Putting Experts in Their Place: The Challenge of Expanding Participation While Solving Problems

This essay critically examines possibilities for expanding democratic participatory governance in light of Mark Bevir\u27s treatment of the subject in his book Democratic Governance. The essay argues that a theory of participatory governance should retain an explicit role for expert analysis, and that the appropriate scope given to such analysis will vary by policy area. The essay also argues that the present organization of capitalist economies mandates a heavy reliance on experts, and that a full-blown account of expanding participatory governance thus must be paired with an account of how to achieve a more democratic political economy. Such an account should also specify how democratic-minded public officials can contribute to greater public participation in policymaking

Changing the People, Not Simply the President: The Limitations and Possibilities of the Obama Presidency, in Tocquevillian Perspective

Attempting to elucidate what precisely Alexis de Tocqueville would have made of either Barack Obama the politician or the astonishing political phenomenon that swept the nation\u27s first African-American president into office in 2008 is a fruitless endeavor. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville devotes relatively little attention to the presidency as an institution, and still less to the merits and accomplishments of particular presidents. In his account, what made American democracy unique and functional was neither its federalist institutional arrangements nor the virtues of its national leaders, but its culture of political participation in local democratic institutions. Tocqueville recognized the power of private pursuits, especially the pursuit of material gain, in American culture, and viewed political participation as a central mechanism for broadening the self-interest of Americans, to force them to temper individualistic tendencies with consideration of the good of the whole. The idea that the fate of the American republic could rest in the hands of an individual leader is no prominent in Democracy. Indeed, many of Tocqueville\u27s observations about the presidency stress its weakness, especially vis-à-vis the force of public opinion

Political Traditions: Conservatism, Liberalism, and Civic Republicanism

How unequal authority and power can be justified is a central question of political theory and of leadership studies (Price & Hicks, 2006). Indeed, while in everyday language leadership is commonly viewed as a positive term and the word leader connotes respect, in some political vernaculars, the very idea of leadership is suspect, if not embarrassing. For instance, one of the most influential public intellectuals of the late 20th century, Noam Chomsky, consistently refers to leadership in disparaging way. In Chomsky\u27s (2005) view, leadership is a code word intended to justify class rule, vastly unequal political and economic power, and imperialism abroad -- all in the name of wisdom, prudence, and justice

Everybody\u27s Got to Wonder What\u27s the Matter With This Cruel World Today : Social Consciousness and Political Commentary in \u3cem\u3e Love and Theft \u3c/em\u3e and \u3cem\u3eModern Times\u3c/em\u3e

Bob Dylan has spent much of the past fifty years trying to escape the label of protest singer.” Over the past decade, there have been plenty of serious topics for the topically minded song writer to address: the Iraq War, threats to civil liberties, rising economic inequality, the financial collapse of 2008 and Great Recession that followed. Unlike his musical peers Neil Young (Living with War [2006]) and Bruce Springsteen (Wrecking Ball [2012]), Dylan to date has not addressed those events in any direct way, through new topical songs, in the last stage of his career

A General Model of Good Executive Leadership in Policy Contexts

This commentary stipulates a general model of policy leadership, encompassing decision-making, implementation, and evaluation. The model stresses attaining clarity about the nature of the issue being addressed, the values at stake, and the possible outcomes of alternative courses of action. While focused on the context of elected executives in municipal government, the stipulated model has broader applicability to other contexts. The article contends that following the model may both improve the effectiveness of political leaders and help build consensus (or compromise) among distinct political actors

Beyond Sprawl and Anti-Sprawl

The widespread acceptance of the term suburban sprawl stands as a major rhetorical victory for critics of the land-use, transportation, and growth patterns characteristic of metropolitan America. As both friends and critics of suburbia have noted, the term sprawl itself has an almost inescapably pejorative connotation (Gordon and Richardson 1997; O\u27Flaherty 2005). Despite the best efforts of numerous academics to define the term with rigor and precision, what comes to mind first for most people on hearing the term is not some scholar or another\u27s strategy for defining and measuring sprawl, but rather an image of something unpleasant-- a particularly ugly strip mall, a suburban traffic jam, a cookie-cutter development on previously green space. The idea that sprawl is a bad thing that we should do something about is not a hard sell in the popular press or among the general public. Indeed, the notion that sprawl is vastly inefficient, grossly inequitable, destructive of the environment, hostile to community, and ugly to boot, has frequently been taken by scholars and other observers as a self-evident truth

Justice, the Public Sector, and Cities: Re-Legitimating the Activist State

The assault on egalitarian social justice in the United States over the past forty years has also been an assault on the legitimacy of vigorous public action to forward substantive goals. This is no coincidence: egalitarian conceptions of social justice invariably assume that the state will be the principal mechanism for establishing just social arrangements and rectifying inequalities (Rawls 1971; Dworkin 2000). In contrast, neoliberal conceptions of governance aim to both straitjacket the public sector and stymie efforts toward meaningful egalitarian redistribution. Given this strong internal connection between attractive conceptions of social justice and the idea of an active, competent public sector, advocates of urban social justice need to develop an account of how public-sector leadership on behalf of normatively desirable ends can be relegitimated. In this chapter, I focus on how we might begin to rehabilitate the idea of a vigorous public sector at the local level, given the existing political climate. As theorists since Tocqueville have recognized, local-level democratic practice is the building block (for better or worse) of larger-scale democracy, and (to use Rawlsian terminology) a society cannot be well ordered, stable, and just if local political and economic life is characterized by large inequalities and the predominance of private interests over public concerns

Political Traditions: Left Political Movements and the Politics of Social Justice

Left political traditions, in this chapter, refer to systems of political thought and theories of political action that aim to transform existing political and economic institutions so as to increase substantially the political and economic power of ordinary people, to eliminate or reduce invidious forms of social inequality, and to prevent private interests from trumping the common good. Although the Left (so defined) shares some goals with liberalism, civic republicanism, and even conservatism, it differs from those political traditions (as generally understood) in that it does not seek to legitimate existing political, economic, and constitutional structures or provide an account of how modest reforms might help them work better. Rather, it aims at root-and-branch systemic change. What role leaders and leadership have to play in that transformative project raises particularly interesting and difficult issues that we will aim to demarcate

Sprawl, justice, and citizenship : The Civic Costs of the American Way of Life

Must the strip mall and the eight-lane highway define 21st century American life? That is a central question posed by critics of suburban and exurban living in America. Yet despite the ubiquity of the critique, it never sticks--Americans by the scores of millions have willingly moved into sprawling developments over the past few decades. Americans find many of the more substantial criticisms of sprawl easy to ignore because they often come across as snobbish in tone. Yet as Thad Williamson explains, sprawl does create real, measurable social problems. Williamson\u27s work is unique in two important ways. First, while he highlights the deleterious effects of sprawl on civic life in America, he is also evenhanded. He does not dismiss the pastoral, homeowning ideal that is at the root of sprawl, and is sympathetic to the vast numbers of Americans who very clearly prefer it. Secondly, his critique is neither aesthetic nor moralistic in tone, but based on social science. Utilizing a landmark 30,000-person survey, he shows that sprawl fosters civic disengagement, accentuates inequality, and negatively impacts the environment. Sprawl, Justice, and Citizenship will not only be the most comprehensive work in print on the subject, it will be the first to offer a empirically rigorous critique of the most popular form of living in America today.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1001/thumbnail.jp

Everybody\u27s Got to Wonder What\u27s the Matter With This Cruel World Today : Social Consciousness and Political Commentary In Love and Theft and Modern Times

Bob Dylan has spent much of the past fifty years trying to escape the label of protest singer. Over the past decade, there have been plenty of serious topics for the topically minded songwriter to address: the Iraq War, threats to civil liberties, rising economic inequality, the financial collapse of 2008 and Great Recession that followed. Unlike his musical peers Neil Young (Living with War [2006]) and Bruce Springsteen (Wrecking Ball [2012]), Dylan to date has not addressed those events in any direct way, through new topical songs, in the last stage of his career