Not by Technology Alone: The “Analog” Aspects of Online Public Engagement in Policymaking

Between Twitter revolutions and Facebook elections, there is a growing belief that information and communication technologies are changing the way democracy is practiced. The discourse around e-government and online deliberation is frequently focused on technical solutions and based in the belief that if you build it correctly they will come. This paper departs from the literature on digital divide to examine barriers to online civic participation in policy deliberation. While most scholarship focuses on identifying and describing those barriers, this study offers an in-depth analysis of what it takes to address them using a particular case study. Based in the tradition of action research, this paper focuses on analysis of practices that evolved in Regulation Room - a research project of CeRI (Cornell eRulemaking Initiative) that works with federal government agencies in helping them engage public in complex policymaking processes. It draws a multidimensional picture of motivation, skill, and general political participation divides; or the “analog” aspects of the digital divide in online civic participation and policy deliberation

Born of Freedom and Dissent: A comparative analysis of American antiwar protest in the first 1,418 days of the Vietnam and Iraq wars

Cultural aesthetics are the latent effects of human relations informing cognitive schemas as cultural variations of social forms in specific time-space contexts. To understand what conditions produce intra-national conflict during wartime, engagement reactivity between social control mechanisms and antiwar protesters was measured. Hypothesis-1 showed high numbers of arrests were influenced by the type and duration of protest and military presence at protest events during Vietnam, whereas place and size of protest were influential during Iraq. Hypothesis-2 showed that where and how antiwar protests occur has changed. Hypothesis-3 showed that, compared to Vietnam, Iraq antiwar protest has increased initial reactivity-intensity, has more arrests and fewer injuries, and is 541.6% larger per event, with a 248.8% greater total number of protesters. This study concludes that structural flexibility and preparedness prevent intra-national conflict, the antiwar movement has become an institution, and the cultural schema for Vietnam antiwar protest has affected its present form

Party competence and the macro polity

This paper reveals a national mood in aggregate evaluations of party competence which translates from government party to opposition, which has meaningful consequences for party ratings for competence, and which significantly shapes congressional voting intentions. Analysis of this ‘macro-competence’ measure, which is constructed using a dataset of 2,512 poll measures of issue handling for parties over six decades, and then based on closer quarterly analyses between 1980 and 2009, reveals that voters judge party competence on the basis of mood in evaluations of policy handling as well as on the basis of a president, the state of the economy and on partisan leanings. The paper offers an aggregate level theory of public opinion about government and party competence, about the way in which parties gain and lose reputations for competence – irrespective of presidential approval – and introduces a measure of policy competence which can contribute in new ways to our aggregate level explanations of congressional party support, and of the Macro Polity in genera

Brains Without Money: Poverty as Disabling

The United States has long treated poverty and disability as separate legal and social categories, a division grounded in widespread assumptions about the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. In the case of disability, individuals generally are not thought to be morally responsible for their disadvantage, whereas in the case of poverty, individuals are assumed to be at fault for their disadvantage and are therefore less deserving of aid. This Article argues that recent advances in brain and behavioral science undermine the factual basis for those assumptions. Poverty inhibits brain development during childhood and, later in life, adversely affects cognitive capacities that are key to decision-making and long-term planning. The science of scarcity is complex and ongoing, but its most basic finding is quickly approaching consensus: poverty’s effects in the brain can be disabling. This Article argues that understanding poverty as disabling has potentially significant implications for policy and doctrine. Viewing poverty as disabling would provide support for poverty programs with less sludge and more money: proposals such as universal basic income, negative income tax, child grants, and greatly simplified benefits determinations. It also reanimates insertion of social welfare concerns into the dominant civil rights framework for disability policy, and it could resolve longstanding tensions between disjointed federal disability laws. In addition, brain and behavioral science may support litigation strategies to compel accessibility to existing systems and potentially help promote a new public understanding of the causes of poverty. The Article concludes by considering the potential (and significant) downsides of using the lens of science in service of policy: backlash, misunderstanding, and the fragility of relying on nascent science to support fundamentally normative policy goals. One necessary mitigation strategy involves the careful translation of science, including its limitations and residual uncertainties, into legal scholarship, an approach this Article attempts to both articulate and model

Emote Control: The Substitution of Symbol for Substance in Foreign Policy and International Law

Historical perspectives, as well as recent work in psychology, converge on the conclusion that human behavior is the product of two or more qualitatively different neural processes that operate according to different principles and often clash with one another. We describe a specific dual process perspective that distinguishes between deliberative and emote control of behavior. We use this framework to shed light on a wide range of legal issues involving foreign policy, terrorism, and international law that are difficult to make sense of in terms of the traditional rational choice perspective. We argue that in these areas, the powerful influence of emotions not only on the general public, but on politicians and judicial decision makers, leads to a substitution of symbol for substance that can be seen at two different levels: (1) in the types of situations and stimuli that drive people to action (namely vivid symbols rather than rational arguments), and (2) in the types of actions that people take—specifically symbolic actions that are superficially satisfying as opposed to more substantive actions that are less immediately satisfying but actually more likely to produce desired long-term results

Pop-up Maktivism: A Case Study of Organizational, Pharmaceutical, and Biohacker Narratives

abstract: The biohacker movement is an important and modern form of activism. This study broadly examines how positive-activist-oriented biohackers emerge, organize, and respond to social crises. Despite growing public awareness, few studies have examined biohacking's influence on prevailing notions of organizing and medicine in-context. Therefore, this study examines biohacking in the context of the 2016 EpiPen price-gouging crisis, and explores how biohackers communicatively attempted to constitute counter-narratives and counter-logics about medical access and price through do-it-yourself (DIY) medical device alternatives. Discourse tracing and critical case study analysis are useful methodological frameworks for mapping the historical discursive and material logics that led to the EpiPen pricing crisis, including the medicalization of allergy, the advancement of drug-device combination technologies, and role of public health policy, and pharmaceutical marketing tactics. Findings suggest two new interpretations for how non-traditional forms of organizing facilitate new modes of resistance in times of institutional crisis. First, the study considers the concept of "pop-up maktivism" to conceptualize activism as a type of connective activity rather than collective organizing. Second, findings illustrate how activities such as participation and co-production can function as meaningful forms of institutional resistance within dominant discourses. This study proposes “mirrored materiality” to describe how biohackers deploy certain dominant logics to contest others. Lastly, implications for contributions to the conceptual frameworks of biopower, sociomateriality, and alternative organizing are discussed.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Communication 201

Risk Management in the Arctic Offshore: Wicked Problems Require New Paradigms

Recent project-management literature and high-profile disasters—the financial crisis, the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the Fukushima nuclear accident—illustrate the flaws of traditional risk models for complex projects. This research examines how various groups with interests in the Arctic offshore define risks. The findings link the wicked problem framework and the emerging paradigm of Project Management of the Second Order (PM-2). Wicked problems are problems that are unstructured, complex, irregular, interactive, adaptive, and novel. The authors synthesize literature on the topic to offer strategies for navigating wicked problems, provide new variables to deconstruct traditional risk models, and integrate objective and subjective schools of risk analysis