Search results

I summarize my views on democratic governance before responding to critics. Governance arose partly from the impact of modernist social science on public policy and it limits the space for democratic action. My preferred alternative is an interpretive social science inspiring more participatory and dialogic democratic practices. In defending these arguments, I concentrate on the nature of interpretive social science and its relation to democratic theory. I define interpretive social science in theoretical terms as based on recognition of the role of meanings in human life and the holistic and historical nature of meanings. This interpretive social science does not lead to any particular methods or topics, but it does rule out reified and deterministic appeals to structures. Democratic renewal depends on promoting interpretive social science, not institutional blueprints.

This action research uses grounded theory and constant comparative analysis of electronic portfolios to explore how prospective secondary social studies teachers connect theories and practices of democratic education to give meaning to the complexity of learning how to teach in more democratic ways. I use contrasting case studies to focus on the relative value of theoretical/experiential ways of knowing. I conclude that students need to move more fluidly between theoretical and experiential or narrative thinking to galvanize their wills to teach more democratically. Because teaching democratically implies that teachers have a democratic world view, documenting how one learns to become a teacher cannot be adequately accomplished with only lesson plans, unit plans, or K-12 student work. Instead, those who wish to construct identities as democratic educators need to articulate their struggles through theoretically positioned stories about day-to-day classroom interactions in which they acknowledge the central role of beliefs, values, and epistemic orientations.

This article explores the ways in which actor‐network theory (ANT) invites an alternative account of democratic process, namely in terms of issue‐formation, which is particularly well suited to the study of democratic practices facilitated by information and communication technologies (ICT). Engaging with arguments that have been made in political theory in favor of the re‐invigoration of institutional and extra‐institutional forms of democratic debate, this article argues that a re‐valuation of issue‐politics is more than timely. In this respect, actor‐network theory is a particularly fruitful approach, since it provides the conceptual and methodological equipment to account for democracy in terms of processes of issue formation. Such an account of democracy, it is argued, is particularly appropriate to the study of ICT‐based democratic processes, since in the context of ICT distributed networks that configure around particular issues can be seen to emerge as the carriers of democratic process. Moreover, ANT provides the conceptual and methodological tools for the development of a research practice of tracing public controversies as they are enacted in such networks on the Web. In tracing a particular controversy on the Web, around the Development Gateway, a portal for development information set up by the World Bank, one begins to articulate an alternative understanding of the significance of ICT for institutional as well as extra‐institutional forms of democracy. A number of requirements on effective democratic action, as facilitated by ICT, are derived from the case study, which move beyond the requirement of social networking, i.e. the building of partnerships, and informational networking, i.e. the exchange of knowledge and opinion. Issue‐networking here comes to the fore as indispensable to democratic politics.

Despite the burgeoning literature dealing with the democratic peace theory, there seems to be surprisingly little research done in actually analyzing how and why democracies cause peace. There is even less research done in empirically analyzing the “how” part of the normative aspects of the democratic peace theory. The purpose of this paper is to explain the theoretical assumptions and how interpersonal trust is linked to a country's preferences to go to war. In addition, a direct comparison is made between democratic and non‐democratic states to ascertain more clearly the effect of trust on decisions to go to war.

This study quantitatively examines the period from 1980 to 2001 and considers 62 democratic countries and 30 non‐democratic countries in their choices to engage in conflict.

The research project finds that interpersonal trust is strongly correlated with states' decisions to go to war.

This is the first time that a study has examined the role of interpersonal trust on a state's decision to go to war, as no scholarly work has been done in applying the study of interpersonal trust to studying the theory of democratic peace.

This article aims to analyze possible interpretations of democratic leadership by revealing the implicit leadership theory (ILT) of a moral, a material and a political ideal of democracy, namely deliberative–participatory democracy (DPD), aggregative–pluralist democracy (APD) and leader democracy (LD). As special “filters,” ILT helps the author to organize and compare conflicting premises and assumptions democratic theories hold about exemplary leadership and followership.

In order to reconstruct the possible meanings of ideal leadership (challenges and political knowledge) and the ideal followership (power relations, interactions and roles) portrayed by theories, the article sets a specific template for conceptual analysis.

The author argues that there is a contest over the meaning of democratic leadership. Political leaders use leadership fictions as political weapons to mobilize possible followers, legitimize their actions and discredit opponents. The article creates a heuristic typology providing a “plural” or nonessentialist reading of actual political situations and democratic practices.

The literature usually aims to find an absolute moral understanding of leadership fitted in democracy or to reconcile the idea of leadership with democracy. Extending J. Thomas Wren's approach, this article examines competing fictions of democratic leadership by blending leadership and democracy theories.

The chapter presents a novel account of a key concept in John Dewey’s reconstructionist theory specifically related to the nucleus underlying his idea of democracy: intersubjective communication, what Dewey called the ‘democratic criterion’. Many theorists relate democracy to a form of rule. Consequently, discussions of democracy tend to be limited to functionalist theories. Dewey’s idea of democracy establishes an important distinction from conventional theories by developing its radical, critical, evolutionary, and intersubjective potential. I argue that Dewey anticipated Jürgen Habermas’s Paradigm of Communication in his reconstructionist social theory with potential to de-reify institutions and to empower human beings democratically.