Bøger af Stephen Coleman

Social conformity surrounds and enmeshes us, but we are seldom aware of its full impact. This book demonstrates just how pervasively social conformity affects society and politics. The impact of conformity on voting behavior and government is a particular focus. When conformity affects voters' choices, it runs contrary to the idea that they are making a rational decision among political parties or candidates the basis of democracy and it can lead to unexpected political consequences. At the extreme, social conformity can hijack democratic government and lead to violence against minority groups or totalitarianism. The impact of conformity is assessed through quantitative and qualitative analyses, a few simple mathematical models, and specific numerical predictions that are verified with historical data from the USA, Germany, Japan, Russia, and many other countries over much of the 20th century. The results give new insights on voting, political party systems, crime, ethnic violence, democratic government, and the nature of society, including both positive and negative consequences of conformity. Building on research in cognitive psychology over the last twenty years, the book also ties conformity and resulting social institutions to certain cognitive processes that go on without a person's conscious awareness.

This book is about what it means to speak of a political mood.

From its inception as a public communication network, the Internet was regarded by many people as a potential means of escaping from the stranglehold of top-down, stage-managed politics.

A radically alternative exploration ofnews circulation that asks: do we even know what news is?

The Media and the Public explores the ways a range of media have constructed and represented the public. The authors argue that the public is a product of representation, invoked through processes of mediation that are dominated by political, institutional, economic and cultural forces.

Relations between the public and holders of political authority are in a period of transformative flux. On the one side, new expectations and meanings of citizenship are being entertained and occasionally acted upon. On the other, an inexorable impoverishment of mainstream political communication is taking place. This book argues that the Internet has the potential to improve public communications and enrich democracy, a project that requires imaginative policy-making. This argument is developed through three stages: first exploring the theoretical foundations for renewing democratic citizenship, then examining practical case studies of e-democracy, and finally, reviewing the limitations of recent policies designed to promote e-democracy and setting out a radical, but practical proposal for an online civic commons: a trusted public space where the dispersed energies, self-articulations and aspirations of citizens can be rehearsed, in public, within a process of ongoing feedback to the various levels and centers of governance: local, national and transnational.

This book sets out to unearth the hidden genealogies of democracy, and particularly its most widely recognized, commonly discussed and deeply symbolic act, voting. By exploring the gaps between voting and recognition, being counted and feeling counted, having a vote and having a voice and the languor of count taking and the animation of account giving, there emerges a unique insight into how it feels to be a democratic citizen. Based on a series of interviews with a variety of voters and non-voters, the research attempts to understand what people think they are doing when they vote; how they feel before, during and after the act of voting; how performances of voting are framed by memories, narratives and dreams; and what it means to think of oneself as a person who does (or does not) vote. Rich in theory, this is a contribution to election studies that takes culture seriously.

Ectogenesis, the gestation of the foetus outside of the human body, will not for much longer be in the realm of science fiction; a number of projects attempting to develop ectogenetic technology are currently under way