increasingly vocal antiliberal thinkers, he argues that modern democracy can provide a moral vision and has made possible such moral achievements as civil rights precisely because it allows a multitude of claims to be heard. Stout's distinctive pragmatism reconfigures the disputed area where religious thought, political theory, and philosophy meet. Charting a path beyond the current impasse between secular liberalism and the new traditionalism, Democracy and Tradition asks whether we have the moral strength to continue as a democratic people as it invigorates us to retrieve our democratic virtues from very real threats to their practice.
Download or read book Tragic Manhood and Democracy written by David A. J. Richards and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is tragedy? This work argues that it is, at once, art and science -- an absorbing art and precisely observed empirical inquiry into human psychology, whose subject matter is the dilemma of manhood under democracy. The author expands discussion of the idea of the tragic to include music drama in general and the operas of Verdi in particular, and explores the indispensable contribution of tragedy to an understanding of personal and political psychology through discussion of: the political theory of structural injustice resting on the suppression of voice (underlying evils like racism, sexism, and homophobia), a developmental psychology of gender (drawing on the work of Carol Gilligan -- the Harvard Project on Women's Psychology, Boy's Development and the Culture of Manhood), and an interpretation of tragic art (including the expressive role of music in it). Exploration of the tragic impact of patriarchy on democratic voice is at the heart of the power and appeal of Verdi's innovations in musical voice. At its core is a complex psychic geography of patriarchal practices imposed on personal and political relationships (parents to children, siblings to one another, and adult men and women). Such practices -- fundamental to the family, politics, and religion -- enforce demands by forms of physical and psychological violence directed by men and women at anyone who deviates from its demands. Verdi's tragic musical drama speaks of an emotional loss that literally cannot under patriarchy be spoken, namely, what the author calls the tragedy of patriarchy -- a divided psychology that lives in the tension between patriarchal practices and democratic principles, and between the psychological demands of patriarchy and democratic manhood.
Download or read book State of the Union Addresses written by Franklin D. Roosevelt and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduction of the original: State of the Union Addresses by Franklin D. Roosevelt
Download or read book Unfree Speech written by Joshua Wong and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An urgent manifesto for global democracy from Joshua Wong, the 23-year-old phenomenon leading Hong Kong's protests - and Nobel Peace Prize nominee - with an introduction by Ai Weiwei With global democracy under threat, we must act together to defend out rights: now. When he was 14, Joshua Wong made history. While the adults stayed silent, Joshua staged the first-ever student protest in Hong Kong to oppose National Education -- and won. Since then, Joshua has led the Umbrella Movement, founded a political party, and rallied the international community around the anti-extradition bill protests, which have seen 2 million people -- more than a quarter of the population -- take to Hong Kong's streets. His actions have sparked worldwide attention, earned him a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, and landed him in jail twice. Composed in three parts, Unfree Speech chronicles Joshua's path to activism, collects the letters he wrote as a political prisoner under the Chinese state, and closes with a powerful and urgent call for all of us globally to defend our democratic values. When we stay silent, no one is safe. When we free our speech, our voice becomes one.
Download or read book Democracy s Voices written by Robert M. Fishman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on one of sociology's core ideas—that social ties can shape collective outcomes—Democracy's Voices shows that connections across class boundaries can remake public rhetoric and thus the quality of democratic life. Robert M. Fishman takes up a question of enduring significance to people concerned with the quality of democratic public life, focusing on why political rhetoric proves engaging and broadly relevant, or disengaging and narrow. The answer to that question, he argues, is to be found not only in the deeds of prominent politicians and the nature of official institutions but also in the existence and the character of social connections among ordinary citizens. Fishman's book, based on long-term fieldwork and systematic survey research in Spain, identifies the special contribution to democratic quality made by conversations between intellectuals and workers. Fishman focuses on what he calls the "discursive horizons" of local leaders and communities: the actual location of the problems and proposed remedies articulated in political rhetorics. Democracy's Voices shows how the subcultural context of social ties may accentuate or diminish their power to reshape rhetorics. Fishman argues that conversations are able to remake public rhetorics whereas ties that take the form of brokerage lack that ability. The book also offers a general critique of social capital theory and argues that the full ability of social ties to shape collective outcomes can only be observed when one distinguishes in useful ways among types of ties.
Download or read book Voice and Power in Africa s Democracy written by Said Adejumobi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-16 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Africa has made notable progress in its nascent democracy but with uneven performance across countries. However, across the board, challenges abound. Central to Africa’s checkered democratic narrative is the weakness of its democratic institutions, participatory mechanisms and accountability platforms. This book interrogates these elements with the role and capacity of the parliament, political parties, media, freedom of information law, trade union movements, gender empowerment mechanisms and accountability methods and processes all under examination. The weakness of democratic institutions has had a corrosive effect on political accountability and limits the scope for popular participation in governance. In many countries, innovative practices, and new social and political encounters are emerging that challenge old institutional cultures, promote reforms and demand accountability from the governing elite. The book captures these varied, innovative patterns of democratic change. With first hand knowledge and expertise of the continent, the contributors analyze the issues, trends, problems and challenges in these critical areas of Africa’s democratic growth. The conclusion is that strengthening democratic institutions, opening up the political space for enhanced political participation and ensuring political accountability will determine the course, prospects and quality of Africa’s budding democracy.
