Browsing by Subject "Democracy"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Agonistic politics, contest, and the Oresteia.
    (2012-06) Gagnon, Jennifer Marie
    Contemporary political theorists, such as William Connolly, Bonnie Honig, and Chantal Mouffe, have adopted the agon from ancient political thought as a critique against liberal theories of pluralism and tolerance. These thinkers view the agon broadly as the institution of contestation and emphasize the beneficial aspects of conflict, strife, and discord for democracy. Despite the adoption of the ancient Greek agon, contemporary agonistic theory exhibits a strange silence towards the ancient roots, experiences, and meanings of the agon. This curious inattention to the ancient understandings and historical contexts of the agon have resulted in a "de-Hellenization" of agonism; contemporary agonistic political theory has stripped the agon of its uniquely Greek-heroic historical characteristics and experiences resulting in an anemic understanding of the place of violence, strife, and contestation in democratic politics. In an effort to re-Hellenize contemporary understandings of agonism I turn to the heroic-epic of Homer's Iliad and the tragic world of Aeschylus' Oresteia. In the Iliad, "The Shield of Achilles" serves as a microcosm of multiple sites of contestation that touch upon all aspects of human life. The shield depicts a world that accepts conflict and discord. Reading the Oresteia as a series of agonistic contests questions the assumptions of agonistic theory that contest leads to a mutual recognition of identities and differences. The Oresteia demonstrates that the challenge of agonistic theory is not to affirm the perpetuity of contests as Honig posits, but to question whether these aggressive tendencies can be controlled and channeled without eradicating differences or limiting the political. By returning to classical conceptions of the agon, this dissertation seeks to demonstrate that contemporary agonistic theory displaces the bloody roots of contest and diminishes the propensity for contests to spiral into violence.
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    Closed Personalities: The Psychological Roots of Autocratic Support
    (2022-04) Armendariz Miranda, Paula
    Why do some citizens support autocratic forms of government while others prefer democratic ones? Despite all the tragedy that dictatorships have brought to humanity some individuals still believe that autocracy is desirable. My dissertation seeks to uncover why citizens living in the same country and experiencing the same phenomena, show different preferences and support for authoritarianism and democracy. In this, I argue that individuals who are wary of diversity and individual autonomy – what psychologists would call individuals with closed personalities – crave autocratic political structures that suppress citizen participation, individual autonomy, and plurality of political expression. This form of government provides such individuals with psychological security and reassurance, particularly during times of perceived crisis and civil disobedience.
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    Disciplined by democracy: moral framing and the rhetoric of Red Letter Christians.
    (2010-03) Boerboom, Samuel Isaac
    In this dissertation I study both the textual reception and rhetorical production strategies of the Red Letter Christians, a discourse community whose identity is linked to these very same strategies. I contend that the Red Letter Christians engage in biblical reading strategies that make them distinct from other politically liberal or progressive religious groups. The Red Letter Christians employ a moral frame based on their particular reading of the Bible. Embedded in the notion of "conservative radicalism," such a moral frame asserts a dedication to timeless principles and truths authenticated by the gospel accounts of Jesus while it simultaneously upholds a passionate defense of social justice and the activist need to engage in political action in the present. Such a moral frame is biconceptual, expressing both conservative and progressive dimensions of moral social action. Due to the biconceptuality of the Red Letter Christian moral frame, Red Letter Christians often stress the importance of humility and non-partisan dialogue. Critics of the Red Letter Christians from both the political left and the right argue that such discourse is often incomprehensible and obfuscates the political positions the group defends in their rhetoric. I assert that in spite of their common reception as a religiously liberal group, the Red Letter Christians offer a model of discourse that at its best authenticates and otherwise justifies a model of post-partisan discourse that re-imagines religion's role in public political discourse.
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    Divided Together: Traffic and Democratic Life in Bogotá
    (2017-06) Cesafsky, Laura
    The dissertation is based on 12 months of mixed-methods, qualitative research into the traffic problem in Bogotá, Colombia, and the ways that citizens and the local government have responded to it. It proposes an alternative—and more specifically, a philosophically pragmatic—reading of urban democracy that highlights different aspects of the ‘democratic question’ than do the political theories typically forwarded in critical urban geography: liberal and radical democratic theory. The dissertation argues that the ‘failure’ of political institutions to remedy traffic in Bogotá has left the problem to linger and nurture democratic life in the form of collaborative and contestatory public practice. Traffic’s hyper-presence as an engulfing, ‘lived’ environmental situation means that it is readily available to emergent subjects, publics and counter-publics as a living laboratory in which possibilities for engagement and activism are sustained. Moreover, because the mobility problem is an inescapable everyday reality even for elites, it forces Bogotanos into an antagonistic political situation that makes them grapple productively with their troubled togetherness. Although the ability to influence the mobility situation is by no means equal, I further argue that there is a notably accessible quality to traffic: it is an ‘issue’ that Bogotanos from all classes literally walk out into everyday and ‘make their voices heard’ in, in the sense that they can transform the common condition through deliberate action—and often to the frustration of elites who are trying to manage behavior in traffic in the service of their own interests. These arguments are inspired by the work of the American pragmatist John Dewey (1859-1952), the dissertation’s central philosophical interlocutor. Political democracy, for Dewey, is an inventive practice of taking care of the serious trouble in which strangers who do not share a way of life find themselves collectively implicated.
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    Empire of the people: the ideology of democratic empire in the antebellum United States
    (2014-07) Dahl, Adam J.
    Settler colonialism played a constitutive role in the construction of democratic culture in the antebellum United States. This dissertation argues that democratic values of popular sovereignty and social equality acquired their conceptual coherence and institutional realization through settler conquest and indigenous dispossession. Out of this dynamic emerged an "ideology of democratic empire," a distinct ideological formation in which the active agent of expansion is not colonial administration or the imperial state but the people in their sovereign capacity for self-government. In this mode of empire, settler conquest acted as a form of foundational violence that enabled the construction of a new democratic society through the elimination of indigenous sovereignty. I trace the ideological development of democratic empire in three phases. First, federalist discourses in the revolutionary period provided a new world conception of empire that privileged the equality of quasi-sovereign settler communities over notions of empire organized around the governance of colonial dependencies. Second, social equality in the Jacksonian period developed in relation to settler expansion, which guarded against the resurgence of feudal land title in the New World and ensured the priority of popular sovereignty over aristocratic systems of rule. The last phase unearths counter-narratives of democratic empire to reveal how colonial subjects challenged settler-colonial rule by reconfiguring antebellum notions of popular sovereignty. Through a conceptual-historical reconstruction of the relationship between settler expansion and American democracy, my project provides the basis for a decolonial theory of democracy that de-normalizes settler experiences as the unsurpassable horizon of democratic politics.
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    Reconceptualization of democracy from an Islamic subaltern
    (2013-07) Kozak, Aysegul Meryem
    This dissertation challenges a dominant trait in contemporary western thought that understands Islamist politics as holistic and antithetical to modernity and democracy; that presents Islamism as an expression of traditionalism in the modern world. I challenge this dominant western perception by asking the question: how have the ideologues and the founders of the most well known Islamic movements of the Muslim world approached democracy, a modern political system, and related it to an Islamic state?Addressing the dynamic relationship between Islamic political thought and socio-political context, with this dissertation, I offer a critique of this literature, which positions the Islamic world as an archaic civilization in an inevitable clash with the West, the representative of modernity. By analyzing the original works of two well-known ideologues of Islamic movements from Indo-Pakistan and Egypt, I depict the ways in which Islamic political thought intervenes in cardinal conversations about democracy. There are four main goals of this dissertation. First, I recover the story of modernity in political thought from the two different parts of the Muslim world. Second, I reveal the voices of Muslim intellectuals in the meaning making and indigenization of a western-originated idea, democracy, into Islam. Third, I challenge a dominant discourse that puts Islam and the West as civilizations in a clash. Fourth, I point out the necessity to engage non-western political theory to enhance our intellectual endeavors and rid the literature of its Eurocentric biases. To achieve these goals, a comparative historical analysis method was utilized based on two cases: Sayyid Qutb and Mawdudi's conceptualization of democracy. In analyzing the data, I employed analytical narrative method in tracing patterns of causal factors as well as in making causal inferences through the comparison between and within these cases. Throughout the study, I pursued a dual analytical agenda, which included examining how each ideologue defined democracy, how these ideologues related democracy and Islam to each other, and how the local and international events and institutions uniquely shaped their ideas regarding democracy. Findings indicate that, both Mawdudi and Qutb opened up the idea of democracy to a new set of critiques and methods of adaptation. For Qutb and Mawdudi, being an imported product of colonial and capitalist world, democracy was not to be implemented to the Muslim world directly. It had to be supplemented with indigenous forms of explanation and interpretation to make sense within existing political realities. Criticizing the slavish imitation of western democracies, they recommended a political system based on local representation. They believed that governments would achieve greater legitimacy if the political structure and language of politics were in line with the culture and beliefs of the people. They emphasized the match between the cultural meanings, values, and beliefs of Islam and democracy. They raised questions regarding certain dogmatic assumptions implicit in the concept, which they identified as part of the secularist/capitalist/colonialist project. Mawdudi and Qutb's works reveals that the western democratic model cannot and should not be replicated in the Muslim world because, at the economic level, it presumes capitalism, and at the social level, it presumes individualism and secularism. Their solution was to create their vernacular political language and terminology to work with the idea of democracy which they named as theodemocracy by Mawdudi and Islamic state by Qutb and strictly refrained from using western terminologies like republican, democratic, or socialist to define their systems.
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    Unity, Democracy, and the All India Phenomenon, 1940-1946
    (2010-08) Rook-Koepsel, Emily
    My dissertation investigates the meaning of the naming strategy 'All India' in defining nationalist politics in India in the 1940s and early 1950s. In it I consider how four organizations, All India Radio, the All India Newspaper Editors' Conference, All India Women's Conference, and the All India Progressive Writers' Association, defined their "All India" commitments during this period.
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    Unregulated Democracy and Campaign Finance Reform
    (2015) Dirckx, Derek D.; Sheagley, Geoffrey