Letteratura scientifica selezionata sul tema "379999 Studies in Human Society not elsewhere classified"

The twentieth was, from one perspective, the democratic century — a span of one hundred years which began with no fully functioning democracies in existence anywhere on the planet (if one defines democracy as a political system in which there is both universal suffrage and competitive elections), and ended with 120 countries out of 192 classified by the Freedom House think tank as ‘democratic’. There are of course still many societies where democracy is denied or effectively neutered — the remaining outposts of state socialism, such as China, Cuba, and North Korea; most if not all of the Islamic countries; exceptional states such as Singapore, unapologetically capitalist in its economic system but resolutely authoritarian in its political culture. Many self-proclaimed democracies, including those of the UK, Australia and the US, are procedurally or conceptually flawed. Countries emerging out of authoritarian systems and now in a state of democratic transition, such as Russia and the former Soviet republics, are immersed in constant, sometimes violent struggle between reformers and reactionaries. Russia’s recent parliamentary elections were accompanied by the intimidation of parties and politicians who opposed Vladimir Putin’s increasingly populist and authoritarian approach to leadership. The same Freedom House report which describes the rise of democracy in the twentieth century acknowledges that many self-styled democracies are, at best, only ‘partly free’ in their political cultures (for detailed figures on the rise of global democracy, see the Freedom House website Democracy’s Century). Let’s not for a moment downplay these important qualifications to what can nonetheless be fairly characterised as a century-long expansion and globalisation of democracy, and the acceptance of popular sovereignty, expressed through voting for the party or candidate of one’s choice, as a universally recognised human right. That such a process has occurred, and continues in these early years of the twenty-first century, is irrefutable. In the Gaza strip, Hamas appeals to the legitimacy of a democratic election victory in its campaign to be recognised as the voice of the Palestinian people. However one judges the messianic tendencies and Islamist ideology of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it must be acknowledged that the Iranian people elected him, and that they have the power to throw him out of government next time they vote. That was never true of the Shah. The democratic resurgence in Latin America, taking in Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia among others has been a much-noted feature of international politics in recent times (Alves), presenting a welcome contrast to the dictatorships and death squads of the 1980s, even as it creates some uncomfortable dilemmas for the Bush administration (which must champion democratic government at the same time as it resents some of the choices people may make when they have the opportunity to vote). Since 9/11 a kind of democracy has expanded even to Afghanistan and Iraq, albeit at the point of a gun, and with no guarantees of survival beyond the end of military occupation by the US and its coalition allies. As this essay was being written, Pakistan’s state of emergency was ending and democratic elections scheduled, albeit in the shadow cast by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. Democracy, then — imperfect and limited as it can be; grudgingly delivered though it is by political elites in many countries, and subject to attack and roll back at any time — has become a global universal to which all claim allegiance, or at least pay lip service. The scale of this transformation, which has occurred in little more than one quarter of the time elapsed since the Putney debates of 1647 and the English revolution first established the principle of the sovereignty of parliament, is truly remarkable. (Tristram Hunt quotes lawyer Geoffrey Robertson in the Guardian to the effect that the Putney debates, staged in St Mary’s church in south-west London towards the end of the English civil war, launched “the idea that government requires the consent of freely and fairly elected representatives of all adult citizens irrespective of class or caste or status or wealth” – “A Jewel of Democracy”, Guardian, 26 Oct. 2007) Can it be true that less than one hundred years ago, in even the most advanced capitalist societies, 50 per cent of the people — women — did not have the right to vote? Or that black populations, indigenous or migrant, in countries such as the United States and Australia were deprived of basic citizenship rights until the 1960s and even later? Will future generations wonder how on earth it could have been that the vast majority of the people of South Africa were unable to vote until 1994, and that they were routinely imprisoned, tortured and killed when they demanded basic democratic rights? Or will they shrug and take it for granted, as so many of us who live in settled democracies already do? (In so far as ‘we’ includes the community of media and cultural studies scholars, I would argue that where there is reluctance to concede the scale and significance of democratic change, this arises out of continuing ambivalence about what ‘democracy’ means, a continuing suspicion of globalisation (in particular the globalisation of democratic political culture, still associated in some quarters with ‘the west’), and of the notion of ‘progress’ with which democracy is routinely associated. The intellectual roots of that ambivalence were various. Marxist-leninist inspired authoritarianism gripped much of the world until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war. Until that moment, it was still possible for many marxians in the scholarly community to view the idea of democracy with disdain — if not quite a dirty word, then a deeply flawed, highly loaded concept which masked and preserved underlying social inequalities more than it helped resolve them. Until 1989 or thereabouts, it was possible for ‘bourgeois democracy’ to be regarded as just one kind of democratic polity by the liberal and anti-capitalist left, which often regarded the ‘proletarian’ or ‘people’s’ democracy prevailing in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba or Vietnam as legitimate alternatives to the emerging capitalist norm of one person, one vote, for constituent assemblies which had real power and accountability. In terms not very different from those used by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, belief in the value of democracy was conceived by this materialist school as a kind of false consciousness. It still is, by Noam Chomsky and others who continue to view democracy as a ‘necessary illusion’ (1989) without which capitalism could not be reproduced. From these perspectives voting gave, and gives us merely the illusion of agency and power in societies where capital rules as it always did. For democracy read ‘the manufacture of consent’; its expansion read not as progressive social evolution, but the universalisation of the myth of popular sovereignty, mobilised and utilised by the media-industrial-military complex to maintain its grip.) There are those who dispute this reading of events. In the 1960s, Habermas’s hugely influential Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere critiqued the manner in which democracy, and the public sphere underpinning it, had been degraded by public relations, advertising, and the power of private interests. In the period since, critical scholarly research and writing on political culture has been dominated by the Habermasian discourse of democratic decline, and the pervasive pessimism of those who see democracy, and the media culture which supports it, as fatally flawed, corrupted by commercialisation and under constant threat. Those, myself included, who challenged that view with a more positive reading of the trends (McNair, Journalism and Democracy; Cultural Chaos) have been denounced as naïve optimists, panglossian, utopian and even, in my own case, a ‘neo-liberal apologist’. (See an unpublished paper by David Miller, “System Failure: It’s Not Just the Media, It’s the Whole Bloody System”, delivered at Goldsmith’s College in 2003.) Engaging as they have been, I venture to suggest that these are the discourses and debates of an era now passing into history. Not only is it increasingly obvious that democracy is expanding globally into places where it never previously reached; it is also extending inwards, within nation states, driven by demands for greater local autonomy. In the United Kingdom, for example, the citizen is now able to vote not just in Westminster parliamentary elections (which determine the political direction of the UK government), but for European elections, local elections, and elections for devolved assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The people of London can vote for their mayor. There would by now have been devolved assemblies in the regions of England, too, had the people of the North East not voted against it in a November 2004 referendum. Notwithstanding that result, which surprised many in the New Labour government who held it as axiomatic that the more democracy there was, the better for all of us, the importance of enhancing and expanding democratic institutions, of allowing people to vote more often (and also in more efficient ways — many of these expansions of democracy have been tied to the introduction of systems of proportional representation) has become consensual, from the Mid West of America to the Middle East. The Democratic Paradox And yet, as the wave of democratic transformation has rolled on through the late twentieth and into the early twenty first century it is notable that, in many of the oldest liberal democracies at least, fewer people have been voting. In the UK, for example, in the period between 1945 and 2001, turnout at general elections never fell below 70 per cent. In 1992, the last general election won by the Conservatives before the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour, turnout was 78 per cent, roughly where it had been in the 1950s. In 2001, however, as Blair’s government sought re-election, turnout fell to an historic low for the UK of 59.4 per cent, and rose only marginally to 61.4 per cent in the most recent general election of 2005. In the US presidential elections of 1996 and 2000 turnouts were at historic lows of 47.2 and 49.3 per cent respectively, rising just above 50 per cent again in 2004 (figures by International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance). At local level things are even worse. In only the second election for a devolved parliament in Scotland (2003) turnout was a mere 48.5 per cent, rising to 50.5 in 2007. These trends are not universal. In countries with compulsory voting, they mean very little — in Australia, where voting in parliamentary elections is compulsory, turnout averages in the 90s per cent. In France, while turnouts for parliamentary elections show a similar downward trend to the UK and the UK, presidential contests achieve turnouts of 80-plus per cent. In the UK and US, as noted, the most recent elections show modest growth in turnout from those historic lows of the late 1990s and early Noughties. There has grown, nonetheless, the perception, commonplace amongst academic commentators as well as journalists and politicians themselves, that we are living through a ‘crisis’ of democratic participation, a dangerous decline in the tendency to vote in elections which undermines the legitimacy of democracy itself. In communication scholarship a significant body of research and publication has developed around this theme, from Blumler and Gurevitch’s Crisis of Public Communication (1996), through Barnett and Gaber’s Westminster Tales (2000), to more recent studies such as Lewis et al.’s Citizens or Consumers (2005). All presume a problem of some kind with the practice of democracy and the “old fashioned ritual” of voting, as Lewis et al. describe it (2). Most link alleged inadequacies in the performance of the political media to what is interpreted as popular apathy (or antipathy) towards democracy. The media are blamed for the lack of public engagement with democratic politics which declining turnouts are argued to signal. Political journalists are said to be too aggressive and hyper-adversarial (Lloyd), behaving like the “feral beast” spoken of by Tony Blair in his 2007 farewell speech to the British people as prime minister. They are corrosively cynical and a “disaster for democracy”, as Steven Barnett and others argued in the first years of the twenty first century. They are not aggressive or adversarial enough, as the propaganda modellists allege, citing what they interpret as supine media coverage of Coalition policy in Iraq. The media put people off, rather than turn them on to democracy by being, variously, too nice or too nasty to politicians. What then, is the solution to the apparent paradox represented by the fact that there is more democracy, but less voting in elections than ever before; and that after centuries of popular struggle democratic assemblies proliferate, but in some countries barely half of the eligible voters can be bothered to participate? And what role have the media played in this unexpected phenomenon? If the scholarly community has been largely critical on this question, and pessimistic in its analyses of the role of the media, it has become increasingly clear that the one arena where people do vote more than ever before is that presented by the media, and entertainment media in particular. There has been, since the appearance of Big Brother and the subsequent explosion of competitive reality TV formats across the world, evidence of a huge popular appetite for voting on such matters as which amateur contestant on Pop Idol, or X Factor, or Fame Academy, or Operatunity goes on to have a chance of a professional career, a shot at the big time. Millions of viewers of the most popular reality TV strands queue up to register their votes on premium phone lines, the revenue from which makes up a substantial and growing proportion of the income of commercial TV companies. This explosion of voting behaviour has been made possible by the technology-driven emergence of new forms of participatory, interactive, digitised media channels which allow millions to believe that they can have an impact on the outcome of what are, at essence, game and talent shows. At the height of anxiety around the ‘crisis of democratic participation’ in the UK, observers noted that nearly 6.5 million people had voted in the Big Brother UK final in 2004. More than eight million voted during the 2004 run of the BBC’s Fame Academy series. While these numbers do not, contrary to popular belief, exceed the numbers of British citizens who vote in a general election (27.2 million in 2005), they do indicate an enthusiasm for voting which seems to contradict declining rates of democratic participation. People who will never get out and vote for their local councillor often appear more than willing to pick up the telephone or the laptop and cast a vote for their favoured reality TV contestant, even if it costs them money. It would be absurd to suggest that voting for a contestant on Big Brother is directly comparable to the act of choosing a government or a president. The latter is recognised as an expression of citizenship, with potentially significant consequences for the lives of individuals within their society. Voting on Big Brother, on the other hand, is unmistakeably entertainment, game-playing, a relatively risk-free exercise of choice — a bit of harmless fun, fuelled by office chat and relentless tabloid coverage of the contestants’ strengths and weaknesses. There is no evidence that readiness to participate in a telephone or online vote for entertainment TV translates into active citizenship, where ‘active’ means casting a vote in an election. The lesson delivered by the success of participatory media in recent years, however — first reality TV, and latterly a proliferation of online formats which encourage user participation and voting for one thing or another — is that people will vote, when they are able and motivated to do so. Voting is popular, in short, and never more so, irrespective of the level of popular participation recorded in recent elections. And if they will vote in their millions for a contestant on X Factor, or participate in competitions to determine the best movies or books on Facebook, they can presumably be persuaded to do so when an election for parliament comes around. This fact has been recognised by both media producers and politicians, and reflected in attempts to adapt the evermore sophisticated and efficient tools of participatory media to the democratic process, to engage media audiences as citizens by offering the kinds of voting opportunities in political debates, including election processes, which entertainment media have now made routinely available. ITV’s Vote for Me strand, broadcast in the run-up to the UK general election of 2005, used reality TV techniques to select a candidate who would actually take part in the forthcoming poll. The programme was broadcast in a late night, low audience slot, and failed to generate much interest, but it signalled a desire by media producers to harness the appeal of participatory media in a way which could directly impact on levels of democratic engagement. The honourable failure of Vote for Me (produced by the same team which made the much more successful live debate shows featuring prime minister Tony Blair — Ask Tony Blair, Ask the Prime Minister) might be viewed as evidence that readiness to vote in the context of a TV game show does not translate directly into voting for parties and politicians, and that the problem in this respect — the crisis of democratic participation, such that it exists — is located elsewhere. People can vote in democratic elections, but choose not to, perhaps because they feel that the act is meaningless (because parties are ideologically too similar), or ineffectual (because they see no impact of voting in their daily lives or in the state of the country), or irrelevant to their personal priorities and life styles. Voting rates have increased in the US and the UK since September 11 2001, suggesting perhaps that when the political stakes are raised, and the question of who is in government seems to matter more than it did, people act accordingly. Meantime, media producers continue to make money by developing formats and channels on the assumption that audiences wish to participate, to interact, and to vote. Whether this form of participatory media consumption for the purposes of play can be translated into enhanced levels of active citizenship, and whether the media can play a significant contributory role in that process, remains to be seen. References Alves, R.C. “From Lapdog to Watchdog: The Role of the Press in Latin America’s Democratisation.” In H. de Burgh, ed., Making Journalists. London: Routledge, 2005. 181-202. Anderson, P.J., and G. Ward (eds.). The Future of Journalism in the Advanced Democracies. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Barnett, S. “The Age of Contempt.” Guardian 28 October 2002. < http://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/comment/0,12123,820577,00.html >. Barnett, S., and I. Gaber. Westminster Tales. London: Continuum, 2001. Blumler, J., and M. Gurevitch. The Crisis of Public Communication. London: Routledge, 1996. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Lewis, J., S. Inthorn, and K. Wahl-Jorgensen. Citizens or Consumers? What the Media Tell Us about Political Participation. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2005. Lloyd, John. What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics. London: Constable, 2004. McNair, B. Journalism and Democracy: A Qualitative Evaluation of the Political Public Sphere. London: Routledge, 2000. ———. Cultural Chaos: News, Journalism and Power in a Globalised World. London: Routledge, 2006.

The twentieth was, from one perspective, the democratic century — a span of one hundred years which began with no fully functioning democracies in existence anywhere on the planet (if one defines democracy as a political system in which there is both universal suffrage and competitive elections), and ended with 120 countries out of 192 classified by the Freedom House think tank as ‘democratic’. There are of course still many societies where democracy is denied or effectively neutered — the remaining outposts of state socialism, such as China, Cuba, and North Korea; most if not all of the Islamic countries; exceptional states such as Singapore, unapologetically capitalist in its economic system but resolutely authoritarian in its political culture. Many self-proclaimed democracies, including those of the UK, Australia and the US, are procedurally or conceptually flawed. Countries emerging out of authoritarian systems and now in a state of democratic transition, such as Russia and the former Soviet republics, are immersed in constant, sometimes violent struggle between reformers and reactionaries. Russia’s recent parliamentary elections were accompanied by the intimidation of parties and politicians who opposed Vladimir Putin’s increasingly populist and authoritarian approach to leadership. The same Freedom House report which describes the rise of democracy in the twentieth century acknowledges that many self-styled democracies are, at best, only ‘partly free’ in their political cultures (for detailed figures on the rise of global democracy, see the Freedom House website Democracy’s Century). Let’s not for a moment downplay these important qualifications to what can nonetheless be fairly characterised as a century-long expansion and globalisation of democracy, and the acceptance of popular sovereignty, expressed through voting for the party or candidate of one’s choice, as a universally recognised human right. That such a process has occurred, and continues in these early years of the twenty-first century, is irrefutable. In the Gaza strip, Hamas appeals to the legitimacy of a democratic election victory in its campaign to be recognised as the voice of the Palestinian people. However one judges the messianic tendencies and Islamist ideology of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it must be acknowledged that the Iranian people elected him, and that they have the power to throw him out of government next time they vote. That was never true of the Shah. The democratic resurgence in Latin America, taking in Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia among others has been a much-noted feature of international politics in recent times (Alves), presenting a welcome contrast to the dictatorships and death squads of the 1980s, even as it creates some uncomfortable dilemmas for the Bush administration (which must champion democratic government at the same time as it resents some of the choices people may make when they have the opportunity to vote). Since 9/11 a kind of democracy has expanded even to Afghanistan and Iraq, albeit at the point of a gun, and with no guarantees of survival beyond the end of military occupation by the US and its coalition allies. As this essay was being written, Pakistan’s state of emergency was ending and democratic elections scheduled, albeit in the shadow cast by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. Democracy, then — imperfect and limited as it can be; grudgingly delivered though it is by political elites in many countries, and subject to attack and roll back at any time — has become a global universal to which all claim allegiance, or at least pay lip service. The scale of this transformation, which has occurred in little more than one quarter of the time elapsed since the Putney debates of 1647 and the English revolution first established the principle of the sovereignty of parliament, is truly remarkable. (Tristram Hunt quotes lawyer Geoffrey Robertson in the Guardian to the effect that the Putney debates, staged in St Mary’s church in south-west London towards the end of the English civil war, launched “the idea that government requires the consent of freely and fairly elected representatives of all adult citizens irrespective of class or caste or status or wealth” – “A Jewel of Democracy”, Guardian, 26 Oct. 2007) Can it be true that less than one hundred years ago, in even the most advanced capitalist societies, 50 per cent of the people — women — did not have the right to vote? Or that black populations, indigenous or migrant, in countries such as the United States and Australia were deprived of basic citizenship rights until the 1960s and even later? Will future generations wonder how on earth it could have been that the vast majority of the people of South Africa were unable to vote until 1994, and that they were routinely imprisoned, tortured and killed when they demanded basic democratic rights? Or will they shrug and take it for granted, as so many of us who live in settled democracies already do? (In so far as ‘we’ includes the community of media and cultural studies scholars, I would argue that where there is reluctance to concede the scale and significance of democratic change, this arises out of continuing ambivalence about what ‘democracy’ means, a continuing suspicion of globalisation (in particular the globalisation of democratic political culture, still associated in some quarters with ‘the west’), and of the notion of ‘progress’ with which democracy is routinely associated. The intellectual roots of that ambivalence were various. Marxist-leninist inspired authoritarianism gripped much of the world until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war. Until that moment, it was still possible for many marxians in the scholarly community to view the idea of democracy with disdain — if not quite a dirty word, then a deeply flawed, highly loaded concept which masked and preserved underlying social inequalities more than it helped resolve them. Until 1989 or thereabouts, it was possible for ‘bourgeois democracy’ to be regarded as just one kind of democratic polity by the liberal and anti-capitalist left, which often regarded the ‘proletarian’ or ‘people’s’ democracy prevailing in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba or Vietnam as legitimate alternatives to the emerging capitalist norm of one person, one vote, for constituent assemblies which had real power and accountability. In terms not very different from those used by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, belief in the value of democracy was conceived by this materialist school as a kind of false consciousness. It still is, by Noam Chomsky and others who continue to view democracy as a ‘necessary illusion’ (1989) without which capitalism could not be reproduced. From these perspectives voting gave, and gives us merely the illusion of agency and power in societies where capital rules as it always did. For democracy read ‘the manufacture of consent’; its expansion read not as progressive social evolution, but the universalisation of the myth of popular sovereignty, mobilised and utilised by the media-industrial-military complex to maintain its grip.) There are those who dispute this reading of events. In the 1960s, Habermas’s hugely influential Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere critiqued the manner in which democracy, and the public sphere underpinning it, had been degraded by public relations, advertising, and the power of private interests. In the period since, critical scholarly research and writing on political culture has been dominated by the Habermasian discourse of democratic decline, and the pervasive pessimism of those who see democracy, and the media culture which supports it, as fatally flawed, corrupted by commercialisation and under constant threat. Those, myself included, who challenged that view with a more positive reading of the trends (McNair, Journalism and Democracy; Cultural Chaos) have been denounced as naïve optimists, panglossian, utopian and even, in my own case, a ‘neo-liberal apologist’. (See an unpublished paper by David Miller, “System Failure: It’s Not Just the Media, It’s the Whole Bloody System”, delivered at Goldsmith’s College in 2003.) Engaging as they have been, I venture to suggest that these are the discourses and debates of an era now passing into history. Not only is it increasingly obvious that democracy is expanding globally into places where it never previously reached; it is also extending inwards, within nation states, driven by demands for greater local autonomy. In the United Kingdom, for example, the citizen is now able to vote not just in Westminster parliamentary elections (which determine the political direction of the UK government), but for European elections, local elections, and elections for devolved assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The people of London can vote for their mayor. There would by now have been devolved assemblies in the regions of England, too, had the people of the North East not voted against it in a November 2004 referendum. Notwithstanding that result, which surprised many in the New Labour government who held it as axiomatic that the more democracy there was, the better for all of us, the importance of enhancing and expanding democratic institutions, of allowing people to vote more often (and also in more efficient ways — many of these expansions of democracy have been tied to the introduction of systems of proportional representation) has become consensual, from the Mid West of America to the Middle East. The Democratic Paradox And yet, as the wave of democratic transformation has rolled on through the late twentieth and into the early twenty first century it is notable that, in many of the oldest liberal democracies at least, fewer people have been voting. In the UK, for example, in the period between 1945 and 2001, turnout at general elections never fell below 70 per cent. In 1992, the last general election won by the Conservatives before the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour, turnout was 78 per cent, roughly where it had been in the 1950s. In 2001, however, as Blair’s government sought re-election, turnout fell to an historic low for the UK of 59.4 per cent, and rose only marginally to 61.4 per cent in the most recent general election of 2005. In the US presidential elections of 1996 and 2000 turnouts were at historic lows of 47.2 and 49.3 per cent respectively, rising just above 50 per cent again in 2004 (figures by International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance). At local level things are even worse. In only the second election for a devolved parliament in Scotland (2003) turnout was a mere 48.5 per cent, rising to 50.5 in 2007. These trends are not universal. In countries with compulsory voting, they mean very little — in Australia, where voting in parliamentary elections is compulsory, turnout averages in the 90s per cent. In France, while turnouts for parliamentary elections show a similar downward trend to the UK and the UK, presidential contests achieve turnouts of 80-plus per cent. In the UK and US, as noted, the most recent elections show modest growth in turnout from those historic lows of the late 1990s and early Noughties. There has grown, nonetheless, the perception, commonplace amongst academic commentators as well as journalists and politicians themselves, that we are living through a ‘crisis’ of democratic participation, a dangerous decline in the tendency to vote in elections which undermines the legitimacy of democracy itself. In communication scholarship a significant body of research and publication has developed around this theme, from Blumler and Gurevitch’s Crisis of Public Communication (1996), through Barnett and Gaber’s Westminster Tales (2000), to more recent studies such as Lewis et al.’s Citizens or Consumers (2005). All presume a problem of some kind with the practice of democracy and the “old fashioned ritual” of voting, as Lewis et al. describe it (2). Most link alleged inadequacies in the performance of the political media to what is interpreted as popular apathy (or antipathy) towards democracy. The media are blamed for the lack of public engagement with democratic politics which declining turnouts are argued to signal. Political journalists are said to be too aggressive and hyper-adversarial (Lloyd), behaving like the “feral beast” spoken of by Tony Blair in his 2007 farewell speech to the British people as prime minister. They are corrosively cynical and a “disaster for democracy”, as Steven Barnett and others argued in the first years of the twenty first century. They are not aggressive or adversarial enough, as the propaganda modellists allege, citing what they interpret as supine media coverage of Coalition policy in Iraq. The media put people off, rather than turn them on to democracy by being, variously, too nice or too nasty to politicians. What then, is the solution to the apparent paradox represented by the fact that there is more democracy, but less voting in elections than ever before; and that after centuries of popular struggle democratic assemblies proliferate, but in some countries barely half of the eligible voters can be bothered to participate? And what role have the media played in this unexpected phenomenon? If the scholarly community has been largely critical on this question, and pessimistic in its analyses of the role of the media, it has become increasingly clear that the one arena where people do vote more than ever before is that presented by the media, and entertainment media in particular. There has been, since the appearance of Big Brother and the subsequent explosion of competitive reality TV formats across the world, evidence of a huge popular appetite for voting on such matters as which amateur contestant on Pop Idol, or X Factor, or Fame Academy, or Operatunity goes on to have a chance of a professional career, a shot at the big time. Millions of viewers of the most popular reality TV strands queue up to register their votes on premium phone lines, the revenue from which makes up a substantial and growing proportion of the income of commercial TV companies. This explosion of voting behaviour has been made possible by the technology-driven emergence of new forms of participatory, interactive, digitised media channels which allow millions to believe that they can have an impact on the outcome of what are, at essence, game and talent shows. At the height of anxiety around the ‘crisis of democratic participation’ in the UK, observers noted that nearly 6.5 million people had voted in the Big Brother UK final in 2004. More than eight million voted during the 2004 run of the BBC’s Fame Academy series. While these numbers do not, contrary to popular belief, exceed the numbers of British citizens who vote in a general election (27.2 million in 2005), they do indicate an enthusiasm for voting which seems to contradict declining rates of democratic participation. People who will never get out and vote for their local councillor often appear more than willing to pick up the telephone or the laptop and cast a vote for their favoured reality TV contestant, even if it costs them money. It would be absurd to suggest that voting for a contestant on Big Brother is directly comparable to the act of choosing a government or a president. The latter is recognised as an expression of citizenship, with potentially significant consequences for the lives of individuals within their society. Voting on Big Brother, on the other hand, is unmistakeably entertainment, game-playing, a relatively risk-free exercise of choice — a bit of harmless fun, fuelled by office chat and relentless tabloid coverage of the contestants’ strengths and weaknesses. There is no evidence that readiness to participate in a telephone or online vote for entertainment TV translates into active citizenship, where ‘active’ means casting a vote in an election. The lesson delivered by the success of participatory media in recent years, however — first reality TV, and latterly a proliferation of online formats which encourage user participation and voting for one thing or another — is that people will vote, when they are able and motivated to do so. Voting is popular, in short, and never more so, irrespective of the level of popular participation recorded in recent elections. And if they will vote in their millions for a contestant on X Factor, or participate in competitions to determine the best movies or books on Facebook, they can presumably be persuaded to do so when an election for parliament comes around. This fact has been recognised by both media producers and politicians, and reflected in attempts to adapt the evermore sophisticated and efficient tools of participatory media to the democratic process, to engage media audiences as citizens by offering the kinds of voting opportunities in political debates, including election processes, which entertainment media have now made routinely available. ITV’s Vote for Me strand, broadcast in the run-up to the UK general election of 2005, used reality TV techniques to select a candidate who would actually take part in the forthcoming poll. The programme was broadcast in a late night, low audience slot, and failed to generate much interest, but it signalled a desire by media producers to harness the appeal of participatory media in a way which could directly impact on levels of democratic engagement. The honourable failure of Vote for Me (produced by the same team which made the much more successful live debate shows featuring prime minister Tony Blair — Ask Tony Blair, Ask the Prime Minister) might be viewed as evidence that readiness to vote in the context of a TV game show does not translate directly into voting for parties and politicians, and that the problem in this respect — the crisis of democratic participation, such that it exists — is located elsewhere. People can vote in democratic elections, but choose not to, perhaps because they feel that the act is meaningless (because parties are ideologically too similar), or ineffectual (because they see no impact of voting in their daily lives or in the state of the country), or irrelevant to their personal priorities and life styles. Voting rates have increased in the US and the UK since September 11 2001, suggesting perhaps that when the political stakes are raised, and the question of who is in government seems to matter more than it did, people act accordingly. Meantime, media producers continue to make money by developing formats and channels on the assumption that audiences wish to participate, to interact, and to vote. Whether this form of participatory media consumption for the purposes of play can be translated into enhanced levels of active citizenship, and whether the media can play a significant contributory role in that process, remains to be seen. References Alves, R.C. “From Lapdog to Watchdog: The Role of the Press in Latin America’s Democratisation.” In H. de Burgh, ed., Making Journalists. London: Routledge, 2005. 181-202. Anderson, P.J., and G. Ward (eds.). The Future of Journalism in the Advanced Democracies. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Barnett, S. “The Age of Contempt.” Guardian 28 October 2002. http://politics.guardian.co.uk/media/comment/0,12123,820577,00.html>. Barnett, S., and I. Gaber. Westminster Tales. London: Continuum, 2001. Blumler, J., and M. Gurevitch. The Crisis of Public Communication. London: Routledge, 1996. Habermas, J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Lewis, J., S. Inthorn, and K. Wahl-Jorgensen. Citizens or Consumers? What the Media Tell Us about Political Participation. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 2005. Lloyd, John. What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics. London: Constable, 2004. McNair, B. Journalism and Democracy: A Qualitative Evaluation of the Political Public Sphere. London: Routledge, 2000. ———. Cultural Chaos: News, Journalism and Power in a Globalised World. London: Routledge, 2006. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McNair, Brian. "Vote!." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/01-mcnair.php>. APA Style McNair, B. (Apr. 2008) "Vote!," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/01-mcnair.php>.

This thesis explores parliamentarians’ emotional labour in their workplace, and argues the enactment of passionate rationality is crucial to how parliamentarians accomplish vocational authenticity. The New Zealand parliamentary workplace is characterised by an elaborate set of feeling rules and a complex emotional culture. On entry to parliament, parliamentarians go through a period of identity transformation akin to a moral career. Parliamentarians must manage emotion to achieve their occupational identities according to local feeling rules. Based on analysis of in-depth group and individual interviews with parliamentarians, and focusing on the passage of the Civil Union Bill as an exemplar of parliamentarians’ emotion work, three interpretative repertoires were identified in their accounts of emotion in the workplace. These repertoires, The Game, The Performance and The Crusade are work-place specific meaning-making resources whose flexible deployment enabled parliamentarians to assert claims of occupational identity and vocational authenticity. These repertoires show the emotional labour involved in parliamentarians’ negotiation of shared meanings around ‘entering’ the occupational role and asserting the authenticity of their new identities. In particular, The Crusade repertoire makes available the subject position of the Knight, the subject position important for accomplishment of being a passionately rational worker. In this thesis, I introduce two new concepts for emotional labour in complex workplaces where that labour has both exchange and use value; emotional convocation and personified emotion. Together these concepts allow for a more thorough theorisation of emotion work than do existing concepts of emotional labour. Although developed in relation to the work of parliamentarians, personified emotion and emotional convocation have utility for understanding other contemporary experiences of work where emotion management within a complex emotional culture is fundamental to both occupational identity and the accomplishment of vocational authenticity.

Fair trade is an alternative approach to international trade. It is both a social movement and an economic approach that aims to make trade fair for the many small scale producers disadvantaged in international trade. This thesis explores the discursive devices used by fair trade organisations to promote fair trade. These devices have two roles: to promote an ethical connection from consumer to producer and to involve the consumer in the work of fair trade through purchasing behaviour and political action. This second role refers to the politicisation of consumption whereby shopping becomes an act of political solidarity with disadvantaged producers. I explore these devices through narrative analysis, focusing on a thematic analysis of Trade Aid’s publication, Vital. My research is framed by Michael Goodman’s (2004) work on the semiotic production of fair trade. The concept of a reflexive consumer is explored. This is the idea that consumer awareness of the conditions surrounding production can lead to purchasing decisions that reflect care for the distant producer. This opening up of the concept of consumption involves an active and engaged consumer who chooses to purchase fair trade because they feel a connection to the work of these organisations. I am interested in the particular form this information takes in Vital. I apply narrative research methods to explore the meta-narrative of fair trade promoted in Vital that tells the reader about the work of fair trade organisations, the impact this has on the lives of producer and how they can be involved in the story as a consumer and as a global citizen.

This thesis examines the spirituality and participation in faith-based activities of young Catholics in Whangarei, New Zealand. Six youth aged 16-17 years have shared their experiences in several areas of Catholicism such as religious attendance, Catholic identity and Catholic faith, morals and values, peer group socialisation and religious commitment. Using a qualitative mixed-methodological approach with the underlying philosophical stance of interpretivism, the intent of the study is to discover ways in which these young Catholics integrate their faith into their daily lives and make meaning out of it. It also compares the religious beliefs and values of Catholic youth in Whangarei to those reported worldwide. The findings reveal many similar themes to those from international studies. Although all of the participants in this study possessed a distinct sense of ‘spirituality’ and being ‘Catholic’ was a very important part of their identity, not all of them seemed to consider it practical to live out their Catholic beliefs. Similarly, although they did not face any insurmountable challenges in practicing their faith in daily life, only a few of them had strong convictions about their faith and, like their peers in other countries, only a few could concretely list the core Catholic beliefs. Concepts of moralistic therapeutic deism were found to affect half the participants while nuances of moralistic relativism were also prevalent. Results also showed a growing disinterest in attending Mass, participating in the sacrament of Confession, leading an active prayer life, being a part of church youth activities and some difficulty in finding similar peer group support. Overall, the findings presented in this thesis suggested that the participants involved in the study could be separated into two groups on the basis of their differing spiritual levels and commitment to the Catholic faith The findings suggest a need for Catholic youth in Whangarei to be supported in their spiritual development in order to help them grow in their Catholic faith. Accordingly, the main recommendations are for community-based services such as providing a variety of youth programmes/groups to engage young people and finding ways to facilitate the secure engagement of youth in a dialogue about their faith and religion, in order to spiritually encourage, nourish and sustain them at whatever stage they might be at.

Family Meetings occur frequently in the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) yet little data existed to guide clinicians in the conduct of these meetings. The medical team is required to deliver complex medical information and navigate complex decision-making with a traumatised family during a meeting. The objectives of this study were to describe the content and process of 15 whanau/family meetings in the PICU, identify family meeting characteristics and patient and family attributes that influence family satisfaction and recommend guidelines for health professionals working in the PICU. The study was conducted in a PICU in a university-affiliated children’s hospital in New Zealand (NZ). The process and content of 15 family meetings were analysed using a coding framework previously developed through a qualitative study of family meetings in the adult intensive care unit (Curtis, 2002a). A questionnaire providing a quantitative assessment of family satisfaction drawn from the same study was administered to 30 family members. Demographic data for the study were collected from the patient’s hospital record and these were combined with data relating to the meeting recording and transcript to identify family meeting characteristics and attributes that might influence family satisfaction. The content and process of family meetings in the PICU were described using a framework detailing 28 codes from the six domains: introductions, informational exchange, discussions of the future, decisions, discussions about death and dying, and closings. A comparison of family meeting characteristics and patient and family attributes revealed that longer meetings (40 minutes plus) were associated with lower family satisfaction and should therefore prompt clinicians to consider whether there are unresolved conflicts, difficulties or misunderstandings between the medical team and the family. Recommendations are proposed to guide health professionals in family meetings in the PICU. This is the first study to record and code the content of family meetings in the PICU. The findings from this study will assist clinicians in their meetings with families. The description of the family meeting content will also provide a foundation for future communication training and research in the health environment.

The thesis proposes and defends a maxim which can serve as a foundation and guideline for professional ethics in nursing, the maxim that nurses should act so far as possible to promote patient's self-determination. The thesis is informed by philosophical ethics and by knowledge of professional nursing practice.

New Zealand forest has been affected by both natural and anthropogenic disturbances. Protecting and restoring indigenous forest is one of the focal issues in conservation of New Zealand, and understanding vegetation dynamics is a key part of management strategies. The longevity of most of New Zealand trees impedes short-term vegetation dynamic studies. Instead fossil pollen records provide one of the most valuable sources of long term data to trace vegetation development. In this study, pollen records are used as proxies of vegetation population to test the roles of long-term climate change and transient environmental disturbances in vegetation dynamics. Two sediment cores, from Sponge Swamp, Haast, and Tiniroto Lakes, Gisborne, were collected as representatives of undisturbed and disturbed sites, the former being used as a reference site to separate out the effects of climate and evaluate the impact of disturbance on the vegetation. Pollen data were inspected using Tilia, and zones defined. Principal component analysis (PCA) was performed on pollen data to summarise the change in species composition over time, and the sample scores of the first PCA axis were exploited as an index of vegetation dynamics for further comparison. Redundancy analysis (RDA) is also applied to help interpretation of the vegetation change with respect to environmental factors. The result of this study indicates that the vegetation development in both sites is characterized by non-equilibrium dynamics, in which vegetation composition is changing continually through time. In Sponge Swamp, this change is steady and consistent over the whole time span, with a consistent decline of Ascarina lucida and a progressive increase of cold tolerant or moisture-stressed taxa, like Gleichenia and Lycopodium australianum. Subsequently there is a partial replacement of swamp forest taxa such as Dacrycarps dacrydioides and tree ferns by Prumnopitys taxifolia, and further expansion of Nothofagus and Phyllocladus is distinguished. A climate gradient, from mild and wet to cooler and/or drier is suggested from the pollen evidence, and appears the driving force for the vegetation dynamics at that undisturbed site. At Tiniroto, however, the vegetation development is divided into two stages. Before c. 2300 yr BP, the vegetation change is steady and consistent which is comparable to that from Sponge Swamp. A forest invasion, a process of gradually replacing open land and light-adapted taxa, such as Dodonaea viscosa, Coprosma, Pseudopanax, Schefflera digitata, Pteridium, Hebe and members of the family Fabaceae and Asteraceae, by increasing proportions of forest taxa, characterise this change. Climate amelioration with increased rainfall is responsible. After c. 2300 yr BP, this trend was frequently punctuated by disturbances, in which sudden changes of vegetation occur, generating substantial fluctuations about the trend. From RDA, sample age explains more than 20% of the variance of species data at both sites. The long-term directional climate change derived from pollen evidence of Sponge Swamp and at least partly at the Tiniroto site, may be represented by the explanatory variable age. At Tiniroto, additional variance is also explained by the explanatory variables charcoal and pollen taxonomic richness, suggesting the impact of disturbance on vegetation dynamics. The impact of disturbance on vegetation dynamics becomes clearer after the climate gradient is removed. Autocorrelation analysis on detrended sample scores of the first PCA axis suggests further differences between the two sites, in response to local disturbances. There is little dependence of the present state of vegetation composition on its past state in the Sponge Swamp site; instead, the vegetation composition is affected by various "random" events, implying small disturbances such as floods, or landslides caused by earthquakes etc. At Tiniroto, the change of vegetation composition is more "successional", and the present state of vegetation depends only on the immediate past state, due to the impact of catastrophic disturbance. Despite the Tiniroto site having been subjected to a long history of disturbance, the climate gradient, which is distinct at the earlier stage, becomes less identifiable and partially masked by outbreaks of disturbances only since c. 2300 yr BP. This implies that the relative role of disturbance on vegetation dynamics with respect to climate is depended on different types or different levels of disturbances and different responses by the vegetation. Short-term vegetation responses to different types of disturbance were examined by fine resolution pollen analyses around five disturbance episodes, including the Taupo (1850±10 yr BP), Waimihia (3280±20 yr BP), Whakatane (4830±20 yr BP) eruptions, and two charcoal peaks (c. 1100 yr BP and c. 2300 yr BP). Almost no vegetation change occurred relative to the eruption within the Whakatane and Waimihia episodes, except that a temporary rise of shrubs and ferns corresponded with intermittent occurrence of charcoal particles. Substantial vegetation change relative to disturbance was found within both the Taupo episode and the fire episode around c. 2300 yr BP, in which establishment of ensuing semi-open vegetation was encouraged for decades. The fire c. 2300 yr BP transformed part of the forest into fernland, while the Taupo eruption turned part of the shrubs and tree ferns into bracken field. Although it is difficult to judge the effect of the fire around 1100 yr BP as the result was unreliable due to contamination, the vegetation at Tiniroto is suggested to be more vulnerable to fire than tephra. Non-equilibrium dynamics are common in New Zealand forests, even at stable sites such as Sponge Swamp, due to climate change. Locally these non-equilibrium dynamics appear highly responsive to disturbances, esp. at Tiniroto. Even disturbances at Tiniroto are dynamic and a change of disturbance regime is suggested around the later disturbance episodes. This change is possibly due to climate increasing the fire frequency, but an alternative explanation is the presence of humans earlier than currently accepted. Forests and forest ecological studies in New Zealand are very dynamic, and forest management needs to improve to incorporate these dynamics.

This thesis has three key aims, firstly to explore the effects that perceived age and ability have on person perception. Secondly to discover how these two constructs add to the theory on person perception and thirdly, to test a new methodological approach to the study of person perception.

Research into the use of information by health care professionals has generally been conducted in countries dominated by the biomedical model. In these contexts, illness is considered to have a scientifically identifiable physical cause, and treatment practices within the formal health care sector are prescribed and managed in accordance with this definition. Yet there are also contexts where other belief systems inform and guide the way that people think about their health. In comparison to the biomedical model, these contexts have contributed very little to our understanding of how health professionals develop their knowledge. This research investigates how primary health care workers (PHCWs) in one such context, Papua New Guinea (PNG), develop their knowledge about the health services they provide. In order to discover and understand the differing views of these PHCWs, 69 semi-structured interviews were conducted in three culturally and geographically diverse regions of PNG. In explaining the diagnostic and treatment practices they use, these participants provided insights into not only how PHCWs engage with information but also how it informs their professional practice. These data were analysed, interpreted and discussed using a framework consisting of four, primary but interconnecting aspects: the context in which information was provided, the interactions with the sources of information, the processes by which information was understood, and the outcomes realized as a result of the information being used. Findings indicated that the majority of participants in this study acknowledged, if not incorporated, information pertaining to biomedicine, Christianity and Indigenous belief systems into their diagnostic and treatment practices. Even when these belief systems clearly contradicted each other, PHCWs did not in general feel the need to make a conscious choice between them. From their comments it would appear that four factors contributed to this ability to incorporate diverse and often conflicting ideas into the way that patients were cared for. First, all of the belief systems were considered legitimate by at least one group of people connected to the community in which the PHCW worked. Second, although varying in degrees of availability and accessibility, members of these groups were able to disseminate information pertaining to the belief system they supported. Third, the PHCW had no particular affiliation with any one of these groups but instead regularly interacted with a range of different people. Lastly, the PHCW worked in situations where health practices were not generally well supervised by their employers and therefore they were relatively free to choose between various diagnostic and treatment practices. The qualitative interpretive approach adopted in this thesis contributes to the field of human information behavior by affirming that conflict is in the eye of the beholder. When a number of belief systems coexist and all are considered legitimate, information about them is freely available, and the recipients actions are neither constrained by their own dogma, nor imposed upon by others, individuals may quite comfortably embrace diverse beliefs. These findings may also contribute to a better understanding of health management practices in developing countries by suggesting that health professionals are not merely personifications of a biomedical model. Instead, the study demonstrates that multiple belief systems can be combined by PHCWs, and that in turn this benefits the formal health care sector through increased treatment options that are both appropriate and effective in such circumstances.

The study aimed to understand and advance the dynamics that influence psychological aggression. Psychological aggression can be defined as, verbal and non-verbal communication with the intent to harm another person mentally or emotionally, and/or control another person. In our society, the occurrence of psychological aggression in relationships is far more tolerated then physical aggression, but the effects can be more long term and harmful. The study hypothesized that an individual’s level of differentiation of self--a person’s ability to differentiate between feeling and thinking in times of stress--and their gender have a role in the severity of psychological aggression. The study was approved by IRB and using an online survey through MTurk asked participants about experiencing and perpetrating psychological aggression in their romantic relationships. The study had 192 participates in the multiple regression analyses, who provided some support that the level of differentiation of self and severity of psychological aggression, experiencing and perpetrating, have a negative significant relationship. Gender was found to not impact the relationship between differentiation of self and severity of psychological aggression. Clinical implications, limitations, and future directions for research were addressed.

The prevalence of social media in political campaigns are changing the face of politics in the United States and abroad. The rapid pace at which this change is occurring demands inquiry into the previously unexplored area of unconventional political campaign messaging practices on social media. Investigation of Donald Trump’s use of tweets as rhetorical strategy in the discursive space of Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign revealed a bypass of traditional media and its source verification processes. This circumventing of mainstream media channels facilitated Trump’s deployment of an unchecked ‘broken system’ narrative alleging government corruption

and a rigged system. Trump’s tweet discourses tapped into existing feelings of disenfranchisement and disaffection felt by a self-identified politically marginalized segment of society. This study

investigates how social media use in political campaigns can serve as a public sphere for contestation of social and political norms. An interdisciplinary theoretical frame comprised of Feenberg’s critical theory of technology, McLuhan’s media ecology, Fraser’s counterpublic spheres, and Iser’s implied reader offer new understandings about the power of anti-establishment discourses and a hybrid discursive space to destabilize governing institutions and redefine social and political identities. Study of Trump’s tweets as rhetorical strategy granted insights into the social and political capacity of alternative truth to undermine the political process. Further, it uncovered the power of social media to awaken and leverage existing political identities for personal political gain.