Doing IT for Themselves: Management versus Autonomy in Youth E-Citizenship

Part of the Volume on Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth. This chapter explores tensions between managed and autonomous conceptions of youth e-citizenship as manifested in six UK-based projects. Managed youth e-citizenship projects are characterized as seeking to establish "connections" between young people and institutions that have power over their lives. Regarding youth as apprentice citizens who need to learn appropriate ways of engaging with encrusted structures of governance, they seek to promote habits of civility, while at the same time encouraging young people to think of themselves as empowered social actors whose (virtual) voices deserve to be heard. In contrast, autonomous e-citizenship projects tend not to be funded by government, and express strong reservations about having relationship too close to the state. These projects are less interested in engaging with powerful institutions than in forming powerful networks of young people, engaged with one another to resist the power of institutions. Regarding youth as independent political agents, autonomous e-citizens expect less from the communicative potential of having their say; for them, empowerment entails an intimate relationship between voice and action. The chapter concludes by proposing a set of policy recommendations that might lead to a productive convergence between these two models of youth e-citizenship

Voter Information in the Digital Age: Grading State Election Websites

Voter Information in the Digital Age: Grading State Election Websites examines the extent to which state election websites provide voters with sufficient information to make informed choices. The report assesses the quantity and quality of candidate and ballot measure information offered by the 50 state and District of Columbia election websites and ranks them from one to 51. It recommends a number of best practices currently used by some state or local jurisdictions, as well as innovations on other websites that are used rarely or not at all on state election websites. The authors recommend that states follow new technologies and trends in information delivery and design, and offer voters a full range of candidate and ballot information in innovative formats and media

Democratic Dissolution: Radical Experimentation in State Takeovers of Local Governments

While state interventions to stabilize the finances of struggling municipalities date back to the Great Depression, the current fiscal crisis has brought a startling escalation in the powers granted to state intervention authorities. Aptly observed by Abby Goodnough in The New York Times, cities and states have tried “myriad ways of righting their fiscal ships as the recession plods on,” but until very recently, “locking the mayor out of City Hall [was] generally not one of them.” In 2010 and 2011, Michigan and Rhode Island, which have been watched closely by other states, dramatically reformed their laws governing state receiverships for local governments in fiscal crisis. The new legislation provided for suspension and displacement of local government in faltering cities during the period of intervention, replacing all elected local officials with a single state appointee. Such interventions leave the legal corporation of the city and its budget intact: the city’s borders do not change, regardless of the revenue potential and service costs of that land base, and the city must pay its own bills. Yet the city’s power to govern that territory and budget is drawn up to the state’s executive branch. The city’s elected officials and its governing charter are set aside for an unspecified period of years. This Article analyzes the new state receivership legislation in Michigan and Rhode Island and offers the concept of democratic dissolution to help interpret this new development. While the new laws are premised on a genuinely urgent and difficult public policy problem—local governments overwhelmed by debt they cannot service and bills they cannot pay—this Article argues that the reforms do both too little and too much. To cure the underlying structural causes of fiscal crisis, the laws do next to nothing; to improve local management, the laws enact a punishing cancelation of local democracy. For Michigan, Rhode Island, and the other states watching them, I propose legal reforms that more moderately balance the seriousness of the challenges of local fiscal stabilization with the importance of local democracy

Can Might Make Right? The Use of Force to Impose Democracy and the Arthurian Dilemma in the Modern Era

US President George W. Bush used force to bring the Taliban to its knees and create a fledgling democracy in Afghanistan, then invaded Iraq with the end goal of establishing a democracy there, as well. Meanwhile, presidential hopeful Barack Obama praised those who built democracy\u27s arsenal to vanquish fascism, and who then built a series of alliances and a world order that would ultimately defeat communism, seeming to extol and vindicate the previous US efforts to impose democracy by force. These two leaders\u27 struggles to nail down a definitive answer on whether force should ever be used to impose democracy exemplify some of the challenges in evaluating the practice. In connection, Thompson discusses these legal, moral, and political complexities. He addresses whether the use of force to impose democracy passes international legal muster, and addresses the practicalities and policy questions to be considered when deciding whether to impose democracy through force

Online civic intervention: A new form of political participation under conditions of a disruptive online discourse

In the everyday practice of online communication, we observe users deliberately reporting abusive content or opposing hate speech through counterspeech, while at the same time, online platforms are increasingly relying on and supporting this kind of user action to fight disruptive online behavior. We refer to this type of user engagement as online civic intervention (OCI) and regard it as a new form of user-based political participation in the digital sphere that contributes to an accessible and reasoned public discourse. Because OCI has received little scholarly attention thus far, this article conceptualizes low- and high-threshold types of OCI as different kinds of user responses to common disruptive online behavior such as hate speech or hostility toward the media. Against the background of participation research, we propose a theoretically grounded individual-level model that serves to explain OCI

Is the Internet a Viable Threat to Representative Democracy?

The Internet, despite its relatively recent advent, is critical to millions of Americans’ way of life. Although the Internet arguably opens new opportunities for citizens to become more directly involved in their government, some scholars fear this direct involvement poses a risk to one of the Constitution’s most precious ideals: representative democracy. This iBrief explores whether the constitutional notion of representation is vulnerable to the Internet’s capacity to open new vistas for a more direct democracy by analyzing statistics and theories about why voters in the United States do or do not vote and by examining the inherent qualities of the Internet itself. This iBrief concludes that the Constitution will adapt to the Internet and the Internet to the Constitution, such that even if there are advances in direct democracy, representative democracy will not be unduly threatened

The Lincoln Magna Carta: marketing a document that changed the world

From the field of Runnymede in 1215, to later English parliamentary struggles, across the seas to a fledgling American democracy, then onwards in time to all parts of the globe where it encourages human rights and helps shapes legal systems, the Magna Carta has transformed the world. Now there are only four copies remaining of the original manuscript, one of which is owned by Lincoln Cathedral of the UK. This paper provides a critical account of the marketing of the Magna Carta to three target groups of the 21st century. These are the schools market, the general visitor market to Lincoln Castle, where the document is on display and the American market, which sees the Magna Carta when it is on tour. This paper identifies a number of marketing problems, arguing that a failure to implement an effective overall strategy has led to missed customer opportunities. This is a problem compounded by one of brand identity, where political, historical and religious discourses are allowed to converge onto the marketing of the Magna Carta in an undisciplined way, resulting in positioning difficulties. Finally, recommendations are made regarding the implementation of a more strategic approach to marketing the Great Charta