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Category Archives: Democratic Theory

The Poor State of Florida’s Civic Health

The 2009 Civic Health Index ranks Florida 44th in terms of its civic culture, concluding “it is, in fact, one of the worst in the nation” (2). The overall ranking is a composite of sub scores, ranking the state 34th in voter turnout, 37th in citizens working with others to address [...]

Private Individualism and Political Withdrawal, Part 3

This is the third in a series of articles on politically disengaging forms of individualism (part 1 and part 2). This series explores the connections between individualism(s) and politics through in-depth interviews I conducted with young (20s and 30s) American professionals for a book I am writing on American political culture.
Individualism is a word familiar [...]

A Manifesto for Educational Democracy

Schools as “Leader Training Grounds”
A couple of years ago, I received news from Deerfield Academy, a prep school in Massachusetts and my high school alma mater, that its headmaster, Eric Widmer was to become the first headmaster of the newly formed “King’s Academy,” in Madaba, Jordan.  As Deerfield’s alumni newsletter indicated, The King’s Academy aspires [...]

On the “political wetlands”

In a series of recent articles David Matthews, President of the Kettering Foundation, has offered the concept of  the “political wetlands” as a wellspring of an organic and deliberative form of democracy.1 He argues that the political wetlands lie underneath the superstructure of institutional politics where in “informal gatherings, ad hoc associations, and the seemingly [...]

The Promise of Local Government as a ‘School of Democracy’ (Part Two): The City of DeLand, Florida

“Not only did citizens see their local governments as more relevant; they were also more accessible.  Relevance and accessibility, de Tocqueville argued, translated into active citizen participation — in local government bodies and in numerous voluntary associations — and what political scientists today would call high feelings of personal efficacy.” [from Part One of this [...]

Private Individualism and Political Withdrawal, Part 2

This is the second part of a piece started in this post.
Private individualism’s third inclination is to define freedom in individual rather than collective terms.  Freedom is commonly considered a, if not the cardinal American value.  Contrary to political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville’s early sense that Americans value their equality more than their freedom, it [...]

Private Individualism and Political Withdrawal, Part 1

This is the first in a series of articles on politically disengaging forms of individualism.  This series explores the connections between individualism(s) and politics through in-depth interviews I conducted with young (20s and 30s) American professionals for a book I am writing on American political culture. Individualism is a word familiar to academics and non-academics [...]

The Promise of Local Government as a ‘School of Democracy’: Alexis de Tocqueville (part 1)

Alexis de Tocqueville is widely considered to be the founding father of studies in community-based empowerment and participatory democracy.  Researching and writing his famous Democracy in America back in the early 1800s, he was the first to argue the relationship between, in the first instance, a particular democratic institutional design (“administrative decentralization,” and vibrant local-level [...]