Posted by Bill Ball on Sunday, March 13, 2011.
This is an update to my earlier post concerning the beginning of the decline in the population of Volusia County, Florida and its ramifications for civic engagement around growth.
As the enclosed chart indicates, the decline in Volusia population has continued for three straight years after the peak in 2007. As I stated in the [...]
Posted by Paul Lachelier on Sunday, March 13, 2011.
Notes from a panel discussion sponsored by the Stetson Diversity Council,
Stetson Room, Carlton Union Building, Stetson University. 7pm, Thursday, January 27, 2011
(See also Bill Nylen’s remarks from the same event)
I’d like to offer a few thoughts on these issues of violence and civility in American society.
ON POLITICAL VIOLENCE
First, about political violence:
I don’t think it’s safe [...]
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Posted by Bill Nylen on Tuesday, February 22, 2011.
Democratic politics is not always pretty. One could even define democracy as institutionally constrained conflict, with an emphasis on both conflict, which is necessary to expand and protect the scope and reach of civil/political rights to all citizens, and institutional constraint, which is also necessary to keep such conflict within the bounds of legality and [...]
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Posted by Bill Ball on Thursday, October 14, 2010.
My students and I are working with the City of DeLand to host a series of public participation forums on DeLand 2050, which is a joint planning project the City is conducting with Volusia County to develop a vision for the long term future of the greater DeLand area. We have completed our first meeting [...]
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Posted by Paul Lachelier on Wednesday, September 29, 2010.
In his autobiography, famed “founding father” Benjamin Franklin enumerated thirteen virtues which he believed led to a morally more perfect life if systematically mastered: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, humility. Franklin’s virtues are considered a classic expression of the so-called “Protestant ethic,” a disciplined lifestyle and set of [...]
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Posted by Bill Nylen on Wednesday, July 28, 2010.
Ten years ago, Rebecca Abers published the first scholarly book in English on participatory budgeting in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre: Reinventing Local Democracy (2000). Since then, a score of books have come out on the subject, including one by this author, as well as numerous scholarly articles and doctoral dissertations. Empirical [...]
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Posted by Paul Lachelier on Tuesday, June 8, 2010.
This is the fourth 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 [...]
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Posted by Steve Frantzich on Thursday, March 18, 2010.
Each person’s life is lived in a series of conversations1
In the most basic sense, politics is a set of conversations in which proponents of one position or candidate attempt to secure support from the opponents and/or the undecided. Conversations flow from the public to policy-makers, between policy-makers and from policy-makers to the public. Who is [...]
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Posted by Bill Ball on Thursday, February 25, 2010.
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 [...]
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Posted by Paul Lachelier on Thursday, January 14, 2010.
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 [...]
Posted by Paul Lachelier on Thursday, December 10, 2009.
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 [...]
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Posted by Bill Ball on Monday, November 16, 2009.
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 [...]
Posted by Bill Nylen on Thursday, November 5, 2009.
“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 [...]
Posted by Paul Lachelier on Tuesday, October 27, 2009.
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 [...]
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Posted by Paul Lachelier on Friday, October 2, 2009.
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 [...]
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Posted by Bill Nylen on Thursday, August 27, 2009.
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 [...]