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Democracy

About: Democracy is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 108612 publications have been published within this topic receiving 2372198 citations.


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TL;DR: For example, Lampi et al. as discussed by the authors found that during Washington's presidency only 6 percent of Americans could vote, which translates into about 15 percent of the free adult population.
Abstract: A long tradition in American political history associates the presidency of Andrew Jackson with the achievement of universal suffrage and the coming of democracy, at least for adult white males. There is some justification for this view, but only in limited senses; for the most part this interpretation has had a deleterious effect on our understanding of political development in the early republic. In particular it has created the belief that relatively few people possessed the right to vote in the early republic, and that therefore mass participation was postponed to the years after 1815. As recently as September 2008 the distinguished historian Jill Lepore could write in the New Yorker that during Washington's presidency only 6 percent of Americans could vote - which admittedly translates into about 15 percent of the free adult population. Sean Wilentz's prize-winning Rise of American Democracy (2005) recognizes that the suffrage was much more widely spread before 1815, but he still builds his interpretation around the assumption that politics did not involve the public at large until the Age of Jackson. Even Alexander Keyssar's illuminating The Right to Vote (2000) and Daniel Walker Howe's excellent What Hath God Wrought (2007) assume that the practice of politics became more democratic in the 1820s because of recent fundamental changes in electoral rules. Such views are explicitly contradicted by the voting data that Philip Lampi has gathered that are now available on the A New Nation Votes website, which confirm the huge expansion of popular participation within two decades or so of the adoption of the United States Constitution.1This expansion was possible because the right to vote had always been extraordinarily widespread - at least among adult white males - even before the country gained its independence. During the colonial period, the right to vote for the lower house of colonial legislatures had been defined in traditional British terms: Only people who had freehold landed property sufficient to ensure that they were personally independent and had a vested interest in the welfare of their communities could vote. That qualification normally applied to men who were heads of households, since women were almost by definition dependent, but the right could extend to widows who had become responsible for the family property. Some colonies excluded propertied people whose civic commitment they suspected - recent arrivals, members of minority religious sects, and racial groups deemed unacceptable. But those most generally excluded were laborers, tenant farmers, unskilled workers, and indentured servants, all of whom were considered to lack a "stake in society," a permanent interest in the community, and the wherewithal to withstand corruption.2In Britain property qualifications increasingly restricted the number qualified to vote. Whereas over 20 percent of adult males had enjoyed the franchise around 1700, population growth and the increasing concentration of wealth reduced the proportion to 17.2 percent by 1754, continuing down to 12.7 percent in England and Wales by the 1820s.3By contrast, the abundance and availability of land in North America meant that large numbers of colonists satisfied similarly denned requirements. This was especially true where the requirement was expressed in terms of acreage rather than value, as was customarily the case in the southern colonies: It was much easier to acquire (and to measure) 50 acres than land worth £50 either at sale or in annual rents. Six colonies also allowed alternative qualifications to freehold ownership in the form of personal property or payment of taxes, opening the suffrage to owners of urban property, and even to those prosperous farmers who rented their land or held it on some form of leasehold.4Consequently, as early as the 1 720s the suffrage was uniquely wide in the colonies. Virginia reputedly had the most restrictive franchise, with fewer than half the free white males qualified to vote, but a recent calculation raises the figure to two-thirds at midcentury, declining slightly thereafter. …

45 citations

Journal Article
Abstract: The struggle against apartheid and the building of democracy has worked, and continues to work, fundamental changes in the sphere of social memory. And, increasingly, the manifold repositories and dynamics of memory in South Africa are being reshaped by technological revolution, international engagement, and exposure to the conditions of postmodernity.' This is the shifting ground on which archives as discipline, profession, repository of memory, public service finds itself. The 1990s have seen the supplanting of a sterile, outmoded archival discourse by what I call a transformation discourse one informed by the assumption that archives require reinvention for a democratic South Africa.* This discourse connects assuredly with the country's new societal dynamics, and underpins endeavours to transform South Africa's archives system.3 And yet, as I shall argue in this article, in the same way that apartheid patterns in society are proving extremely resilient, in archives many of our core ideas resist new realities, at most entertaining re-formation (rather than trans-formation). These ideas, or formulations, are still embedded in a paradigm I would describe as pre-postmodern or, more precisely, as Positivist. They continue to shape fundamentally how archivists conceptualize themselves and their endeavour^.^ They also raise significant questions about the nature of transformation in South African archives.

45 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Schmitt's "solution" to this quandary of political representation, which suggests that representation can bring about the political unity of the state, but only if the state itself is properly represented by the figure or person of the sovereign as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: I. Political Representation"Representation means the making present of something that is nevertheless not literally present."1 This definition, provided by Hanna Pitkin in her celebrated book on the subject, contrasts strongly with most modern discussions of political representation which regularly delimit their focus to technical questions of election and accountability.2 Even theorists who see in representative government the classical virtues of a necessarily "chastened" (public) authority rely on impoverished notions of political representation in the sense of the definition outlined above.3 As Pitkin herself suggested, political representation explores the way in which "the people (or a constituency) are present in governmental action, even though they do not literally act for themselves."4 This paper examines Carl Schmitt's "solution" to this quandary of political representation, which suggests that representation can bring about the political unity of the state, but only if the state itself is properly "represented" by the figure or person of the sovereign.5In assessing and explaining the centrality of representation to Schmitt's political thought-an area often excluded from discussion6-I focus upon his attempted reconciliation of a starkly "personalist" and then Hobbesian account of representation that would justify support for the Reichsprasident under the Weimar Republic, with insights drawn from the constitutional republicanism of the Abbe Sieyes that placed the constituent power of the people at the basis of representative democracy. The argument develops and modifies Bockenforde 's hypothesis, that Schmitt's well-known concept of the political-first presented in a lecture of 1927-provides the "key" to understanding his more substantial constitutional theory, Verfassungslehre, published the following year.7 Instead, Schmitt's concept of representation provides the key with which to understand his densely structured constitutional argumentation.8 Therefore, after outlining the early theological and personalist roots of Schmitt's account of representation in order to show his long-standing concern with the issue, the central arguments of Sieyes and Hobbes concerning representation are next outlined, and their impact on Schmitt's political and constitutional theory discussed.9 Such a structure places in sharp relief the political implications of his ideological appropriation of the language of modern representative democracy in order to justify support for the presidential leader.II. Capitalism, Rationality, and Representation: The Figure of the RepresentativeIn his 1923 essay "Roman Catholicism and Political Form," Schmitt claimed that the technical-economic rationality of modern capitalism and its dominant political expression, liberalism, stood at odds with the truly political power of the Catholic Church.10 Schmitt was concerned to illuminate the particularly "representative" character of the Catholic Church as a complexio oppositorum, in contradistinction to its typical appearance as the unworldly "other" to an ascetic and industrious Protestantism, so as to counter the "anti-Roman temper that has nourished the struggle against popery, Jesuitism and clericalism with a host of religious and political forces, that has impelled European history for centuries."11Even the "parliamentary and democratic nineteenth century" was an era where Catholicism was defined as "nothing more than a limitless opportunism." It was Schmitt's contention, however, that this missed the fundamental point of such a complex of opposites, which was that the "formal character of Roman Catholicism is based on the strict realisation of the principle of representation. In its particularity this becomes most clear in its antithesis to the economictechnical thinking dominant today."12 Schmitt contended that something peculiar to Catholic representation allowed it to "make present" the true essence of something by "representing" it. …

45 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: For most of its history, the People's Republic had castigated advertising as the apotheosis of the capitalist religion of consumption as mentioned in this paper, and few commercial billboards or newspaper advertisements interrupted the skein of relentlessly political messages that crossed public space.
Abstract: During the 1980s, bracketed by the Third Plenum in 1978 and the suppression of the democracy movement in 1989, China edged, step by step, away from the orthodoxies of the Cultural Revolution, and each reversal excited a certain amount of commentary both within and without China. As time passed, and the list of reintroduced institutions and practices grew ever longer, habituation reduced the surprise of succeeding announcements. But the reintroduction of advertising, a cental totem of advanced capitalist culture, occupied a particularly significant place on the list because its reappearance in China forced the Chinese to reconsider distinctions that had formerly been drawn between capitalist and socialist societies. For most of its history, the People's Republic had castigated advertising as the apotheosis of the capitalist religion of consumption. This was especially so in the late 1960s during the height of the Cultural Revolution. Afterwards few commercial billboards or newspaper advertisements interrupted the skein of relentlessly political messages that crossed public space. When advertising was officially reintroduced in 1979, and its sanctioned scope expanded beyond industrial goods, the state faced a daunting ideological task: rebuilding a case for advertising in a socialist system that had long defined itself as one that did not need commercial exhortation. In essence, it had to sell the legitimacy of selling.

45 citations

01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: Active social capital tracing the roots of development and democracy as discussed by the authors is an example of such a book that has been downloaded millions of times in the last few years and used by millions of malicious bugs inside their computers.
Abstract: Thank you very much for downloading active social capital tracing the roots of development and democracy. Maybe you have knowledge that, people have search numerous times for their chosen readings like this active social capital tracing the roots of development and democracy, but end up in infectious downloads. Rather than reading a good book with a cup of coffee in the afternoon, instead they juggled with some malicious bugs inside their computer.

45 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20244
20236,229
202213,024
20212,720
20203,839
20193,951