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- Archer, Alfred, et al.
(author)
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Celebrity, Democracy, and Epistemic Power
- 2020
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In: Perspectives on Politics. - 1537-5927 .- 1541-0986. ; 18:1, s. 27-42
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- What, if anything, is problematic about the involvement of celebrities in democratic politics? While a number of theorists have criticized celebrity involvement in politics, none so far have examined this issue using the tools of social epistemology, the study of the effects of social interactions, practices, and institutions on knowledge and belief acquisition. We will draw on these resources to investigate the issue of celebrity involvement in politics, specifically as this involvement relates to democratic theory and its implications for democratic practice. We will argue that an important and underexplored form of power, which we will call epistemic power, can explain one important way in which celebrity involvement in politics is problematic. This is because unchecked uses and unwarranted allocations of epistemic power, which celebrities tend to enjoy, threaten the legitimacy of existing democracies and raise important questions regarding core commitments of deliberative, epistemic, and plebiscitary models of democratic theory. We will finish by suggesting directions that democratic theorists could pursue when attempting to address some of these problems.
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- Bernhard, M., et al.
(author)
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Making Embedded Knowledge Transparent: How the V-Dem Dataset Opens New Vistas in Civil Society Research
- 2017
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In: Perspectives on Politics. - : Cambridge University Press (CUP). - 1537-5927 .- 1541-0986. ; 15:2, s. 342-360
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- We show how the V-Dem data opens new possibilities for studying civil society in comparative politics. We explain how V-Dem was able to extract embedded expert knowledge to create a novel set of civil society indicators for 173 countries from 1900 to the present. This data overcomes shortcomings in the basis on which inference has been made about civil society in the past by avoiding problems of sample bias that make generalization difficult or tentative. We begin with a discussion of the reemergence of civil society as a central concept in comparative politics. We then turn to the shortcomings of the existing data and discusses how the V-Dem data can overcome them. We introduce the new data, highlighting two new indicesthe core civil society index (CCSI) and the civil society participation index (CSPI)and explain how the individual indicators and the indices were created. We then demonstrate how the CCSI uses embedded expert knowledge to capture the development of civil society on the national level in Venezuela, Ghana, and Russia. We close by using the new indices to examine the dispute over whether post-communist civil society is weak. Time-series cross-sectional analysis using 2,999 country-year observations between 1989 and 2012 fails to find that post-communist civil society is substantially different from other regions, but that there are major differences between the post-Soviet subsample and other post-communist countries both in relation to other regions and each other.
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- Coppedge, M, et al.
(author)
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Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: A New Approach
- 2011
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In: Perspectives on Politics. - 1537-5927 .- 1541-0986. ; 9:2, s. 247-267
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In the wake of the Cold War, democracy has gained the status of a mantra. Yet there is no consensus about how to conceptualize and measure regimes such that meaningful comparisons can be made through time and across countries. In this prescriptive article, we argue for a new approach to conceptualization and measurement. We first review some of the weaknesses among traditional approaches. We then lay out our approach, which may be characterized as historical, multidimensional, disaggregated, and transparent. We end by reviewing some of the payoffs such an approach might bring to the study of democracy.
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- Erikson, Josefina, 1979-, et al.
(author)
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Three Dimensions of Gendered Online Abuse : Analyzing Swedish MPs' Experiences of Social Media
- 2023
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In: Perspectives on Politics. - : Cambridge University Press. - 1537-5927 .- 1541-0986. ; 21:3, s. 896-912
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Women’s political representation has increased rapidly in the past few decades, but significant barriers continue to circumscribe women’s political participation in a myriad of ways. Previous research has indicated that online abuse constitutes one such obstacle. Yet, only a small number of studies have systematically examined and compared the experiences of online abuse of men and women politicians. We argue that it is not enough to merely state that online abuse is gendered if we wish to understand and tackle such abuse: it is essential to know how it is gendered. In this article we conceptualize gendered online abuse in terms of three dimensions—frequency, character, and consequences—so that we can provide a more comprehensive empirical understanding of its prevalence. Using original survey data and interviews with a large number of Swedish MPs, we demonstrate the merit of unpacking the concept of such abuse in respect to different analytical dimensions. We find all three dimensions to be gendered in the Swedish context but in different and sometimes unexpected ways. Although women do not experience a higher frequency of online abuse than men, the character of the abuse is gendered insofar as women MPs are subjected to more sexualized and gendered harassment. We also find that men exposed to high levels of online abuse seem slightly more inclined to leave politics, whereas women report that they feel that their personal agency is circumscribed to a greater extent.
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