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Introduction: The Networked Communication of Contentious Politics

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Civic Participation in Contentious Politics

Abstract

The chapter sketches out the broad theoretical outlines of the book and provides an overview of the substantive chapters.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Givan et al. (2010) for a theoretical grounding of the topic.

  2. 2.

    Such delimitations valorise ‘conventional’ modes of participation (Barnes and Kaase 1979, pp. 409–477) deemed to bolster ‘incumbent’ democracy. They stand in contrast to ‘unconventional’ participation that expounds a ‘critical’ democracy hostile towards government (Blaug 2002). A sharp separation of these two forms of participation has, however, historically been disputed on the grounds that ‘by now much of these originally unconventional modes of participation have become largely conventional (Hooghe and Marien 2013, p. 133). Moreover, a cultural disposition in liberal democracies which is favourable to unconventional participation evidenced in the rising number of protest events and the scope of involvement in them has been recorded with terms such as ‘demonstration democracy’ (Etzioni 1970).

  3. 3.

    Contentious politics as defined in this volume is part-and-parcel of the catalogue of ‘voluntary activities by citizens usually related to government, politics and the state’ (van Deth 2014, p. 353) or which ‘are targeted at that sphere [so as to] attract attention to problems that have either not been perceived as problematic or have not been recognised as problems requiring government/state involvement so far’ (2014, p. 357).

  4. 4.

    Although ‘insurgent politics’ was intended as a heuristic for capturing a renewed impetus to challenge the neoliberal status quo of the 1990s and the 2000s, ‘contentious politics’ is a more sophisticated analytical tool that is better equipped to grapple with the amorphousness of mobilisations of the present decade (Biekart and Fowler 2013).

  5. 5.

    In speech, the human individual ‘identifies himself (sic) as the actor, announcing what he (sic) does, has done and intends to do’ (1978, p. 179).

  6. 6.

    Interpersonal relations are not shielded from deception and dissimulation that conceal another’s capacity for action and therefore dehumanise them.

  7. 7.

    Though not a prescriptive concept to the degree that its definition would comprise a checklist of attributes the epitome of which would be the Freedom House Democracy Scores (Dawson 2014). The latter are aggregate measures for the comparative empirical study of political regimes.

  8. 8.

    See Putnam (2000) who clamours precisely the erosion of the social groundwork that supports that edifice.

  9. 9.

    According to the website Internet Livestats, which compiles data on global Internet diffusion released by the International Telecommunications Union and the UN Population Division, there were more than 3 billion people online in early 2015. For more details see: http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/.

  10. 10.

    The term mediatisation represents an invitation to grapple with the progressive encoding of fundamental societal and cultural institutions and processes by the media, understood broadly as agents of ‘communicative construction of sociocultural reality’ (Matoni and Treré 2014, p. 261) rather than a type of content producer (e.g. a media corporation) or a particular technology (e.g. television or social networking services).

  11. 11.

    For example, the neoliberal conception of the individualistic entrepreneurial citizen for whom choice and autonomy would trump a disposition to see social entitlements as enablers of civic and political virtue (Olssen 1996).

  12. 12.

    I am, however, mindful that a critique of the effectiveness of civic education carried out through the educational system can very easily play right into the hands of its neoliberal detractors. These may invoke precisely such arguments to call for the scaling back and rearticulation of formal civic education at an elusive community level (inter alia, proposing to instill volunteering as a cardinal social virtue as envisioned in David Cameron’s Big Society Programme sooner than a critical conscience conducive to contention, Kinsby 2010). Therefore, in line with Lawy and Biesta (2006, p. 47), I should stress that I view formal civic education as a bridge that can be extended into politically peripheral constituencies (such as young people) in order to bring them in closer contact with democratic institutions.

  13. 13.

    A similar indictment was levelled against networked individualism more widely which posits that person-to-person connectivity takes precedence over place or group-based connectivity (Rainie and Wellman 2012; Chua 2013).

  14. 14.

    Proposed legislation designed to enhance the surveillance capability of the British Intelligence Services, dubbed the ‘Snooper’s Charter’, is the most recent case in point, Travis et al. (2015).

  15. 15.

    Media practices encompass interactions of media subjects (journalists, activist spokespersons) who produce and circulate messages for public consumption with media objects (smart-phones, laptops and all the way to newspapers, Mattoni and Treré 2014, p. 259). Media practices are at the same time habitual and creative tactics wherewith one may partake in mediatisation.

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  1. City University London, London, UK

    Dan Mercea

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Mercea, D. (2016). Introduction: The Networked Communication of Contentious Politics. In: Civic Participation in Contentious Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50869-0_1

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