What is Good Public Discourse?
An Annotated Bibliography
Prepared by
David M. Ryfe
for the
Penn National Commission
on
Society, Culture, and Community
April 12, 1999
Not for distribution or reproduction without permission of the
Penn National Commission on Society, Culture, and Community.
© 1999
Trustees of the
University of Pennsylvania
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What is Good Public Discourse?
An Annotated Bibliography
Prepared by
David M. Ryfe
April 12, 1999
Abu-Lughod Lila & Catherine Lutz. (1990). “Introduction: emotion, discourse and the politics
of everyday life,” in Lutz & Abu-Lughod, eds., Language and the Politics of Emotion,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-23. Reviews the history of anthropological study
of the emotions in terms of four strategies: essentializing, relativizing, historicizing, &
contextualizing. Contributions to the present volume consider emotions as part of particular
social and cultural discourses. These discourses shape the performance & assessment of
emotions & are inevitably entwined with political negotiations among classes, races & genders in
the production of everyday life.
Aldrich, John. (1995). Why Parties?: the origin and transformation of political parties.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Traces the formation & disintegration of three
American political parties from the founding to the civil war period drawing on an institutional
analysis. It is argued that political actors form parties to solve problems that current institutional
arrangements do not solve. Such problems include those of ambition & office seeking, making
decisions for the polity and the problem of collective action. This framework is applied to the
dramatic transformation of political parties in the post-WWII period to explain the trend toward
candidate-centered parties. Rather than a deterioration of party power, it is suggested that this
transformation has revitalized parties & made them more effective governance institutions.
Ansolabehere, Stephen & Shanto Iyengar. (1995). Going Negative: how attack ads shrink and
polarize the electorate. New York: The Free Press. The effect of negative advertisements on
American politics is investigated drawing on results of several experimental studies. It is shown
that politicians employ negative ads because they work; that is, they work to lower the
favorability numbers of political opponents. This is particularly true in the case of Republican
voters, who are more predisposed to take a jaundiced view of political institutions and
politicians, and less true of independents.
Aristotle. (1958). The Politics. edited & translated by Ernest Baker. Oxford: Oxford
University Press. A classical theory of politics that has been hugely influential in the AngloSaxon world, particularly on 17th & 18th century British political theory. Perhaps its most
influential aspect has been in the area of constitutionalism and its relationship to citizenship.
According to Aristotle, a good polis was one explicitly erected by those who would come under
its province; it in turn would moralize individuals by providing a space in which to become
public (which for Aristotle meant truly human) individuals.
Aronovitch, Hilliard. (1997). "The Political Importance of Analogical Argument," Political
Studies, 45: pp. 78-92. It is contended that analogical argumentation is especially suited for
political life because it provides a basis for rational, non-relativist normative claims. Analogical
reasoning is defined as reasoning from case to case, by example or paradigm instance. This form
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of reasoning puts people in a context without confining them to it, allowing for political
imagination to work without sacrificing connections to concrete reality.
Arrow, Kenneth. (1963). Social Choice and Individual Values. 2nd ed. New York: Wiley.
Examines whether or not a procedure can be put in place whereby the individual preferences can
be translated into rational patterns of social decision-making within welfare states. It is shown
that aggregating individual utilities into a social choice cannot lead to rational actions at the
social level because a rational ordering of preferences is impossible. Instead, ordering of any two
proposals must rely upon a value choice which is not contained within the aggregation of
individual choices. Thus, the only methods for passing from individual preferences to social
preferences are through imposition or dictatorial decision-making. This is not to deny the
necessity of making choices for the general welfare, only to stress that such choices are not
instrumentally rational, but are the result of ethical judgments made in the context of democratic
procedures.
Auletta, Ken. (1991). Three Blind Mice: how the television networks lost their way. New York:
Random House. Traces the demise of network television news in the late 1980s drawing on
ethnographic data. It is shown that this demise began when the networks were bought by larger
corporations. These corporations demanded that the news become more profitable just as cable
television began to whittle away at the networks' audience share. Between demands for profit
and the need to garner a mass audience, the devotion of network news to the public interest was
diminished. While in many ways the news has become more visually compelling and attractive,
it has also become less useful for large-scale deliberations on pressing public issues.
Avey, Michael. (1989). The Demobilization of American Voters: a comprehensive theory of
voter turnout. New York: Greenwood Press. Analyzes voter turnout in terms of segments of the
voting age population & barriers & stimulants to participation confronted by these segments.
Thus, nonvoting is explained less as a consequence of characteristics of nonvoters, such as their
socio-economic status, than by the inability or unwillingness of politicians & the political system
to reach out to constituencies on the lower half of the socio-economic ladder. The implication of
this theory is that voting rates can be increased without changing the socio-economic status of
voters. Instead, actions can be taken at the institutional level to ensure that the system reaches
out to under-represented constituencies.
Bagdikian, Ben. (1997). The Media Monopoly. 5th ed. Boston: Beacon Press. A major
statement of the view that control of the mass media by a relatively few corporations ultimately
ends in constraining public discourse. The growth of media monopolies is demonstrated. It is
then shown in a variety of ways that public discourse is narrowed by this concentration of media
power, so much so that in the end it has produced an enormous gap between ordinary people &
their representatives.
Baumgartner, Frank & Jeffrey C. Talbert. (1995). "Interest Groups and Political Change." in
Bryan Jones, ed. The New American Politics: reflections on political change and the Clinton
Administration. Boulder: Westview Press, pp. 93-110. Examines the dynamics of interest group
behavior that contribute to political change, focusing particularly on the situation facing
President Clinton with that of some of his Democratic predecessors. It is shown that the interest
group system has undergone significant changes in recent years. These changes especially have
affected two policy areas: the environment & health care. In each of these cases, policy
networks that feature a diversity of interests are now well-represented in the Washington
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corridors of power. No longer confined to lobbying separately, these interests today form
alliances which can change the dynamics of the political system in profound ways.
Beck, Ulrich, Anthony Giddens & Scott Lash. (1994). Reflexive Modernization: politics,
tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order. Stanford: Stanford University Press. An
edited volume that investigates the nature of the shift to a post-fordist, global economy and its
implications for politics, culture, and society.
Beer, Francis. (1994). "Words of Reason," Political Communication, 11: pp. 185-201. Reviews
the linguistic meaning of reason. It is argued that a core meaning of reason is attached to
context-cues of behavioral & textual dimensions. Thus, the meaning of reason varies
continuously. Thus, reason comes to function as an important rhetorical trope in political
discourse, as its very plasticity evokes different images & responses in different settings. A
notion of pluralistic reason is defended as one most likely to foster deliberative democracy.
Belenky, Mary Field, et. al. (1997). Women’s Ways of Knowing: the development of self, voice
and the mind, New York: Basic Books. Examines women’s ways of knowing and describes five
different perspectives from which women view reality and draw conclusions about truth,
knowledge and authority, drawing on interview data. These five perspectives include silence,
received knowledge, subjective knowledge, procedural knowledge, constructed knowledge, &
family life.
Bellah, Robert, et. al. (1985). Habits of the Heart: individualism and commitment in American
life, Berkeley: UC Press. Investigates the consciousness, culture & daily practices of average
middle-class Americans in four different communities drawing on extensive interviews. It is
found that individualism lies at the core of American culture, but that other traditions compete
for space in the American psyche, including Biblical & Republican traditions. It is questioned
whether modern individualism can sustain an adequate public or private life. Individuals
expressed much ambivalence about the loss of social ties caused by an individualism that they
cherish. If overcoming deficiencies in individualism cannot mean going back to discriminatory
tradition practices, then traditional institutions must reform themselves to speak to the sense of
individualism Americans covet. In this way, individuals might begin to reconnect to the
communities of memory from which they have sprung.
Benhabib, Seyla & Drucilla Cornell. (1987). Feminism as Critique: on the politics of gender,
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. An edited volume containing 8 essays which
elaborate feminist critiques of gender & politics. These critiques target theories of production,
the differentiation between public & private, theories of the unencumbered self, & the
constitution of the female subject & the deconstitution of gender identity. Of these themes,
particular attention is given to the relation between the public & the private, especially as it has
been described in the work of Jurgen Habermas. A position is sought by the authors which
agrees with Habermas’ notion of communicative practice, yet avoids the universalizing &
gendered aspects of his theory.
Bennett, Lance. (1996). The Governing Crisis: media, money, and marketing in American
elections. 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin's Press. Traces the current crisis in American
governance to several factors: the transformation of electoral campaigns into high-tech
communication processes; the increased marketization of politicians & political causes; & the
unprecedented flow of money into the political process. Within the dynamic interaction of these
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factors, citizens have been cut-off from governing institutions, and have developed a deep
cynicism toward the political process.
Bennett, W. Lance & John D. Klockner. (1996). "The Psychology of Mass-Mediated Publics,"
in Ann Crigler, ed., The Psychology of Political Communication, Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan Press, pp. 89-110. It is argued that the voicing or silencing of public opinion in the
news is constructed through a process based on an ecology of interests. Shared norms among
journalists, elites & publics enable these diverse players to judge which voices should be
included & excluded from news accounts. In an analysis of a broad spectrum of issues in the
news, it is shown that public opinion is either excluded from or discredited in mass media news
about foreign policy & macro-economic trends. In contrast, numerous grass-roots voices are
included without qualification in news reports of social, moral & pocketbook economic issues.
The result is a dual-democracy, with strong mobilization of opinion in some areas & a much
weaker civic culture in others.
Benson, Thomas, ed. (1997). Rhetoric and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century America,
East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press. A series of close textual readings of
important 19th century public documents which inquires into the relation of the text to context,
rhetorical forms & genres the intentions of the speaker, the response of the audience & the role of
the critic.
Berkowitz, Peter. (1996). "The Debating Society." The New Republic 215(November 25): pp.
36-42. A critical review of Amy Guttmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and
Disagreement (1996) which questions their political program for fostering better public debate.
Guttmann and Thompson suggest that a set of basic moral principles must underlie public
discourse, and in so doing prevent fundamental questions from being raised about them.
Moreover, Guttmann and Thompson appear to advocate a form of public discourse in which
power will naturally flow to elites like themselves who possess better deliberative skills. It is
concluded that their vision of deliberative democracy ends in collapsing the virtues of freedom
with the virtues of the classroom, and thus ignores many other qualities that are central to
democracy deliberation.
Berman, Sheri. (1997). "Civil Society and Political Institutionalization," American Behavioral
Scientist, 40: pp. 562-574. Argues that the tendency of research scholarship to examine societal
and cultural variables outside their broader context leaves fundamental questions unanswered
and misinterprets important dynamics of political development. To know whether civil society
activity will have positive or negative consequences for democratic development, one must marry
an analysis of societal & cultural factors to the study of political institutions.
Bessette, Joseph. (1994). The Mild Voice of Reason: deliberative democracy and American
national government, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Examines whether or not the
modern American Congress over the last fifty years remains the kind of deliberative institution
imagined by the framers when they constructed the national governmental framework. The
framers believed that Congress ought to be the primary deliberative body in US politics, & would
maintain their legitimacy by sharing basic values & goals of their constituents. They defined
deliberative democracy as a system of popular government that fosters rule by the informed and
reasoned judgments of the citizenry. This implies that aggregated opinions of the kind developed
in polls are not conducive to informed judgment. Instead, informed opinions are more likely to
be produced by the operation of representative institutions. The modern Congress is found
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lacking in its obligation to carry out this deliberative duty. It is suggested that legislators ought
to make several changes to amend this situation: (1) they should spend their time with the
requirements of deliberation in mind; (2) they should not delegate their deliberative duties to
aides; & (3) they should minimize artificial publicity & concentrate on holding meetings in
public. Recommendations are also made for the bureaucracy & the executive to assist in the
resuscitation of deliberation within the Congress.
Best, Stephen & Douglas Kellner. (1997). The Postmodern Turn. New York: Guilford Press.
Develops a map of the defining moments in the turn toward postmodernity in various fields. The
principle concepts, issues and problems associated with this turn are reviewed. The major
sources of postmodern theory in 19th century thinkers such as Karl Marx & Frederick Nietzsche
are outlined. Then, different trajectories of the postmodern are traced, including that of the
French situationists, developments in postmodern literature, arts and science. It is suggested
throughout that these various genealogies of the postmodern amount to a fundamental paradigm
shift as Western societies move from modern to postmodern worlds.
Billig, Michael. (1991). Ideology and Opinions: studies in rhetorical psychology, London:
Sage. Presents a series of studies which aim to develop a rhetorical approach to social
psychology. According to this rhetorical approach, the holding of opinions and attitudes is
essentially rhetorical and argumentative. This means that opinions and attitudes must be studied
in a social context as forms of ideology. The expression of opinions is understood as strategic in
that it is concerned with arguing and persuading, criticizing and justifying, concealing and
exposing. Common sense itself is a form of ideological opinion-formation, in that when
speakers appeal to common sense they are making use of social stereotypes resonant in the
moment. Several case studies are provided to demonstrate these points. Included in these case
studies are analyses of the rhetoric of British Young Conservatives, arguments against Fascist
propaganda, the case of the British Monarchy & the nature of strong opinions.
Billig, Michael. (1996). Arguing and Thinking: a rhetorical approach to social psychology,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Argues for the importance of argument in social
psychology. The modern model of social psychology is taken to be that of persuasion. This
model tends to venerate logical thinking to the neglect of the sort of rhetorical thought which
composes imaginative styles of thinking. Further, it overlooks the way in which individual
thinking itself is modeled on argumentative structures, & so mirrors public debate. The form of
argument is taken to be contrastive: categories are developed & oppositional categories arise to
contest these originals. This notion of thinking as argument is applied to the notion of attitudes,
the concept of commonsense and the rhetorical flexibility by which individuals express their
attitudes.
Black, Jay. ed. (1997). Mixed News: the public/civic/communitarian journalism debate.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. A collection of essays in which the practice of public
journalism is debated. The linchpin of these debates centers on the term community, how it is
defined, what can be expected from it, and what individuals must do to sustain it. On the side of
public journalism, it is generally argued that Americans require a common public space in which
pressing issues may be addressed. Journalism has a special responsibility for cultivating that
space. Critics of public journalism raise a number of dilemmas involving the first amendment,
the traditional role of journalists, and the danger of collective thinking within journalism. It is
also argued that while public journalism favors public debate, the industry from which it has
spawned remains private, closed and unexamined. Rather than compassionate journalism, the
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critics argue that journalists would do better to return to their primary mission: informing the
public of what it needs to know so that it can participate in self-governance.
Blakely, Edward & Mary G. Snyder. (1997). Fortress America: gated communities in the
United States. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. Traces the rapid increase in
gated communities in the United States & locates this increase within broader social, cultural &
political changes. Gated communities are a response to a felt need among the middle-classes for
greater security & peace of mind. In many ways, such communities are simply the latest
manifestation of the longstanding desire to create a suburban utopia in the US. However, these
communities also divide neighborhoods, encourage privatization and send signals of exclusion.
It is suggested that creating better communities is the appropriate response to the challenge of the
gated phenomenon.
Boggs, Carl. (1997). "The Great Retreat: decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century
America," Theory and Society, 26: pp. 741-780. Traces the demise of the public sphere in the
face of several cultural currents: an anti-political rant against big government; localism,
metaphysical politics; the urban revolt of poor inner-city residents; & the deep ecology
movement. To reinvigorate the public sphere, there is a need for commonly-possessed
information, but this need confronts the global media industries which prevents its satisfaction.
Bohman, James & William Rehg. eds. (1997). Deliberative Democracy: essays on reason and
politics. Cambridge: MIT Press. An edited volume which brings together several of the most
important statements on the theme of deliberative democracy. Writings from Jon Elster, Jurgen
Habermas, Joshua Cohen & John Rawls are introduced as seminal statements of the need for
deliberative democracy. Nine subsequent essays tackle various problems associated with the
concept, especially those that arise as a consequence of the tension between reason and actual
political engagement.
Bohman, James F. (1990). "Communication, Ideology, and Democratic Theory," American
Political Science Review, 84: pp. 93-109. Draws upon Habermas to outline four necessary but
not sufficient conditions for genuine democratic decision-making: that they be: (1) formally &
procedurally correct; (2) cognitively adequate; (3) concern issues over which consensus is
possible; & (4) free of ideology. Communication that is free from ideology is one that is selfreflective and self-correcting. The result of these normative guidelines is a public sphere that is a
space for social learning, criticism & autonomy.
Boorstin, Daniel. (1961). The Image: a guide to pseudo-events in America. New York:
Atheneum. Argues that Americans have employed their technology and other resources to
systematically distort direct experience and confuse clear thinking. This point is demonstrated in
a survey of several domains, including the nature of news-making, celebrity in the mass culture,
advertising and public relations, and tourism. Americans today prefer their illusions to reality
largely because they have outsized expectations of what they can expect from the world. Since
these expectations cannot be met in the real world, Americans turn to illusions to satisfy their
hopes and dreams. It is suggested that discovering our illusions will not clear our vision, but it is
a necessary first step to reclaiming reality.
Brady, Henry, Sidney Verba & Kay Lehman Schlozman. (1995). "Beyond SES: a resource
model of political participation," American Political Science Review, 89: pp. 271-294. Develops
a resource model of political participation. It is shown that time, money and skills are distributed
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differentially among groups defined by SES. Further, it is demonstrated that these resources
have powerful effects on overall political activity, as measured by giving time and/or money to
politics, and voting. Each of the modes of participation: giving time, giving money and voting,
is a different kind of activity requiring different configurations of resources.
Brooks, Clem & Jeff Manza. (1997). "The Social and Ideological Bases of Middle-Class
Political Realignment in the United States, 1972-1992," American Sociological Review, 62: pp.
191-208. Investigates changes in voting behavior among managers and professionals in the US.
It is found that among professions there has been a decisive shift away from Republican
presidential candidates and toward Democratic candidates. It is suggested that increasingly
liberal attitudes toward social issues explains this shift. Party identification and partisan affect
are shown to substantially mediate the effects of social group membersip, views of the welfare
state and attitudes toward social issues.
Brooks, Clem and Jeff Manza. (1997). "Social Cleavages and Political Alignments: US
presidential elections, 1960-1992," American Sociological Review, 62: pp. 937-946. It is argued
that racial & gender social cleavages in the US have widened in recent years, while religious, and
class cleavages have declined or remained stable. The net effect has been to create stable overall
social cleavage in this period. This finding contradicts other scholarship, which has suggested
that political cleavages arising out of social group memberships has declined since 1960.
Brown, Penelope & Stephen Levinson. (1987). Politeness: some universals in language,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Makes an argument that politeness, construed in terms
of E. Goffmann's notion of face, is a universal feature in human language interactions. This
argument is pursued in terms of four points: (1) all model persons have positive face & negative
face and are rational agents; (2) it is generally in the interest of two model persons to maintain
each other's face; (3) some acts intrinsically threaten face; & (4) the more an act threatens a
speaker's or addressee's face, the more the speaker will want to choose a higher-numbered
strategy (according to the following tree of actions: on record face-threatening action;
with/without redressive action; positive/negative politeness. This argument is pursued in the
context of P. Grice's theory of maxims for conversational implicature.
Burnheim, John. (1985). Is Democracy Possible? the alternative to electoral politics,
Cambridge: Polity Press. Argues that democracy as imagined by democratic theorists is
impossible. In its place, it is proposed that most decisions that take place within multi-function
agencies can be taken by autonomous specialized agencies that are coordinated by negotiations
among themselves or by quasi-juridical arbitration. Participation in this process would be limited
to those affected by the decisions in question to the degree in which they are affected. This
would entail abandoning elections and referendums and replace them by choosing by lot who is
to hold office. This form of government, termed demarchy, is defended as a reasonable proposal
given the facts of modern democratic practice.
Burns, Nancy, Kay Lehman Schlozman & Sidney Verba. (1997). "The Public Consequences of
Private Inequality: family life and citizen participation," American Political Science Review,
91(1997): pp. 373-389. Tests the proposition that because women are unequal at home, they
cannot be equal in the polity drawing on survey data. It is found that for husbands, control over
major financial decisions & autonomy in using small amounts of time enhance their ability to
participate in politics beyond what would be expected on the basis of their other characteristics.
In short, being boss at home is politically empowering to husbands. No significant relationship
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was found between presence/absence of free time at home & women's civic participation.
Instead, beliefs about equality are most strongly associated with women's participation.
Burtt, Shelley. (1990). "The Good Citizen's Psyche: on the psychology of civic virtue," Polity,
23(1990): pp. 23-38. It is suggested that there are three courses of civic virtue in the republican
tradition: education of the passions, manipulation of interests and the compulsion to duty. It is
suggested that self-interested motives can sustain civic virtue because any threat to the republic
will be taken as a threat to private well-being. Thus, individuals will be compelled to take up
their public duty through an education of the passions, which allows them to identify threats to
their self-interest.
Burtt, Shelley. (1993). "The Politics of Virtue Today: a critique and a proposal," American
Political Science Review, 87(1993): pp. 360-368. Argues for a distinction between a publiclyoriented and a privately oriented conception of civic virtue. Both liberal and republican notions
of civic virtue are taken to be publicly oriented. Problems in their conceptualization are traced to
this public orientation. The legitimacy and promise of a privately oriented virtue is shown in a
reading of the work of Stephen Elkin and Bruce Ackerman. It is concluded that the challenge of
modern politics is to link private virtue to political deliberation.
Calhoun, Craig. ed. (1992). Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press. A
major edited book which critically assesses the value of Jurgen Habermas' notion of the public
sphere outlined in his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere from a variety of angles.
Included among the themes are philosophical discussions involving the appropriateness of
Habermas' model of public space, historical discussions which situate Habermas' description of
the 18th century French & English public spheres in a broader historical view, and
communication discussions which touch upon his analysis of the mass media. Included as an
appendix to this volume is an important response by Habermas himself.
Calhoun, Craig. ed. (1994). Social Theory and the Politics of Identity. Cambridge: Blackwell.
An edited volume which takes seriously the notion that identity politics challenges social theory
to put identity at the center of its activity. Contributors explore issues of identity from both
macro and micro perspectives. The apparent conflict between collective and personal identities
is particularly addressed.
Canary, Daniel, Jeanette Brossmann, Brent Brossmann, & Harry Weger. (1995). "Toward a
Theory of Minimally Rational Argument: analyses of episode specific effects of argument
structures," Communication Monographs, 62: pp. 183-212. Investigates the argumentative
structure of interpersonal settings in two experiments. It is found that conversational arguments
are expected to change structure in light of issue importance. A scope condition of minimal
rationality exists in which parties are expected to elaborate completely on reasons for their
positions regarding important issues. Jointly constructed arguments appear to be most effective,
leading to consensus & to a positive evaluation of communicators.
Cappella Joseph & Kathleen Hall Jamieson. (1997). Spiral of Cynicism: the press and the
public good. New York: Oxford University Press. Explores the effects of strategy-driven,
conflict-based press coverage on voters and citizens in both campaign and public policy
environments. Drawing on analysis of news content frames & the effect of such frames on
viewers, it is shown that the overwhelming effect of such coverage is to make the public more
cynical about politics & the political process. When politicians, journalists and the public learn
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to expect less of each other, and of themselves, the result is a spiral of cynicism that ultimately
leads to a degraded public discourse.
Cargile, Aaron Castelan & Howard Giles. (1997). "Understanding Language Attitudes:
exploring listener affect and identity," Language & Communication, 17: pp. 195-217.
Investigates the affect of a speaker's non-standard accent, the fluency of his/her speech & the
aggressiveness of his/her message on Anglo-American listeners' mood state and American
identity. It is found that speakers experience less pleasure hearing any variety of Japanese accent
than after hearing a speaker with a standard American accent.
Chaney, David C. (1994). The Cultural Turn: scene-setting essays on contemporary cultural
history. London: Routledge. A collection of essays which interrogate various cultural forms of
modernity in light of the recent cultural turn within the academy generally, & cultural studies
specifically. Such forms as suburban enclaves, shopping malls, mass entertainment, & art &
literature are included in the discussion. Although the essays are written to stand alone, all are at
least broadly concerned with the difficulty of conducting social historical investigations within a
postmodern period.
Charity, Arthur. (1995). Doing Public Journalism. New York: Guilford Press. A book on
public journalism which grew out of Jay Rosen's Project on Public Life and the Press at New
York University. It is specifically devoted to the practice rather than the theory of public
journalism, and includes descriptions of the best public journalism projects undertaken across the
country. Included in this discussion are segments on the Charlotte Observer ; Cape Cod Times;
Dayton Daily News; Spokane Spokesman-review; Wisconsin State Journal; Virginian-Pilot &
the Huntington Herald-Dispatch.
Chen, Guo-Ming & William J. Starosta. (1996). "Intercultural Communication Competence: a
synthesis," Brant R. Burleson, ed., Communication Yearbook 19: pp. 353-383. A three
perspective model of intercultural competence is presented: (1) an affective perspective focused
on positive self-concept, open-mindedness, non-judgmental attitudes, and social relaxation; (2) a
cognitive perspective representing cultural awareness; & (3) a behavioral perspective
representing inter-cultural adroitness based on message skills, appropriate self disclosure,
behavioral flexibility, interaction management and social skills.
Cheney, George. (1991). Rhetoric in an Organizational Society: managing multiple identities,
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Argues that organizational rhetoric is a process of
the management of multiple identities drawing on the work of Kenneth Burke. This definition of
organizational rhetoric is elaborated in a case study of the development of the US Catholic
Bishops’ 1983 pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace. It is shown that organizations are
principally involved in negotiating among a number of identities. To be heard within an
organization, one must adopt an insider’s identity which does not challenge the core identity of
the organization as a whole. Organizations face the task of reaching outsiders who may not
condone their core identity while not losing authority with insiders. To change their identity,
organizations must ground their arguments in the interests of at least some parts of their
organization. This can be especially difficult in a multi-national organization with a diversity of
cultural ethnic & national identities.
Cherwitz, Richard & James Hikins. (1986). Communication and Knowledge: an investigation
in rhetorical epistemology, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. Develops a
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rhetorical epistemology in which rhetoric is defined s a description of reality through language.
The interface between rhetoric and epistemology is language. Meaning in language is a function
of a linguistic unit's embodiment of relations among rhetor, tacit audience and extra-linguistic
phenomena. A rhetoric which serves to advance epistemology is one in which the relations
among rhetors, extralinguistic phenomena and audience is made explicit; valid inferences are
drawn between first-person epistemic judgments and derived knowledge; conclusions are derived
through dialogue and preserved in a marketplace of ideas to establish their validity; and the
perspective of the rhetor is made plain. Truth within this rhetorical epistemology, knowledge is
understood in relational terms as a process of discovery between rhetors in which all perspectives
are considered.
Chong, Dennis. (1993). "How People Think, Reason, and Feel about Rights and Liberties,"
American Journal of Political Science, 37: pp. 867-899. Investigates how citizens think and
reason about political issues drawing on interviews conducted in San Francisco in which citizens
were asked to consider such topics as crime, human rights, abortion, freedom of expression &
homosexuality. It is found that people experience considerable ambivalence over many civil
liberties controversies. Most people revise their opinions over time as they uncover different
dimensions of the issues. A central tension is a belief in democratic values combined with a fear
of granting freedom to groups that violate the norms of society.
Chong, Dennis. (1994). "Tolerance and Social Adjustment to New Norms and Practices,"
Political Behavior, 16: pp. 21-53. Argues that tolerance arises not only out of people's
willingness to restrain themselves from punishing those who deviate from social norms. It also
depends on the ability of people to assuage fears & anxieties and to reconcile themselves to
social change. Because people are able to adapt psychologically to changes in norms and
practices, increases in tolerance are not necessarily accompanied by increases in self-restraint,
social strain or tension. The process by which people adjust to change plays a critical role in the
development and expansion of tolerance.
Citrin, Jack, Beth Reingold & Donald Green. (1990). "American Identity and the Politics of
Ethnic Change," Journal of Politics, 52: pp. 1124-1154. Investigates the way subjective
dimensions of national identity influence the mass public's reactions to the changing ethnic
composition of American society drawing on survey data. It is found that normative beliefs
about Americanism strongly influence general attitudes toward cultural minorities. These beliefs
contain strains of liberalism & ethnocentrism.
Cloud, Dana. (1998). Control and Consolation in American Culture and Politics: rhetoric of
therapy, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Examines the rise of therapeutic discourse as a political
strategy of contemporary capitalism by which dissent is contained within a discourse of
individual or family responsibility. The therapeutic is defined as a set of discourses that have
adopted psychotherapy’s lexicon: the language of healing, coping, adaptation & restoration of a
previously existing order. These discourses work hegemonically to channel social unrest and
discontent into individualistic, private-sphere accommodations and adaptations. This thesis is
demonstrated in a series of case studies, such as the debate during the Persian Gulf War &
contemporary debates on welfare.
Cmiel, Kenneth. (1990). Democratic Eloquence: the fight over popular speech in nineteenthcentury America. New York: William Morrow & Company. A history of struggles over the
American language from the late 17th century to the end of the 19th century. It is argued that the
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rise of popular democracy in the early 19th century challenged the assumptions of educated
public speech. This challenge ultimately produced "middling styles" of speech which privileged
informality and common sensical speech patterns. Eventually, these middling styles became
patrolled by professional grammarians. However, debates over the proper standard of English
continue today, demonstrating a fundamental tension between the refined & the vulgar which lies
at the heart of public speech in a democracy.
Coates, Jennifer. (1993). Women, Men and Language: a sociolinguistic account of gender
differences in language, 2nd ed., London: Longman. Reviews evidence across the social
sciences to establish whether men & women talk differently & if so, why they do. It is found that
women use more standard forms of language while men use more non-standard forms. These
differences are explained in terms of the relative strength of social networks in preserving
vernacular modes of language. Women are found to pursue different interactive styles than men:
men dominate mixed-gender conversations, interrupt women more; women use linguistic
markers of politeness more, & more hedges. These differences are discussed in terms of power
differentials between men & women & their different locations in society.
Cohen, Joshua & Joel Rogers. (1992). "Secondary Associations and Democratic Governance,"
Politics & Society, 20: pp. 393-472. Associative democracy is characterized by a broad
commitment to the abstract ideal of a democratic society, and agreement that citizens are equals
in respect of certain basic capacities. Six other principles underlie these general conditions:
popular sovereignty, political equality, distributive equity, civic consciousness, good economic
performance & state competence. Associations have the advantage of dispersing information,
equalizing representation, providing citizen education and promoting alternative forms of
governance. The core idea of associative democracy is to curb the mischiefs of faction through a
deliberate politics of association while netting such group contribution to egalitarian-democratic
governance.
Cohen, Joshua. (1998). “Democracy and Liberty,” in Jon Elster, ed., Deliberative Democracy,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 185-231. Deliberate democracy is described in
terms of several features: it must privilege public reasoning; participants must be understood to
be free, equal, reasonable & having conflicting philosophies of life. This structure of
deliberation is motivated by a principle of deliberative inclusion, which suggests that participants
to a discussion must work to find politically acceptable reasons for others to accept their position.
The importance of the principle of deliberative inclusion is discussed with reference to three
kinds of liberty: religious, moral & expressive.
Cohen, Lizabeth, Thomas W. Hanchett & Kenneth T. Jackson. (1996). "Shopping Malls In
America." An American Historical Review Forum. American Historical Review 101: pp. 10491121. A forum which places the emergence of shopping malls in the United States in historical
context. Cohen and Hanchett argue that malls are both sources and products of key elements of
post-World War Two American life. Cohen suggests that the "malling of America" has produced
a new cultural landscape in which public space is more commercialized, privatized and
feminized than it had been in the past. Hanchett demonstrates that this process was directly
subsidized by government policies, especially in the form of tax breaks. Jackson comments on
the two essays, and situates the growth of malls in the wider context of American culture.
Condit, Celeste Michell. (1993). "Opposites in an Oppositional Practice: rhetorical criticism and
feminism," in Sheryl Perlmutter Bowen & Nancy Wyatt, eds., Transforming Visions: feminist
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critiques in communication studies, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, pp. 205-230. Takes issue with
the tradition of rhetorical criticism which sharply divides the public from the private.
Situationalist & positionalist approaches to rhetoric are shown to depend upon a male-dominated
canon, to focus primarily on public speeches given by men, & to use male-gendered language.
Recently, feminists have challenged this tradition by focusing on different data & using methods
more process-oriented models. It is concluded that rhetoricians ought to view the individual
rhetor as gynandrous, to denote the variety of ways individuals may appropriate gender resources
to produce themselves in communicative contexts.
Connor, Steve. (1992). Theory and Cultural Value, Oxford: Blackwell. Argues that the question
of value necessitates recognition of the radical self-contradiction & paradox of value. The
imperative of value is to move toward the better & away from the worse, form of life. This goal
cannot be achieved by following either resolutely universalist or relativist principles. Instead, a
society must tack between these extremes in a process of constant negotiation & argument. By
remaining self-reflexive, the forms & registers of value may multiply in a variety of forms and so
fill up a healthy plural conversation. This process will entail both cognitive/ethical &
aesthetic/emotional forms of discourse which idealize, reify and displace value forms. It will
also require a constant process of translation of value from the terms of one culture to those of
another.
Conover, Pamela, Ivor Crewe & Donald Searing. (1991). "The Nature of Citizenship in the
United States and Great Britain: empirical comments on theoretical themes," Journal of Politics,
53: pp. 800-832. Examines citizens' conceptions of rights, duties, and civic identities in the US
& the UK. It is found that in the minds of citizens, citizenship is a complex matter, and that they
blend together liberal and communitarian elements. These findings indicate that it is possible to
have some of the benefits of communitarianism in a basically liberal polity.
Conover, Pamela, Ivor Crewe, & Donald Searing. (1990). Conceptions of Citizenship Among
British and American Publics: an exploratory analysis, Essex: Essex Papers in Politics and
Government, no. 73. Explores citizens' conceptions of rights duties & civic identities in the US
& UK using focus group data. It is argued that citizens have much richer conceptions of their
roles than has been captured by survey instruments. The discourse of liberalism is dominant in
both countries, although communitarian strands are also present. But it is generally found that
citizens blend varieties of liberalism & communitarianism in complex ways, & that while
basically liberal, these conceptions can accommodate sentiments appropriate to smaller, more
homogeneous communities.
Conover, Pamela, Stephen Leonard & Donald Searing. (1993). "Duty is a Four-Letter World:
democratic citizenship in the liberal polity," in George Marcus & Russell Hanson, Reconsidering
the Democratic Public, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 147171. Investigates conceptions of citizenship of ordinary individuals drawing on focus group data
gathered in North Carolina. It is found that those who identify with liberal sentiments are as
likely to engage in civic life as those who identify with communitarian sentiments. Similarly,
those who identify as communitarians are likely to hold a liberal vision of the polity that stresses
individual rights & autonomy & the obligation to participate in public life. Respondents were
most liberal when speaking in terms of the nation, and most communitarian when speaking about
local issues. Thus, contra communitarians, it is found that liberalism itself may be a source of
citizen activity.
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Converse, Philip. (1964). "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics." in David Apter. ed.
Ideology and Discontent. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Compares the nature of belief systems
among elite political actors & the masses drawing on survey data. It is found that elite actors
have much more integrated, cohesive belief systems which comprise a kind of ideology. This
ideology allows them to absorb contextual information in a way that makes clear the connections
between policy areas. In contrast, mass publics have very unformed belief systems and so tend to
be easily swayed by contextual information.
Conway, David. (1996). "Capitalism and Community," Social Philosophy and Policy, 13: pp.
137-163. Argues that the breakdown of community has not been caused by too much capitalism,
but by not enough capitalism. Communitarians have blamed capitalism for a breakdown of
community at the level of the family, neighborhood, nation & state. This analysis is refuted.
Most societies that have witnessed a breakdown of community have not been fully capitalist in
form. Further, by assuming responsibility for community activities, the state has effectively
eroded community spirit. Thus, it is the welfare state rather than capitalism that has eroded
community in modern states.
Cook, Timothy E. (1998). Governing with the News: the news media as a political institution.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Develops a theoretical model of the news media
which centers on a singular theme: the news media are best approached as a political institution,
much like the political parties. This thesis is developed in a survey of the institutional
development of the news media from the beginning of the nation. It is then demonstrated in a
synthesis of the literature on news media/government interactions. The conclusion drawn from
this evidence is that the news media are an important avenue by which governance takes place.
To the extent that this is true, its production values and ideology will have an important influence
on the shape of political interactions and deliberations.
Crotty, William. (1978). Decision for the Democrats: reforming the party structure.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Traces the history of the party reform movement
within the Democratic Party in the years 1968-1972. During this time, two reform committees
were formed by the Democratic party—the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate
Selection, and the Commission on Rules, which together issued a number of recommendations
which subsequently altered the party system. Specifically, reforms instituted on the
recommendation of these Commissions opened the party system, redistributed power within
them, and nationalized the parties. Ironically, though the reforms produced greater democracy,
they also resulted in a general weakening of the political parties & greatly reduced their ability to
control elections or the governing process.
Crotty, William. (1983). Party Reform. New York: Longman. Reviews and assesses the
movement to reform the political parties that began in 1968 and has continued to this day. The
roots of reform are traced to changes in the demographic profile of the Democratic party in 1968,
and its effort to respond to these changes by making its institutional structures more open and
egalitarian. These reforms ultimately led to a series of other reforms proposed by various
commissions from the 1980s to the present. Though the Republican party did not go through the
traumatic changes of the Democrats, it revised its institutional structure in similar ways. It is
suggested that the present party system has essentially failed, and that the parties will have to be
revised even more if they are to respond effectively to the prevailing political culture.
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Crotty, William. ed. (1991). Political Participation and American Democracy. New York:
Greenwood Press. An edited volume which investigates the roots, patterns and significance of
growing nonparticipation in American politics. An effort is made by contributors to discern
whether or not key indicators such as social condition or class status are most closely associated
with nonparticipation. The institutional structures of demobilization are also examined.
Curran, James. (1991). “Rethinking the Media as a Public Sphere,” in Peter Dahlgren & Colin
Sparks, eds., Communication and Citizenship: journalism and the public sphere in the new
media age, London: Routledge, pp. 27-57. Criticizes liberal free-market & collectivist-statist
strategies for organizing the institutions of the mass media has having significant drawbacks.
The liberal media system produces an unrepresentative media system, while the statist system
ended in state censorship. In place of these alternatives, a centrally controlled market economy
approach is proposed in which the basic terms & rules of the system by which competition is to
be conducted are centrally determined according to the public interest.
Dahl, Robert. (1989). Democracy and Its Critics, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Discusses the possibilities & limits of democracy. Democracy is defended in terms of three
principles: the Principle of Equal Consideration of Interests; the Presumption of Personal
Autonomy & the Strong Principle of Equality. Together, these principles indicate that only in
democracy every individual formulate autonomous interests, express these interests, & be
assured that these interests are considered. That is, only democracy promotes freedom, human
development & the formation of collective interests. This understanding of democracy is
process-oriented, and concentrates on the ability of citizens to have an adequate, equal
opportunity for expressing their preferences & the opportunity to evaluate the final outcome
according to these preferences. It also includes the opportunity to develop an enlightened
understanding, defined as an understanding which members would choose if they possessed full
information. Limitations of this view of democracy are discussed, including the problem of
inclusion & dilemmas raised by majority rule.
Danielson, Michael N. (1976). The Politics of Exclusion. New York: Columbia University
Press. Traces the growth of white, middle-class suburbs in the twentieth-century and the
concomitant disinvestment in inner-cities that are largely populated by people of color. It is
particularly shown that federal and local governments have subsidized this process, and thus
have contributed to a politics of racial exclusion.
Danzinger, Sheldon & Peter Gottschalk. eds. (1993). Uneven Tides: rising inequality in
America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. An edited volume which investigates causes for
the continued growth of inequality in the U.S. in recent decades. Trends in income inequality are
documented. The role of government policies in fostering inequality is demonstrated. It is
shown that these trends are closely associated with changes in the labor market. In turn, the
growth of inequality has reshaped the family structure & the distribution of family incomes.
Davidson, Roger H. (1981). "Subcommittee Government: new channels for policymaking." in
Thomas E. Mann & Norman J. Orenstein, eds. The New Congress. Washington, D.C., American
Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, pp. 99-133. Traces the historical development of
subcommittee government within Congress during the 1960s. In response to Executive power
and rising calls for inclusive decision-making, Congress in the 1960s began to delegate more
policy decisionmaking to subcommittees. This had the effect of making decisionmaking process
more open, but also more fragmented and contested. Today, individual politicians are in
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business for themselves and respond to shifting coalitions around specific issues. Although
legislators express worry about this situation, the political climate has prevented fundamental
reform from occurring.
Davis, Darren. (1995). "Exploring Black Political Intolerance," Political Behavior, 17: pp. 1-22.
It is observed that forty years of research has produced only tangential evidence of blacks'
commitment to the principles of democracy & their willingness to apply them in specific
situations. Explanations for this finding have included blacks' socialization into a rigid,
authoritarian culture, low levels of education, and psychological deficiencies. However, it is
argued that black intolerance actually functions as a political strategy designed to protect &
emancipate blacks from groups who directly threaten them. Thus, black intolerance is a
conscious & focused decision made in the context of a racist culture.
de la Garza, O. Rodolfo, Angelo Falcon & F. Chris Garcia. (1996). "Will the Real Americans
Please Stand Up: Anglo & Mexican-American support for core American values," American
Journal of Political Science, 40: pp. 335-351. Investigates the relationship between acculturation
& ethnicity in a national survey of Mexican-Americans. It is found that at all levels of
acculturation, Mexican-Americans are no less likely & often more likely to endorse values of
individualism & patriotism than are Anglos.
de Tocqueville, Alexis. (1966). Democracy in America. ed. by J.P. Mayer & Max Lerner.
Trans. by George Lawrence. New York: Harper & Row. A classic analysis of the American
society and culture based upon Tocqueville's travels through the US during the 1840s.
Tocqueville considers most every aspect of American society, from its politics to religion, to the
relationship between the races. Although he praises many aspects of democratic society in the
US, particularly its vibrant civil society, he also argues that democracies tend to produce a unique
kind of conformity and mediocrity rather than excellence in many important arenas of life,
including politics, and the arts and humanities.
Derrida, Jacques. (1976). Of Grammatology. trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press. A foundational text in the field of deconstruction which traces
the significance of a singular insight: any sign—linguistic or otherwise—is structured by
difference. One sign is distinguished from another by its difference; the traces of that difference
therefore remain within the sign, and are analyzable by a careful deconstruction of texts. One
ramification of this notion is that constructs of reason always contain the traces of its opposite,
irrationality. Thus, reason and irrationality are closely connected.
Dimaggio, Paul, John Evans & Bethany Bryson. (1996). "Have Americans' Social Attitudes
Become More Polarized?" American Journal of Sociology, 102: pp. 690-755. Little evidence of
polarization over the past two decades is found in an analysis of General Social Survey &
National Election Survey data. The only exceptions have been in the case of opinions toward
abortion & between Republican & Democratic identifiers.
Dryzek, John & Jeffrey Berejikian. (1993). "Reconstructive Democratic Theory," American
Political Science Review, 87: pp. 48-60. It is observed that democratic theory has become
disconnected from the empirical study of actual democratic discourse. To reconnect democratic
theory to empirical analysis, a reconstructive democratic theory is proposed drawing on Q
methodology. Using this methodology in a study of actually existing discourse among thirtyseven subjects, four discourses are identified: contented Republicanism; deferential
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Conservatism; disaffected populism; & private liberalism. Each of these discourses carries its
own ontology, ascription of agency, motivation & natural relationships.
Dryzek, John. (1990). Discursive Democracy: politics, policy and political science, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. Constructs a political framework for discursive democracy which
reconciles the demands of democracy with the fact of expert rationality. This framework is
constructed on the basis of two paradigms: critical rationalism & critical theory. Critical
rationalism is defined in terms of: (1) an idealized scientific community; open society, piecemeal
social engineering; experimenting society; the real-world approximation of liberal polyarchy; &
instrumental and objectivist rationality under criticism. Critical theory is defined in terms of: (1)
an idealized speech situation; (2) authentic public sphere; (3) discourse experimentation; (4)
discursive designs; (5) the real-world approximation of new social movements; & (6)
communicative rationality. Bureaucracies of liberal-democratic states are taken to stand as the
major barrier to implementation of these critical programs. The critical policy sciences are posed
against the discourse of opinion research as a viable model for democratizing the sciences. It is
concluded that expertise need not erode discursive democracy through techniques of
rationalization—but may contribute to democratic dialogue through adoption of the principles of
communicative rationality & critical rationalism.
Ehrenhalt, Alan. (1991). The United States of Ambitions: politicians, power, and the pursuit of
office. New York: Times Books. Argues that with the decline of parties, those involved in
politics from the local to the national levels must be personally entrepreneurial. That is, people
must nominate themselves. This simple fact has had tremendous consequences for the nature of
American politics: it means that most politicians will have a positive view of government & that
they will put greater emphasis on equality, openness & freedom when holding office. These
values of opennesss, equality & freedom are taken to be congruent with wider changes in our
political culture, which, while guaranteeing the opportunity to participate, do not always produce
good conditions for governance.
Eliasoph, Nina. (1997). "'Close to Home:' the work of avoiding politics," Theory and Society,
26: pp. 605-647. Presents examples from a two-year fieldwork & interview study among
volunteers, activists, and recreation groups in a West Coast suburb, demonstrates how the
language of 'close to home' worked to set boundaries around the political within this network of
individuals. Citizens tended to sound more public-minded in casual and intimate contexts and
less so in wider contexts. Thus, contrary to communitarians like Wuthnow and Bellah, it is
found that individuals did not lack a language of civic obligation, they only lacked it in certain
situations. When political language seemed dangerous, or solidarity was threatened, or the power
to change things was not at hand, individuals employed a language of political avoidance to
demarcate narrow political boundaries. This language protected a faith in the democratic process
in the face of citizens' intuited powerlessness.
Eliasoph, Nina. (1998). Avoiding Politics: how Americans produce apathy in everyday life.
New York: Cambridge University Press. Investigates how political ideas circulate within a
community drawing on an ethnographic investigation of various community groups in the
Northwest. It is found that politeness within groups functions to set very firm boundaries on
what can be questioned and discussed, and how. Most often, individuals congregated to share
community, not to talk politics. When together, groups worked to construct a definite sense of
appropriate subjectivity, which often did not include much room to be politically active. Despite
taking actions in service of public life, such as bringing blankets to the needy, etiquette prevented
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individuals from talking together to develop a more substantive political consciousness. It is
suggested that such political evaporation can only be overcome by carving out public spaces for
open-ended, broad-minded political conversation.
Elster, Jon & Aanund Hylland. eds. (1986). Foundations of Social Choice Theory. New York:
Cambridge University Press. An edited volume which lays out the fundamental precepts of
social choice theory. The fundamental problem for social theory is to find a function that links a
set of individual preferences to a social preference order such that social policies can be
explained. Difficulties in achieving this link through formal modeling are identified: including
the problem of objectionable preferences, the difficulty of judging interpersonal preferences, and
the question of values.
Elster, Jon. (1998). “Introduction,” in Elster, ed., Deliberative Democracy, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-18. It is observed that group decision-making can take place
via three avenues: arguing, bargaining and voting. Arguing and bargaining are speech acts while
voting is not. Contributors to this volume develop six reasons to prefer arguing over the other
two modes of decision-making: it reveals private information; lessens the impact of bounded
rationality; forces a particular mode of justifying demands; legitimizes the ultimate choice; is
desirable for its own sake; makes for Pareto-superior decisions; makes for better decisions in
terms of distributive justice; makes for a larger consensus; & improves the moral or intellectual
qualities of the participants.
Ely, John. (1980). Democracy and Distrust: a theory of judicial review, Cambridge: Harvard
University Press. Develops a theory of judicial review on the basis of decisions made by the
Warren Court. Theories of judicial review have been stuck between varieties of interpretivism &
non-interpretivism for some time. However, neither of these positions is tenable. An alternative
is presented which allows the court some discretion in protecting values related to participational
goals of broadened access to the processes of representative government, but that limits judges
from selecting other particular substantive goods or values. The selection of substantive values
is left to the political process, while the Court concentrates on questions of participation.
Entman, Robert. (1989). Democracy Without Citizens: media and the decay of American
politics, New York: Oxford University Press. Investigates four paradoxes of American massmediated politics: (1) that citizenship has not grown commensurately with the number of media
outlets; (2) that journalists have become more aggressive without becoming more responsible;
(3) that the media have withstood great pressure to reform despite their sensitivity to other kinds
of pressure; & (4) that journalism seems at once extremely power & vulnerable at the same time.
These paradoxes arise out of a peculiar dilemma: that to become sophisticated citizens,
Americans would need high-quality, independent journalism; but to produce such journalism,
news organizations would need sophisticated citizens to stay in business. The result is rampant
democracy without citizens. Various remedies are proposed, including strengthening public
broadcasting & providing public subsidies for partisan media.
Etzioni, Amitai. (1996). The New Golden Rule: community and morality in a democratic
society, New York: Basic Books. A communitarian blue-print for the good society which is
structured to privilege two values: a thickly ordered society that mobilizes people to the service
of common purposes; & a respect for individual autonomy. This blueprint seeks to satisfy the
sense that the gap between individual preferences & social commitments ought to be reduced not
by forcibly imposing new responsibilities but by expanding the real of duties individuals affirm
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as moral responsibilities. Autonomy in this sense is the freedom to realize one’s best social self.
It is suggested that the last thirty years in the US have been characterized by the deterioration of a
moral order brought about by an expansion of unaccountable autonomy. To reverse this process,
it is suggested that the US might slowdown adjustments to globalization, create more community
jobs, institute work sharing & job security measures, maintain a basic social safety net, &
willingly limit consumption. Deliberations within the new, revitalized civil society should strive
not to affront the deepest moral commitments of other groups & use a language of needs &
interests rather than of rights. Institutions might help this dialogue occur by creating small
forums for moral dialogue, perhaps even in cyberspace.
Fairclough, Norman. (1989). Language and Power. New York: Longman. Examines the
relationship of language use and social power drawing on examples from modern British society.
It is shown that many common sense linguistic assumptions serve to reproduce unequal power
relations. These assumptions are properly viewed as ideologies in that they are a means of
legitimizing existing social relations through the recurrence of ordinary ways of talking. To
illuminate these assumptions, and thus denaturalize ordinary language use, a critical language
approach is developed. This approach is devised by borrowing from a number of other language
study traditions, including discourse analysis, sociolingustics, conversational analysis and
linguistics.
Farrell, Thomas. (1993). Norms of Rhetorical Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press,
1993. A rhetorical culture is defined as an institutional formation in which motives of competing
parties are intelligible, audiences available, expressions reciprocal, norms translatable & silences
noticeable. Such a rhetorical culture for our time is constructed on the basis of revisions of
Aristotelian principles of rhetoric. These principles include a form of practical reason in which
partiality is used as a resource by which individuals may see themselves in others. Recovering
these principles entails attaching modern vocabularies to traditional norms; turning toward the
constraints of dialogue & reciprocity as normative guides for the on-going practice of rhetoric; &
providing an enlarged sense of the forum & occasions for rhetorical practice. The resulting
rhetorical culture is imagined as a revised Habermasian public sphere in which context provides
the crucial cognitive resources for rhetoric as a figurative language of conversational and public
coherence.
Fendrich, James Max. (1993). Ideal Citizens: the legacy of the civil rights movement, Albany:
State University of New York Press. Assesses the long-range consequences of participation in
the civil rights movement by tracing the careers of prominent ex-activists in Talahassee, FL since
the 1960s. It is found that 1960s activists are ideal citizens, still exercising their citizenship
rights & active in communities. This was particularly true for African Americans, less so for
white activists. However, both groups demonstrated higher levels of civic engagement than their
non-protesting counterparts.
Fischer, Frank & John Forester, eds. (1993). The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and
Planning, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Considers the implications for policy analysis of
the post-positivist turn toward argumentation in American public culture. Viewing policy
planning as argument means that more attention is paid to the day-to-day work that analysis do &
the language by which they justify their proposals. It also means paying greater attention to the
socio-political context in which policy planners work.
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Fischer, Frank. (1993). “Policy Discourse and the Politics of Washington Think Tanks,” in
Frank Fischer & John Forester, eds., The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 21-42. Argues that liberal elites in the 1960s adopted a
technocratic strategy which sought to supplant the less sophisticated opinions of the common
citizen with technical arguments. The success of this strategy provoked a conservative backlash.
However, instead of returning policy discussions to ordinary citizens, conservatives politicized
the policy planning process. The result has been the continued marginalization of citizen
participation in policy discussions. It is concluded that new political institutions must be built
that permit the public to engage in a much wider range of discourse.
Fisher, Walter. (1989). Human Communication as Narration: toward a philosophy of reason,
value and action, Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1989. It is argued that all
forms of human communication must be understood as stories, symbolic interpretations of the
world occurring in time and shaped by history, culture and character. On this view, particular
forms of discourse should be considered "good reasons," rather than arguments. That is,
arguments are merely value-laden warrants for believing and acting in certain ways. This form of
narrative rationality is an extension of Chaim Perelman's notion of argumentative competence,
adding two new criteria: coherence and fidelity.
Fishkin, James. (1991). Democracy and Deliberation: new directions in democratic reform,
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Presents the deliberative opinion poll as a
mechanism for reconciling the demands of democracy with those of deliberation. In recent years
American politics have become more democratic, but at the sacrifice of careful deliberation. To
satisfy an ideal democracy, three conditions must be met: political equality, non-tyranny by the
majority & deliberation. Political equality is defined as an institutional arrangement in which
every individual's preferences are considered & everyone is allowed to formulate their
preferences. By non-tyranny is meant that policies must not end in severe deprivations to anyone
when other policies were available. And by deliberation is meant the refinement of ordinary
opinion by discussion into enlightened understanding. To fulfill these conditions, new structures
of representing public opinion are proposed. Among these is the deliberative opinion poll. This
poll is defended as serving the goals of both democratic equality & deliberation in the context of
a large-scale mass-mediated society, and as being preferable to direct democratic proposals.
Fletcher, George. (1996). "The Case for Tolerance," Social Philosophy and Policy, 13: pp. 229239. A complex notion of tolerance is defended against its critics. This complex notion of
tolerance allows individuals to distance themselves from behavior with which they disapprove
while allowing that behavior to continue. Notions of respect or indifference carry moral costs
which tolerance does not fall prey to. Tolerance is not perfect, but it enables contrary ways of
life to co-exist.
Foss, Sonja & Cindy Griffin. (1995). "Beyond Persuasion: a proposal for an invitational
rhetoric," Communication Monographs, 62: pp. 2-18. Argues that most theories of rhetoric place
a positive value on dominating & changing others. An alternative rhetoric is proposed that is
grounded in feminist principles. This rhetoric stresses an invitation to understanding, equality,
immanent value & self-determination. Its purpose is to construct a public space of safety, value
and freedom.
Foucault, Michel. (1965). Madness and Civilization: a history of insanity in the Age of Reason.
trans. by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books. Traces the history of madness in
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Western Europe from the end of the 16th century through the 18th century. It is argued that
madness could only become a major trope in the consciousness of Europe when rationality was
embraced as an ideal. Madness came to serve as the repressed unconscious of a culture
enamored with the notion of pure rationality. Thus, rather than a term described a fixed medical
condition, the notion of madness has been variable, dependent on the historical context and the
manner in which it has been juxtaposed to other seminal cultural tropes.
Fox, Charles & Hugh Miller. (1995). Postmodern Public Administration: toward discourse,
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Counterposes a discourse theory of public administration to the
orthodox theory & its main rival, communitarianism. According to orthodox theory, public
administration ought to work through a representative democratic accountability feedback loop.
Failures of this loop engendered a communitarian response that sought to interrupt the loop by
directly accessing citizens. Drawing on the work of Jurgen Habermas particularly, a discourse
theory is proposed as the only viable way to take account of the postmodern condition. Within
this model, policies are debated through argumentation warranted by several conditions:
sincerity, situation-regarding intentionality, willing attention, & substantive contribution.
Nascent forms of this discourse model are found in public policy networks, interagency
consortia, & community task forces.
Fox, Harrison W. Jr. & Susan Webb Hammond. (1975). "The Growth of Congressional Staffs."
in Harvey C. Mansfield, ed. Congress Against the President. Proceedings of the American
Academy of Political Science 32: pp. 112-124. Explores the consequences of the rapid growth in
congressional staffs during the post-World War Two period. It is shown that staff sizes have
grown exponentially at all levels, from personal to committee offices. In part, this growth has
been spurred by the greater demands on the time of Congressional members, & by the greater
need for publicity of their initiatives. These staffs are not passive conduits of information, but
actively shape the kinds of issues and the manner in which they are addressed.
Frank, Robert. (1988). Passions Within Reason: the strategic role of the emotions, New York:
W.W. Norton. Argues that emotion may be central to reason, because individuals actions to
solve public problems often involve commitments to behave in ways that may later prove
contrary to the individual's interests. Emotions such as guilt, anger, envy and love can motivate
individuals to act in ways contrary to a narrow construal of self-interest. A commitment model is
proposed which suggests that people can make reasonable inferences about character traits in
others, & that these inferences may guide action. This model is contrasted to a self-interest
model which suggests that individuals are always guided by narrow self-interests. It is shown
that in a variety of situations, people proceed on the basis of reasonable emotional inferences.
Moreover, these inferences may open paths of action that are closed off within a strict selfinterest model.
Fraser, Nancy. (1989). Unruly Practices: power, discourse, and gender in contemporary social
theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. A collection of essays which engage in
various political-theoretical debates of the 1980s. Among these debates are the contribution of
Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and Jurgen Habermas to political theory &
political praxis. Of particular importance is the contribution of these authors to the development
of a theoretically and politically savvy feminist political theory.
Fraser, Nancy. (1997). Justice Interruptus: critical reflections on the post-socialist condition,
New York: Routledge. The post-socialist condition is defined as a sense of skepticism & doubt
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that pervades the Left after the 1989 revolutions. It consists in the lack of a credible alternative
to the present order; a shift in the grammar of claims-making to group rights; & a resurgent
economic liberalism. Essays in this volume are dedicated to moving beyond this impasse. They
embrace a politics of identity that can be wedded to a politics of social equality. And they argue
for a revised Habermasian public sphere that eliminates social equality; allows the production of
a variety of public spheres; considers private as well as public issues; & allows both for strong &
weak publics.
Frohock, Fred. (1997). "The Boundaries of Public Reason," American Political Science Review,
91: pp. 833-844. Liberalism assumes that a shared form of merit reasoning separate from
historical or political influences may adjudicate between incompatible beliefs & interests of
various social groups. It is shown that this view of public reason is unintelligible in conditions of
deep pluralism, when social disputes are profound & very divisive. In place of merit reason, a
form of non-computational reasoning is proposed that allows collective terms to dominate simple
merit adjudication. These terms require a survey of considerations beyond the merits of the case
at hand and thereby open public reason to the more general needs of the political society. Thus,
the juridical, merit form of reasoning is transcended by a more expansive sense of public reason.
Fullinwider, Robert. (1995). "Citizenship, Individualism, and Democratic Politics," Ethics, 105:
pp. 497-515. Defends a version of Rawlsian individualism against radical critics such as Iris
Marion Young, Bonnie Honig & Chantal Mouffe. It is suggested that it may be possible for
individuals to leave behind their particularities on entering the public sphere (to become
"citizens") and retain them at another level (but remain Baptists, gay, etc.). Thus, the universal
category opens the possibility for particular individuals to enter the public realm and voice their
experiences and concerns.
Gallois, Cynthia. (1993). "The Language and Communication of Emotion," American
Behavioral Scientist, 36: pp. 309-338. Reviews research on the universality and group-based
specificity of emotional language and communication. This research is divided into three
traditions: the experience of emotion, the social skills involved communicating & reading
emotion, & the social rules, codes & styles that structure the communication of emotion.
Gallois, Cynthia. (1994). "Group Membership, Social Rules, and Power: a social-psychological
perspective on emotional communication," Journal of Pragmatics, 22: pp. 301-324. Investigates
three contexts that cause communication problems for many people: self-disclosure of painful
emotions and events, conflict in marriage and assertive communication drawing on a review of
the literature on emotional communication. It is observed that the literature has made two
opposing claims: a more inter-dependent self-concept will lead to more and less intense
expression of emotion. These contradictions are resolved through appeal to cultural rules about
emotional expression, the context, the relative power of interactants, and the motivation to
maintain the relationship. Together, these factors imply that people communicate their emotions
in difficult contexts using strategies that maximize their own comfort and sense of power, and
that these strategies are closely tied to socio-cultural power differences (such as race and gender).
Gamson, William. (1992). Talking Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Investigates how people talk about politics & the influence of the mass media on these
conversations drawing on focus group discussions on four topics: affirmative action, the ArabIsraeli conflict, plant closings, & nuclear power. It is found that people use a variety of
resources, including media discourse, popular wisdom & experiential knowledge to develop
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understandings of these issues. Those who employed cultural strategies were most likely to be
influenced by the media, while those who used personal & integrated strategies were relatively
more immune to the media. Proximity to & engagement with the issue determined whether or
not these resources would be put together into an integrated resource strategy. On some
occasions & for some groups, particularly for engaged white & black groups, these integrated
resource strategies would produce cohesive collection frames.
Ganguly, Keya. (1992). "Accounting for Others: feminism and representation," in Lana F.
Rakow, Women Making Meaning: new feminist directions in communication, New York:
Routledge, pp. 60-82. Discusses feminist contributions to the politics of representation. Efforts
to limit representation of women to fixed categories are resisted in favor of a process-oriented
understanding. To get at the processes of representation, interpretive constructions of the
audience are favored over sociological analyses. Recent feminist post-colonialist writings are
discussed as exemplars of efforts to create more nuanced, process-oriented understandings of
how representation is produced in practice.
Gargarella Roberto. (1998). “Full Representation, Deliberation and Impartiality,” in Jon Elster,
ed., Deliberative Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 260-280. Suggests
that to fulfill the criteria of both deliberation & full representation, & to create impartial decisionmaking processes, substantial changes are necessary in the present representative system. These
changes include: (1) the acknowledgment of radical pluralism & heterogeneity; (2) the
abandonment of the notion that politics is restricted to parliamentarian debates; & (3) rejection of
the notion that more impartial outcomes will be produced simply by introducing more
deliberation. Instead, institutions must be amended to reinforce impartiality.
Gellner, Ernest. (1992). Reason and Culture: the historic role of rationality and rationalism,
Oxford: Blackwell. Presents a history of rationalism in European culture from Descartes,
through Kant & Hume, into the present. Although Descartes believed he had revealed an
inherent, unitary form of rational thinking, he in fact had only opened the way for the
construction of a culturally specific version of this practice. Rooted in efforts to gain autonomy
from tradition, particularly religious tradition, rationalism in European history evolved in a series
of debates over the possibility of knowing the world in an uncontroverted manner. Durkheim
perhaps sums up received opinion when he argues that rationalism is poly-functional, instilled in
particular societies, & oriented to providing members of a community with the same
compulsions. This rationalism may not end in true knowledge, but it provides the motive force
behind human creativity. The transformation from this form of rationalism to the bureaucratic
rationalism described by Weber is taken to be the biggest single event in modern European
history.
Gibson, James. (1993). "Political Freedom: a socio-psychological analysis," in George Marcus
& Russell Hanson, Reconsidering the Democratic Public, University Park, PA: The
Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 113-138. Investigates how widespread perceptions of
political freedom are in the US & the origins of these perceptions drawing on survey data.
Freedom is defined as the ability to formulate preferences, signify these preferences to others, &
have these preferences weighed equally in the conduct of government. It is found that blacks are
much more likely to perceive constraints on their freedom than whites. Further, a substantial
number of both blacks & whites feel that the government would not allow them conventional
means of political participation. A majority of respondents also felt that expression of political
opinions would have unwelcome repercussions from friends and family. Thus, political freedom
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is not widely perceived in the US. The origins of this finding are traced to four variables, social
class, political involvement, ideology & personality. More education, political involvement, less
rigid dogmatism & health personality traits are strongly associated with perceptions of freedom.
Giddens, Anthony. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: self and society in the late modern age.
Stanford: Stanford University Press. Examines the emergence of new mechanisms of selfidentity which are shaped by & shape, the institutions of modernity. Modern social life is
defined as institutionally self-reflexive, & radically decontextualized from traditional
instantiations of time and space. The result is a pervasive sense of doubt, uncertainty and risk.
Individuals within this society continuously and self-reflexively organize their lives as a project
unfolding in the context of multiple choices as filtered through abstract systems. In turn, this
understanding of the self has produced new senses of commitment, trust & intimacy. Moreover,
it has turned politics toward greater consideration of moral issues & dilemmas.
Gilens, Martin. (1995). "Racial Attitudes and Opposition to Welfare," The Journal of Politics,
57(1995): pp. 994-1014. Examines the role of racial attitudes in shaping white Americans'
opposition to welfare. It is found that controlling for economic self-interest, individualism &
egalitarianism, racial attitudes are the most important source of opposition to welfare among
whites. The stereotype of the black as lazy is found to be particularly widespread.
Gilens, Martin. (1996). "'Race Coding' and White Opposition to Welfare," American Political
Science Review, 90: pp. 593-604. Assesses the extent to which white Americans' opposition to
welfare is rooted in their attitudes toward blacks drawing on survey data. It is found that racial
attitudes are the single most important influence on whites' welfare views. While whites hold
similar views of black & white welfare mothers, their views of black mothers are more politically
potent & generate greater opposition to welfare.
Giles, Howard, Angie Williams, Diane M. Mackie & Francine Rosselli. (1995). "Reactions to
Anglo- and Hispanic-American Accented Speakers: affect, identity, persuasion, and the EnglishOnly Controversy," Language & Communication, 15: pp. 107-120. An investigation in which
subjects listened to pro and con messages in either Anglo or Hispanic-accented English. It is
found that speakers were only influential when their message was not congruent with their
identity: Anglos speaking against EoM; Hispanics speaking for EoM. In general, it is found that
Anglos experienced more happiness and feelings of national identity when ethnically-similar
sounding speakers argued against English exclusivity.
Ginsberg, Benjamin. (1986). The Captive Public: how mass opinion promotes state power.
New York: Basic Books. A critical history of the rise of the public opinion industries which
argues that they have essentially led to the domestication of the public and the promotion of state
power. By appearing to cater to the opinions of ordinary citizens while in fact narrowing their
ability to participate in the political process, the state succeeds in using opinion polling to
legitimize itself in the name of democracy.
Gitlin, Todd. (1980). The Whole World is Watching: mass media in the making and unmaking
of the New Left. Berkeley: University of California Press. A major study of the mass media's
role in shaping the influence of the student movement during the 1960s. By analyzing news
frames of this movement, Gitlin demonstrates that the news media function as crucial filters and
shapers of this social movement's public image, often in ways that are detrimental to the longterm goals of that movement. Further, it is shown that social movement leaders end up
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participating in this process, most notably by making themselves available as "stars" of the
movement.
Gittell, Marilyn. (1980). Limits to Citizen participation: the decline of community
organizations, Thousand Oaks, CA, Sage. A comparative study of sixteen organizations’
leaderships and memberships involved in education policy-making in three cities. It is found that
these organizations had little influence on the decision-making process. The agenda of lowerincome organizations was defined by professionals, with little input from the citizens they serve.
Further, self-initiated middle-class citizen organizations faced the barrier of professionally-run,
mandated and service organizations which approach citizens as consumers & clients.
Policymakers interested in stimulating citizen participation are urged to take several steps:
encourage organizations to become independent from external funding sources; do not mandate
community organizations; & decentralize policymaking.
Glasser, Theodore & Charles Salmon. eds. (1995). Public Opinion and the Communication of
Consent. New York: Guilford Press. An edited volume which considers the nature of public
opinion within systems of mass communication, explores connections between individual &
mass opinion, & addresses the missing link between public opinion and social action. Sections
are devoted to the nature of public opinion, the institution of public opinion historically, the
social & psychological contexts of public opinion, systems of mass communication, & the
relation of public opinion to the promise of democracy. The book is intended to represent the
state-of-the-art research in this area & to develop an implicit model of the way in which public
opinion is produced through a cycle of conversation-opinion-organization-action.
Goldberg, Ellis. (1996). "Thinking About How Democracy Works," Politics & Society, 24: pp.
7-19. A review of Robert Putnam's book, Making Democracy Work. It is suggested that
Putnam's two variables, civic culture & social capital, do not undergird effective democratic
institutions, as he claims. This is shown in a reconsideration of the evidence from his case study
of North & South Italy.
Golebiowska, Ewa. (1995). "Individual Value Priorities, Education and Political Tolerance,"
Political Behavior, 17: pp. 23-48. Argues that increases in political tolerance may be tied to the
broad-based value shift currently sweeping through advanced industrial societies. Higher
education is shown to be strongly associated with greater tolerance. It is suggested that this
connection exists because higher education leads to individual value priorities that are conducive
to greater openness & political diversity.
Gould Carol. (1988). Rethinking Democracy: freedom and social cooperation in politics,
economy and society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Makes a philosophical argument
for the primacy of freedom and the equal right to the conditions of self-development, not only in
politics, but in the economy and other areas of social life as well. Freedom is defined not only as
a capacity of free choice, but also as an activity of self-development. Both social cooperation
and access to material conditions are necessary for self-development, and so necessary for the
exercise of freedom. On this basis, it is argued that individuals must have the equal right to
participate in those decisions that concern the common activities which are among the conditions
for self-development. These areas of joint decision-making will include not only the political
domain, but also the domains of social & economic life. Thus, the value of individual freedom is
not only compatible with social cooperation, but the two are largely inter-dependent. To realize
this democratic theory, several personal traits are needed in the democratic citizen: initiative, a
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disposition to social reciprocity which combines the requirements of tolerance and respect; openmindedness; commitment and responsibility; & communicativeness & sharing.
Granovetter, Mark, (1973). "The Strength of Weak Ties," American Journal of Sociology, 78:
pp. 1360-1380. It is argued that the degree of overlap of two individuals' friendship networks
varies directly with the strength of their tie to one another. This allows relatively weak ties to
have tremendous influence on the diffusion of information, mobility opportunity and community
organization. It is concluded that relations between groups may be just as important social
bonding as relations within groups.
Grice, Paul. (1989). "Logic in Conversation," in Grice, Studies in the Way of Words,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 22-40. Introduces four conversational maxims: a
maxim of quantity: make your contribution as informative but no more informative than is
required; a maxim of quality: do not say what you believe to be false & do not say that for which
you lack adequate evidence; a maxim of relation: be relevant; & a maxim of manner: avoid
obscurity, ambiguity, prolixity, and disorderliness. These maxims are taken to support the
Cooperative Principle: that a conversational contribution should be made as required, at the
stage at which this requirement occurs, according to the accepted purpose or direction of the talk
exchange in which one is engaged. It is contended that these maxims are essentially connected
with certain general features of discourse & that they not only are followed in ordinary
conversation, but should be followed. Moreover, it is shown that they are involved not in the
meaning of what is actually said in conversation, but in the implication of what is said. Hence,
they are conversational "implicatures."
Gumperz, John & Jenny Cook-Gumperz. (1982). "Introduction: language and the
communication of social identity," in John Gumperz, ed., Language and Social Identity,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-21. Presents a sociolinguistic framework for
analyzing the role of communicative phenomena in the exercise of power & control & the
production & reproduction of social identity. It is suggested that in late-capitalist, highly
bureaucratic & technicist welfare state, communication becomes the key avenue for the
establishment of personal rights & entitlements. New assertions of ethnic identity, which are
established in language, often contradict the preferred modes of communication in mainstream
institutional spaces. The result is conflict between communicative modes which usually ends in
a subordination of minority groups' interests & needs & the ideological assertion of the dominant
group's status.
Gumperz, John. (1984). "Communicative Competence Revisited," in Deborah Schiffrin, ed.,
Meaning, Form, and Use in Context: linguistic applications, Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press, pp. 278-289. Argues that the capacity to contextualize & thus make sense of
what is heard in any given conversational interaction is itself governed by cognitive abilities that
share many of the characteristics of grammatical competence. Conversations may be governed
by general & universal organizing principles, but these principles only act as guidelines that give
rise to expectations of behavior. This perspective indicates that cultural background & culturally
channeled interactive experience may determine the acquisition of contextual conventions & thus
the sense-making process.
Gunther, Marc. (1994). The House that Roone Built: the inside story of ABC news. Boston:
Little, Brown & Co. Traces the rise of Roone Arledge at ABC News from his days as the creator
of The Wide World of Sports to his to the top of ABC news. Arledge is generally credited with
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transforming the nature of network news by incorporating entertainment values into its
production and delivery. From packaging journalists as television stars to introducing new
camera techniques such as slow motion, Arledge set a new standard for the production of
television news. In so doing, he pioneered the sense that network news could not only be
entertaining, it could become an important source of revenue for its corporate owners.
Gutmann, Amy & Dennis Thompson. (1996). Democracy and Disagreement, Cambridge: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Four forms of moral disagreement are outlined:
scarcity, limited generosity, incomplete understanding & incompatible values. Sketches a form
of deliberative democracy grounded in the notion of reciprocity (defined as the ability to
recognize that position is worthy of moral respect even when it may be interpreted as morally
wrong) as a response to the problem of moral disagreement. Reciprocity, as opposed to
impartiality or prudence, is a more attractive basis on which to conduct deliberation because it
allows moral problems to be acknowledged, expressed, and discussed in an atmosphere of
mutual respect. Other qualities of an admirable deliberative process include publicity &
accountability (defined as the requirement that everyone should given an account to everyone
else. To create a deliberative sphere animated by these principles, several other background
conditions must be apparent: basic liberty, basic opportunity & fair opportunity. Together, these
principles of reciprocity, publicity & accountability, when acted out under conditions of liberty &
opportunity, can produce an admirable deliberative process that is capable of meeting the
challenge of moral disagreement.
Guttmann, Amy & Dennis Thompson. (1990). "Moral Conflict and Political Consensus,"
Ethics, 101: pp. 64-88. Argues that a consensus on higher-order principles must permit greater
moral disagreement about policy & greater moral agreement on how to disagree about policy
than contemporary liberals have allowed. Two kinds of principles are identified: principles of
preclusion (which policies deserve to be on the political agenda) & principles of accommodation
(how should parties disagree on morals). Liberals concentrate on the first of these kinds of
principles, and in so doing miss how agreement is also needed on the way in which people hold
or express positions. At the core of these principles is that of mutual respect.
Guttmann, Amy. (1993). "The Challenge of Multi-culturalism in Political Ethics," Philosophy
and Public Affairs, 22: pp. 171-206. Assesss three responses to the challenge of multiculturalism
to social justice: cultural relativism, political relativism & comprehensive universalism. A form
of deliberative universalism is proposed which offers an alternative to the cultural relativist
position that social justice is what any particular culture says it is, to the political relativist view
that social justice is the outcome of legitimate procedures & to the comprehensive universalist
view that social justice is a set of substantive moral prescriptions. Deliberative universalism
defends a noncomprehensive set of substantive priciples that provide the necessary conditiosn for
deliberation about fundamental moral conflicts, along with a set of procedural principles that
support deliberation about such conflicts. Deliberative universalists do not believe in universal
morals, but only in the moral equivalent of a universal grammar.
Guttmann, Amy. (1995). "Civic Education and Social Diversity," Ethics, 105: pp. 557-579.
Argues that political liberalism (as espoused by John Rawls) does not offer a form of civic
education that is more amenable to social diversity than comprehensive liberalism (as in John
Stuart Mill). Both camps agree that teaching toleration & mutual respect is important. But
political liberals deceive themselves in believing that this may be enough. At times, parents may
push unliberal ideas on their children which contradict the demands of toleration & self-respect.
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In this situation, the state has a duty to step in & enforce a comprehensive view of liberalism. By
supporting these virtues in the face of parental opposition, the state helps to create a democratic
citizenry capable of respecting diverse ways of life.
Habermas, Jurgen. (1975). Legitimation Crisis. Boston: Beacon Press. Traces the typical
patterns of economic, political & social crisis in advanced capitalist societies to a basic crisis of
legitimation. Today, the economic system functions in close relation to the state, which is
charged with regulating its excesses and ameliorating its crises. Thus, economic crises are
routinely shifted into the political system by the government. Of course, the government is
unable to finally solve these crises, but must continually confront them. As this is happening, the
political system suffers a crisis of motivation, as the occupational & educational system are
unable to maintain the public's motivation to engage in politics, and thus individuals turn more to
the consumption of material goods to sustain their psychic selves. The combination of political
and cultural crises produces a legitimation crisis for the state. That legitimation is dependent
upon its ability to regulate, or to appear to regulate, the economy well enough that consumable
goods appear to be available to all individuals equally.
Habermas, Jurgen. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action. trans. by Thomas McCarthy.
Boston: Beacon Press. A major two-volume theory of communication and rationality in modern
societies. Communicative rationality is defined as inter-subjective interactions that take place
within the life world in the form of verbal interactions. This notion is contrasted to an
instrumental notion of rationality more appropriate to functionalist world of systems. The notion
of communicative rationality is developed further to critique the dominant sociopathologies of
modern societies, and prior theories which have sought to take account of these sociopathologies.
Habermas, Jurgen. (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an inquiry into
a category of bourgeois society. trans. by Thomas Burger. Cambridge: MIT Press. A work that
has launched a growing literature on the nature of reasoned deliberation in modern late-industrial
democracies. The book traces the development of a bourgeois public sphere independent of the
state on the one hand and the private sphere on the other in 17th century France & Great Britain.
It is argued that this public sphere embodied a notion of rational deliberation that has remained
central to democratic theory ever since. As such, this public sphere functions as both a historical
reality and a critical norm by which to evaluate its recent disintegration in the face of the growth
of bureaucratic political systems and a commercial mass media.
Hall, John A., ed. (1995). Civil Society: theory, history, comparison, Cambridge: Polity Press.
An edited volume which investigates the nature of civil society & its possibilities & limitations
in emerging democracies. The history of civil society is traced from the 18th century to the
present. The relation of civil society to capitalism, nationalism & various state structures is
discussed. The notion of civil society is generally endorsed, though disagreement is registered as
to its precise nature & the dangers it faces from other institutions & social trends.
Hallin, Daniel & Paolo Mancini. (1984). "Speaking of the President: political structure and
representational form in U.S. and television news." Theory and Society 13: 829-850. Compares
the presentation of news in the United States and Italy during President Reagan's trip to Europe in
June, 1982. It is found that the American broadcasts are more unified, tended to concentrate on
Reagan himself rather than his party, were more visually-oriented, and paid attention to ordinary
individuals more than the Italian broadcasts. These differences are traced to variances in the
political economic structures of politics and the news media in the two countries.
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Hallin, Daniel. (1986). The Uncensored War: the media and Vietnam. New York: Oxford
University Press. A study of the news media's coverage of the Vietnam War during the 1960s
which demonstrates several things: (1) that the news media generally follow the lines of debate
within official Washington circles; (2) that its coverage therefore did not turn critical toward the
war until Washington elites themselves began to disagree; & (3) that, therefore, news media
coverage of the war cannot have "lost" the war for the US by demoralizing the public. Rather,
the news media routines and practices put them very close to elite opinion—and it was only when
elite opinion changed that the media's coverage of the war changed.
Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison & John Jay. (1982). The Federalist Papers. New York:
Bantam. The classic statement of American democratic theory 85 separate letters written in
defense of the proposed Constitution and published in New York newspapers. In these papers,
James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay attempt to account for the major criticisms of
the Constitution, and in so doing offer the best explanation for how the framers imagined the
document would work in practice. Madison's Federalist #10 is perhaps the most famous of these
papers, as it overturns two hundred years of conventional wisdom that democracies could only
flourish in small, homogeneous societies. But several of the other papers remain crucial
statements of the purpose and function of the three branches of government.
Hardin, Russell. (1996). "Trustworthiness," Ethics, 107: pp. 26-42. Discusses several devices
which may be used to ensure trust between parties to an interaction. These devices include
institutional constraints & safeguards & social constraints of conventions & norms. These
devices are intended to make it in the individual's interest to be trustworthy. But the self-interest
of the party who is trusted is taken to be the best insurance that one will act in a trustworthy
manner.
Harris, Sandra. (1995). "Pragmatics and Power," Journal of Pragmatics, 23: PP. 117-135. Sets
out to ascertain on the basis of actual language behavior whether "universal pragmatics,"
especially Grice's Maxims and Habermas' validity claims, can provide a sustainable conceptual
framework for understanding the relationship between pragmatics and power. Data on
magistrate/defendant and police/suspect discourse are examined. Three points are argued: (1)
that the asymmetrical distribution of speech acts prevents validity claims from being raised or
challenged except by institutional representatives; (2) that truth comes to be defined as what is
accepted explicitly as shared knowledge; & (3) that any definition of communicative competence
must be formulated in such a way that challenges to authority or the right to speak are not labeled
inappropriate or incompetent language behavior. Thus, neither Grice nor Habermas provide a
conceptual framework which can easily be applied to natural language data. Grice's maxim of
cooperation is clearly insufficient, while Habermas distinction between strategic and
communicative discourse is difficult to sustain.
Harrison, Bennett & Barry Bluestone. (1988). The Great U-Turn. New York: Basic Books,
1988. A critique of Reaganomics which demonstrates the adverse effect of Reagan's policies on
the standard of living of most Americans. Data are provided which show that average wages fell,
family incomes stagnated, & wealth became more polarized during the 1980s.
Hartz, Louis. (1955). The Liberal Tradition in America: an interpretation of American political
thought since the revolution. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Traces American political history
based upon the foundational assumption that America, unlike Europe, began as a basically liberal
society. Liberal habits of mind are engrained in the American psyche, and therefore go a long
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way towards explaining the unique cultural patterns of American political life. It is suggested
that the greatest danger to this liberal mindset is not the danger of majority faction, as James
Madison supposed, but the danger of unanimity, or the "tyranny of opinion," which Tocqueville
foresaw. Implications of America's fundamental liberality are discussed in the context of its
relationship with Europe and, more importantly, its then-current cold war relationship with the
Soviet Union.
Harvey, David. (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural
change. Oxford: Blackwell. Traces a relationship between shifting the rise of postmodernist
cultural forms, the emergence of flexible modes of capital accumulation, and a new round of
time-space compression within capitalism. These changes are described in terms of
developments in architecture and urban design, post-fordist methods of economic production, the
experience of time and space and the more general logic of capital.
Hassan, Ihab. (1987). The Postmodern Turn: essays in postmodern theory and culture.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press. A collection of essays written over two decades which
reflect upon the nature & significance of postmodernism. Postmodernism is located within
various traditions of 19th century European culture, including romanticism, modernism &
mannerism. Postmodernism is briefly contrasted to modernism in terms of several dichotomies,
& particular manifestations of postmodernism in science, art & society are examined. The
relevance of postmodern criticism to literary theory is demonstrated in several analytic essays on
various texts. The fate of postmodernism in the near future is briefly discussed.
Heelas, Paul, Scott Lash & Paul Morris. eds. (1996). Detraditionalization: critical reflections
on authority and identity. Cambridge: Blackwell. An edited volume which investigates the
extent to which modern societies have moved beyond tradition into a post-traditional or
postmodern period. Broady, two responses are considered: that traditional & (post)modern
aspects of society coexist together, or that they are radically discontinuous. Contributors to the
volume take various stances toward these responses as they review the nature, evidence for &
significance of detraditionalization.
Herbst, Susan. (1993). Numbered Voices: how opinion polling has shaped American politics.
Chicago. The University of Chicago Press. Traces the history of public opinion in the US from
the mid-19th century to the present, paying particular attention to the growth of quantitative
descriptions as authoritative sources on the public's mood in the 20th century. It is shown that
opinion polling has become central to modern American politics, but that this instrument has not
necessarily led to enhanced public debate. Rather, scientific polling often leads elites to ignore
dimensions of public problems that fall outside the categories it employs to monitor public
debate.
Hirsch, Alan. (1991). Talking Heads: political talk shows and their pundits. New York: St.
Martin's Press. A critical analysis of television political talk programs such as The McLaughlin
Group & Cross Fire. It is argued that these shows do a mediocre job of promoting political
debate, and in many instances they do much harm, especially by narrowing the range of dialogue.
Moreover, these shows are bad for the careers of newspaper columnists. This harm is discussed
in the context of profiles of six television talkshow commentators, including William F. Buckley,
George Will, James Kilpatrick, Robert Novak, Patrick Buchanan & Sam Donaldson.
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Hirst, Paul. (1994). Associative Democracy: new forms of economic and social governance,
Amherst, MA: The University of Amherst Press. Makes an argument for voluntary associations
as a principle political form for solving vexing political issues left in the vacuum of the decline
of social collectivism and liberal democracy in the late 20th century. Three principles are
identified as central to associative democracy: primary associations may be forms of democratic
governance; the state should be pluralized & federalized; & democracy is best understood as a
form of communication. Within this model, associations are to be publicly funded, will provide
welfare services to their members & will allow members to exit annually. This model will only
be enacted through the multiplication of diverse efforts animated by citizens' initiative. It is
defended from its critics as a reasonable alternative in the current political climate.
Hochschild, Jennifer. (1993). "Disjunction and Ambivalence in Citizens' Political Outlooks," in
George Marcus & Russell Hanson, Reconsidering the Democratic Public, University Park, PA:
The Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 187-210. Analyzes the way in which citizens'
politics are characterized both by disjunction & ambivalence. Disjunction is defined as the case
in which the boundary between two arenas of life is problematized. Ambivalence is defined as
contradictory views within particular arenas. Disjunctions & ambivalences are shown to occur as
individuals respond to their circumstances. Whether disjunctions and ambivalences are resolved
depends on the institutions, ideas and political movements available to them. Changes in social
and political circumstances also alter disjunctions and ambivalence. A person's role in a given
setting also shapes how he or she feels disjunctions or ambivalences. It is concluded that
situations of disjunction and ambivalence demonstrate that politics is crucial in the resolution of
political issues.
Hochschild, Jennifer. (1995). Facing Up to the American Dream: race, class, and the soul of
the nation, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Argues that a consistent ideology animates the
American culture. This ideology, termed the “American Dream,” suggests that anyone,
regardless of race, class, gender or other ascriptive characteristic, can succeed through individual
effort & virtue. Challenges to this dream related to racial relations over the last thirty years are
discussed. It is shown that the gap between poor & middle class African Americans has widened
in this period. As this gap has widened, African Americans in both classes have become very
discouraged about the whether the American Dream applies to their race. This has happened
while whites have become convinced of the inclusion of blacks in their dream. The resulting
racial divide is taken to be the most pressing challenge to the continuation of the American
Dream.
Hogan, J. Michael. (1998). “Preface: rhetoric and community,” in Hogan, ed., Rhetoric and
Community, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, pp. xii-xxiv. Introduces a series of
case studies which reflect upon the role of hate in the construction of community in a variety of
settings. Several of the essays look at reactions to the mainstream community of 19th century
African Americans & women. It is found that for all their distinctiveness, these rhetorical
interventions also share several qualities which mark them as American. They thus exist in
tension between the rhetorical resources of their sub-group & those of the mainstream
community. To prevent excessive fragmentation caused by this tension, several steps may be
taken: changing the environment of public discourse to make it less reliant on mass media;
making all voices heard; respect for the sacred at the heart of all sub-communities; reflection on
the limits of one’s own moral code. These changes must be facilitated by several institutional
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changes: reform of political institutions; reform of mass media; & reform of the educational
system.
Hosman, Lawrence A. & Susan A. Siltanen. (1994). "The Attributional and Evaluative
Consequences of Powerful and Powerless Speech Styles: an examination of the 'control over
others' and 'control of self' explanations," Language & Communication, 14: pp. 287-298.
Investigates whether aspects of powerful & powerless speech produces corresponding
evaluations of a speaker's competence, authoritativeness, and social attractiveness in an
experimental study. It is found that attributions of self--control are associated with the various
components of powerful and powerless speech, such that the use of hedges, tags, etc. are
associated with a lack of self-control and authority.
Hoyt, Paul D. (1997). "The Political Manipulation of Group Composition: engineering the
decision context," Political Psychology, 18: pp. 771-789. It is argued that the dynamic nature of
group composition provides opportunities for actors to manipulate the decision context to favor
their policy preferences. Types of manipulation include informational, procedural &
compositional. This process is demonstrated in an analysis of the American decision process
during the Iranian revolution.
Huckfeldt, Robert, Paul Allen Beck, Russell J. Dalton & Jeffrey Levine. (1995). "Political
Environments, Cohesive Social Groups and the Communication of Public Opinion," American
Journal of Political Science, 39: pp. 1025-1054. Investigates the extent to which the social
communication of political information is structured by the geographic distribution of support for
presidential candidates in the 1992 election drawing on survey data. It is found that individuals
are differentially exposed to larger environments of opinion depending on micro-environmental
patterns of social interaction and political communication. Hence, the construction of a citizen's
social network serves as a filter on the macro environmental flow of political information. Thus,
the influence of larger environments of opinion depend upon the existence of microenvironments which expose citizens to surrounding opinion distributions.
Hughes, Robert. (1993). Culture of Complaint: the fraying of America, New York: Oxford
University Press. Argues that the US today is characterized by a culture of complaint in which
an authority figure is always to blame & the expansion of rights is demanded without
corresponding duties & obligations. The result has been a fragmentation of the polity, as groups
large and small demand recompense while the sense of common citizenship dissolves. Calls for
a return to common sense, which recognizes that all Americans share a common cultural
heritage bequeathed from Europe, and that it is characterized by individual freedom, plurality, &
reasoned & civil disagreement.
Hunter, James D. (1991). Culture Wars: the struggle to define America. New York: Basic
Books. Argues that America is in the midst of a culture war whose stakes are nothing less than
how Americans will order their lives together in the future. Traditionally, culture wars in the US
took place along religious lines. Today, however, a number of other fault lines have arisen.
These divisions are captured in the binary of orthodoxy versus progressivism. Adherents of
orthodoxy have a firm commitment to external, definable, and transcendent authority, while
progressivists tend to resymbolize historical faiths according to the prevailing assumptions of
contemporary life. The way in which this basic division plays itself out is discussed in terms of
several debates concerning the family, education, the arts, the law & electoral politics. It is
suggested that the media's presentation of these debates has served to inflamed rather than to
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explain the basic elements of the conflicts. A recommitment to moral pluralism and the notion
that people may agree to disagree in a democratic polity is advanced as the only path to moving
beyond these culture wars in a manner that does not cause irreparable harm.
Huspek, Michael & Kathleen Kendall. (1991). "On Withholding Political Voice: an analysis of
the political vocabulary of a 'non-political' speech community," The Quarterly Journal of Speech,
77: pp. 1--19. Investigates reasons for the withholding of political voice in the everyday speech
patterns of a group of lumber-industrial workers. It is shown that the workers' withholding of
voice is an active choice grounded in community-based meanings that are discursively produced
in on-going interactions within the speech community.
Inglehart, Ronald. (1990). Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society, Princeton: Princeton
University Press. Describes the transition from materialist to post-materialist values in Western
industrialized countries in terms of a broad cultural change defined by a decline of traditional
religious orientations, conventional sexual & social norms & the emergence of new forms of
economic & political behavior. This transition is traced in an empirical analysis of
Eurobarometer surveys from 1970-1988. New political practices based identity, aesthetic, &
intellectual values are taken to be a consequence of the change toward postmaterialist societies.
These practices include Green/environmental movements, new social movements such as the
women’s movement, & political practices targeted at social issues such as abortion, education, &
community & individual well-being. This process has resulted in a transition from class-based
political axes toward value-based political polarization.
Jackman, Robert & Ross Miller. (1996). "A Renaissance of Political Culture?" American
Journal of Political Science, 40: pp. 632-659. Tests the theory that cultural differences drive
elements of political and economic life drawing on data sets produced by Putnam (1993) and
Inglehart (1990). Little evidence is found to indicate a systematic relationship between political
culture and political and economic performance. Instead, it is suggested that institutions are
important for structuring the incentives for individual action.
Jackson, Kenneth. (1985). Crabgrass Frontier: the suburbanization of the United States. New
York: Oxford University Press. Examines why American residential patterns have historically
diverged from those in Western Europe by offering a broad interpretation of the growth of the
American suburb. Several factors are identified as central to this growth: the actions of land
developers; the availability of cheap land; the development of inexpensive construction methods;
improved transportation technologies; abundant energy sources; government subsidies; and racial
stress. It is particularly stressed that the growth of suburbs has been as much a governmental as a
natural process. Whatever the cause, the result of this process has been a diminishment of
community as public spaces increasingly have given way to privatized housing tracts &
associated businesses and spaces that undergird them.
Jackson-Lears, T.J. (1983). "From Salvation to Self-Realization: advertising and the
therapeutics of consumer culture, 1880-1920." in Richard Fox & Jackson-Lears. eds. The
Culture of Consumption. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 1-38. Explores the role of national
advertising in the transformation of the American culture from a producer to a consumer-oriented
focus in the decades surrounding the turn-of-the-century. It is shown that advertising facilitated a
moral change from a Protestant ethos of salvation through self-denial toward a therapeutic ethos
that stressed self-realization through the consumption of material goods.
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Jacobs, Lawrence & Robert Shapiro. (1994). "Issues, Candidate Image, and Priming: the use of
private polls in Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign." American Political Science Review 88:
pp. 527-540. Demonstrates that John Kennedy employed polling studies by his private pollster,
Louis Harris, not only to alter his public image, but to devise substantive policy positions. Thus,
the usual distinction between image and substance is contradicted by Kennedy's use of the polls.
Rather, for Kennedy, image and substance were fused together into a unitary form of political
decision-making.
Jameson, Frederic & Masao Miyoshi. eds. (1998). The Cultures of Globalization. Durham:
Duke University Press. An edited volume which contributes to recent theoretical discussions on
the relationship between local cultures and global, particularly economic and cultural, forces.
Jameson, Frederic. (1998). The Cultural Turn: selected writings on the postmodern, 1983-1998.
New York: Verso. A collection of essays which interrogate various aspects of postmodern
theory, aesthetics, and cultural practice.
Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. (1992). Dirty Politics: deception, distraction and democracy, New
York: Oxford University Press. Examines the use of attack ads in US presidential campaigns
from the 19th century to the present. The main distinction of contemporary attack ads is
television, which offers a powerful new way to reconfigure the message for maximum visceral
impact. Rather than making propositions to be debated, these ads make assertions about reality
that are warranted by emotive impact. Combined with the focus on strategy of the news media,
these ads have eroded civic discourse. To reverse this trend, it is proposed that candidates ought
to be forced to engage in a multiplicity of forums, including broadcast speeches, advertising,
debates, call-in programs, press conferences, press interviews & analytic recapitulative news
pieces so that the form of public debate is expanded. In this expanded deliberative context,
candidates will be forced to make arguments, & to be accountable for those arguments. It will
also reduce the amount of sheer assertion, vilification & storytelling that takes place in American
campaigns.
Jargowsky, Paul. (19960. "Take the Money and Run: economic segregation in US metropolitan
areas," American Sociological Review, 61: pp. 984-998. It is shown that economic segregation
has increased steadily for whites, blacks and hispanics since the 1970s, but these increases have
been particularly large for blacks and hispanics. This suggests that a fundamental transformation
is underway in US cities.
Jeffres, Leo, Jean Dobos & Mary Sweeney. (1997). "Communication and Commitment to
Community," Communication Research, 14: pp. 619-643. A path analysis of neighborhood and
metropolitan survey data was conducted. This analysis indicated that communication contributed
to commitment to remain in a neighborhood via a process of belief and attitude formation. Thus,
newspapers may play a more important role than social interaction in forming beliefs about a
community, particularly beliefs about community assets.
Johnson, James. (1998). “Arguing for Deliberation: some skeptical considerations,” in Jon
Elster, ed., Deliberative Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 161-184.
Suggests that arguments in favor of democratic deliberation are misguided in several ways: (1)
they misconstrue the difficulties of non-deliberative procedures such as voting; (2) they do not
adequately justify the constraints they impose on the range of views admissible to deliberative
arenas; & (3) they do not adequately specify the mechanisms at work as parties to deliberation
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seek to persuade or convince one another. A good argument for deliberation cannot rely on
utopian assumptions, must not exclude self-interest or the conflicts deliberation might generate
from the range of admissible topics; must specify the mechanisms at work when parties advance
arguments to persuade others; must include an account of the institutional forms that deliberative
processes might take; & must include an account both of the sort of effects that we might
anticipate from deliberation & of how we might justify those effects.
Jones, Karen. (1996). "Trust as an Affective Attitude," Ethics, 107: pp. 4-25. Trust is
understood as an attitude of optimism that the goodwill and competence of another will extend to
cover the domain of interactiosn with her, together with the expectation that the one who is
trusted will be directly moved by the thought that others are counting on her. Thus, trust is not a
belief but an emotional response. This affective understanding of trust is a a way of seeing the
one trusted, which explains the willingness of trusters to allow those trusted to get dangerously
close to the things they care about.
Just, Marion, et. al. (1996). CrossTalk: citizens, candidates and the media in a presidential
campaign, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. An account of the 1992 presidential
campaign that combined content analysis of candidate ads, campaign news in major metropolitan
markets & interviews, focus groups & surveys with average citizens. It is found that citizens
believe assessments of candidates as persons, especially qualities of character, offer the most
reliable indicators of how candidates will perform. Because information about the campaign is
omni-present, citizens did not have to take many information short-cuts. However, relative
access to information is key in how well individuals put together the available information. This
campaign is distinguished by its immediate predecessors in that it allows the public a degree of
participation in the process.
Kant, Immanuel. (1990). Critique of Pure Reason. trans. by J.M.D. Meiklejohn. Buffalo:
Prometheus Books. A landmark philosophical text which carved a new path which much of
Western philosophy has followed ever since. At the time of its writing, philosophy was
deadlocked between competing camps: materialists who saw the world in terms of objective
matter; & materialists who argued that the world acquired reality from the human mind. Kant
charted a course between these two extremes to show that reality was a construction of human
reason, but reason developed through concrete experience of the world.
Kateb, George. (1992). The Inner-Ocean: individualism and democratic culture, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press. A series of essays which defend a notion of rights-based individualism
drawing on the work of Emerson, Thoreau & Whitman. Among these rights are those outlined in
the Bill of Rights, & three more: the right to vote and take part in politics; the right to be spared
from utter degradation & material misery; & the right to equal protection of the laws (as outlined
in the 14th amendment). These last two rights require of government positive action, and
therefore set up a constant antagonism between the other rights & state actions which encroach
upon them to fulfill the requirements of the last two. A democratic culture must be vigilant
against the excesses of state action. This means the construction of a set of institutions which
give moral meaning to the conception of individual rights. It also means that the best expression
of national citizenship for most people is to become attentive to the health of personal rights.
Not in the sense of arguing for group rights—for this fixes struggles too much & ultimately
erodes the democratic sensibility. Rather, it means paying attention to the healthiness of basic
individual rights. By doing this, a democratic culture also serves the cause of human dignity.
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Kautz, Steven. (1993). "Liberalism and the Idea of Toleration," American Journal of Political
Science, 37: pp. 610-632. It is observed that the notion of toleration is under attack from various
sides: conservatives worry that it weakens civic and moral virtue; democrats believe it is a mask
for social inequality; postmodernists argue that it does an injustice to diversity. The classical
notion of toleration as "settlement" is defended. According to this understanding, toleration
simply means that each party must be willing to make concessions to the just claims of other
partisans.
Kelley, Stanley, Jr. (1956 ). Professional Public Relations and Political Power. Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins Press. An early work on the role & consequences of public relations in
American politics. The history of public relations is traced from its beginnings in 19th century
American politics. Its role in the political process is then reviewed, with special attention given
to presidential politics. It is suggested that public relations has made public opinion a
maneuverable element in politics, although individual citizens rarely participate in this process.
And, in a prescient forecast, it is suggested that public relations will move beyond the electoral
process to become much more influential in the public policy process.
Kelly, Jerry S. (1978). Arrow Impossibility Theorems. New York: Academic Press. A volume
which elaborates the implications of several of Kenney Arrow's theorems concerning the nature
of social choice. According to Arrow, it is impossible to integrate individual preferences with
collective preferences in a rational manner because there is no rational method for aggregating
individual preferences into a clear notion of the public good. The implication of this insight and
ways of amelioriating its worst effects on public policy are investigated.
Kenny, Christopher. (1992). "Political Participation and Effects from the Social Environment,"
American Journal of Political Science, 36: pp. 259-267. Examines the distinction made in the
literature between individually and socially based foroms of participation as affected by social
environment drawing on survey responses from a 1984 study in South Bend, IN. It is shown that
the distinction between these two terms is not always clear. Putting up a sign in one's yard may
be an individual or a social act, depending on the context. Further, the effects of the social
environment on participation may vary depending on how the environment is measured. Finally,
individuals may select reinforcing social environments.
Kernell, Samuel. (1986). Going Public: new strategies of presidential leadership. Washington,
D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press. An extension of Richard Neustadt's thesis concerning the
propensity of modern presidents to resort to rhetorical strategies to achieve their political goals.
It is argued that in the past, when presidential constituencies were relatively stable, it was better
for presidents to bargain than to go over the heads of political actors and appeal directly to the
public. However, the political environment has fragmented to such an extent that is now often
more desirable for a president to appeal to the public than to bargain. Examples of the pitfalls
and possibilities of this strategy are discussed.
Kinder, Donald & Lynn Sanders. (1996). Divided by Color: racial politics and democratic
ideals. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Explores the views of whites and blacks
toward the variety of issues associated with race relations drawing on survey data. It is shown
that whites and blacks have subtle but important disagreements about race relations, and that
these differences are often exploited by politicians to achieve electoral success. These
differences are rooted not in perceived self-interest, but in perceived collective interests of the
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races. Implications of these divergences of opinion for the practice of democratic politics are
discussed.
King, Anthony. (1997). Running Scared: why America's politicians campaign too much and
govern too little. New York: Martin Kessler Books. It is argued that American politicians are
more continuously worried about their electoral futures than are the politicians of any other
country. This constant stress on electoral considerations ultimately degrades American politics
because it consumes time & resources, & makes it very difficult to deal with intractable
problems. Thus, it is suggested that to better equip American politics to deal with difficult
problems, it is necessary to insulate it, at least to some extent, from the vagaries of the current
electoral process.
Knack, Stephen. (1992). "Civic Norms, Social Sanctions, and Voter Turnout," Rationality and
Society, 4: pp. 133-156. Argues that incentives to vote are primarily based in civic norms rather
than special interest norms drawing on Census data. Enforcement of social norms has been
found to significantly enhance voter turnout. The American turnout decline is interpretedin
terms of weakening social ties adversely affecting the socialization and enforcement of norms
reponsible for generating civic participation.
Kochman, Thomas. (1984). "The Politics of Politeness: social warrants in mainstream
American public etiquette," in Deborah Schiffrin, ed., Meaning, Form, and Use in Context:
linguistic applications, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 200-209. It is argued
that mainstream Americans impose distinctive protocols on public discourse. Among these are:
(1) all sides must remain rational; (2) one should seek to avoid actions or statements others find
offensive; (3) there is no monopoly on truth; (4) flexibility is paramount; & (5) strong selfassertion is to be avoided. These protocols act as social warrants which by their nature discredit
those of other social or cultural groups.
Kuhn, Deanna. (1991). The Skills of Argument, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Investigates thinking as a form of argument in a study involving interviews with ordinary people
& experts in the area of urban social problems. It is found that people generally embrace three
types of causal theories: single cause, multiple parallel & multiple alternative. It is found that
whatever causal theories individuals embraced, they displayed a high degree of certainty in
offering their causal explanations. This epistemological naiveté is taken to be a key to
understanding people’s limited argumentative reasoning ability. Two basic ways of knowing are
discerned: knowing in comfortable ignorance & knowing through a constant effort of evaluating
possibilities. The latter form of arguing is taken to be superior because it entails the ability to
reflect upon one’s own theory & to consider alternative theories & evidence. Subjects differed
vastly in their ability to perform this task. Analysis of experts’ ability to argue demonstrated that
it is possible to attain expertise in the reasoning process itself. However, expertise in a content
area may expand the range of knowledge available, but it also main lead to rigid thinking & an
inability to recognize alternative views.
Kuklinski, James, Ellen Riggle, Victor Ottati, Norbert Schwarz & Robert Wyer. (1993).
"Thinking about Political Tolerance, More or Less, with More or Less Information," in George
Marcus & Russell Hanson, Reconsidering the Democratic Public, University Park, PA: The
Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 225-247. Investigates the question of whether
deliberation produces better political choices than gut reactions drawing on survey data.
Thinking is distinguished from the amount of information people have available to think. This
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distinction implies that thinking can take place with more or less information. It is found that
people generally prefer to express knee-jerk opinions on issues, and that these opinions are
largely intolerant. Moreover, when asked to think more about issues, subjects expressed even
greater intolerance than before. Only when subjects were exposed to a range of arguments,
including those concerning long-run freedom, did their level of tolerance achieve that of their gut
reactions. It is concluded that political tolerance alone does not equal democracy. Rather,
democracy entails the ability to recognize complexity and deal with it in a balanced, flexible and
even-handed manner. To achieve this goal, citizens must be invited to think about politics in a
relatively informed way.
Kurtz, Howard. (1996). Hot Air: all talk all the time. New York: Random House. Examines the
explosion of political talk shows in the 1990s in the context of a general growth of political
commentary, both within & outside the media. The growth of talk is taken to have put an
enormous burden on political decision-makers because it often forces them to act before they are
prepared to do so. Moreover, the talk show culture has opened political debate to different
voices, many of which exist on the margins of the political spectrum, and has changed the nature
of journalism. The result of this talk saturation is a general impoverishment of the political
culture, and a growing difficulty in achieving consensus on difficult political issues.
Langerak, Edward. (1994). "Pluralism, Tolerance and Disagreement," Rhetorical Society
Quarterly, 24: pp. 95-106. Argues that a notion of tolerance is needed which at once allows
individuals to respect the views of others and to judge that these views are diagreeable, and even
to take actions against them on occasion. Thus, a notion of toleration is needed which allows
individuals to be intolerant. Such a construction is offered which makes a firm distinction
toleration and respect.
Langerak, Edward. (1994). "Pluralism, Tolerance and Disagreement," Rhetorical Society
Quarterly, 24: pp. 95-106. Argues that a notion of tolerance is needed which at once allows
individuals to respect the views of others and to judge that these views are disagreeable, and even
to take actions against them on occasion. Thus, a notion of toleration is needed which allows
individuals to be intolerant. Such a construction is offered which makes a firm distinction
toleration and respect.
Lasch, Christopher. (1979). The Culture of Narcissism: American life in an age of diminishing
expectations. New York: Norton. Traces what is termed a culture of narcissism that has
developed in the 20th century. This culture is a direct outgrowth of the crisis of capitalism
administered by a bureaucratic state & the liberal political theory associated with this economic
mode. Various aspects of its growth can be seen in the development of the therapeutic
sensibility, the eclipse of the work ethic, the rise of a politics of spectacle and hero worship, the
collapse of authority, the erosion of schooling, and a new kind of bureaucratic paternalism. It is
suggested that these processes have carried the logic of individualism to an extreme; they have
made individual happiness the sole focus of human action; and, they have turned the pursuit of
individual satisfaction into the primary political strategy for escaping repressive conditions.
Lash, Scott & John Urry. (1987). The End of Organized Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity. A
macro-social theoretical discussion which proposes that the era of organized capitalism—defined
as a concentration & centralization of major economic institutions, the growth of large-scale
hierarchical bureaucracies, the inter-articulation of states & large monopolies, & the expansion of
empires overseas—is currently being replaced by a new form of disorganized capitalism. In the
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new environment, national markets are becoming less regulated, a new service class is emerging
as the working-classes decline, the state & capital increasingly take an antagonistic view toward
one another, and a new form of flexible accumulation characterizes the global economy. This
new form of economic organization has tended to fragment the cultural and political spheres in
the manner that many postmodernist theorists have suggested.
Lazear, Edward P. (1996). Culture Wars in America. Stanford: Hoover Institution on War,
Revolution and Peace. Examines the extent to which American attitudes toward newcomers &
desires by immigrants to become assimilated have changed over time drawing on a variety of
empirical data. It is found that these attitudes have changed, and for the worse. New immigrants
have clustered in separate communities to an extent greater than in the past, and incentives to
assimilate have changed in response to the welfare state. The result is a situation in which large
minority cultures may retain their own cultures and speak their own languages for a very long
time. This puts these minority groups at an economic disadvantage, but the government puts a
floor on consumption levels so that they never experience the economic hardship necessary for
them to embrace the cultural attitudes and skills which will help them to better succeed. To
counter this trend, it is suggested that more resources ought to be focused on young children
rather than adults because these resources are more likely to have a higher return among that
population.
Leighley, Jan. (1991). "Participation as a Stimulus of Political Conceptualization," Journal of
Politics, 53: pp. 198-211. Tests the proposition that political participation enhances individuals'
conceptualization of politics drawing on data from the 1976 American National Election Study.
While the hypothesis is generally supported, it is observed that characteristics of the participatory
experience (e.g., success of failure) may determine the nature of its effect on conceptualization.
Leighley, Jan. (1995). "Attitudes, Opportunities and Incentives: a field essay on political
participation," Political Research Quarterly, 48: pp. 181-210. Presents a survey of the literature
on political participation. Three broad conclusions are drawn from this analysis: (1) the
discipline broadly accepts as a basic model of participation the "standard socio-economic model"
which stresses individuals' socio-economic status & civic orientations as predictors of
participation; (2) political participation is typically equated with voter turnout; (3) rational choice
models have attained a significant theoretical status in the study of political participation.
Levi, Margaret, ed. (1996). "Special Section: Critique of Robert Putnam's Making Democracy
Work," Politics & Society, 24(1). A special journal section which includes 3 essays criticizing
various aspects of Putnam's work.
Levi, Margaret. (1996). "Social and Unsocial Capital: a review essay of Robert Putnam's
Making Democracy Work," Politics & Society, 24: pp. 45-55. According to Putnam, a dense
network of civic engagements leads citizens to trust each other & to produce good democratic
government. However, these links are not clear, as membership in one kind of society is not
easily translated into addressing free rider problems in another. Putnam has neglected the role of
government in creating institutions that foster particular kinds of civic culture. The social capital
produced in voluntary associations is not enough to translate into a generalized trust. Thus,
Putnam ends in a kind of romanticization of associational life to the neglect of a theory of social
capital.
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Lichterman, Paul. (1995). "Beyond the See-Saw Model: public commitment in a culture of selffulfillment," Sociological Theory, 13: pp. 275-300. Argues against the notion found in much
communitarian thought that a culture of self-fulillment & political commitment to the public
good are incompatible. A case study of membership in a local chapter of the US Green
movement is presented to demonstrate that the personalist culture may inform and motivate
political commitment. Through personalism, the community shared a dedication to free debate
among individuals and stressed personal expression, discussion & consensual agreement. Thus,
personalism created a deep resonance and sense of responsibility within individuals & fostered a
culture that defined organization in fluid terms.
Lindblom, Charles. (1965). The Intelligence of Democracy: decision-making through mutual
adjustment, New York: The Free Press. Compares centrally directed decision making & partisan
mutual adjustment as two processes for rational decision making. In partisan mutual adjustment,
no central agency directs the relationships of actors with one another. Rather, actors adjust to
their antagonists in a number of ways, including adaptively (asking nothing of the other party), or
manipulatively (by bargaining, negotiating, discussing, compensating, etc.). Described in this
manner, government becomes a process by which political actors engage in partisan mutual
adjustment. Common values limit these interactions somewhat, but are also produced in the
process of adjustment. Because actors must always adjust to others, partisan mutual adjustment
privileges strategic reasoning, which itself produces more reasonable, legitimate, inclusive,
consensual outcomes than centralized decision making.
Lindholm, Charles & John Hall. (1997). "Is the United States Falling Apart?" Daedalus, 126:
pp. 183-210. Argues that the US is not falling part. The institutional structure of the US has the
capacity to diffuse divisive conflicts between classes, religous sects & ethnic communities
throughout society rather than concentrating them against the state. So long as the economy is
healthy, new identities & groups will not pose a significant challenge to the nation's social fabric.
All Americans continue to believe in the possibility of success & so hold a common cultural
frame. The US is not really a civil society, if by that is meant that tolerance is given to genuinely
alternative ways of life. Thus, America will remain a land intolerant of real divergence but
simultaneously capable of absorbing difference & turning outsiders into Americans in short
order.
Link, Michael & Robert Oldendick. (1996). "Social Construction and White Attitudes toward
Equal Opportunity and Multiculturalism," The Journal of Politics, 58: pp. 149-168. Differences
in the cognitive images whites hold of minority groups in comparison to their own race are
demonstrated to significantly determine white attitudes toward group-based issues. In effect,
negative constructions of racial groups lower one's support for policies aimed at these groups.
Lipsitz, George. (1998). The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: how white people profit from
identity politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. It is argued that American whites are
encouraged to invest in their whiteness by the major institutions of society which dispense
rewards, incentives, power & opportunity according to race. This thesis is elaborated in a
discussion of the many ways in which political, economic, cultural & social institutions subsidize
the lives of whites through such mechanisms as home loan policies, labor union strategies, and
privileged media representations.
Loomis, Burdett A. (1976). The New American Politician: ambition, entrepreneurship, and the
changing face of political life. New York: Basic Books. Examines the Congressional Class of
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1974 as a new model of American politician, one that is less rooted in the party system, more
entrepreneurial and personally ambitious, and therefore less willing to go along with the larger
party structure in negotiations over policy issues. The emergence of this new kind of politician is
explained in terms of three factors: broad secular trends in the aftermath of the Vietnam War &
Watergate; internal changes within Congress which relaxed traditional hierarchies; & a vast
turnover in politicians that allowed the new type to quickly make its mark on the political
process.
Loury, Glenn. (1994). "Self-Censorship in Public Discourse: a theory of 'political correctness'
and related phenomena," Rationality and Society, 6: pp. 428-461. It is argued that uncertainty
about what motivates senders of public messages leads receivers to read between the lines to
discern the sender's deepest commitments. Anticipating this, senders edit their expressions to
further their own ends. General moral discourse on difficult social issues can become impossible
when the risks of upsetting some portion of one's audience are too great. Groups develop plans
of action which no one believes will work, but which become impossible to criticize.
Lund, William R. (1993). "Communitarian Politics and the Problem of Equality," Political
Research Quarterly, 46: pp. 577-600. Critiques a virtue-centered communitarian notion of
equality as impractical. According to this communitarian conception, individuals will be equally
interested in living virtuously within a community committed to participatory democracy and a
substantive conception of the common good. This account is shown to shape communitarians'
account of legitimate politics, including the denial of a strong right of privacy. The policy
implications, however, of this lack of regard for privacy can sometimes be very troubling. These
difficulties are traced to a basic conceptual understanding of equality rather than to specific and
eliminable errors.
Luntz, Frank. (1988). Candidates, Consultants, and Campaigns: the style and substance of
American electioneering. Oxford: Blackwell. A volume by a leading Republican political
consultant which discusses the modern practice of American political campaigning, particularly
the role of political consultants in that enterprise.
MacDonald. J. Fred. (1994). One Nation Under TV: the rise and decline of network television.
Chicago: Nelson-Hall Publishers. Traces the history of television from its beginnings in radio to
its fragmentation in the 1980s and 1990s. It is shown that television was born into a highly
integrated, mature communications industry which systematically prevented competition from
entering the market. This monopoly situation produced the condition for a mass televisual
audience that integrated the nation into a collective imaginary that has not been seen before or
since. Eventually, this system was challenged by the cable and satellite industries, and the
resulting fragmentation has greatly reduced the ability of television to assemble a mass national
audience.
MacIntyre, Alasdair C. (1981). After Virtue: a study in moral theory. Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press. A major statement in moral philosophy which begins from the premise
that morality today is in grave disorder because the prevailing moral idiom is disjointed &
conceptually barren. An Aristotelian moral view is outlined in which morality is conceived in
terms of shared conceptions of the good. The good is defined in terms of practices relevant to a
shared life. As such, individuals can only attain the good, and hence a moral point of view, by
entering into relationships with others.
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Mackin, James. (1997). Community Over Chaos: an ecological perspective on communication
ethics, Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press. Presents an ecological ethic grounded
in pragmatic realism & Piercean semiotics as solution to the cynicism, skepticism and
fragmentation characteristic of postmodern public discourse. According to this framework, while
the relation between signs & objects is tenuous, human beings in dialogue may achieve some
semblance of truth by identifying patterns of regularity in our social world. An art of
communicative ethics is described based on the Aristotelian notion of virtue as habit that lead to
happiness for both the community & the individual & the Piercean notion of fuzzy logic. This
art stresses the practice of openness & honesty in public deliberations & the possibility of
achieving community through diversity.
Maltese, John. (1992). Spin Control: the White House Office of Communications and the
management of presidential news. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Examines
the history of the White House Office of Communications, the primary institution through which
presidents attempt to control the public agenda by making presidential news. Richard Nixon
created this office in 1969, and it has steadily grown since that time. As it has grown, it has
become a more prominent vehicle for staging presidential events, managing administration news,
and generally controlling the public agenda. Developments within each administration from
Nixon to Clinton in this are carefully parsed and analyzed.
Manin, Bernard. (1997). The Principles of Representative Government, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. Identifies four principles of representative government which have remained
constant over two hundred years since their enunciation by the founders: (1) those who govern
are appointed by election at regular intervals; (2) the decision-making of those who govern
retains a degree of independence from the wishes of the electorate; (3) those who are governed
may give expression to their opinions and political wishes without these being subject to the
control of people who govern; & (4) public decisions undergo the trial of debate. Three ideal
types of representative government are compared on the basis of these principles:
parliamentarianism, party democracy & audience democracy (to denote the growing role of
individual personalities in elections). Where in parliaments, discussion is reserved for the
parliament, & in party democracy in inter- & intra-party negotiations, audience democracy
locates discussion in the negotiations between interest groups & the government, & in debates in
the media which seek to attract the attention of the floating voter. It is suggested that recent
alarm at a crisis in representative democracy is nothing more than anxiety about the nature of the
institutions in audience democracy—they do not reflect the erosion of the four principles of
representative government.
Mann, Thomas & Gary Orren. eds. (1992). Media Polls in American Politics. Washington,
D.C.: The Brookings Institution. An edited volume which investigates the role of opinion polls
in contemporary political reporting. Contributors include leading pollsters, media critics and
scholars of the political process. Attention is paid to the evolving technology of polling, typical
errors made by pollsters and the media who cover them, and the impact of polls on both the
public and reporters. Throughout, it is argued that polls can be a constructive part of American
public life, but only if they are used to report rather than create the news.
Mansbridge, Jane. (1980). Beyond Adversary Democracy. New York: Basic Books. Draws
upon case studies of a small New England town governed by a town meeting & a small
democratic workplace to outline a theory of unitary democracy. In the more traditional
adversarial theory of democracy, it was assumed that a good politics took place through conflict,
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the protection of individual interests, majority rule and a secret ballot. This traditional model is
rejected in favor of a unitary democracy that favors common interests, equal respect, consensus,
and face-to-face deliberation. It is concluded that the task before American citizens is to unify
these two different kinds of democracies into a single institutional framework that allows
individuals both to advance their interests & to resolve conflicts.
Margolis, Howard. (1982). Selfishness, Altruism, and Rationality: a theory of social choice.
New York: Cambridge University Press. Develops a model of social choice which is capable of
explaining the existence of public goods. Traditional models of social choice, which suggest that
individuals make social decisions based on their rational self-interest, are unable to explain why
any public good is ever created. It is suggested that individuals respond to three kinds of interest:
individual, group and participative. Under normal circumstances, they seek not to achieve selfinterest, but to balance these three interests. It is this balance which gives individuals a sense that
they have done their fair share. The utility of the model for explaining social behavior is
demonstrated in an analysis of several examples.
Massey, Douglas, Andrew Gross & Kumiko Shibuya. (1994). "Migration, Segregation and the
Geographic Concentration of Poverty," American Sociological Review, 59: pp. 425-445.
Analyzes patterns of African-American mobility and white mobility in US cities. drawing on US
Census data. It is found that the geographic concentration of black poverty has not been caused
by out-migration of non-poor blacks. Rather, it is caused by residential segregation of AfricanAmerican in urban housing markets.
Matusow, Barbara. (1983). The Evening Stars: the making of the network news anchor. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin. Traces the emergence of the network news anchor as the singular figure of
television evening news. Included in this history is a description of Edward R. Murrow's legacy
for the network news anchor, and the rise of the first television news "stars," such as Walter
Cronkite, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Harry Reasoner, and Barbara Walters. The production of
these individuals as television stars is discussed in the context of a general trend toward making
television news more entertainment-oriented.
McCarthy, Thomas. (1992). "Practical Discourse: on the relation of morality to politics." in
Craig Calhoun. ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 51-72.
Critically examines Jurgen Habermas' notion of practical discourse. It is suggested that within
this notion persists a fundamental tension between situated reasoning & the kind of transcendent
reasoning necessary to achieve rational consensus. Ultimately, this tension seriously troubles
Habermas' notion of the public sphere, which at once depends upon situated discourse & the
possibility of transcendent discourse. Because Habermas has failed to resolve this tension,
suspicion is cast on his democratic theory as a whole, which depends upon the ability to achieve
rational consensus on deeply conflictual issues.
McGerr, Michael. (1986). The Decline of Popular Politics: the American North, 1865-1928.
New York: Oxford University Press. Traces the demise of the party system to the activities of a
relatively small group of late-19th century northern liberal reformers who were affronted by the
excesses and spectacularism of party politics. These reformers eventually succeeded in
transforming politics into a matter of education and information rather than of public display.
However, this political form soon was challenged by a form of consumer politics advanced by
the mass media. The result is a politics much more individualistic than collective, more
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concerned with knowledge than with commitment, and ironically, unable to attract the attention
and participation of even a majority of the electorate.
McLeod, Douglas & Elizabeth Perse. (1994). "Direct and Indirect Effects on Socio-economic
Status on Public Affairs Knowledge," Journalism Quarterly, 71: pp. 433-442. Draws on survey
data in Wisconsin to demonstrate that a strong relationship exists between SES and public affairs
knowledge. The evidence suggests that there is a strong relationship between perceived utility of
information & news media use & SES.
McManus, John H. (1994). Market-Driven Journalism: let the citizen beware? Thousand
Oaks: Sage. Examines the process by which market-oriented logic has been applied to news
drawing on data from four television stations located in the western United States. It is found
that as journalism has become more market oriented, the news has tended to value wealthier
audiences more than poorer ones. Moreover, while market-driven news does attract larger
audiences, and hence act to integrate audiences, it does so by offering those audiences more
entertainment and less information. This was done not by adding entertainment to information to
produce "info-tainment," but by displacing or distorting information in favor of whatever
producers believed would attract the most attention at the least possible cost.
Mill, John Stuart. (1978). On Liberty. edited by Elizabeth Rapaport. Indianopolis: Hackett
Publishing Co. A seminal text of liberal political philosophy which advances the principle that
individuals in political society ought to be free to exhibit their individuality to the extent that this
exhibition does not harm others. The state is therefore prohibited from violating the liberty of
individuals except in cases in which that liberty may unduly curtail the liberty of others.
Miller, David. (1992). Political Studies, 40: pp. 54-67. Contrasts the liberal conception of
democracy as an aggregation of individual preferences with the deliberative conception of
democracy as a process of open discussion leading to an agreed judgment on policy. It is shown
that deliberative democracy is less vulnerable to common criticisms—the arbitrariness of
decision rules, vulnerability to strategic voting—than liberal democracy. Within deliberative
democracy, discussion tends to produce sets of policy preferences that are single-peaked; further,
decision rules may vary according to the nature of the issue to be decided.
Miller, David. (1995). "Citizenship and Pluralism," Political Studies, 43(1995): pp. 432-450.
Three conceptions of citizenship are distinguished: liberal, libertarian and republican. It is
suggested that the liberal conception fails to respond to the condition of cultural pluralism
because it does not show why everyone should give political priority to its conception of
citizenship. The libertarian notion of citizenship-as-consumer addresses the issue of pluralism,
but at the cost of any common status enjoyed by all members of society. Only the republican
conception of the citizen as actively engaging in political discussion addresses the condition of
cultural pluralism. Contrary to such writers as Iris Young, this conception does not require the
imposition of norms of impartiality and publicity which exclude certain groups.
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat. (1989). The Spirit of the Laws. Edited & Trans. by Anne
M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller & Harold Samuel Stone. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. A foundational text of republican and constitutional political thought which addressed the
issue of how to reconcile law and political power. Montesquieu imagined no singular answer to
this dilemma, but many answers that were dependent upon configurations of time, space, and the
traditions of individual countries. Moreover, solutions may need to be revised as circumstances
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change within countries. Montesquieu considered several ideal solutions: a republic, monarchy,
aristocracy and despotism, and associated a constitutive principle with each: virtue, honor,
moderation and fear, respectively. Famously, Montesquieu imagined that a republic was only
possible in small, relatively homogeneous communities in which virtue could be fostered through
regular social interaction.
Moon, J. Donald. (1991). "Constrained Discourse and Public Life," Political Theory, 19: pp.
202-229. Addresses the circularity of deliberative politics arguments: any model of deliberation
depends upon a commonly agreed upon set of principles or rules, but these conditions must
themselves be up for discussion. Any such discussion will likely end when it is acknowledged
that some people will be excluded prior to the very discourse it is supposed to allow. Thus, any
notion of completely unconstrained discourse is impossible, because the very effort to hear some
voices will silence others. It is proposed that the effort to prescribe universal rules of discourse
be abandoned. In its place, a revised discourse model is proposed in which generalized
discourses are contextualized to specific social and historical settings in such a way that the basic
framework is always open to challenge. This holds the promise of creating a balance between
exclusion and inclusion.
Morone, James. (1990). The Democratic Wish: popular participation and the limits of
American government, New York: Basic Books. Argues that Americans have negotiated the
tension between their dread of government & the fact that they have built large-scale
administrative institutions by adhering to a myth of communal democracy. New administrative
apparatuses were routinely sold to the public as a way of restoring power to the American people.
This democratic wish—to instill power in the people—entails three other assumptions: that
participation in politics will be direct; that people will ascribe to a homogenous set of views; and
that they will live in a communities. Periods of administrative construction have usually
characterized by a four-stage process: (1) political stalemate; (2) popular response; (3)
implementation of new political institutions & expansion of government power; & (4) the
reassertion of a new liberal political equilibrium in which new institutional rules are designed to
empower people. Thus, American political institutions have largely been shaped by the
American populist myth. In the end, government always lacks the communitarian sentiment that
reformers champion & that the image of a homogenous people remains a myth. The result is that
Americans have failed to institutionalize a communal spirit within their government, which over
time has meant that administrative institutions have become detached from popular control.
Moynihan, Daniel P. (1998). Secrecy: the American experience. New Haven: Yale University
Press. Examines the origins, growth and significance of secrecy in American government in the
post-World War Two period. Government secrecy is taken to be a form of regulation in that it
prescribes what citizens may do & what they may know. In developing an enormous secrecy
apparatus, the federal government in the Cold War period essentially ceded the issue of domestic
Communism to demagogues in this country, and forced presidents to rely on estimates of Soviet
strength developed by intelligence officers who themselves were shrouded in secrecy and so
unavailable for skeptical questioning. As secrecy insinuated itself into the national security
bureaucracy, it produced an enormous waste of resources as the United States responded to the
Soviet Union's perceived threat. Secrecy became a form of ritual within the government. This
ritual ultimately spawned greater public cynicism about government and a plethora of both rightand left-wing conspiracies.
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Muller, Edward & Mitchell Seligson. (1994). "Civic Culture and Democracy: the question of
causal relationships," American Political Science Review, 88: pp. 634-652. A causal model of
relationships between structural properties of states, civic culture attitudes and the general public
& change in level of democracy is tested with cross-national data. It is found that interpersonal
trust is relatively dissociated from levels of democracy. However, trust may be enhanced through
long-term experience with democracy. A large percentage of the public which prefers gradual
reform is a stronger, though still relatively weak predictor of level of democracy. Income
distribution levels are found to be a stronger predictor of level of democracy than any attribute of
civic culture. This conclusion contradicts the thesis of Robert Inglehart (1988) that attributes of
civic culture are a principal or even major cause of democracy.
Murphy, Andrew R. (1997). "Tolerance, Toleration, and the Liberal Tradition," Polity, 29: pp.
593-623. Makes a distinction between tolerance and toleration. Toleration is defined as a set of
social or political practices while tolerance is defined as a set of attitudes. Universal tolerance is
taken to be impossible and unnessary. In its place, a muted notion of tolerance is proposed which
localizes & neutralizes the intolerance that threatens to deny citizenship rights to vulnerable
groups. A key task of liberal societies is to develop standards of behavior that permit all citizens
to negotiate their differences in the absence of universal toleration.
Mutz, Diana. (1994). "The Political Effects of Perceptions of Mass Opinion," in Michael X.
Delli Carpini, Leonie Huddy & Robert Shapiro, eds., New Directions in Political Psychology,
Greenwood, CT: JAI Press, pp. 143-168. Reviews the history of public opinion research on the
effects of mass opinion on political attitudes. The contexts in which this literature has developed
include: the spiral of silence theory, the third-person effect, the effect of exit polls, the influence
of pre-publication of pre-election polls, & momentum in presidential primaries. Six difference
mechanisms have been identified for explaining the impact of perceptions of mass opinion.
These are, strategic considerations, normative conformity, going with a winner, socialized
consensus heuristic, cognitive response theory & suggestion/contagion/familiarity. This
literature is described as uncompelling & methodologically inconsistent. However, several
patterns have emerged despite the spottiness of the research. Mass opinion is turned to in the
absence of other cues; underdogs are generally favored & people tend to think that others think
like them. These patterns indicate a constructivist account of how people use political
information.
Myerson, George. (1994). Rhetoric, Reason and Society: rationality as dialogue, Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage. A version of dialogic rationality is argued for drawing on the work of several
prominent social theorists, including Seyla Benhabib, Michael Billig, Jon Elster, Nancy Fraser,
Anthony Giddens, Jurgen Habermas, Hilary Putnam & Richard Rorty. Each of these authors
stresses distinctive aspects of rational dialogue: criticality, impartiality, trust, courage, solidarity,
empathy, tolerance, efficiency, sensitivity. It is suggested that dialogic rationalism implies gaps,
which always leave room for the imagination. It also advocates a culture of encouragement
which includes the following conditions: (1) a disposition to communicate ideas; (2) ways of
thinking which favor comparisons; (3) creative forms of negation; & (4) active tolerance of
difficult emotions. Encourage recognizes imagination, creativity, multiplicity, diversity &
reflexivity.
Nelson, Michael. (1995). "Why Americans Hate Politicians," PS: Political Science & Politics,
28: pp. 72-77. Suggests Americans hate politics because of fundamental aspects of their political
culture. On the one hand, they celebrate liberty & equality & popular sovereignty, on the other
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they revere the Constitution as a higher law. When things do not go well, they cannot blame
themselves (who are free and supposed to be served by government), or the Constitution (which
is revered); so they blame politicians.
Nelson, Thomas & Donald Kinder. (1996). "Issue Frames and Group-Centrism in American
Public Opinion," The Journal of Politics, 58: pp. 1055-1078. Public opinion is strongly
influenced by the attitudes citizens possess toward the social groups perceived as the
beneficiaries of the policy. But the intensity of this group-centrism hinges in part on how issues
are framed in public debate. When issues are framed in ways that draw attention to a policy's
beneficiaries, group centrism increases; when issues are framed to draw attention away from a
policy's beneficiaries, group-centrism declines.
Neuman, W. Russell, Marion Just & Ann Crigler. (1992). Common Knowledge: news and the
construction of political meaning, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Investigates the
construction of political knowledge in the US using a multi-method design that included
experimental research, survey research depth interviews & content analysis on five issues:
apartheid in South Africa, Star Wars, the stock market crash of October 1987, drug abuse &
AIDS. It is found that political knowledge is produced gradually, iteratively & interpretively.
Audiences were found to frame the issues in different ways than the news media, often using
personalized languages of private thought & discussion rather than the official & public
discourse that dominates the language of politicians & journalists. Issue salience is found to be
central to the dynamics of political learning, as people developed more complex beliefs about
isses that were more important to them. It is suggested that the media ought to play different
roles with respect to the character of the topic of communication: rally public interest to low
salience topics & stressing multi-perspectival views on high salience items.
Neuman, W. Russell. (1986). The Paradox of Mass Politics: knowledge and opinion in the
American electorate, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The paradox of mass politics is
defined as the gap between the expectation of an informed citizenry put forward by democratic
theory & the reality revealed by systematic survey interviewing. The key to this paradox is taken
to lie in the fluidity of the public agenda, & the evolving manner in which issues are raised &
individual opinions are formed. It is suggested that the public is best understood as three subpublics: an apolitical public, composing 20% of the population; a mass public, composing 75%
of the population, & an activist public representing 5% of the population. For the middle group,
a tension exists between their democratic norms & their habitual political behavior. They
therefore exercise information short-cuts to form political opinions—not surprisingly, leading to
the conclusion that they vote, but possess little knowledge about politics, that they are relatively
apathetic, but can be mobilized when an issue is framed in the right way. Thus, a theory of
stratified political sophistication is put forward to explain the paradox of mass politics.
Neustadt, Richard E. (1990). Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: the politics of
leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan. New York: The Free Press. The standard textbook of
presidential politics which advances the proposition that presidential power is largely contained
in the power to bargain. Possessing few explicit political instruments, presidents of necessity
must enter into relationships with other political actors in Washington to achieve their goals.
Their power within these relationships is largely determined by their reputation among
Washington elites & their prestige with the public (as measured by public opinion polls).
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Newton, Kenneth. (1997). "Social Capital and Democracy," American Behavioral Scientist, 40:
pp. 575-586. Identifies three aspects or dimensions of the notion of social capital: norms
(especially trust), networks and consequences. Various models of democracy are discussed in
relation to social capital, including communal society, Tocqueville's model of voluntary
associations, & modern democratic forms based on abstract trust, education and the media.
Nie, Norman, Jane Junn & Kenneth Stehlik-Barry. (1996). Education and Democratic
Citizenship in America, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Considers the extent to
which education influences how knowledgeable citizens are, how attentive they are, how
regularly they vote, how active in politics they are beyond the vote & how tolerant they are of the
free expression of unpopular views drawing on data from the 1990 Citizen Participation Study.
A consistent relationship is found between formal educational attainment and seven attributes of
enlightened political engagement. Education has a strong positive influence on political
knowledge, political participation and voting, attentiveness to politics and tolerance. Political
enlightenment is disaggregated from political engagement. It is found that verbal proficiency
links education to attributes of democratic citizenship through a cognitive pathway, while social
network centrality ties educational attainment to enlightened political engagement through a
positional pathway. The two together, verbal acuity and social networks, combine to shape the
configuration of democratic citizenship. This implies that those closest to the institutions of
political discourse will have a greater ability to express their political views, and that this
positioning is largely determined by educational attainment. Formal equality is impossible
because of the inherent scarcity of political access. In the future, as equality in access to
education becomes greater, so will the weight given to where that education was received.
Moreover, the US is experiencing something of an educational inflation, as people are spurred by
competition to attain greater formal education than is necessary for the position in the economy.
Thus, more education is not likely to create more social capital, but rather to spur more social
competition.
Nino, Carlos Santiago. (1996). The Constitution of Deliberative Democracy, New Haven: Yale
University Press. Proposes a theory of constitutionalism which traces its legitimacy to three
elements: a historical constitution, democratic or participatory processes & the protection of
individual rights. It is suggested that deliberative democracy best accounts for the challenges of
instituting these principles in a constitutional order. This democratic design is preferable to
utilitarianism, the economic theory of democracy, elitism, pluralism or consent theory because is
sees democracy as inextricably entwined with morality & relies on its power to transform
people’s preferences into morally acceptable ones. Thus, deliberative democracy contains great
epistemic advantages. An institutional arrangement which might bring deliberative democracy
into being includes: (1) mechanisms for direct democracy; (2) a mixed media system; (3)
dispersed sovereignty; (4) a mixed presidential/parliamentary system; & (5) the presence of an
entrenched constitution interpreted by a judiciary intent on protecting its most treasured aspects.
Norris, Pippa. (1996). "Does Television Erode Social Capital: a reply to Putnam," PS: Political
Science & Politics, 29: pp. 474-449. Rebuts Robert Putnam's (1995) argument that television
erodes social capital. Using data from The American Civic Participation Study (1990), it is
shown that the amount of television viewing supports Putnam's argument, but other evidence
regarding what Americans watch does not. A diversity of news sources are associated with
healthy aspects of democratic participation. Further, Americans are a nation of joiners, when
compared to other countries, and television has not slowed this tendency.
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Nussbaum, Martha. (1986). The Fragility of Goodness: luck and ethics in Greek tragedy and
philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University press. Examines the aspiration to make the
goodness of human life safe from luck in Greek ethical thought through the controlling power of
reason. Greek thought was consumed by the relation between luck & the good life. Plato tried to
insulate humans from the force of luck, but Aristotle returned to the lessons of tragedy to
describe a form of practical rationality. This form of practical rationality entails seeking ethical
truth through dialogue with one another that is based upon the values & judgments they already
hold dear. This rationality aims at both activity & receptivity, a limited control balanced by
limited risk, & a good life lived along with friends, loved ones and community. Exposure and
risk in this analysis become not things to be guarded against, but as elements that bind people
more closely to one another. Within this rationality, purity & simplicity erode the richness &
complexity of human life. Practical rationality demands that compassion for the contingency &
risk of human life be a principle feature of human relations.
Nussbaum, Martha. (1996). "Compassion: the basic social emotion," Social Philosophy and
Policy, 13: pp. 27-58. Argues that compassion is a social emotion based in thought rather than
instinct, a sort of though about the well-being of others. Because compassion is a certain sort of
reasoning, it does not violate liberal models of politics which privilege cognition over emotion.
Further, it is suggested that compassion provides a necessary bridge between individuals and the
community in which they live. Individuals need to be trained to be compassionate in their words
if a truly compassionate state is to be created.
O'Sullivan, Noel. (1997). "Difference and the Concept of the Political in Contemporary Political
Philosophy," Political Studies, 45: pp. 739-754. Analyzes three contemporary competing notions
of the political: liberal, discourse theory & agonal. The liberal conception is strictly juridical
(Rawls); the discourse theory primarily communicative and oriented to rationality (Habermas),
while the agonal stresses a concept of care that attends to the specific needs of individuals (Honig
& Connolly). The classical model of civic association (Mouffe) is proposed as a key to the
problem of diversity. Several features characterize this model: a non-purposive framework of
formal rules; an independent judiciary; accountability mechanisms; acceptance of plurality; a
modern welfare system This model is defended against its critics.
Orlie, Melissa. (1994). "Thoughtless Assertion and Political Deliberation," American Political
Science Review, 88: pp. 684-695. Most theories of political deliberation view it as either
contemplation without interest or interest without contemplation. These views deny the ability to
transfigure interest and power without pretending to transcend them. A version of political
perspectivism is presented which incorporates multiple perspectives in an effort to respond to the
demands of power. A political space that recognizes power will seek to make what is common
truly shared through respect for all perspectives. This demands constant deliberation and selfreflection.
Page, Benjamin & Robert Shapiro. (1992). The Rational Public: fifty years of trends in
Americans' policy preferences. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. It is argued that the
collective policy preferences of the American public are predominantly rational in that they are
coherent, consistent, predictable, sensible and understandable. This claim is defended in a
review of hundreds of opinion surveys of the American public over the last fifty years. It is
shown that the public has reacted sensibily when new issues become of concern, and that their
responses are generally predictable. Political education might be improved, as lack of
information often allows the government to be nonresponsive to public opinion or elites to
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manipulate the public's policy preferences. However, critics who contend that a mass public is
inherently ungovernable because of its inability to form collective policy preferences are refuted.
Patterson, Thomas E. (1993). Out of Order. New York: Alfred Knopf. A critical analysis of
the presidential electoral system which argues that the system is seriously flawed. As parties
have decayed, the news media have become the chief intermediaries in election process, a
situation which puts the values at journalism at odds with the values of politics. Several
proposals are made to reform the system, including shortening the campaign season.
Perelman, Chaiz & L. Olbrechts-Tyteca. (1969). The New Rhetoric of Argumentation, Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Sketches a theory of argumentation which stretches
beyond the constraints of abstract logic to the terrain of everyday reason-giving in social practice.
Argumentation geared to assent is distinguished from argumentation dedicated to revealing the
self-evident. The former is primarily discursive & oriented to interactions between arguers &
audiences. The various elements of arguments geared to different audiences are described. It is
suggested that despite their differences, all arguments contain several basic features: premises,
facts & truths, presumptions, values, & hierarchies. It is in the realm between arbitrariness &
absoluteness that argumentation exists to give meaning to human freedom, a state in which a
reasonable choice can be exercised.
Perelman, Chaiz. (1982). The Realm of Rhetoric, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Makes several claims with respect to argumentation: (1) it proceeds informally, not according to
rules of formal deduction & induction; (2) it is always addressed to audiences to produce
adherence (or assent); (3) it must proceed from premises acceptable to audiences if it is to win
assent; (4) it proceeds by procedures that make it present in the minds of those addressed; (5)
ambiguity is unavoidable; (6) the relationship of concepts to attitudes is created & dissolved by
verbal techniques which are distinguishable from one another (quasi-logic, arguments based on
the structure of reality, on examples, clarifications, amplification, etc.) Thus, argument is taken
to be rhetorical in the sense that it is not self-evident, but must be made to others, and judged to
be reasonable by those others.
Phillips, Kendall. (1906). "The Spaces of Public Discussion: reconsidering the public sphere,"
Communication Monographs, 62: pp. 231-248. Argues that the centrality of consensus in
contemporary theories of the public sphere limit understanding of the role of dissent &
disputation. Contemporary theories of the public sphere identify six qualities pertinent to
exemplary discussion: openness, boundary maintenance, impartiality, intersubjectivity,
rationality, and consensus as care. It is shown that each of these qualities can be invigorated with
a more robust notion of dissent. To the extent that scholars ignore the role of dissent, they risk
constructing theories of the public sphere which to do little more than obscure the complexity
and diversity of contemporary public discourse.
Pitkin, Hannah F. & Sara M. Shumer. (1982). "On Participation," Democracy, 2: pp. 43-54.
Critically assesses the work of Hannah Arendt & Janes Mansbridge to ascertain a principled
definition of democratic participation. Mansbridge's advocacy of unitary democracy is criticized
because it fails to consider conflicts as truly political. Arendt's notion of democracy fails to
understand how individual needs & interests may lead people to connect with one another.
Democratic participation is defined as "an encounter among people with differing interests,
perspectives, and opinions...in a context of conflict...[where] resolutions are temporary, subject
to reconsideration and rarely unanimous. What matters is not unanimity but discourse." To
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achieve democratic discouse, both organizational forms & types of authority that sustain it are
necessary. These forms can be constructed on the basis of face-to-face political interactions,
moving upward into larger social forms.
Pocock, J.G.A. (1975). The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine political thought and the
Atlantic republican tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. A seminal work in the
political theory of republicanism which demonstrates that, contrary to conventional wisdom,
republican thought has been a key aspect of Anglo-Saxon liberal thought since the 17th century.
Of particular importance in this regard is the role of republicanism in the formation of early
American constitutional thought.
Polanyi, Livia. (1985). Telling the American Story: a structural and cultural analysis of
conversational storytelling, Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishers Corp.. Examines the typical
American values that underlie conversational stories told within a group of American friends.
These stories are shown to be grounded in a common grammar that stresses the present,
individual responsibility, equality, pragmatism, autonomy & redemption. These qualities are
integrated along axes of maturity/immaturity; adulthood/childhood; present/past &
competent/incompetent.
Polsby, Nelson. (1983). Consequences of Party Reform. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Explores the impact of party reforms made in the late 1960s and early 1970s on the activities of
political actors. These reforms were of two types: reforms of the delegate selection process and
reforms of party finance. These reforms have had wide-ranging effects, from the way political
actors conduct their business, to the role of interest groups and the news media in the political
process. The consequences of these reforms have been mixed: they have opened the political
process to many more types of individuals and groups which were once excluded. At the same
time, they have made political choices more difficult to make, degraded public deliberation in
significant ways, and polarized politics to a great degree.
Popper, Karl. (1945). The Open Society and Its Enemies, vols. 1-2, London: Routledge.
Contrasts the closed society, defined as a society organized according to tribal or collectivist
customs, with an open society, defined as one in which individuals are confronted with personal
decisions. Western societies are described as open, a legacy of their Greek ancestors. But they
are endangered by impulses to collectivism & to tribalism, which threaten their freedom & their
ability to use their reason to produce knowledge of the world & inform their political decisions.
These dangers are likened to Plato’s ideal society in that they seek to achieve a perfect order by
the suppression of individual freedom. It is only when society allows its members to use their
faculty of reason that the open society can be maintained.
Portis, Edward. (1986). "Citizenship & Identity," Polity, 18: pp. 457-472. Argues that both
citizenship and long-term political support must be seen as communal in nature because of the
impossibility of a completely instrumental commitment to social affairs. Individuals must define
themselves in social terms, and for this reason alone they must value relevant social entities as
meaningful in themselves.
Przeworski, Adam. (1998). “Deliberation and Ideological Domination,” in Jon Elster, ed.,
Deliberative Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 140-160. Argues that
deliberation may lead people to hold beliefs that are not in their best interest. In the process of
deliberation, people may alter their preferences, either because they now see new causal
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relationships between decisions & outcomes or they have been persuaded to adopt new values.
Through deliberation, people become locked into equlibria & these equilibria have distributional
consequences.
Putnam, Hilary. (1990). Realism with a Human Face, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Defends a version of internal realism in which truth is understood in terms of ideal epistemic
situations. Truth, so defined, is a statement which could be verified were epistemic conditions
ideal. This view is contrasted to metaphysical realism, which assigns truth to certain statements
which can be verified through abstract logical maneuvers. It is defended through appeal to the
work of Kant, Wittgenstein, & Cavell. It claims that reason is a grounded activity of interacting
with others, establishing the truth of things in a given situation & acting on those truths. It thus
melds facts & values, the rational & the emotional, in the pursuit of understanding & explaining
human experience.
Putnam, Robert. (1995). "Tuning In, Tuning Out: the strange disappearance of social capital in
America," PS: Political Science & Politics, 28: pp. 664-683. Defines social capital as features of
social life, networks, norms and trust, that enable participants to act together more effectively to
pursue shared objectives. This form of social capital is decreasing in the US. Various factors are
identified to explain this trend: education, pressures of time & money, mobility and
suburbanization, the changing role of women, the breakdown of the family, race and the rights
revolution, and the rise of the welfare state. However, controlling for these variables, television
turns out to be strongly associated with the erosion of social connections. It is argued that
television erodes social capital by taking up time, affecting the outlook of viewers & influencing
childhood education.
Putnam, Robert. (1996). "The Strange Disappearance of Civic America," The American
Prospect, 24: pp. 34-48. Investigates the erosion of civic activity among Americans. A variety
of empirical data are presented to demonstrate that Americans born between 1910 and 1940 are
much more likely to engage in civic activity than Americans born after this period. Education is
found to be most strongly correlated with civic engagement in all its forms. Various forces are
identified as causal mechanisms of the decline of civic participation: pressures of time & money,
mobility, changes in the marriage structure, the rise of the welfare state & white flight in the face
of civil rights laws for blacks. But television is considered the prime suspect in the decline of
civic activity.
Rauch, Jonathan. (1994). Demosclerosis: the silent killer of American government. New York:
Times Books. Argues that the problem of American democracy is not that elites are too far
removed from citizens, but they are not removed enough. In the past few decades, a dizzying
array of interest groups have emerged in Washington to campaign for the interests of nearly every
kind of group. In the process of this interest group politics, efforts to reach consensus on
pressing public problems have been stymied. It is suggested that to improve American politics, it
will be necessary to make politicians less responsive to the immediate demands of interest
groups, and thus more accountable for promoting the public interest.
Rawls, John. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Belknap Press. The seminal text in
post-WWII American liberal political theory which argues that political justice is achieved when
free and rational persons in pursuit of their own interest accept in an initial position of equality
the terms of their political association. This theory of justice is termed, "justice as fairness." The
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principles outlined in the original position of equality are to regulate all further agreements, and
to determine the level of cooperation necessary to achieve those agreements.
Rawls, John. (1993). Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. A volume
which updates Rawls' Theory of Justice (1971) by taking into account the comments of critics
over the past twenty years. A particular revision of the theory has to do with the normative
grounds on which a notion of justice may be legitimized. In the original theory of justice, these
grounds were simply assumed as a kind of Kantian a priori. In the present volume, they are
instead situated within the Western, and in particular, the American, political and cultural
traditions.
Reynolds, Charles & Ralph Norman, eds. (1988). Community in America: the challenge of
Habits of the Heart, Berkeley: UC Press. An edited volume which offers commentary & critique
on Robert Bellah, et. al.’s Habits of the Heart. The most trenchant criticism is that Bellah’s
effort to restore the meaning of citizenship & refocus on the common good ends in a kind of
dangerous conservatism that squashes dissent. Pluralism by definition is ambivalent, ambiguous,
& conflictual, & any effort to stamp out these elements will by its nature undermine diversity.
Reynolds, Charles & Ralph Norman. eds. (1988). Community in America: the challenge of
Habits of the Heart. Berkeley: University of California Press. An edited volume which reviews,
analyzes and critically appraises Robert Bellah et. al.'s Habits of the Heart. The notions of
culture, practical reason, civic practice & religious practice developed in that book are examined
in separate sections of essays. Robert Bellah's response to contributors' objections is included.
Rieff, Philip. (1968). The Triumph of the Therapeutic: uses of faith after Freud. New York:
Harper & Row. Diagnoses the dilemma of modern societies in terms of the rise of a therapeutic
sensibility which puts personal well-being above all other qualities of a good life. This
sensibility is traced to Freud, and its triumph in our culture is taken to be a result of the creation
of new technologies that allow the economy to run relatively free of human supervision. The
culture of the therapeutic is taken to have dissolved feelings of cultus, or belonging, which once
sustained individuals, and so to have eroded the social bonds which once provided the glue of
society.
Riker, William. (1980). “Political Trust as Rational Choice.” in Leif Lewin & Evert Vedung.
eds. Politics as Rational Action: essays in public choice and policy analysis. Boston: D. Reidel,
pp. 1-24. Argues that rational calculations underlie trust in political interactions. It is shown that
individuals can rationally calculate their level of trust in political interactions. These calculations
can take the form of pure utilitarianism, learning, rules of thumb or introspection. But every
method yields a better than random chance of predicting when it is useful to trust. It is concluded
that institutions are often arranged so that rational calculations of trust can be made quickly and
firmly.
Riker, William. (1982). Liberalism Against Populism: a confrontation between the theory of
democracy and the theory of social choice, San Francisco: W.H. Freeman & Co. Uses social
choice theory to devise a theory of democracy. It is shown that any particular aggregation of
voter preferences is likely to be irrational for a variety of reasons: different choices may be made
on the basis of identical values; there is no singular avenue for ordering social choices; people
may be manipulated into voting in irrational ways; & leaders may control agendas. Thus, the
populist notion that what the people want is the policy that should be enacted is deemed false
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because there is no prima facie method for knowing what the people would want in any given
instance. A liberal notion of democracy is thus supported by social choice theory. Liberalism
entails the guarantee of certain basic procedural rights, to vote, free expression, & the neutrality
of elections, so that groups may struggle among themselves to influence social policy.
Democracy in this sense is process- rather than substantively-oriented.
Rimmerman, Craig. (1997). The New Citizenship: unconventional politics, activism, and
service, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Assesses the ways citizens do & do not participate in
politics in the US, paying particular attention to a set of activities described as new features of
citizenship. These new features are rooted in the sense that people must be trained to be citizens,
& are focused on the importance of understanding civic rights & regular participation. The
empirical literature has turned to voter-turnout data to describe an apathetic and detached
citizenry. This finding is also reflected in citizen anger toward politics as usual and politicians,
and is manifested in two additional trends: the number of incumbents who have chosen to leave
office; & the increased popularity of television and radio call-in talk shows. The new citizenship
movement, rooted in the civil rights movement, is taken to be a challenge to civic indifference. It
also composes a challenge to other kids of organizations, such as ACT UP, Earth First!,
Operation Rescue and the militia movement which promote incivility. ACORN, the
Labor/Community Strategy Center, and the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste are
discussed as examples of the New Citizenship.
Rorty, Richard. ed. (1967). The Linguistic Turn: recent essays in philosophical method.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. An edited volume which contains seminal writings
on the recent turn to linguistic philosophy among philosophers. According to this tradition,
philosophical problems may be solved or dissolved either by reforming language or by
understanding more about the language presently used. Ideal-language and ordinary language
philosophy are distinguished as separate strands of this emerging tradition. Classical statements
of these traditions are included, as are several sections which unravel the metaphilosophical
problems attendant to them.
Rosen, Jay. (1996). Getting the Connections Right: public journalism and the troubles in the
press. New York: Twentieth Century Fund. An important monograph staking out the
philosophical arguments behind the public journalism movement. It is suggested that American
journalism is in trouble largely because it has lost its focus on serving a public that might be
interested in the news it produces. Journalists are encouraged to rediscover the public by taking
actions which bring it into being. Of course, this requires a fundamental transformation of the
journalist self-identity. But it is argued that such an identity transformation is necessary if
journalism is to recover its role in American life.
Rothenbuhler, Eric. (1991). "The Process of Community Involvement," Communication
Monographs, 58: pp. 63-78. Investigates the role of communication in community involvement
drawing on survey data from 400 adult Iowans. It is found that getting together & staying caught
up on the news are strongly associated with community involvement. However, there exists a
large class of people for whom community involvement is not an issue.
Rowland, Robert. (1990). "Purpose, Argument Evaluation, and the Crisis of the Public Sphere,”
in David Williams Michael Hazen, eds., Argumentation Theory and the Rhetoric of Assent,
Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, pp. 119-119. Argues that the epistemic crisis
in the public sphere can be overcome by the use of argumentative criticism to evaluate informal
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rationality. This position is defended in comparison to other approaches: (1) the view that
knowledge can be defined based on the agreement of a rhetorical community, or can be audiencecentered; (2) the view that knowledge is best produced in a dialectical process of free & open
debate; & (3) Willard’s field theory which suggests that knowledge should be situated within the
particular fields that produce it. It is suggested that arguments can be assessed according to infield & field-invariant tests. Among the latter are tests of evidence, tests of formal coherence &
comparisons to expert knowledge. The form may be drawn from the specific purposes of the
field in which the argument is to occur. This purpose-centered view of argument is taken to be a
viable way of reducing the epistemic crisis that current afflicts the public sphere.
Ryan, Mary. (1997). Civic Wars: democracy and public life in the American city during the
nineteenth century. Berkeley: University of California Press. Examines 19th century civic life in
New York, New Orleans and San Francisco in light of recent charges that American culture has
become progressively uncivil and combative. It is found that civic life in the 19th century was no
less uncivil. It is true that public ceremonies and rituals enacted in public space provided a
minimal amount of social cohesion to address common problems. But even during these
ceremonies much political contention can be discerned. Given their longstanding importance to
American public life, civic wars are taken to be a constitutive feature of American democracy,
not an indicator of its impending demise.
Sabato, Larry. (1981). The Rise of Political Consultants: new ways of winning elections. New
York: Basic Books. Traces the emergence of the political consultant and consulting tools in
American politics in the last half of this century. Drawing on interviews with two dozen political
consultants, the tools, attitudes, and perspectives of political consultants are examined. The role
of polling, media advertising and direct mail are discussed. It is shown that these new campaign
technologies have been incorporated into the major political structures, including the Congress,
parties, and the presidency. It is suggested that one way to stem the worst effects of political
consulting would be to strengthen the party structures.
Sabato, Larry. (1988). The Party's Just Begun: shaping political parties for America's future.
Glenview: Scott, Foresman. Presents a defense of American political parties and outlines a
method by which they may be strengthened. The history of parties in the U.S. is traced,
beginning with their rise in the 1830s and ending with their demise in the last three decades. To
revamp parties, several suggestions are made: (1) the creation of party ombudsmen; (2) the
provision of non-political services by parties to their members; (3) the expansion of party
fundraising and candidate recruitment; (4) the creation of institutional party advertising and
broader educational campaigns; & (5) the development of party-controlled presidential debates.
Sandel, Michael J. (1998). Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge
University Press. Argues against a liberal ideal of justice which conceives of this property in
terms of deontological subjects bereft of wider social attachments save its own personal
calculations of self-interest. Justice in these terms is defined as that which is best for the
maximization of individual self-interest. This view of justice is criticized for its failure to
understand that individuals are part of communities, and that justice must be defined in terms of
the values and commitments shaped by these communities. Moreover, individual calculations of
self-interest are by their nature conditioned by the ethos of the larger community. Thus, justice
cannot be defined in terms of individuals, but instead must be imagined in the context of social
relations and bonds.
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Sandel, Michael J. ed. (1984). Liberalism and Its Critics. Oxford: Blackwell. An edited
volume which brings together the most important liberal thinkers of this half century and their
critics. Included on the liberal side are John Rawls, Isiah Berlin, Ronald Dworkin, Friedrich
Hayek & Robert Nozick. Critics include Alasdair MacIntyre, Peter Berger, Michael Sandel,
Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer Hannah Arendt & Michael Oakeshott. Broadly, the liberal
thinkers hew most closely to a conception of justice as individual rights and liberties. This
conception is challenged by their critics, who suggest that rights and liberties cannot be deemed
fundamental without embracing some wider vision of the good life. The basic disagreement
outlined in this book has become the basis for a wider debate between liberals and so-called
communitarians.
Sanders, Lynn. (1997). "Against Deliberation," Political Theory, 25: pp. 347-376. Presents
several grounds on which to be suspicious of the ideal of deliberation: (1) it it is fraught with
connotations of rationality, reserve, cautiousness, quietude, community, selflessness and
universalism; (2) it carries an over-ambitious standard of mutual respect; & (3) it ignores the fact
that some people will be better at articulating their argument than others. In place of the
deliberative model, it is proposed that modern democrats adopt the idea of giving testimony as a
way of increasing participation.
Scaff, Lawrence. (1975). "Two Concepts of Political Participation," The Western Political
Quarterly, 28: pp. 447-462. Discerns two conceptions of political participation in conventional
attitudes: one that stresses the idea of sharing in a common life and acting on the basis of
reciprocity in order to promote the public good; & another that looks upon participation as an act
of exchange to gain power & so increase the probability of realizing private benefits.
Schiffrin, Deborah. (1985). "Everyday Argument: the organization of diversity in talk," in Teun
van Dijk, ed., Handbook of Discourse Analysis: discourse and dialogue, v. 3, London: Academic
Press, pp. 35-46. Analyzes snippets of argumentative talk to demonstrate that argument is
fundamentally a discourse genre in which individuals work to build support for their own
position while simultaneously undermining support for an opponent's position. This dual
movement results in a continual negotiation of referential, social, and expressive meanings. This
oppositional form of argument is posed against a rhetorical form of argument in which
individuals do not try to undermine another's position.
Schiffrin, Deborah. (1990). "The Management of a Cooperative Self During Argument: the role
of opinions and stories," in Allen D. Grimshaw, ed., Conflict Talk: sociolinguistic investigations
of arguments in conversations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 241-259. Describes
how giving an opinion & telling a story help individuals to cooperatively manage themselves
during conflict talk by adjusting the participation framework of talk. These adjustments are
taken to allow individuals to negotiate two of the idealized standards underlying argument: truth
& sincerity. Opinions are shown to sacrifice the absolute truth of a position for the sincerity of
its speaker while stories widen the speaker's claim to both truth & sincerity of the position. Thus,
opinions & stories help to satisfy the Gricean maxim of quality: do not say what you believe to
be false, by separating the speaker's belief from the truth or falsity of what is said.
Schlozman, Kay Lehman, Nancy Burns & Sidney Verba. (1994). "Gender and the Pathways to
Participation: the role of resources," The Journal of Politics, 56: pp. 963-990. In a survey study,
it is found that men are a bit more active politically than women. Women are comparatively
disadvantaged when it comes to the resources that facilitate political activity. When resource
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deficits are viewed in the context of paths to participation, and women are endowed with the
political resources of men, it is shown that women's levels of political activity are closer to men's.
Scholz, John & Wayne B. Gray. (1997). "Can Government Facilitate Cooperation? an
informational model of OSHA enforcement," American Journal of Political Science, 41: pp. 693717. Tests the theory that government can facilitate cooperation between private parties in
collective action dilemmas by providing a bargaining arena to establish common expectations
and using enforcement activities. Data for the study were drawn from OSHA inspections on
injury rates at 6,842 plants from 1979-1985. It is found that a combination of coercion &
facilitation were crucial to resolving conflicts.
Schrag, Calvin. (1992). The Resources of Rationality: a response to the postmodern challenge,
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. A response to the postmodern argument against
modern reason & rationality which suggests that rationality is transversal to the multiplicity of
our discursive & nondiscursive practices. In the guise of three moments of communication
praxis: discerning & evaluating critique, interactive articulation; & incursive disclosure, reason
cuts across the play of discourse & action, word & deed, speaking & writing, hearing and
reading. Reason on this view is not universal & transcendent, but a set of techniques created
over time for critique, articulation & disclosure. As a transversal phenomenon, reason stands
neither above human beings more horizontal to their everyday concerns. Rather, it is between the
universal & the particular, a shifting back and forth between the two perspectives. It is in this
middle-ground that the resources of rationality afford human beings the possibility of freedom &
progress.
Schudson, Michael. (1989). "The Sociology of News Production Revisited." Media, Culture &
Society 11: 263-282. A review of three basic approaches to explaining the production of news:
a political-economy approach which focuses on macro-economic structures; an organizational
approach which concentrates on the routines and practices of news organizations; & a
culturalogical approach which focuses on the aspects of narrative, voice and image which serve
to structure the news. It is suggested that the culturalogical approach is most in need of
development.
Schudson, Michael. (1997). "Sending a Political Message: lessons from the American 1790s,"
Media, Culture & Society, 19: pp. 311-330. Reviews the public sphere of the early American
state to argue that public spheres do not only differ according to degrees of democracy,
deliberation & exclusion, but also on kinds of democracy, deliberation & exclusion. Different
political structures will configure these qualities in different ways, and so create different
possibilities for political communication.
Schudson, Michael. (1998). The Good Citizen: a history of American civic life. New York:
The Free Press. Traces the history of citizenship in the United States in terms of three stages:
citizenship as deference; citizenship as affiliation; & citizenship as individual rights. These
stages roughly correspond to the early Republic, the long 19th century party period, & the 20th
century, respectively. Within this history, the assumption that politics is today degraded, and that
citizenship is dissolved, is consistently challenged. It is argued that citizenship is not worse, only
different from prior manifestations, and that comparisons with prior forms are useless because
the conditions which supported them are no longer apparent. Moreover, there is much that is
good in a conception of citizenship as individual rights.
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Seidman, Steven. ed. (1994). The Postmodern Turn: new perspectives on social theory. New
York: Cambridge University Press. An edited volume which presents seminal challenges to the
Enlightenment paradigm of social knowledge. Together, these writings represent the best
expression of postmodern theories of knowledge. Included among these statements are writings
of Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler,
Zygmunt Bauman & Nancy Fraser, among others. Contributions engage with major themes in
postmodern theory, such as the crisis of representation, the nature of knowledge as a form of
narrative, and the political significance of postmodern critique. The volume also incudes several
empirical illustrations of the postmodern sensibility.
Seligman, Adam. (1992). The Idea of Civil Society, New York: The Free Press. Traces the
development of the idea of civil society from the 18th century to the present. From the 18th
century onward, the idea of civil society developed along two lines: post-Hegelian Marxist &
Anglo-American. In the Anglo-American edition, animated by the Scottish Enlightenment, civil
society was defined as a realm of solidarity held together by the form of moral sentiments and
natural affections, particularly by the rule of reason. In this tradition, civil society was separated
from ethical society, which was thought to be located in the private sphere. In contrast, the
Hegelian tradition understood civil society as an embodiment of an ethical ideal. In Hegel, civil
society is historicized, posited to be an arena of conflicting interests, the transcendence of which
produces a new ethical unity. Marx jettisons this notion of ethical unity, but keeps the notion of
conflict of interests historically negotiated. In the late 19th century, the idea of citizenship came
to replace the problem of civil society as the locus of social conflict. Issues of participation &
values of membership came to the forefront. Universal reason became embodied in the idea of
universal citizenship. This was a paradoxical move which produced a number of contradictions,
most notably between collective solidarity & individualism. In the 20th century, these
contradictions have been manifested in debates about social trust. Civil society assumes a certain
level of social trust, but does not provide the conditions in which such trust can be established.
Thus, proposals such as those of Habermas’ discourse ethics founder on the shoals of the issue of
trust. Civil society is taken to have been an idea rooted in a prior age which has little relevance
for contemporary politics—particularly for the situation of Eastern Europe.
Sen, A.K. (1970). Collective Choice and Social Welfare. San Francisco: Holden-Day.
Investigates the dependence of public policy judgments on social choice & the preferences of the
members of the society. It has been conventionally understood that social choices are optimal
when they accord with the preferences of a society's members. This notion, first advanced by
Pareto, suggests that optimality is achieved when a choice is made that everyone will regard as at
least as good as any other choice that might be made. Various systems of social choice designed
to achieve such optimality are reviewed. It is shown that in every case it is possible to
demonstrate that universal principles often produce unequal outcomes. Thus, it is argued that
there is no singular optimal system of collective choice for every society, but that the particular
context of that society is important for evaluating appropriate choice systems.
Shienbaum, Kim. (1984). Beyond the Electoral Connection: a reassessment of the role of voting
in contemporary American politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Examines
the role of voting in the context of the realities of contemporary American politics. It is argued
that voting today is largely a symbolic ritual undertaken by those who have benefited from the
system in more direct ways to express their political support for the status quo. However,
citizens are participating in politics in other than electoral ways to achieve their political
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objectives. It is concluded that rather than imagining American democracy as representative, and
putting elections at the center of this vision, it is perhaps best to imagine it in terms of citizenparticipants. On the latter view, although fewer people are voting, they are nonetheless
participating in politics in important ways, and American democracy is none the worse for wear
because of this transformation.
Shotter, John. (1993). Conversational Realities: constructing life through language. Thousand
Oaks: Sage. Argues that ordinary language primarily functions to construct different kinds of
social relationships rather than to impart information. That is, talk is taken to be rhetorical and
responsive to particular social relationships rather than referential & representational of states of
being. This argument is juxtaposed to those current in the discipline of psychology which insist
that talk is rooted in the subjective intentions of individuals. The practice of doing psychology
on the basis of this dialogical (rather than monological) perspective is elaborated. Part of this
practice requires analysts to be wary of becoming entrapped in their own stories, and to become
more attentive to the contexts and communities within which talk is produced.
Silbey, Joel. (1991). The American Political Nation, 1838-1893. Stanford: Stanford University
Press. Traces the political history of the American republic during the long period of the 19th
century party system. This period is taken to be distinctive because parties dominated the
political system as never before or since. The ideas, operating principles and institutions of this
party politics are delineated. It is then shown that new forces arose in the post-civil war period to
challenge the party system. New kinds of organizations and political tools were developed to
circumvent and ultimately weaken the party system. By the end of the 19th century, the parties
that had dominated the political system for over fifty years had been overtaken by first elements
of the administrative state and interest group politics.
Simon, Herbert. (1982). Models of Bounded Rationality. Cambridge: MIT Press. A twovolume set of essays which constitute the collective work of the author. Within these essays, a
theory of bounded rationality is developed to explain economic decision-making. Within this
theory, actors are viewed as relatively rational decision-makers who suffer from insufficient
information to make fully rational judgments. In this context, actors will often make "satisficing"
decisions, or decisions which, while not optimal, are satisfactory in the context & given the
amount of information available.
Simons, Herbert. ed. (1990). The Rhetorical Turn: invention and persuasion in the conduct of
social inquiry. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. A collection of essays spawned by a
1984 Iowa Symposium on The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences, in which it is generally argued
that the discipline of rhetoric may provide the tools necessary to reconstruct social scientific
inquiry in the aftermath of widespread dissatisfaction with positivism. Critiques of objectivism
have convinced a large number of social scientists that inquiry is conditioned by individual and
communal judgments. As such, research is always oriented toward persuading others that one's
conclusions are justified. The advantages rhetorical theory possesses for analyzing how this
process of persuasion takes place are demonstrated in a variety of case studies, including
discussions of the rhetoric of science, psychoanalysis, decision science, the life sciences and
politics. The relation of the rhetorical view to realism and objectivism is also considered in
several essays.
Simpson, Andrea. (1998). The Tie That Binds: identity and political attitudes in the post-civil
rights generation. New York: New York University Press. Examines the nature of black
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identity among the post-civil rights generation drawing on interviews conducted for the 1993-94
National Black Politics Study. It is found that young blacks experience different forms of racism
than in the past, forms that are symbolic and aversive. When encountered in majority-white
institutions, such as universities, such racism tends to promote black unity. That is, these
environments lead young blacks to embrace a black identity. However, majority-black
environments tend to allow ideological differences to emerge. It is concluded that integration has
failed to promote racial understanding, but instead has produced new kinds of racism that are
often difficult to identify and rectify.
Skillington, Tracey. (1997). "Politics and the Struggle to Define: a discourse analysis of the
framing strategies of competing actors in a 'new' participatory forum," British Journal of
Sociology, 48: pp. 493-513. Examines the structure of discursive formations of various
participating actors at the Irish National Recycyline Conference in 1993 to explore the way in
which members struggled to define the symbolic rules of this forum. Economic actors at this
meeting rarely strayed from frames of meaning that stressed economic growth. To the extent that
they dominated the conference, they simply incorporated a productivist perspective into a new
participatory forum. Critiques of their efforts were constrained by poorly rooted opportunities
for action & a structural system that remains non-participative at heart.
Smith, Craig & Michael Hyde. (1991). "Rethinking 'The Public': the role of emotion in beingwith-others," The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 77: pp. 446-466. Draws upon Heidegger to argue
that emotion plays a central role in sustaining the communal & public character of everyday
being-with-others. This insight is developed in a neo-Aristotelian treatment of emotions which
stresses the importance of recognizing the emotions as vehicles for the active sensibility of
human beings who are related & exist in a temporal & spatial public life.
Smith, Craig. (1989). Freedom of Expression and Partisan Politics, Columbia, SC: University
of South Carolina Press. Investigates the tension between the value of freedom of expression &
that of political order in a discussion of several case studies, including political campaigns &
national security debates. This tension is discussed in terms of three kinds: tension between
freedom of expression and restrictions on political subject maters; freedom and the regulation of
communication media; & freedom & restrictions on communicative objectives. To resolve these
tensions, it is suggested that openness ought to be favored wherever possible & that pragmatic,
workable applications of public policy be enacted to address local situations. It is concluded that
when viewed historically, freedom of speech has been a better alternative than censorship
because it leads to better decisions & outcomes.
Smith, Rogers. (1991). "The 'American Creed' and American Identity: limits of liberal
citizenship in the United States." Political Research Quarterly 41: pp. 225-252. Identifies three
major cultural strands in American thinking about citizenship: liberal, republican and ethnocultural. While the liberal strand has stressed the protection of individual rights, the republican
and ethno-cultural strands have often been employed for racist or exclusionary purposes. This is
demonstrated in a brief analysis of immigration law from the 19th century to the present.
Smith, Rogers. (1997). Civic Ideals: conflicting visions of citizenship in US history, New
Haven: Yale University Press. Examines federal & state citizenship laws from the founding to
the early 1900s in an effort to trace three competing models of citizenship in US culture:
liberalism, republicanism & ethno-culturalism. It is shown that US citizenship laws have always
contained illiberal, undemocratic ascriptive myths of US civic identity, along with various types
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of liberal and republican ones. Appeals to republican and ascriptive myths have usually been
made during times in which the political culture was being expanded to include new kinds of
groups. It is suggested that leading versions of liberal democratic theory today are not up to
defending liberalism against the attractiveness of these other myths because they do not devise an
adequate sense of common political identity. Doing so, it is argued, requires imagining political
communities as something like parties: they are not natural or benign, but are indispensable.
Membership in them must also be a matter of choice.
Smith, Tom. (1997). "Factors Relating to Misanthropy in Contemporary American Society,"
Social Science Research, 26: pp. 170-196. Draws upon the Rosenberg 5-item misanthropy scale
included in the yearly General Social Survey since 1972 to measure levels of misanthropy with
the US population. It is found that misanthropy is higher among lower SES groups, subgroups
toward the social periphery such as racial & ethnic minorities & southerners, people suffering
from negative life events, people who do not attend church, fundamentalists & younger
generations. For blacks, misanthropy decreased by more social contact with whites, but the same
was not true of whites. In contrast to the social capital school (led by Robert Putnam), it is
shown that there has not been a large & long-term rise in levels of misanthropy.
Somers, Margaret. (1994). "The Narrative Constitution of Identity: a relational and network
approach," Theory and Society, 23: pp. 605-649. Argues for a reconsideration of identity
formation through the concept of narrative. Four dimensions of narrative identity are outlined:
ontological, public, conceptual & metanarrative. The notion of narrative identity is proposed as a
way of conceding the move of identity-politics to reintroduce previously excluded subjects and
suppressed subjectivities and at the same time rejecting the tendency of identity theories to fix
their new normative categories. Moreover, the notion throws into sharp relief the question of
what kinds of narratives socially predominate and how people are organized within them.
Spragens, Thomas. (1990). Reason and Democracy, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Reflects upon the role of reason in democratic deliberation. The notion of rationality has long
been a central feature of Western political theories, however, recent accounts of political
rationality have been narrow & inadequate. This narrowness has been due to the pre-eminence of
a calculative ideal in political theories of rational decision-making. An alternative form of the
rational political enterprise is proposed. This rational enterprise is one in which autonomous
persons are oriented to the attainment of the common & individual human good. The central
institutional feature of this orientation is practical discourse, which both defines the common
good & places constraints on the principle of right. This proposal is compared to pluralist, liberal
& communitarian conceptions of democracy. It is suggested that citizenship in a society that
practices rational discourse will be characterized by participation, tolerance, respect, an effort to
improve good political judgment & a focus on the common good. Policy implications of this
view are several: education ought to be oriented to producing practical discourse; political
institutions ought to be democratized; political journalism ought to be improved; & crossparadigm forums ought to be developed.
Stanley, Manfred. (1990). “The Rhetoric of the Commons: forum discourse in politics and
society,” in Herbert Simons, ed., The Rhetorical Turn: invention and persuasion in the conduct
of inquiry, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 238-257. Suggests that American
political society is composed of two regimes: liberalism, which is based on the market economy
& democracy, which is based on the principle of popular sovereignty. These regimes create
distinctive forums for political conversation. The liberal forum has several characteristics: it is
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policy-oriented; interested in creating consensus based on evaluating policy decisions; choices
are made through a process of working through alternatives to come to a least objectionable
decision; & forum participants are conceived as aggregates of individuals who bring their wants
to the political marketplace. The democratic forum has different characteristics: it is civicoriented; aims at a much more comprehensive notion of consensus; operates on the basis of an
immigration metaphor of moving between distinctive worlds; participants are conceived of as
complex social beings whose consciousness is structured by group & institutional memberships,
collective memories, & naturalized ideologies.
Stokes, Susan. (1998). “Pathologies of Deliberation,” in Jon Elster, ed., Deliberative
Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 123-139. Considers instances of
democratic deliberation which end in pathological outcomes. These outcomes include those in
which deliberation induces preferences that appear to be more in line with the interests of the
communicator that with those of message recipients; deliberation creates the public belief that
preferences have been transformed; & those in which social inequality produces identities that
are politically debilitating. Several rules are suggested by this discussion: (1) if elites shape
citizen preferences, then parties are needed that cover a broad spectrum to permit citizens a
choice of preferences to cleave to; competitive media structures are necessary to reduce the
amount of press mis-interpretation of what people want; resource-source poor citizens’
associations must be capacitated; & the public and politicians have to know where information &
points of views come from.
Sullivan, Patricia & Steven Goldzwig. (1995). "A Relational Approach to Moral DecisionMaking: the majority opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 81:
pp. 167-190. The majority opinion in this Supreme Court case is taken to be an instance in
which the court acknowledged the complex web of relationships involved in abortion decisionmaking. In this sense, it is an example of relational moral reasoning. This relational approach
stresses interconnectedness, context & humility in conversations over moral issues. The notion
of relational moral reasoning stems from feminist theorizing, & is advocated as a useful revision
of traditional approaches to rhetoric that stress individual autonomy & argument.
Sunstein, Cass. (1990) After the Rights Revolution: reconceiving the regulatory state.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Traces the nature and significance of regulatory measures
enacted during the rights revolution that was initiated by the New Deal. This rights revolution is
defined as the creation by Congress and the president of a set of legal rights that were not
recognized in the Constitution. Among these rights are the right to clean air and water, to safe
consumer products and workplaces, and to a social safety net. This revolution has spawned an
enormous regulatory framework that in many ways has been successful. However, this
regulatory mindset has also jeopardized important constitutional values, given rise to powerful
interest groups, ignored the redundancy and inefficiency of many regulatory measures, and
downplayed the difficulties associated with treating the management of social risks as
conventional rights. Principles and reforms are proposed that might promote the purposes of
regulatory programs while avoiding these problems.
Tannen, Deborah. (1993). "Editor's Introduction," in Tannen, ed., Gendered and Conversational
Interaction, New York: Oxford University Press. Introduces a set of essays which explore the
relationship between gender & language using ethnographically centered discourse analysis.
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Tannen, Deborah. (1998). The Argument Culture: moving from debate to dialogue, New York:
Random House. The argument culture is defined as a set of values/attitudes/beliefs which lead
individuals to approach public discourse in terms of war-like interactions. In this culture,
aggressive tactics are adopted for their own sake & irrelevant points are seized upon for the sake
of rhetorical victory. This culture is traced in the press, politics & the law. It is argued that men
are more likely to engaged in this agonistic form of conversation than women, and that
technology tends to increase the likelihood of its occurring. Examples from other cultures are
reviewed for other ways in which opposition may be negotiated. It is concluded that a greater
variety of interactive styles is necessary so that argument can be used in appropriate formats, and
not used when it is inappropriate.
Teske, Nathan. (1997). "Beyond Altruism: identity-construction as moral motive in political
explanation," Political Psychology, 18: pp. 71-91. Draws upon data from long interviews to
argue against current self-interest & moral motive models of political actin. In place of these
models, it is suggested that individuals are motivated to engage in politics in a complex
interweaving of self & moral motives. Activists are primarily concerned with what kind of
person they are and what kind of life they are living. These concerns are both moral & selfregarding, and therefore defy the conventional dichotomy in the literature.
Teske, Nathan. (1997). Political Activists in America: the identity construction model of
political participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Investigates why people
become involved in politics using interviews with environmental, social justice, and pro-life
activists. Against the conventional wisdom that engagement in politics is inherently costly and
lacking any intrinsic reward, it is argued that active involvement in politics is personally
fulfilling, & enables activists to become people whom they would otherwise have been unable to
become. Thus, motivations for political activity are both self-interested and altruistic, as
individuals seek to realize their personal interest in fashioning moral selves.
Theis-Morse, George Marcus & John Sullivan. (1993). "Passion and Reason in Political Life:
the organization of affect and cognition and political tolerance," in George Marcus & Russell
Hanson, Reconsidering the Democratic Public, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State
University Press, pp. 249-272. Explores the role of affect & cognition in the construction of
perceptions of threat and political tolerance drawing on survey data. It is found that arousing the
emotions is an effective way to gain people's attention. When emotions are not aroused & people
attend to their thoughts, they are more tolerant. However, it is also found that affective reactions
play an important role in enabling people to evaluate their current environment. Further, when
people attend to their circumstances, emotions and cognitions often work together. Thus, people
who seek to ignore their passions will likely become inattentive and unresponsive to their
political environment.
Theiss-Morse, Elizabeth. (1993). "Conceptualizations of Good Citizenship and Political
Participation," Political Behavior, 15: pp. 355-380. Investigates how individuals view their
responsibilities as citizens & the relationship of these views to political participation drawing on
a Q method study in the Twin Cities. Four distinct perspectives on participative duties were
found: Representative Democracy; Political Enthusiast; Pursued Interests & Indifferent. Most
people are engaged in politics to an extent consistent with their citizenship perspective.
Thelen, David. (1996). Becoming a Citizen in the Age of Television: how Americans
challenged the media and seized political initiative during the Iran-Contra debate. Chicago:
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The University of Chicago Press. Explores how Americans become citizens in the age of
television drawing on an examination of the conflict between citizens & political leaders that
exploded in 1987 during the Iran-Contra hearings. It is shown that politicians and citizens live in
different political worlds. The world of the politician is shaped by technical and expert kinds of
knowledge while the ordinary citizen views politics through the prism of his or her informal
relationships. The implication is that citizens are not apathetic or unmotivated, but located in a
different social sphere than politicians—and that television does not help bring the two together.
Therefore, a call is made to draw politics closer to everyday life so that politicians and citizens
may once again find one another.
Thernstrom, Stephan & Abigail Thernstrom. (1997). America in Black and White: one nation,
indivisible. New York: Simon & Schuster. Presents an analysis of the status of AfricanAmericans in the contemporary U.S. drawing on a wide variety of statistical data. It is shown
that the conventional wisdom on their status is misguided in a number of ways. Blacks gained
the most in the years between World War Two and the 1970s—before the start of the modern
affirmative action era. Black gains as measured by a variety of indicators—graduate rates,
income, social relationships—have been impressive. While problems in race relations remain, it
is argued that they will not be solved by traditional civil rights strategies. Thus, affirmative
action programs have threatened, not contributed to, racial progress. Only through a common
understanding among Blacks and Whites alike that we are one nation, indivisible, will racial
progress continue.
Toulmin, Steven. (1985). The Uses of Argument, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Compares two models of argument, one mathematical and the other prudential. In the first,
argument is laid out in logical form in quasi-geometrical shapes; in the second, it is laid out
procedurally, in proper form. It is suggested hat examples of mathematical arguments compose a
special kind of logic which should not be mistaken as a generalizable model. Instead, idealized
logic ought to be combined with the procedural logic applied in concrete fields of interaction to
compose a new discipline of applied logic. Validity within any given field is field-specific, not
transcendent, and so follows the procedures of validity which are taken to be legitimate within it.
Tulis, Jeffrey. (1987). The Rhetorical Presidency. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Traces the emergence of a strong, rhetorically-centered presidency in the 20th century. In the
original Constitution, the presidency was imagined as an executor of legislative decisions rather
than as a strong political force in its own right. This sense has changed in the 20th century, as
presidents began to develop a strong program of popular leadership. It is concluded that this
transformation is dangerous, because it leads to demagoguery, spectacle, & an abuse of
presidential power.
Underwood, Doug. (1993). When MBAs rule the Newsroom: how the marketers and managers
are reshaping today's media. New York: Columbia University Press. Examines the impact of
market-driven journalism on the contemporary newsroom, the daily newspaper, and the attitudes
of newspaper journalists drawing on interviews & surveys. The transition to marketing-oriented
journalism is traced to economic crises within the newspaper economy that began in the 1980s.
Today, market-minded managers have displaced most traditional news editors in newspapers
across the country, & have steadily implemented mechanisms which are transforming the way in
which journalism is done. As this process has taken place, it has threatened the traditional values
of autonomy & community service prized by journalists. The result is that reporters are
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increasingly demoralized, more fearful for their job prospects & the kind of job they will be
performing in the near future, and generally gloomy about their profession.
Van Dijk, Teun. (1988). "Social Cognition, Social Power and Social Discourse," Text, 8: pp.
129-157. A framework which draws connections between social power & discourse is presented.
Within this framework the mediating power of social cognitions is emphasized. Social
cognitions involve the interpretation, recognition and legitimation of power through ideological
models. These models are adopted by individuals to guide their beliefs, language and actions.
One can witness these models in action in discourse, in markers of interaction, linguistic codes,
and symbolic dimensions of interactions. It is in the communication of these models that
relations of social power are reproduced.
Van Dyke, Vernon. (1982). "Collective Entities and Moral Rights: problems in liberaldemocratic thought," The Journal of Politics, 44: pp. 21-40. Makes the argument that certain
kinds of collective entities have legal & moral rights. To make judgments as to which groups
have such rights, several principles are offered: (1) a group has a stronger claim the more it is
self-conscious & desires to preserve itself; (2) the more it has a reasonable chance of succeeding;
(3) the more its criteria of membership are clear; (4) the more it is significant in the lives of its
members; (5) the more important the rights sought are to its members; (6) the more organized it
is; (7) the more firmly established in tradition it is; & (8) the more clear it seeks rights that are
compatible with an equality principle.
van Dijk, Teun. (1987). Communicating Racism: ethnic prejudice in thought and talk.
Newbury Park: Sage. The way in which racism is reproduced in everyday talk is analyzed
drawing on data from a variety of projects conducted from 1980-1985, including interviews with
about 180 individuals in Amsterdam & San Diego. It is shown that the major cognitive
structures that form the basis of discrimination & racism are manifested in everyday talk. In such
talk, individuals orient themselves to main topics, engage in storytelling, make arguments &
semantic moves, & assume particular styles of rhetoric, which are structured by underlying racial
structures. Thus, though specific utterances are individually spoken, they are deeply embedded
with wider social relationships.
van Eemeren, Frans, Rob Grootendorst, Sally Jackson, and Scott Jacobs. (1993). Reconstructing
Argumentative Discourse, Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press. Constructs a
dialectical model of argument which consists of several stages: identifying disagreements;
establishing agreement as to process by which arguments are to proceed; providing for indefinite
exploration of relevant issues; ending in resolution which satisfies all participants. Particular
types of speech acts are appropriate to each stage: expressing standpoints to confrontation;
challenging or defending standpoints to openings; advancing, accepting or requesting further
argumentation in the argumentation stage; & establishing & accepting the result in the
concluding phase. An engineering metaphor is suggested to connect this idealized form of
argument to concrete argumentative situations.
van Mill, David. (1996). "The Possibility of Rational Outcomes from Democratic Discourse and
Procedures," The Journal of Politics, 58: pp. 734-52. Compares two traditions in democratic
theory: theories of democratic discourse & disequilibrium theories of social choice, according to
their conclusions as to what outcomes can be expected from democratic procedures. It is shown
that both theories hold identical assumptions concerning the requirements for a fair procedure:
equal access, the absence of powerful agenda setters, unrestrained discourse, etc. However, the
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first argues that this procedure will yield morally legitimate outcomes, while the second argues
that more democracy will yield instability & arbitrary results. Theorists of democratic discourse
are urged to create models that is open and democratic but also that creates stability by placing
limits on freedom.
Verba, Sidney & Gary Orren. (1985). Equality in America: the view from the top, Cambridge:
Harvard University Press. Observes that a tension exists between economic & political equality.
Inequality in the economic sphere does much to shape politics as those with more resources use
them for political gain. Political equality, also as ideal & reality, poses a constant challenge to
economic inequality as disadvantaged groups petition the state for redress. The history of the US
may be described at least in some part as a norm of inequality, both political & economic, spiked
by surges of egalitarianism. The limits to the redistributive process are set by the limits of
American beliefs about equality, and these beliefs in turn are in large measure defined by the
most affluent classes. Members of the highest SES are the most ideological in their perspective
on public life. They also hold a set of views toward equality that is fairly uniform & structured
by a set of values toward the New Deal, race, quotas, causes of inequality, redistribution &
gender. American leaders agree that income equality should not be attained, but they disagree
more often on equality of influence in politics. While accepting this value, elites struggle with
one another to assure themselves of more political influence than other groups. The result is that
political equality is unlikely to be attained, both because elites cannot agree on what it means &
because political equality is linked to economic equality. For these reasons, inequality, both
economic & political, is likely to continue in the near future.
Verba, Sidney, Kay Lehman Schlozman, Henry Brady & Norman Nie. (1993). "Citizen
Activity: who participates? what do they say?" American Political Science Review, 87: pp. 303318. Compares the demographic attributes & attitudes of participant publics to the public as a
whole drawing on data from a large-scale national survey. It is found that while voters do not
differ much in terms of attitudes, they differ substantially in their demographic characteristics,
economic needs, and the government benefit they receive. These differences are exacerbated
when one moves from voting to acts that are more difficult, convey more information and exert
greater pressure. While the disadvantaged are more concerned with basic human needs,
participative publics tend to focus on other issues. The result is that the policy preferences and
issues of the disadvantaged rarely make it into public discourse.
Viswanath, K. & John R. Finnegan, Jr. (1996). "The Knowledge-Gap Hypothesis: twenty-five
years later," Brant R. Burleson, ed., Communication Yearbook 19: pp. 187-228. The knowledgegap hypothesis states that as mass media information increases in society, the gap between
segments of the population in terms of the ability to acquire information will become greater.
Research has found that knowledge gaps are less likely to be found on issues defined as
important to communities. Differences in knowledge have been associated with differences in
media attention,processing, and dependency relations between the lower- and higher-SES groups.
Little has been done to link situational and structural levels of analysis into a coherent
framework.
Walker, Jack. (1983). "The Origins and Maintenance of Interest Groups in America." The
American Political Science Review 77: 390-406. An influential article which investigates how
interest groups attract & hold their member base drawing on survey data collected in 190-81. It
is found that the number of interest groups in operation, the mixture of types, and the level &
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direction of political mobilization in the US at any point in time will be determined by the
composition and accessibility of the system's major patrons of political action.
Walton, Douglas. (1992). The Place of Emotion in Argument, University Park, PA: The
Pennsylvania State University Press. Investigates the role of emotion in ordinary conversational
arguments drawing on analysis of several case studies. More specifically, it seeks to determine
appropriate & inappropriate conditions for using four forms of emotional argument: argument
that appeals to popular sentiment; argument that appeals to pity; argument that appeals to threat;
& argument that uses a personal attack. Arguments based on emotional appeal may be good
when they link an argument to an arguer’s commitments or underlying positions on an issue.
Especially in situations that have no verifiably correct position, arguments based on emotion may
steer interlocutors toward a resolution of the conflict of opinion by weight of presumption or
burden of proof. However, arguments based on emotion are always inherently weaker than
arguments based on logic. In fact, they may be dangerous when used to harden biases into
fanatical, dogmatic or prejudicial attitudes & thus to impose a fallacy on otherwise reasoned
discussion.
Walton, Douglas. (1995). A Pragmatic Theory of Fallacy, Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of
Alabama Press. A theory of fallacy is presented which defines the term as: (1) an argument; (2)
that falls short of some standard of correctness; (3) as used in a context of dialogue; (4) but that
for various reasons, appears correct in that context; & (5) poses a serious obstacle to the
realization of the goals of dialogue. Fallacy is thus not associated with personal intent to
deceive, but as a technique used inappropriately in a given context.
Warren, Mark. (1992). "Democratic Theory and Self-Transformation," American Political
Science Review, 86: pp. 8-23. Those who argue for an expansion of democratic expansion rely
upon an a view of the self as socially and discursively constructed. Individuals who engaged in
democratic discourse will be transformed, becoming more public-spirited, tolerant,
knowledgeable and self-reflective. This view of the self is contrasted to liberal notions, which
understand the self as coming to politics fully formed with coherent opinions. It is argued that
while the transformative notion of the self has much to recommend, it cannot answer standard
objections that more participation may make individuals more enlightened, but also less tolerant
& less public-spirited. It is suggested that an interest-based theory of the self combined with
complementary theories of personality, language and moral identity may develop a more
adequate social constructionist account of the political self. This theory yields sixteen types of
public goods, from material to symbolic, that may transform the self in distinctive ways.
Warren, Mark. (1993). "Can Participatory Democracy Produce Better Selves? psychological
dimensions of Habermas' discursive model of democracy," Political Psychology, 14: pp. 209234. Habermas has argued that democratic discourse leads to individual development of critical
capacities for political judgment, or autonomy. It is argued that Habermas' model relies too
heavily on cognitive dimensions of the self to the neglect of affective dimensions. The
connection between political language & character-structure is re-modeled on the basis of a
therapeutic model of communication. It is suggested that this model might be incorporated into
the workplace to produce more democratically discursive selves.
Warren, Mark. (1996). "Deliberative Democracy and Authority," American Political Science
Review, 90: pp. 46-60. It is argued that deliberative democrats need a concept of authority, not
the least because the scale and complexity of contemporary societies limit the numbers of
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decisions that can be made by deliberatively democratic means. A view of authority is developed
which imagines it a limited suspension of enabled by a context of democratic challenge and
public accountability. Understood in this manner, democratic authority may enhance deliberative
decision making by enabling individuals to allocate their time, energy & knowledge to issues
most important to them.
Warren, Mark. (1996). "What Should We Expect from More Democracy?" Political Theory,
24: pp. 241-270. Argues that radical, deliberative democrats ought to give up three assumptions:
that the state can be an expression of democratic community or that democracy can reveal or
result in community; that people would naturally choose to be active democrats; & finally, that
participation leads only to positive goods. Instead, more democracy should be championed
because it will transform hardened identities by opening new social ground; cultivate the
autonomy of individuals; & develop & restore limited and pluralized patterns of institutional
authority.
Wattenberg, Martin. (1996). The Decline of American Political Parties, 1952-1984. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press. Traces the demise of American political parties since the 1950s. It is
shown that the levels of the public identifying themselves with one party or the other has
decreased substantially over this period. More dangerously, the numbers of people who refuse to
identify themselves with any of the three largest political groups—Republicans, Democrats or
Independents—is an indication that the public is not disaffected from the parties per se, but from
the entire political process.
Weale, Albert. (1989). "The Limits of Democracy," in Alan Hamlin & Philip Pettit, eds., The
Good Polity: normative analysis of the state, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 35-48. Suggests that
four restrictions limit the democratic-ness of any form of government: scope, source,
constituency, & decision-rule. However, it is argued that democratic-ness is best understood not
as a particular arrangement of organizations, but as a critical mode of justification of political
institutions. This notion of democracy carries with it a set of assumptions, foremost among
which is that people are free and equal, and that the protection of autonomous interests (formed
before discussion must be a first condition of a democracy. A second assumption is that there are
generalized interests of the community which are long-term, universal & common to all members
of society, that must be open for debate.
Weilhouwer, Peter W. & Brad Lockerbie. (1994). "Party Contacting and Political Participation,
1952-1990," American Journal of Political Science, 38: pp. 211-229. Investigates the impact of
economic experiences and evaluations, personal characteristics, party contacting & attitudinal
orientation to politics on political participation drawing on analysis of American National
Election Studies from 1952-1990. It is found that parties continue to be active organizations and
contact one-fifth to one-quarter of the electorate. When contacted by parties, individuals have a
greater propensity to vote and to engage in other political activities. These findings hold up even
alongside the other variables tested.
Weissberg, Robert. (1974). Political Learning, Political Choice and Democratic Citizenship,
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Explores the link between early political learning and
political life drawing on data from the secondary literature. It is found that several values
represent a bedrock foundation of political learning in the US. These include the idea that
political participation should be directed to electoral participation; that political conflict should
be relatively exciting but not sharply divergent; & abstract support for free speech. However, it
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is also found that most Americans enter adulthood with many anti-democratic policy preferences,
particularly with respect to extending the right of free speech to unpopular groups. It is
suggested that Americans are socialized to these values, & that little explicit manipulation is
required to secure consent to them. However, this also means that it is very difficult if not
impossible to manipulate Americans to believe differently once they reach adulthood. Thus, in
the US a set of persistent, broad, fundamental political orientations exists without systematic
manipulation to guarantee or challenge them. It is concluded that these broad orientations are
unlikely to change in the absence of significant amendments to the institutions which support the
basic rules of the political game in this country.
Willard, Charles. (1989). A Theory of Argumentation, Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of
Alabama Press. Presents a theory of argument in which that term is defined as a form of
communicative interaction in which two or more people maintain what they construe to be
incompatible positions. This definition places argument into the sphere of communication rather
than logic. Arguers are perceived to be individuals seeking to balance their needs & interests
with events, public codes, etiquettes & standards. To assess arguments, one must therefore
employ an ethnomethodological stance that seeks to explain the context from which arguers
make their claims. Argument is never fixed, but emerges in contexts of interaction. By engaging
in argument, individuals are naturally forced into public areas & conventional contracts of
interaction. Rationality in this context is defined as a socio-cultural aspect of interactions, in that
individuals want to appear rational to identify with social groups.
Willard, Charles. (1990). “The Problem of the Public Sphere: three diagnoses,” in David
Williams Michael Hazen, eds., Argumentation Theory and the Rhetoric of Assent, Tuscaloosa,
AL: The University of Alabama Press, pp. 135-156. Considers two prominent diagnoses of the
problem of the public sphere: the epistemological & the pedagogical. The former suggests that
the public sphere is withering for the want of a commensurating discourse; the latter
operationalizes the needed discourse in terms of argument techniques. These diagnoses are taken
to be inferior to the epistemic diagnosis, which focuses on the relativity dividing the elite
decision-maker from the expert & the relativity that divides experts. Within the epistemic
diagnosis, attention is turned to putting mistakes & skills of argument into a context in which the
relativity of daily life & dependence on authority are unavoidable if problematic aspects of
ordinary decision-making.
Wilson, John. (1990). Politically Speaking: the pragmatic analysis of political language,
London: Basil Blackwell. Presents an analysis of political talk from the perspective of linguistic
pragmatics. The basis of this perspective is that what is meant is never wholly contained by what
is said. This means that the meaning of political claims may not be centered in the words that are
said, & that speakers may manipulate language so as to mean something that is not contained by
the words they speak. Instances of such talk include the use of metaphor, the use of pronomials,
presuppositions & conversational implicatures & questions/answer types.
Wilson, Woodrow. (1908). Constitutional Government in the United States. New York:
Columbia University Press. A classic text in political history which argues that Congress is no
longer capable of being the effective leader of the nation. Instead, Congress tends to be
interested in local affairs, to be unduly tied to party rather than public concerns, and therefore to
be unresponsive to the national interest. Instead, it is argued that the presidency ought to be
strengthened so that it can lead the nation. Since the president is the only political actor elected
by the national public, only he properly represents national public opinion, and so ought to lead
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the country. Wilson's call for a strong presidency is widely taken to be an important moment in
the seemingly inexorable gravitation of state power to this office in the 20th century.
Wolf, Susan. (1992). "Two Levels of Pluralism," Ethics, 102: pp. 785-798. The dilemma of a
lack of foundation for any particular ethical judgment leads individuals in one of two directions:
relativism or subjectivism. A pluralist position is proposed to avoid choosing between these two
views. According to pluralism, moral disagreements may be registered but judgments can be
made through logic and conversation, & experience. One may not interrogate first-order varieties
of morals (equality, liberty, etc.) but second-order varieties of morals (systems, practices, etc.)
may be amenable to a form of objective relativism that allows some judgments to be made.
Wolfe, Alan. (1998). One Nation, After All. New York: Viking. An investigation of the social
mores of the American middle classes which draws upon in-depth interviews with respondents in
four middle-class communities across the U.S. It is found that these Americans are remarkably
uniform in their social and cultural attitudes. Far from a culture war, the American public
appears to be reasonably tolerant of alternative views. While holding firm views of their own,
they shrink from imposing these views on others. However, there is one area where respondents
registered more intolerance: homosexuality. They were far more likely to express intolerant
attitudes and beliefs on this issue than on any other. It is concluded that if a culture war exists at
all in the U.S., it centers mainly on the issue of homosexuality, and not on the broad expanse of
social and cultural concerns.
Wolfe, Christopher. (1994). The Rise of Modern Judicial Review: from constitutional
interpretation to judge-made law, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Traces the rise of
modern judicial review in three phases: a traditional period in which The Constitution was
perceived as definitive—perhaps broad & general, but not ambiguous or vague. A transitional
period in the mid-19th century when judges began to strike down what they considered arbitrary
legislation. A modern period in which judges not only engaged in judicial activism, but did so on
the basis of a theory of judicial power which understood the Constitution as a set of
presumptions, or vague principles, that required balancing on the part of the Supreme Court.
This practice required interpretation of the Constitution.
Wolff, Edward N. (1995). "The Rich Get Increasingly Richer: latest data on household wealth
during the 1980s." in Richard Ratcliff, Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, eds. Research in
Politics and Society: the politics of wealth and inequality. Greenwich: JAI Press: pp. 33-68.
Using data from the 1983 and 1989 Survey of Consumer Finances, the extent of household
wealth inequality is investigated. It is found that while mean wealth increased by seven percent
in real terms over this period, median wealth grew only by one percent. Almost all of the growth
in real wealth accrued to the top twenty percent of wealthholders. Thus, the concentration of US
wealth in 1989 was more extreme than at any time since 1929.
Wolin, Sheldon. (1960). Politics and Vision: continuity and innovation in Western political
thought. Boston: Little, Brown. Traces developments in Western political philosophy from
Plato to the early 20th century. Within this discussion, the political thought of the Romans, early
Christians, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Machiavelli, Hobbes, 18th-19th century liberals & 20th
century thinkers are all reviewed. It is suggested that a basic trend in recent decades has been the
sublimation of notions of the political into forms of association which earlier thinkers have
deemed non-political. This movement amounts to a reaction against the general nature of
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traditional political theory & a widening of the claims of the political to a scope as wide as
society itself.
Wuthnow, Robert. (1991). Acts of Compassion: caring for others and helping ourselves,
Princeton: Princeton University Press. Considers the tension between American individualism &
the impulse to be compassionate toward others. Typical resolutions of this tension rely upon a
notion that to help others is to help oneself. But this form of argument is taken to be
unpersuasive. Instead, an argument for compassion is developed through the metaphor of the gift
exchange. In a complex society, a person giving a gift has the satisfaction of knowing that he is
contributing to a member of the group, & thus to the persistence of that group’s reality. On this
view, acts of compassion are important precisely because they connect us to others while at the
same time protect our individuality. Thus, there is a social value in compassion that at once
supports individualism & transcends it to image metaphorically the kind of society in which one
wants to live.
Young, Iris. (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton: Princeton University
Press. Argues that the notion of distribution should be confined to consideration of material
goods, while domination & oppression should be the primary terms used for conceptualizing
injustice. Oppression is defined in terms of exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural
imperialism, & violence. The welfare corporate society is accused of deflecting attention from
these issues & thereby depoliticizing public life by restricting discussion to distributive issues in
a context of interest-group pluralism. Further, the preference for an impartial civic identity in the
public sphere has also contributed to the erasure of issues of oppression & domination from the
public conversation. A politics of difference is proposed in which group representation would be
ensured for disadvantaged groups so that group-specific needs might be promoted & social
equality achieved.
Youniss, James, Jeffrey McLellan & Miranda Yates. (1997). ""What We Know about
Engendering Civic Identity," American Behavioral Scientist, 40: pp. 620-631. Reviews data on
the link between youth participation in organized activities and civic behaviors 15 years or more
later. It is found that students who participated in high school government or community service
projects are more likely to vote and to join community organizations than are adults who were
non-participants. Thus, participation in the period of youth can be seminal in the construction of
a civic identity.
Zaller, John. (1992). The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. New York: Cambridge
University Press. Develops a comprehensive theory of how people acquire political information
in a mass society. It is suggested that individuals are differentially exposed to political
information, that they react critically to new information only to the extent that they are
knowledgeable about political affairs, that they rarely have fixed attitudes toward politics, & that
they employ political ideas that are most immediately salient to them. In this context, political
elites tend to dominate mass opinion because they construct the relevant frames for
understanding political information which are then disseminated by the mass media. Thus, it is
not necessarily critical that citizens are widely informed about politics. Rather, they must only be
able to pressure leaders in useful directions, and to remove leaders when necessary.
Zarefsky, David. (1992). "Spectator Politics and the Revival of Public Argument,"
Communication Monographs, 59: pp. 411-414. The crisis of political communication today is
defined in five terms: events are transient and volatile; the public avoids complex subjects; the
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public simplifies what it cannot avoid; the public magnifies the trivial; & political debate is
debased. This crisis is taken to be caused by the fact that politics has been constructed in the
image of the media. What is needed is a rich and vital conception of argument.
Zinni, Frank, Franco Mattei & Laurie Rhodebeck. (1997). "The Structure of Attitudes Toward
Groups: a comparison of experts and novices," Political Research Quarterly, 50: pp. 597-626.
Tests the notion that groups are important symbols that structure political reasoning using data
from the 1980 & 1984 studies of delegates to the Democratic & Republican national conventions
& National Election Studies data for the same years. It is found that the structure of attitudes
toward groups becomes more ideological as the level of political sophistication increases.
Furthermore, decreasing levels of political sophistication leads to greater reliance on emotion as
a guide to the political world.
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